A Man's Hearth Part 7

"I dined down-town."

That was the first deliberate lie the younger man had told the older in all their life together. But Tony confronted an utter impossibility; he could not confess that he had sat until midnight in a park pavilion, with no more thought of life's common-sense routine than a sentimental boy. Nevertheless, his voice sounded unconvincing to his own ears, and humiliation swept over him like a wave of heat. The desire to get away from everyone and everything familiar made it difficult for him not to spring up and leave the room and the unfinished breakfast.

But Mr. Adriance was convinced and appeased. In his relief, he felt a really kind desire to relieve Tony from his evident depression.

"You appear to have something on your mind," he observed. "If it is anything I might remove, pray call upon me, Tony."

"Financially?" queried his son, drily.

"Certainly, if you wish. You are not in the least extravagant. In fact, you are a charming contradiction of a great many popular conceptions concerning those not forcibly employed."

"Thank you. But I wish you would employ me, sir, if not forcibly. I want to go away for a time; not just--for amus.e.m.e.nt. Can you not send me somewhere to take charge of your interests instead of a hired agent? I could learn to help you, perhaps."

The last expression was unfortunate. Mr. Adriance's brow contracted and the cordiality left his gaze.

"I am not yet superannuated," he signified. "When I am in need of help, I will ask it, Tony. Naturally I intend training you to take charge of your own affairs after my death. You will find that quite enough to occupy you, some day. I am sorry if you are unable to amuse yourself, already. Next year, if you like, we will take up the matter of your business education. This year, I shall be too busy. You are young and I am not old."

His glance turned toward a mirror set in a buffet opposite. The face reflected was clear in outline, firm to the verge of hardness; the eyes full and alert, the carefully brushed hair so abundant that its grayness gave dignity without the effect of age. Self-appreciation touched Mr.

Adriance's lip with a smile, as he gazed, smoothing away his slight annoyance. His son, tracing that glance, felt a movement of kindred admiration and a renewed sense of his own personal inadequacy. Tony Adriance had accomplished nothing, yet he was already tired. How would he look when he was thirty years older? Hardly like that, he feared. Nor would Fred Masterson! Whose was the fault, and what the remedy?

Mr. Adriance, returning to his coffee, surprised the other's observation of him, and shrugged an unembarra.s.sed acceptance of the verdict.

"We have plenty of time, you see," he remarked. "Moreover, you are hardly ready for abstract affairs. You are not sufficiently settled.

After you are married that will come. I myself married young. Marriage makes private life sufficiently monotonous not to interfere with the conduct of outside matters of importance."

"Does it?" speculated Tony, doubtingly.

"It should. Monotony is closer to content than is agitation, would you not say?"

"Doesn't that depend on the kind of monotony?"

"Surely. That is why each man should choose his own wife."

"I see. If I ever choose a wife, I shall remember the advice."

This time Mr. Adriance was astonished. He did not miss the significance of the remark, or the alteration in Tony since the previous day, when he had last seen him. It was not possible to be explicit in a matter so delicate, especially with servants present; but his curiosity was not to be denied.

"You have not--reached that point? I had fancied----"

"I have no such engagement at present," was the steady reply.

Mr. Adriance pushed away his finger bowl and allowed his cigar to be lighted by the deferential automaton behind his chair.

"I am sorry," he said.

His son did not misunderstand him; in fact, he understood more clearly than perhaps did the older man himself. Mr. Adriance had chosen the hostess he wanted for his house, or rather, he had been enchanted by Tony's supposed choice. Lucille Masterson filled his ideal of his son's wife. Her loveliness would be a point of pride; her social experience would make her competent for the position; moreover, she was too clever not to have courted and won the genuine liking of Tony's father long ago. Fred Masterson was hardly considered, except as an obstacle readily removed, when the proper time came. And now, Tony himself was overturning all the pleasant family life that Mr. Adriance had planned.

He knew that his father never willingly relinquished a perfected plan; rarely, indeed, was he turned aside from a purpose on which his mind was fixed.

"Perhaps you will reconsider that statement later," Mr. Adriance presently suggested.

"I think not, in the sense you mean," he made slow reply.

