The Mastersons' apartment had, like many such apartments, a charming little foyer. It was lighted by a jade-green lamp, swung in bronze chains delicately green from the tinting of time; and the notes of bronze and dull jade were carried through all the furnishings, through leather and tapestry and even a great, dragon-clasped Chinese vase. But those greenish lights were not always becoming to visitors. When Tony Adriance entered the foyer that evening they were so unbecoming to him that the maid privately decided he was ill. Her master not infrequently came home with that worn look about the eyes and mouth. She wondered if Mr. Adriance gambled.
None of the other guests had arrived. Indeed, it was not yet time. The clink of glass and bustle of servants in the dining-room alone told of the coming event in hospitality. Hospitality? Tony Adriance stood still, arrested in his movementtoward the drawing-room; the sick distaste of all the last weeks finally culminated in paralysis before the prospect of the farce he was expected to play out, with his unconscious host as spectator.
"I—am not ready," he found himself temporizing with the maid. His glance fell upon a desk and prompted him. "I have forgotten an important letter; I will write it before I go in. Don't wait; I know my way."
She obeyed him. Of course he had nothing to write, but he fumbled for a sheet of paper and picked up a pen. He was awake at last to the enormity of his presence here as a guest; before he had glimpsed it, now he saw it, stripped naked.
He could not go on. There was no reason why the conviction should have come to him at this moment, but it did so. As he sat there, that knowledge rose slowly to full stature before his vision like an actual figure reared in the path he had been following. It was no longer a question of Lucille's desires or his own; he could not do this thing.
He was not accustomed to intricate windingsof thought, or to self-analysis. He hardly understood, as yet, what was aroused in him, or why. But he knew that he must act; that his time of passive drifting was ended. Once Lucille had reproached him with cowardice. To-day, the girl in the pavilion had innocently brought the charge again. And the girl was right; it was cowardly to let a wrong grow and grow. Masterson's friend in Masterson's house! Adriance dropped the pen his clenching fingers had bent, and stood up.
The maid had gone back to that centre of approaching activities, the kitchen. Alone, Adriance went down the corridor to the drawing-room.
Mrs. Masterson was alone there, moving some introduced chairs into less conspicuous situations. The alien chairs were covered in rose-color and marred the clouded-blue effect of the room. She pushed them about with a vicious force, as though she hated the inanimate offenders; her expression was sullen and fretful.
That expression altered too quickly, when she saw Adriance standing on the threshold.He caught the skilful change that transformed it into winning plaintiveness.
"You, Tony?" she greeted him, advancing to give him her hand. "I am so glad it was no one else.Youknow how I must contrive and make the best of what little I have. How I loathe this cramped place, and bringing chairs from bed-chambers to have enough, and all pinching——!" She glanced about her with a flare of contempt, her smooth scarlet lip lifting in a sneer.
Adriance slowly looked over the room, not very large, perhaps, yet scarcely cramped; made lovely by opalescent lamps and fragrant by the perfume of roses set in high, slender vases of rock-crystal. All one wall was smothered in the silken warmth of a Chinese rug, against whose blue was lifted the creamy whiteness of an ivory elephant quaintly carved and poised on its pedestal. Even to his eyes nothing here warranted discontent.
"I thought this very pretty," he dissented. "I thought Masterson had done things very well, here."
"Well enough, for a nook in a house; not forthe house," she retorted. "I hate living in apartments. I always have wanted stairs; wide, shining stairs down which I would pass to cross broad rooms!"
She drew a thirsty breath. In the gleaming gown which left uncovered as much of her beauty as an indulgent fashion allowed, her large light eyes avid, her yellow head thrown slightly forward as she looked up at the man, she was a vivid and unconscious embodiment of greed. Not the pitiful greed of necessity, but the greed which, having much, covets more. As if he shared her mind, Adriance knew that she pictured herself descending the stairs in his father's house gowned and jewelled as Mrs. Tony Adriance could be and Lucille Masterson could not.
He was not aware of the change in his own face until he saw its reflection in the sudden alarm and question clouding hers. He answered her expression, then, compelling his voice to hold its low evenness of speech with the inborn distaste of well-bred modern man for betrayed emotion.
"That is it," he interpreted. "That is whyyou would marry me and leave Masterson. You want more than he can give you. If he had as much to give as I have, it would not matter what he did. You would bear with him. Perhaps you have been bearing with me."
"Tony!" she stammered.
"It is quite true. I have been a solemn fool. I have been nerving myself to lay down my self-respect without flinching, because I believed that I had led you to count upon me; and all the while you were counting upon what I owned."
She gathered her forces together after the surprise.
"Rather severe, Tony, because I dislike expensive tenement life!" she commented, with careful irony. Turning aside, she laid her lace scarf across a table, gaining a respite from his gaze. "Have I ever pretended not to care for beautiful, luxurious things? And does that argue that I care for nothing else? I think you should apologize—and pay more heed to your digestion."
