A Man's Hearth Part 18

His wife leaned toward him, her gray eyes quite wet with her earnestness.

"Anthony, there is nothing in the world that would make me so happy as for you to write home and tell them that I belong to you. I have so _hoped_ you would think of it!"

"Why didn't you tell me to do so, long ago?" he asked reproachfully.

"Now, how could I tell you a thing like that?"

"Why not?" he wondered, densely.

She made an expressive gesture with her little hands, resigning the hopeless task of explanation.

"Never mind. But I shall be so glad! You see, they do not know that I am married at all. I have not dared tell them, because they have such stately, quaint ideas that they would be profoundly offended if you did not write yourself. They would consider it a great slight to me. So I have just waited."

He gazed at her in utter marvel at such patience.

"Never do it again," he requested. "Please remember that you have deigned to wed a poor, dull animal who needs your constant guidance.

Even yet, I have failed to grasp the delicate point of your not setting me to work at this weeks ago. But bring the writing things and sit beside me as expert critic; we will attend to this before we sleep."

They did so; and were drawn still closer together by the fulfillment of that act of courtesy and consideration which they unwittingly had neglected so long.

The warm, gay intimacy of their life together sank deeper into the fibre of both, as the days went by. They found a comrades.h.i.+p of minds as well as hearts, never failing in novelty and delight to the man.

"I never before had an intimate friend," he said, one morning, with a wondering realization of the fact. "I knew so many people that I never guessed it, Elsie, but I've been lonely all my life. I can't see how I could be any happier than I am now."

They had just risen from the breakfast-table.

Across it Elsie met her husband's eyes; her own infinitely wise, splendidly happy as his, yet touched with that delicate raillery which caressed and laughed at him.

"Oh, yes!" she dissented. "Yes, Anthony."

Puzzled, he searched her meaning in her s.h.i.+ning gaze.

"I could be happier?"

"Yes. _We_ could be."

"But----?"

She came around the table and told him the answer, putting her hands into his. She did not speak shyly, but proudly, with frank courage and comrades.h.i.+p.

An hour later, when Adriance went down the long hill to his day's work, he carried himself with a dignity new as the blended exaltation and dread that paled his face. Once he stopped in the snapping March wind to bare his head and draw a full, deep breath, looking up at the bright-blue sky where tufts of white cloud sailed. Although the season was so far advanced, new-fallen snow overlay road and hills, so that Adriance seemed to himself as standing between two surfaces of pure, glinting brightness. His thoughts were only now becoming articulate, yet a sense of final change had settled through him. His manhood had come to full dignity. Now he knew what he had done when he s.n.a.t.c.hed Elsie Murray out of her cross-current of life and took her for himself. He had found love like a jewel on the road; content had reared a shelter for his inexperience. Now, he stood as protector and shelter as long as he should live for the weaker ones who were his. And with responsibility, ambition sprang fully grown to life and challenged him. Was his wife to rank as a chauffeur's wife, and nothing more? Was their child to be reared in that place, and he to give the two nothing better? Anthony Adriance pa.s.sed his glance, with his father's cold accuracy of appraisal, over the great factory lying far down at the foot of the cliffs, where he himself was awaited to drive a truck.

Presently he went on, down the road. But he went differently.

CHAPTER XII

THE UPPER TRAIL

Adriance had not spent half a year in the mill, even in the limited capacity of chauffeur, without observing many things. He had come to recognize flaws in that smooth-running mechanism of which he was a part.

Might he not find in this fact an opportunity? He saw much that he himself, given authority, might do to promote efficiency. He did not delude himself with the idea that he could go into any factory as an efficiency expert; he did see that here he might fairly earn and ask for a salary that would give Elsie more luxuries than she had even known in her own home and more than he himself had learned to desire. After all, there had been no quarrel between his father and himself. When the young man had chosen a course that he knew to be disagreeable to the older, he simply had withdrawn from their life together as a matter of courtesy and self-respect. Since he no longer gave what was expected of Tony Adriance, he could not take Tony's privileges; now however, knowledge of Elsie had changed the situation. His father had only to meet his wife, Anthony felt a.s.sured, for his marriage to explain itself. Even if Mr. Adriance were disappointed by the simplicity of his son's choice and ambitions, even if he preferred the brilliant Mrs. Masterson to the serene young gentlewoman as a daughter-in-law, why should there be rancor between the two men? For the first time it occurred to Adriance that his father might be lonely and welcome a reconciliation. They never had been intimate, but they had been companions, or at least pleasant acquaintances. The house on the Drive had not contained only servants, as now it must--servants who were merely servants, too, not the faithful, devoted, tactful servitors of romance, but the average modern hireling. The house-keeper engaged and dismissed them and was herself a shadowy automaton, who appeared only to receive special orders and render monthly accounts. For any atmosphere of home created in the house, the Adriances might as well have been established in a hotel.