Mr. Adriance raised himself abruptly.

"I hope so," he said, with a touch of sharpness; "I hope you are not going to grow irresolute and changeable, Tony. I detest weakness of character. Perhaps you had better take a trip somewhere and get yourself in tone."

"Perhaps," Tony agreed; his voice was not yielding, but sullen and desperate.

Indeed, he was as near illness as a man may be without physical injury or disease. After his father had left the breakfast-room he sat for a long time in utter mental incapacity to undertake any line of effort.

Finally he arose, oppressed with a sense of suffocation in the rich, sombre atmosphere; of imprisonment and helplessness. He wanted air and solitude, the solitude he had come to the breakfast-room to escape, and he could think of no place where he could be so well a.s.sured of both as in his motor-car.

In his abstraction he walked bareheaded and without an overcoat across the frozen stretch of lawn between the house and the garage. He was quite indifferent to the weather; his chauffeur put him into furs and pa.s.sed him his gloves and cap as a matter of course, or he might have fared forth poorly equipped to meet the wind and storm.

He swung his machine from the cement incline into the street and turned across Broadway. He did not wish to pa.s.s Elsie Murray ensconced in the park pavilion with Holly Masterson at her knees; yet his thoughts were so swayed by her that when he reached One Hundred and Thirtieth Street he turned west again and took the ferry across the Hudson. He had no better reason for doing so than the tranquillity and content she seemed to draw from contemplating the opposite sh.o.r.e.

He sped up Fort Lee hill with a crowd of other cars, turned west and north to escape their companionship and all the landmarks he knew. He avoided the main highway and chose mere cross and hill roads and lanes.

Always he had before him the vivid, pretty face of Lucille, the tired young face of Masterson and the gray eyes of Elsie Murray.

A nurse-maid! The girl who had told him the legend of Raoul Galvez, the girl by whose standard he had come to measure himself and his companions and who had fixed the sluggish attention of his conscience upon the mischief being wrought by his yielding good nature--that girl was Lucille's nurse-maid. That amazement of the night before remained with him, coloring all other emotions. He had come out to arrange his thoughts, but the hours pa.s.sed and they remained in chaotic condition.

Near noon he was running through a narrow woodland track when a bend in the road suddenly revealed his way blockaded by an enormous wagon that stood before him. It was a moving van; its canvas sides distended by bulky furniture and household fittings, its rear doors tied open to allow a huge old-fashioned cupboard to stand between. Adriance brought his machine to an abrupt halt.

"Clear the way there," he impatiently shouted to the invisible driver; "what is the matter--broken down?"

The answer came, not from the concealed front of the van, but from the bank bordering on the side of the road.

"All right; but ain't it a shame that you blew in at dinner-time!"

The reply was unexpected; Adriance looked towards the complainant's voice. In the shelter of a big boulder that gave some protection from the wind, three men were seated, each with a leather lunch-box on his knee. Two of them wore the striped ap.r.o.ns of moving-men; the third evidently was the spokesman and the driver. All three held various portions of food and stared down at the intruder in the att.i.tude in which his advance had arrested them.

"It ain't as if we could just turn out," the driver pursued, not resentfully but with an impersonal disgust. He put the apple in his hand back into his lunch-box and stood up. "We've got to go on a mile before there's room for you to pa.s.s. Come on, boys."

"No," Adriance aroused himself from self-absorption to forbid the upheaval. "I am in no hurry; finish your lunch, and I will wait."

The three on the bank stared harder.

"You're a sport," complimented the driver; "but it ain't more than five minutes after twelve."

"What has that to do with it? Oh, I see; you mean that you rest until one?"

"You're on."

"Well, I said that I was not in a hurry," he accepted the delay he had not contemplated. "Take your rest and I will smoke."

The three men regarded each other, then the driver slowly sat down. The munching horses were blanketed against the cold, but the men appeared careless of temperature. They obviously were constrained by the presence of the man in the automobile, however.

"This road ain't much used," the driver ventured presently. "We're taking this load to a farmhouse up here a ways. That's why we thought we could stop traffic without being noticed."

His round, bright eyes asked a question that Adriance answered with doubtful truthfulness.