He paused an instant, steadying himself. Asusual, she had contrived to make him feel in the wrong and ashamed.
"I do apologize," he said, less certainly. "I did not come in here to say all that, Lucille. But I did come to say what reaches the same end. We cannot finish this thing we have begun. We could not stand it. Think whatever you may of me as a coward, I am not going on."
"Indeed, I think you have gone far enough," she calmly returned. "Suppose we sit down and be civilized. Will you smoke before dinner?"
He shook his head, baffled in spite of himself by her elusiveness, but also angered to resolution. And he knew that he had seen her truly a moment since; the loveliness that had glamoured his sight for a year could not hide from memory that glimpse of her mind.
"I am not staying to dinner, thanks," he refused. "And I am not playing. Our matter looked bad enough as it was, but you showed me a worse thing, just now. It was bad enough to take my friend's wife for love; I can't and won't take her by means of my father's money."
She wheeled about, swiftly and hotly aflame, and they stared at each other as strangers.
"You have forgotten that we are engaged," she said stingingly. "Or doesn't your conscience heed a broken word?"
"Perhaps it is heeding the tactfulness of being engaged to one man while you are married to another," he struck back, goaded to a brutality foreign to his nature.
The faint chime of touching glasses checked them on the brink of a breach that would have made reconciliation impossible. Mrs. Masterson dropped into a chair, snatching up a fan to shade her flushed face. Adriance stood stiffly, where he was, wisely making no attempt at artificial nonchalance. The servant who entered saw only composure in his immobility.
Mrs. Masterson eagerly lifted the offered cocktail to her lips, as if anger had parched them. Adriance took a glass from the tray presented to him, but at once set it aside upon the table; now that he realized, he felt that the hospitality of this house was not for him. But the brief interlude helped both of them.
When the servant had gone, Adriance spoke with restored calmness.
"You see, even now the situation has warpedus all awry. If it were not so, I should like to buy things for you, I suppose. I can imagine——"
He broke the sentence; quite suddenly he had remembered the little buckled shoes bought for the girl in the pavilion. He had looked interestedly at other things in the shop, while he waited for his parcel. It would have given him delight to purchase certain elaborate stockings and absurd lace-frilled handkerchiefs.
"I can imagine that I should," he finished lamely. "Lucille, you will come to agree with me, I hope. But even if you do not, I cannot go on."
She rose and came up to him with a swift movement that brought both her hands against his shoulders before he grasped her intention. Her warm face was directly beneath his own.
"Is there someone else, Tony?" she demanded. "Some girl? Of course it would be a young girl who inspired all this; 'pure as water'—and as tasteless! Is that it?"
She might have struck him with less effect. Tony Adriance went absolutely numb with disgusted wrath. What preposterous thing did sheimply? The shining gray eyes of the girl in the pavilion looked at him across the alert, probing gaze of Lucille Masterson; looked at him with beautiful candor, with indignation. He felt outraged, as if the young girl herself had been made present in this nasty scene. And without cause! He had no thought of loving that sober little figure; he was sick of love.
"I am sorry you cannot credit me with one disinterested motive," he said coldly. "As it happens, you are wrong. There is no one except you. I am going away because you are neither unmarried nor a widow, since you force me to repeat all this. If you were either——"
"You would stay?" she whispered.
He looked down at her, and as always before her magic his strength grew weak. He lifted her hands from his shoulders, before replying.
"Yes," he conceded, his voice changed. "But it is over, Lucille. Tell Masterson I have gone abroad; to stay."
As he moved toward the door, Mrs. Masterson turned to the table and caught up his untouched glass. Fear and chagrin were swept from her face; it still glowed from her late rage,but her eyes were lighted with confidence and ironic relief.
"To your safe voyage and pleasant return!" she exclaimed lightly, facing him across the room. "For you will come back, Tony. The spasm will pass; and leave you lonely. I can wait, then. Good-night."
She laughed outright at the consternation in his glance, as he paused. But he turned and went out, leaving her leaning across the arm of one of the discordant rose-colored chairs, watching him.
Back in the foyer, Adriance stopped to recover a conventional composure of bearing before going out. He recalled that he must pass inspection by the elevator boy and footman; must meet their wonder, no less obvious because dumb, at his departure before the dinner.
The heavy blankness of his waiting was broken by the gayest sound in the world. The gurgling laughter of a happy child rippled through the silence like a brook, cascading down in a cadence of chuckles. As if to confirm the recognition to which Adriance started, a girl's clear laugh joined the baby merriment. Oppositehim, light showed in a thin line through a curtained doorway. Without the slightest remembrance of proprieties or conventions, he sprang that way and swung the door open.