Anthony wondered if even Elsie could leaven that dense ma.s.s of formality, or if her art was too delicate, too subtle a combination of heart and mind and personality to affect such conditions. He could not be certain. He could well imagine her, daintily gowned and demurely self-possessed, as mistress of that household; but he could not imagine the household itself as altered very much or made less stupidly ponderous by her presence. He had not thought of this before, but now he could not think his pleasure would be quite the same if they sat together in state in that drawing-room he knew so well, while she told him the tales he had learned to delight in. It could not be quite the same as a hearth of their own, and his pipe, burning with a coa.r.s.e, outrageous energy, expressed in volumes of smoke, while Elsie leaned forward, little hands animated, gray eyes sparkling, and mimicked or drolled or sang as the mood swayed them or the tale demanded. He knew that he himself could never read aloud with enthusiasm and verve if Mr.

Adriance listened with amused criticism. No, Anthony realized with some astonishment that he did not want to take his wife home.

Nevertheless, the thing must be done. It was a duty. He could not selfishly continue in the way he liked so well. He must consider Elsie and the third who was to join their circle. He must pick up for them what he had thrown aside for himself.

But he refused to go back to his father like a defeated incompetent to plead for his inheritance. His pride recoiled from the certainty that his father would so regard his return; there must be a middle course. At the great gate to the factory yard he paused to survey again the enormous buildings with their teeming life. In more than one sense this was his workshop.

There was more than the usual hubbub and confusion in the s.h.i.+pping-room when he went down the stone incline to that vast subterranean apartment.

The little wizened man in horn-rimmed spectacles, who vibrated around his long platform, checking rolls and bales and boxes as they were loaded into the trucks, had already the appearance of wearied distraction. His thin hair was flattened by perspiration across his k.n.o.bby forehead, although it was not yet eight o'clock and freezing draughts of air swept the place as the doors swung unceasingly open and shut. Groups of grinning chauffeurs and porters loitered in corners or behind pillars, eying with enjoyment or indifference, as the case might be, the little man's bustling energy and anxiety.

This condition had already lasted two days, like a veritable festival of confusion. Adriance had watched it with the utter indifference of his mates, merely attending to the duties a.s.signed him and leaving Mr. Cook to solve his own perplexities; but this morning he hesitated beside the fiery, streaming little man. The little man caught sight of his not unsympathetic face and hailed him, calling through the tumult of cars, rattling hand-trucks, pushed by blue-s.h.i.+rted porters, and the complex din of the place.

"Here, Andy--you know New York, how long should I allow this man to go to the Valparaiso dock, unload and get back? Three hours?"

"Two," responded Adriance, mounting the long platform beside his chief.

"Can't be done," the chauffeur of the waiting truck sullenly contradicted.

"Why not?"

"You ain't allowing for the ferry running across here only every half hour, nor for the traffic over on the other side."

The tone was insolent, and Adriance answered sharply, unconsciously speaking as Tony rather than as Andy:

"You don't know your business when you propose going that way. Go down the Jersey side here where the way is open, and take the down-town ferry, that runs every ten minutes. And come back by the same route."

"Who are you----" the chauffeur began, but was curtly checked by Mr.

Cook:

"Do as you're told, Pedersen, and if I catch you at more tricks like that you're fired. You've got two hours. Next! Herman, get your truck loaded and take the same route and time; do you hear?"

"Yes, sir; but----"

"Get out, and the two of you come in together."

"Excuse me, Mr. Cook;" said Adriance, his glance taking appraisal of the second truck; "Herman has a cargo of heavy stuff, he can hardly get it unloaded in as short a time as Pedersen."

The little man turned on him wrathfully.

"Can't? Can't? They've got to get back for second trips."

"Then give him two extra helpers."

Mr. Cook stared at him through his spectacles, then turned and shouted the order. When he turned back he dried his forehead and relieved himself by a burst of confidence.