A Man's Hearth Part 28

"Try 'Tony'," suggested the other with his sudden smile.

So while the indignant Cook struggled with double duties, Adriance and Mr. Goodwin sat opposite one another in the latter's private office, and held long converse.

With the exception of the Masterson side of the affair, Adriance told the story without reserve. He hoped to win Mr. Goodwin's temporary silence, but he actually won more than he had imagined possible. Mr.

Goodwin was excited and interested as he had not been for years. When Adriance concluded, the other was quite the most agitated of the two.

"You will not tell my father to-day of my presence here, you will give me time to do so myself?"

"I will do better," said Mr. Goodwin, much moved, "I will help you--I adopt you, as it were. Mr. Adriance----"

"Tony."

"Tony, I will train you to succeed me here. I wish much to retire, as I have told you. My wife and I--we have no children--have long planned to travel; we have even selected the places we would visit and the routes we would prefer to take. It has been, I might say, our dream for years; but Mr. Adriance would not listen to my desire to leave. He declares there is no one he could trust in my place." Pride colored the thin old face. "His esteem flatters me; but now I will give him a successor whom he can trust. It is very suitable that you should have this position. I will say nothing to him, as you wish; but do you enter my office here and study the management of this concern with me. I will myself take charge of that."

Astonished in his turn, and deeply touched, Adriance took the offered hand.

"Of course you know I can find no words of sufficient grat.i.tude, Mr.

Goodwin. If you will indeed be so good you shall not find me lacking so far as my abilities reach."

"They have reached quite far already," said his senior, drily.

What had appeared a calamity had become strange good fortune. Mr.

Goodwin readily satisfied any doubt he might have felt of Tony's ident.i.ty. Next morning when he would have gone to his usual place, a clerk stopped him and took him to Mr. Goodwin's private office, where a desk awaited him.

"Of course it is all my name, or rather my father's," Adriance said to Elsie that night. "There are a score of cleverer men than I already there who will continue, I suppose, plodding on as they are. Cook is one of them. But I am not altruistic enough to throw away the luck I have been born into, I am afraid. I shall take all Goodwin will give me, and if my father refuses to keep me there, at least the training will make me more fitted to earn our living in some other place."

"Man, you have not enough vanity to nourish you properly," Elsie gravely told him.

Mr. Goodwin proved a harder taskmaster than Cook or Ransome. He entered upon the education of Tony Adriance with an enthusiastic zest tempered with a conscientious severity that made him exacting and meticulous in detail. Adriance was fond enough of the outdoors to miss the motor-truck at times--there were even hours when he thought wistfully of Russian Mike; but he learned rapidly under the forced cultivation. Now he saw how superficial had been the knowledge of the factory on which he had prided himself in the s.h.i.+pping room, and how absurdly inadequate to the management of the great place he would have been had his father put it in his hands. But under Mr. Goodwin he was becoming in actuality what he once had fancied himself to be. Incidentally the teacher and the student grew cordially attached to one another; and as this attachment was obvious, as the new man was known in every department where he was sent to gather experience as "Mr. Adriance," and as Mr. Goodwin called him "Tony," his ident.i.ty was soon no secret in the factory. But the senior Adriance never came in personal contact with any member of the force except Mr. Goodwin, so this was a matter of indifference. Adriance continued to be entered on the books as a chauffeur, and received the corresponding salary.

The genuine chauffeurs whose comrade Andy had been looked curiously after him and whispered among themselves when, he chanced to pa.s.s, although his greetings to them were the same as always. Cook dropped the use of "Andy," and said "sir" if the young man spoke to him suddenly.

Mr. Goodwin advised his pupil to let such things pa.s.s without comment.

Either Anthony's position would be a.s.sured and demand such deference, or he would leave the factory altogether; in either case protest would only be hypocritical or useless.

The time when Anthony should go to his father with an account of the affair, was indefinitely postponed. The more accomplished first, the better. Secretly, both he and Goodwin had come to dread the possibility that Mr. Adriance would refuse to continue Anthony in his position, either through resentment or lack of faith in Tony's ability.

Sometimes Anthony felt a sharp misgiving that perhaps the very preparation that fitted him for the place he so much desired, would deprive him of it. It was more than possible that Mr. Adriance would keenly resent what was being done without his knowledge. In a sense Anthony was fortifying himself in his father's own territory in order to resist the older man's will in regard to Mrs. Masterson. Anthony never learned to think without vicarious shame and pain of the treachery his father had planned against Elsie. He could not reconcile that idea with anything their years together had shown him of his father. But he worked on and thrust from his mind what he could not remedy.

CHAPTER XIX

THE ADRIANCES

The weeks ran quietly on, bringing spring as the only visitor to the little red house. Masterson had been invited to come, but he never availed himself of the invitation. The Adriances did not speak of him, by tacit agreement feigning to forget the only painful evening they had spent since their marriage.

The event that fell like an exploding sh.e.l.l into the tranquil household, shattering its accustomed life as truly as if by material destruction, came quite without warning. It chose one of the first evenings of April, when a delicate, pastel-tinted sunset was concluding the day as gracefully as the _envoi_ of a poem.