He was on the threshold of a nursery; a room pink as the inside of a rosebud, gay with all the adorable paraphernalia babyhood demands, fragrant with violet-powder and warm as a nest. At the foot of a shining little bed, clutching the brass rail for support while executing a stamping dance, was the lord of the domain; his silk-fine, frankly red hair rumpled into glinting ringlets about his moist, rosy face, his blue eyes crinkled shut by mirth. The girl knelt opposite, steadying the chubby figure and serenely indifferent to the small, mischievous fingers that had loosened her dark hair from its braids. Without her hat, she was younger, even more wholesome and good than he had thought. She looked as fresh and candid as the damp, open-lipped kisses the baby lavished upon her.
Perhaps the intruder moved, perhaps she felt his gaze, for as he watched the girl broke up thepicture. She rose abruptly, turned, and saw him standing there.
At first her startled face told only of surprise; indeed his mere presence there gave her no reason to feel more. But in his dismay and bewilderment and complete obsession Tony Adriance betrayed himself.
"I didn't know," he stammered, grasping blindly at justification and apology. "I didn't know who Holly was—or that you lived here. I am sorry; I should not have spoken——"
He stopped short. He had forgotten the fiction of a third person with which he had masked his confidence in the park; forgotten that the girl knew neither his name nor his purpose in this house. Quite without necessity he had enlightened her.
For the girl was swift of perception. Perhaps his expression alone would have told her the truth, if he had been silent. Mechanically she had put one arm around the baby, now she drew it closer, as if in protection. Her rain-gray eyes grieved, reproached, rebuked him. Possessed of Lucille Masterson's plans, holding her son, she faced him in judgment.
Of course he had known Lucille had a child, somewhat as he knew his father owned the factory behind the electric sign. He never had seen either of them, except distantly; they meant nothing actual to him. But now, there seemed nothing in the world so important. The girl had not spoken, yet she had abruptly brought him face to face with new things.
"You know, I would have taken him, too," he tried to answer all she left unsaid, hating himself for the unsteady humility he could not keep from his voice. "I always meant to. I meant to do everything for the boy. I could—I am Anthony Adriance."
She spoke, then, her smooth voice all roughened.
"You can buy him everything? You cannot buy him his father. And nothing will make up for that."
"But——"
She struck down the weak protest.
"Iknow. I have a good father. And Holly," the infinite compassion of her glance embraced the baby, "he has not even a real mother to doher half. It is not right; you cannot make it right."
"But I have! I am going——!"
He faltered. How was he to explain to her the scene that had just been enacted? Was it decent to Lucille?
"I've done my best," he stammered. "I told you; you know I've not liked this."
The exclamation blended defiance and appeal; it was almost a cry wrested from him. His position had been hard enough before the introduction of this new element. The girl understood, for the anger died from her eyes like a blown-out flame.
"There must be a way," she said quite gently. "There is always a right way, if one can only find it. I think you had better not stay here, now. Mr. Masterson always comes at this time; it is even late for him."
The warning had been delayed too long. Almost with the last word, a man's step sounded in the foyer, the curtains rustled apart and the door swung.
"What, Tony in a nursery!" exclaimed the master of the house, with an oddly tired gayety.He came forward and gave his hand to Adriance, his amused scrutiny wholly cordial. If he wondered how the other man came here, he was both too indifferent and too well-bred to betray the fact. "You have caught me; here is the only place I am behind the times," he added. "Hello, son!"
Adriance was spared the necessity of replying. The baby, who had stood staring round-eyed at the visitor, exploded into a very madness of chuckles and shouts, twisting out of the girl's hold and plunging toward the newcomer with fat arms insistently spread. With an apologetic, half-diffident glance at his guest, Masterson caught and swung Holly into the game of romps demanded.
It was a good game, evidently the result of practice. The pink room rang with treble shrieks of glee; and Masterson laughed, too, occasionally interjecting phrases of caution or comment.
"Jove, what a punch! How's that for muscle, Tony? Easy, son! How doyoulike your wig pulled? Steady, now."
The two in the background looked on. Adriance's throat was contracting; he was suffocating with a terrible sense of barely having escaped a shameful action. He understood the girl even better now. Only, if he loathed himself so much, yet knew that at least he had ended the wrong, how much more must her clear sight find him despicable in her ignorance of his tardy amendment! He dared not look at her. He tried to remember Lucille Masterson's regretfully murmured plaints of Fred's carelessness with money, his "wildness" and neglect of her. But he could only think heavily that if Mrs. Masterson had obtained a divorce, the custody of the child would surely have been awarded to her, the irreproachable wife. There would have been no more bedtime romps for Fred Masterson and his son. How much alike the two looked! He had forgotten how very auburn Fred's hair was, and how boyish his eyes were when he laughed.
THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO MORE BEDTIME ROMPS FOR MASTERSON AND HIS SONTHERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO MORE BEDTIME ROMPS FOR MASTERSON AND HIS SON
With a final toss and shout the dishevelled, panting baby was replaced in the bed, one cheek poppy-red from a rough masculine caress. Alittle shame-faced over the sentimentality, Masterson turned to his guest.
"All over!" he affected lightness. "Come have a Martini before dinner, Tony."
"No, thanks. I couldn't." Adriance pulled himself together with a sharp effort. "I heard your kiddie laughing, and just looked in here. I ought to apologize; I have not yet met this lady——"
Masterson regarded him curiously.
"Miss Elsie Murray, Mr. Adriance," he obeyed the implied request. "Miss Murray is good enough to be Holly's guardian, since no one of his family has time for that—or inclination."
She was a nurse. The simple fact came home to Adriance for the first time. The severe black dress, the little white cuffs and collar that made it a uniform, her constant attendance upon the baby—all the obvious evidence had been overshadowed for him by her face and bearing, the personality out of all accord with the position in which she was.
There was no change in her face. He comprehended that she never had imagined himignorant of her relation to Holly. Through all his whirling confusion of thought, Adriance contrived to hold outward composure and acknowledge the introduction as he would that to any gentlewoman. The quaint word seemed to suit her.
She met him with a poise at least equal to his own. But it was he who offered his hand, heedless of Masterson's observation. It seemed to him that he never had desired anything in his life so desperately, with such passionate eagerness as he desired to be justified before this girl. He wanted her to know the very thing he could not honorably tell anyone: that he had broken with Lucille Masterson of his own free will. His eyes sought hers, unconsciously beseeching her grace of comprehension; indeed, he had a confused idea that she would comprehend that his offered handclasp was ventured only because he was not going to do the wrong they both hated.
Perhaps she did understand. At least, she gave him her hand, for the first time in their acquaintance. He grasped it with a brightening of his drawn face, leaning toward her.
"Thank you!" he said. "I congratulate Holly; you will teach him in time about Maître Raoul Galvez."
That speech took her by surprise; for an instant she did not withdraw her hand, her direct gaze meeting his. He saw her gray eyes cloud and clear, and cloud again; abruptly her dark lashes cloaked them from him.
"Yes," she murmured. "Yes."
Masterson was staring at the two, his lips parted by cynical interest. But no one perceived the second observer. Mrs. Masterson had come to the doorway while Masterson was playing with the baby and still stood there, narrowed, incredulous eyes appraising the amazing tableau offered by her nursemaid and Tony Adriance. She herself had followed Adriance for a last word, unaware of her husband's return home. And she had found this group, in her nursery.
When the others moved, she drew back. The curtains noiselessly fell shut. The two men came into the foyer almost immediately, but the bronze lamp lighted an empty room.
Masterson asked no questions of his guest as they paused outside the nursery, but Adriancehad recollected himself enough to shelter the girl from embarrassment.
"I stopped one day to speak to your boy in the park," he remarked casually. "Miss Murray was telling him an odd fairy tale that struck my fancy; Creole, I should think."
Masterson dropped his hand on the other's shoulder with an intimacy long unused between them, ignoring the explanation.
"We never seem to get together, any more, except at some society nonsense," he regretted. "We used to be pretty close, Tony. Remember that night in the Maine camp after the canoe had upset, when there was only one blanket left and we tossed up for it? I don't remember who won, but I know we both slept under it——as much as we could get under." He laughed reminiscently. "Well, it's a far cry from there to here! Shall we go in to Lucille?"
"Thank you, but I have made my excuses to Mrs. Masterson," Adriance answered steadily. "I had a telegram——! I am off for the rest of the year; perhaps longer. I am going to South America."
"Your father's business? I remember youonce spoke of some such thing. I wish I were going with you."
He sighed with impatient fatigue, and the two stood for a silent moment. Masterson aroused himself to hold out his slender, nervous hand.
"Well, good luck go with you, Tony. Itusually does, though! 'To him who hath——.'"
The next day it stormed. A biting north wind hunted across river and city; a wind that carried the first ice-particles of the approaching winter. There were no children on the Drive or in the park, except a few sturdy urchins neither of the age nor class attended by nurses. No one uncompelled cared to face the grim, gray, scowling day whose breath was freezing.
In the Adriances' breakfast-room, an effort had been made to offset the outside cheerlessness by aid of lamps glowing under gold-colored shades. But only an optimist could have deluded vision into accepting the artificial sunshine as satisfactory. Tony Adriance was even irritated by the feeble sham, and snapped out the lamp nearest to him as he took his seat.
The action was trifling, but Mr. Adriance, seated on the opposite side of the round table, glanced keenly at his son and read an interpretation of it. He believed that Tony wished toshadow the pale exhaustion of his face. In this he was wrong; Tony Adriance was quite past thoughts of his appearance. Not having looked in a mirror, he was not even aware of the traces left by the last night. He did not at all appreciate the significance with which his father presently inquired, courteously concerned:
"You are not well, this morning?"
"Quite well, thank you," Tony replied; he glanced up from his plate somewhat surprised at the question.
Mr. Adriance met the glance with sincere curiosity. His first hazard failing, he sought for a second. Indeed, he knew very well that Tony had none of the habits which lead to uncomfortable mornings, although to a casual regard his present bearing suggested a white night. Fortunately, he had not perceived the innuendo within the older man's question and was not offended. Mr. Adriance detested being in the wrong.
Tony was too listless to pursue the subject at all. After vainly waiting a moment for his father to explain the inquiry, he proceeded with the business of breakfasting more or less indifferently.He was conjecturing as to his own ability to set forth his trouble for the calm inspection of the gentleman across the table. He had come down-stairs with that intention, born of the night's bitter experience of solitude in unhappiness. Now he felt that the project was impossible. His father and he were not on terms of sufficient intimacy. He suffered an access of discouragement and weariness. His only idea had failed, yet something must be decided, some course followed.
"You dined at the Mastersons', last night, I believe?" Mr. Adriance had found his second hazard. Unconsciously his voice sharpened; it would be intolerable if Tony and Masterson had made some clumsy scene between them. Occasionally Mr. Adriance wondered what so clever a woman as Lucille Masterson had seen in either of the two.
"No," Tony denied.
"No? I had understood——?"
"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; hecould 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 amusement. Can you not send me somewhere to take charge of your interestsinstead 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 personalinadequacy. 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 unembarrassed 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 thegenuine 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 undertakeany 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 assured 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 passed 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 pass 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 tranquillityand content she seemed to draw from contemplating the opposite shore.
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 passed 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 enormouswagon 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 aprons 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 attitude 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 pass. 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.
"I lost my way."
"Oh!" The driver paused, then suddenly slid down the bank.
"Ain't we the hogs," he observed deprecatingly, coming up to the side of the car and offering his lunch-box. "Won't you eat?"
The tired, dark-blue eyes of Tony Adriance met the cheerful, light-blue eyes of the other man. The two men were about the same age, and one of them was desperately lonely and sick of his own thoughts. They both smiled involuntarily.
"Thanks, I will," said Adriance; and took a thick, rye bread sandwich from the box presented. The driver sat down on the running-board of the automobile and there ensued a well-employed silence.
The sandwich was excellent. Adriance had eaten little breakfast; yet, left to himself, hewould hardly have thought of food in his bitter preoccupation; but it did him good. The ham smeared with cheap mustard had a zest of its own, a little brutal, perhaps, but effective. It was a generously designed sandwich, too, not a frail wafer. He ate it all, even the acrid crust.
"'Nother?" invited the host.
"No, thanks; but that one tasted good." Adriance drew out his cigar-case. "Won't you all have a smoke with me, now?"
The cigars were passed and lighted. Before returning the case, the driver frankly inspected the fine leather toy with the tiny monogram in one corner.
"That's all right," he approved, returning it to its owner. "I was afraid you'd pull out a little gold box of cigarettes."
"Why?" amused.
"Oh, I don't know, my luck, I guess."
"You don't like them?"
"Me? I got a pipe three years old that holdssometobacco—that for me. But this cigar is all right. Ever try a pipe?"
"Yes."
The driver leaned back comfortably againstthe spare tire strapped beside the car, gazing up at the gray, cold sky.
"A pipe, my feet on the kitchen stove, the kids and the missus—me for that, nights."
Adriance looked at him with startled scrutiny. Almost he could have imagined that Elsie Murray had come to the man's side and prompted him. What, was it then real and usual, that homely content she once had painted so vividly? Did most men have such homes?
"You're married?" he vaguely asked.
"Sure, these five years; we got two kids." The boyish driver chuckled and shook his head reminiscently. "Darn little tykes! What they ain't up to I don't know. Dragged a big bull pup in off the street last week, they did, and scared the missus into fits. Pete—he's four—had it by the collar bold as brass, and it ugly enough to scare you. Say, I'm trying one of those schemes for training kids on him; exercising him, you know. You ought to see the muscles he's got already, arms and legs hard as nails. Think it will work all right?"
Adriance looked down into the eager face.
"Yes, I do," he said slowly. "You cannot be more than twenty-five or six——?"
"Twenty-five is right."
"You must have worked pretty hard?"
"Ever since I was fourteen," was the cheerful assent. He pulled out a watch of the dollar variety and looked at it. "One o'clock it is! We'll get along again, boys. Yes, I've been busy. But the missus and I are saving up. Some day I'm going to have a trucking business of my own; there's good money in it. Well, we're sure obliged to you for waiting for us."
The other two men were coming down the bank. Adriance drew off his glove and held out his hand to his acquaintance.
"I am glad I met you. Good luck!"