Elsie was making ready for her husband, much as she once had described to him a wife's employment at this hour, and so all unconsciously had cleansed the temple of his heart, thrusting down the false idols to make a place for herself. The table stood arrayed, she herself was daintily fresh in attire and mood; the little house waited, expectant, for the man's return. The soft flattery of love lapped Adriance around whenever he crossed this threshold; life had taught him a new luxury in this bare school-room.

Elsie was singing, as she went about her pleasant tasks with the deft surety and swiftness so pretty to watch; singing a lilting, inconsequent Creole _chanson_, velvet-smooth as the sprays of gray p.u.s.s.y-willow she presently began to arrange in a squat, earthen jar. She was happy with a deep, abiding, steadfast content, and a faith that admitted no fear.

She was listening, through all her occupations. The crackle of Anthony's quick, eager step on the old gravel walk would have brought her at once to the door. But the sound of an automobile halting before the gate pa.s.sed unnoticed; many cars travelled this road, day and night. So, as before, Masterson came unheralded into his friend's house. Only, this time he found the door open and entered without knocking. When his shadow darkened across the room, Elsie turned and saw her visitor.

Rather, her visitors. Masterson carried in the curve of his arm a diminutive figure clad in white corduroy from ta.s.selled cap to small leggings. The child's dimpled, ruddy-bright cheek was pressed against the man's worn and sallow young face, the s.h.i.+ning baby-gaze looked out from beside the fever-dulled eyes of the other. A chubby arm tightly embraced Masterson's neck.

"Holly!" Elsie cried, the willow-buds slipping through her fingers.

"Why--how----? Oh, how he has grown! Holly, baby, don't you remember Elsie? He does, truly does--please let me have him!"

Masterson willingly relinquished his charge, putting Holly into the eager arms held out, and stood watching the ensuing scene of pretty nonsense and affection. He did not speak or offer interruption. When Elsie finally looked toward him again, recovering recollection and curiosity, baby and woman were equally rose-hued and radiant.

"But--how did it happen?" she wondered. "Did--was the agreement kept, after all? Is Holly to stay with you, now?"

The man met her gaze with a strange blending of defiance and entreaty.

Now she perceived his condition of terrible excitement and that his dumbness had not been the apathy she fancied. He was on the verge of a breakdown, perhaps irreparable to mental health. Her question was answered by her own quick perception before he spoke.

"I have stolen him. No! I did _not_ steal him; I took my own. It was in the park--he was with a nurse, and she struck him. She didn't know me. I had stopped to get a sight of him. Well, that is all Lucille will ever give him: nurses! She never wanted him, or had time to trouble about him. She doesn't like children. He stumbled, fell down, and the woman slapped him--more than once."

She looked at him with a sense of helpless inability either to aid or condemn. Every conscious fibre in her championed his cause, except her reason. How could this sick man hope to keep Holly against the world?

"You----?" she temporized.

"I've told you what I did; I took him away from her. 'Tell Mrs.

Masterson that Holly has gone with his father,' I said. That was all. I carried him to my car and drove straight here. You will keep him for me?

You and Tony? I have got to go; to get back and make my last fight."

Elsie gently set down the baby. She saw what Masterson in his dazed and selfish absorption overlooked: that she and Anthony were to be drawn into a conflict surely evil for them. Mrs. Masterson must resent this, and call on the law to undo the kidnapping. She herself and Anthony would be dragged from their happy obscurity, their long honeymoon ended.

More menacing still, Anthony's position in his father's factory would be discovered and exploited by the newspapers, with the probable result that Mr. Adriance would end that situation by dismissing the impromptu employee.

But she never even thought of sending Masterson away. The baby hands that grasped her dress grasped deeper at her heart. Also, this man in need was Anthony's friend and one to whom he owed atonement for a wrong contemplated, if not committed.

"Of course we will keep him," she promised, kindly and naturally. "But you must stay, too. You are not well and must rest for a while--it is absurd to speak of fighting when you can scarcely stand. Sit there, in that arm-chair. Presently Anthony will come home, then we will have supper and talk of all this."

The serene good-sense calmed and cooled his fever. Sighing, he relaxed his tenseness of att.i.tude.

"I must go," he repeated, but without resolution.

For answer she drew forward the chair. He sank into it and lay rather than sat among its cus.h.i.+ons, pa.s.sive before her firmness.

Elsie moved about the matter at hand with her unfailing practicality.

She took off Holly's wraps and improvised a high-chair by means of a dictionary and a pillow. To an accompaniment of gay chatter she made ready her small guest's evening meal, tied a napkin under the fat chin and superintended the business of supping. Hunger and sleep were contending before the bread and milk and soft-boiled egg were finished.

Afterward, Elsie carried a very drowsy little boy into her room and made him a nest in her antique-shop four-posted bed. Masterson looked on, mutely attentive to every movement of the two as if some dramatic interest lay in the simple actions. When Elsie returned from the sleeping baby, he abruptly spoke:

"You know, I only mean you to keep him for to-night, not always. I will come back for him. You know all I planned for him and myself. This has hurried me, but I have money enough. Earned money. Did I tell you Mr.

Adriance, Tony's father, has offered me a considerable sum to stop 'making a mountebank' of myself at the restaurant? No? He has. I fancy her former husband's occupation grates on Lucille." He laughed, moving his head on the cus.h.i.+ons of the high-backed chair. "Well, I refused."