"Same to you!" He pulled off his mitten to give the clasp. "Are you going to the ferry?"
"I—I—? Yes."
"Well, turn off when you get to the next road. It's a poor one, but it's a short cut to the Palisades road."
The horses were unblanketed and the bags which had held their luncheon removed. The men climbed into their places, and presentlyAdriance's lusty machine was rebelliously crawling on behind the moving-van.
At the end of a mile they came to the side road, and parted with cheerful shouts of farewell.
It was impossible to measure the good that interlude of healthy companionship had done to Tony Adriance. It had swept aside vapors, cleared his mind to normality, invigorated him like a pungent tonic. Yet it had laid a reproach upon him. He contrasted himself with that boyish husband and father; yes, contrasted Mr. Adriance, senior, with that driver who was anxiously training his son's body by his own efforts after the day's work. He could not recollect his father ever playing with him or seriously advising him. Even Fred Masterson was doing better.
The road debouched abruptly upon the main highway. A passing automobile momentarily delayed Adriance, and looking idly across the way, he perceived a house. After the other car had passed and the way was open, he sat quite still in his machine, gazing.
There was nothing about the house beforehim to catch the eye except a certain air of quaint sturdiness that had survived desertion. It was rather a cottage than a house, bearing a sign "For Sale," and unoccupied. It was a red-painted cottage, built in that absurd Gothic fashion once favored by some insane builders. Its ridiculous roof and windows were highly peaked; its high, narrow porch had a pointed top like a caricature of the entrance toNotre Dame de Paris. It stood quite back from the road with an air of abandonment; but it was unconquerably cheerful, even against the gray sky. It was a house that wanted to be cosy.
Suddenly Adriance realized that he was very tired. He was not ready to go home; he even thought with abhorrence of going there. Yet he was weary of guiding his machine along the highway. He left his seat and walked up the wood path—two planks in width—leading to the cottage. The windows gaped, uncurtained; he looked in, then deliberately seated himself upon the step and lapsed into heavy revery.
There were few passers-by on such a day. Those who were compelled to the road lingered in the cold to look curiously at the automobilestanding by the gutter and at the young man who sat on the old wooden step.
It was four o'clock when Tony Adriance rose and went back to his automobile. He did not turn down to the ferry, but looked again at the signboard on the house; then turned his machine about and drove to an address which was seven miles inland.
Tony Adriance had not really heeded the weather until he found his way to the stone pavilion on Riverside Drive at dusk that evening. Cold and wind had recorded slight impression on his preoccupied mind and his healthy body. Indeed, his feeling was that of a man passing through a fever, rather than one chilled. And he was hot with a savage sense of victory, for he brought decision back with him. He knew, at last, what he meant to do.
He was brought to heed the weather by his need of seeing the girl who was Holly's nurse. He stood for a while in the pavilion, after realizing the absurdity of expecting to find her, and considered. He was accustomed to having his own way; hardly likely to abandon it when his necessity loomed urgent. His distrust of himself was deep, if unconfessed; he dared not wait until the next day. Besides, the storm might continue. After a brief pause of bafflement, he walked up to Broadway, found a stationer'sshop and a messenger, and dispatched a note to Miss Elsie Murray. He looked curiously at the name, after it was written; it seemed so soft, even childish, matched with that steadfastness of hers to which he held as to the one stable thing in his knowledge.
Would she come? The doubt bore him company on his way back to the pavilion. Could she free herself from duties to come, if she wished? He did not know, but he was obstinately resolved to see her that night. He was indeed like a man in a fever; one idea consumed him.
A quarter of an hour passed; a half hour. Dusk, their hour of adventure fixed by chance, had almost darkened to night when Adriance saw the small figure for which he watched step from the curb. She hurried, almost ran across the broad avenue, the wind wrapping her garments around her.
"Thank you," the man greeted her, his gratitude very earnest.
The girl brushed aside his speech with a gesture. She was breathing rapidly; amid all the shadows her face showed white and small.
"Of course I came," she said. "It was noteasy—to come. I cannot stay long. But I knew you would not have sent unless it was important."
"No," he affirmed, and paused. "I wonder why you are there? I mean, why are you somebody's nurse, to be ordered about when you could do so much better things? Of course, I can see how different you are!"
He stopped, with a sense of alarmed clumsiness. Because she was weary, the girl sat down on the cold stone bench before answering.
"You are quite wrong," she said quietly. "I cannot do clever things at all. I do not mean that I am stupid, exactly, but that I cannot do anything so especially well as to make people pay me for it. Neither can my father. I think he is the best man in the world, and my mother the dearest woman, but they cannot make money. He is a professor of romance and history, at a small college in Louisiana. There are a good many of us—I have four younger sisters—so I came North to support myself."
"But——"
"Not as a nurse, of course. I came with an old lady whose son we knew at the college. Sheasked me to be her private secretary. But after a few months she died. I could not go back to be a burden. After I had tried to find other things to do, and failed, I came to take care of Holly. Why are we talking about me? There was something important, you said?"
"I—yes," Adriance said. He could read so much more than she told. Afterward he was ashamed to remember that he neither felt nor expressed any pity for her disappointed hopes. His whole attention was fixed on her steady courage; the fighting spirit that he had divined in her and toward which his indecision reached weak hands groping in the dark for support.
The girl shrank behind the stone column nearest her as a blast of freezing wind rushed past.
"Well?" she spurred his hesitation.
She was successful. He moved nearer her to be heard; the fever of the last twenty-four hours thickened and hurried his speech.
"I'm not going to tell you about Mrs. Masterson," he told her. "In the first place, you would not listen, and in the second place, I have nothing to say. But you must know that lastevening she broke her engagement with me. I mean, before I saw you in the nursery. I was free, then."
"She dismissed you?"
He had deliberately thought out the falsehood that protected Lucille Masterson at his own expense. But it was harder than he had anticipated to play this weak rôle before Elsie Murray.
"Yes," he forced the difficult acknowledgment.
"You need not have told me that," her slow reply crossed the darkness to him. "I know it is not true. And I know what is true. It does not matter how I—learned. But we may as well speak honestly."
He could have cried out in his great relief. Instead, he seized the offered privilege of speech.
"I will, then! You know what I have done to Fred Masterson. I brought the glamour of money, of what I could buy, into his household and made his wife awake to discontent and ambition. I didn't know what mischief I was working, until too late. I did not understand some of it until last night. Now, what? Suppose I go away? Where can I go? Abroad, or on a huntingtrip? While I was gone she would get the divorce, when I came back she and the rest would push me into the marriage. My own father is pushing me. Everyone pities her and thinks the thing is suitable. You don't know me! I like her, and I'm easily pushed. I tell you I never did anything but drift, until last night. I am afraid of myself, yet."
"Then, why have you sent for me?" she asked, after a silence.
There was as much sullenness as resolution in the unconscious gesture with which he folded his arms.
"Because I mean to stop this thing. Because I am going to take my own way for the rest of the journey instead of being pushed and pulled. I quit, to-night."
"How? What do you mean?"
"I am leaving the position where I am not strong enough to stand firm. And because I know myself, I am fixing it so I cannot go back. You"—he stumbled over the word—"you are not much better off than I, so far as getting what you want out of life is concerned. Do you want—will you try the venture with me? I think, I'msure I could keep my half of a home. You once said you would like to be a poor man's wife——"
The last word died away as if its boldness hushed him with a sense of what he asked so readily. The girl rose to her feet, swaying slightly in the strong wind; her fingers gripped the stone railing behind her while she strove to see his face through the dark. A street lamp sent a faint grayness into the pavilion, but he stood in shadows.
"You—are asking—me——?"
He laughed shortly to cover his own embarrassment.
"To marry a man who isn't much more than a chauffeur out of work! Driving a car is my only way of earning money, just now. Of course, if we go away together we will have to live on what I can bring in. It's not very dazzling, but neither is being a nurse."
Comprehension slowly came to her.
"You would do this so you never could go back," she whispered, half to herself. "To be cut off from everyone, because of me!"
"Not that!" he offered quick apology. "Why, you are above me by every count I canmake! No, it is because I can't stand alone. And, of course—if I were married——"
"Mrs. Masterson would give her husband another chance," she finished.
He could not see her expression, but he felt her bitterness, and that he was losing.
"Don't be offended," he appealed. "I thought we could be good friends—why, if I did not respect and—and admire you, would I be asking to spend my life with you? I know I am not offering you much, but it's my best."
"You do not love me."
He bent his head to the assertion; for it was an assertion, not a question. After the dazzling companionship of Lucille Masterson, love was scarcely an emotion he could associate with the grave, quiet little figure of Elsie Murray. He was surprised and embarrassed anew, and showed it.
"I am not very sentimental, I'm afraid. Couldn't we start with friendship? I'll try to make a good comrade for everyday."
The delay was long, so long that he anticipated the refusal and felt his heart sink with a sense of loss and apprehension. All his plans,he suddenly realized, were founded upon a strength drawn from her. He felt the tremor of his structure of resolution, with that support withdrawn. Unreasonable bitterness surged over him. Even she would not have him, penniless.
She was shivering. He noticed that, when she spoke.
"You wish us to understand each other?" she said, her voice quite steady. "Very well. Remember, then, I never knew who you were until last night. You were just a man who seemed lonely, as I was just a woman alone. Remember that I am human, too, and imagine things, and how monotonous it is to be a nurse and do the same things every day. I thought you talked to me and came so often because you were commencing to like me. Once you bought violets from a man on the corner, then threw them away before you crossed to me. I knew you meant them for me, but feared I would not like you to give them to me. I liked you better for throwing them away than for buying them. I was—foolish. And I cannot marry you, because you do not love me, while I—might you."
With the last low word, she passed him and went from the pavilion, not in running flight, but with the swift, certain step of finality. Adriance was left standing, struck out of articulate thought. The astounding blow had fallen among his accumulated ideas and scattered them like dust. She loved him. Slowly stupefaction gave place to hot shame for the insult of his proposal to her. He had been coarse, selfish beyond belief and wrapped in egotism. He had asked her to be his wife with the grace of one engaging a housemaid. And he might have had the unbelievable! A slow-rising excitement mounted through him; a tingling, vivifying interest in the future he had faced with such sullen indifference.
She was gone from sight. Adriance was not rapid of thought, or readjustment. But he knew where to look for her, now. He sprang from the pavilion and ran, throwing his weight against the wind's blustering opposition. The physical effort, in that stinging air, sent his blood racing with tonic exhilaration. He felt dulness and morbidity dropping away from him; zest of life taking their place.
The girl was crossing a dark little strip of park that lay before the house where the Mastersons lived, when he overtook her.
"Elsie Murray!" he panted. "Elsie Murray!"
His voice had changed, and his accent. He spoke to her possessively; he no longer depended, he directed. Instantly sensitive to the difference, the girl stopped.
"Are you running away from me, Elsie Murray?" His hand closed lightly on her arm, he stood over her with the advantage of his superior height, and she heard him draw the cold air deeply into his lungs. "I did not tell you the truth, back there. I meant to, but I did not know it myself. I want what you might give, and I want to give as much to you. Why, do you know what started me toward ending all this bad business, what has given me the will to keep on? It was what you said, the first night I saw you, about a woman waiting for her husband, with the lamps lit, and all. I can't say what I mean—I'm clumsy! But, will you come keep the lamp for me?"
She tried to speak, but to his dismay andher own, instead covered her face; not weeping, but fiercely struggling not to weep.
"No," she flung refusal at him. "No! No!"
As her firmness lessened, his gained. She looked pitiful and helpless, she, his tower of strength. Suddenly, protectingly, he caught her from the assault of a violent swirl of the gale; caught and held her against him, in the curve of his arm.
"If you may love me, and I want you, we have enough to start with," he gently insisted. "I promise you I'll do my part. Will you try it with me?"
She remained still. But the long pause, the contact between them, joined with the change in the man and helped him.
"Will you marry me to-night?" he pressed.
She drew away from him with a flare of her natural resolution.
"No! Not to-night, if you could!"
"To-morrow, then?"
"Go home," she bade him. "Go home; think of everything—of what you have and what you would leave, of all you want and must miss.Think.And if, to-morrow——"
"Yes?"
"If you are sure, come back. I——may try it."
He knew better than to force her further.
"To-morrow, then, I will meet you at noon, in the pavilion," he yielded, quietly, in spite of his leaping excitement. "And there is something else. Once I bought these, for you. Of course I dared not give them to you, afterward. But I did not throw them away, and I brought them in my pocket to-night. Perhaps you will wear them to-morrow, when we go away."
The storm swooped down again. This time he did not hold her from the gust, and she flitted with it into the darkness. But she took the little package he had pressed into her hands; she had at last the little pair of buckled shoes.
They were married at two o'clock the next day. The wedding was in church, at Elsie Murray's desire. With a certain defiance expressive of his attitude toward all the world, Adriance, after obtaining their license, took her to the rector of that costly and fashion-approved cathedral which the Adriances graced with their membership and occasional attendance. Of course the two were met with astonishment, but there was a decision in the young man's speech and bearing that forbade interference. The clergyman did not find the familiar, easy, good-natured Tony Adriance in the man who curtly silenced delicate allusion to the wedding's unexpectedness and the surprising absence of Mr. Adriance, senior.
"I am over age, and so is Miss Murray," was the brief statement, whose finality ended comment. "Will you be good enough not to delay us; we are leaving town?"
There were no more objections. Of course the bride was not recognized as Mrs. Masterson's nurse; she simply was an unknown girl. And she did not in any way suggest that Mr. Adriance was marrying out of his world. Adriance himself entirely approved of her in this new rôle. He liked her dark-blue suit with its relieving white at throat and wrists, and her small hat with a modest white quill at just the right angle. And she wore the shining, Spanish-heeled, small shoes of his choosing. He noticed how large her gray eyes were, when she lifted them to his, large, and clear as pure water is clear under a still, gray sky. But her heavy lashes threw shadows across them, as he had once seen lines of shadow lie across a little lake in Maine on an autumn day. He wondered if she was happy, or frightened. He could not tell what she was thinking or feeling.
So they were married before the imposing altar of cream-hued marble, and the conventional notice went to the newspapers: