A Man's Hearth Part 9

"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. She asked 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 last evening 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 antic.i.p.ated to play this weak role 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 hunting trip? 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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'm sure 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 embarra.s.sment.

"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 can make! 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 a.s.sertion; for it was an a.s.sertion, not a question. After the dazzling companions.h.i.+p of Lucille Masterson, love was scarcely an emotion he could a.s.sociate with the grave, quiet little figure of Elsie Murray. He was surprised and embarra.s.sed anew, and showed it.

"I am not very sentimental, I'm afraid. Couldn't we start with friends.h.i.+p? I'll try to make a good comrade for everyday."

The delay was long, so long that he antic.i.p.ated 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 s.h.i.+vering. 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 pa.s.sed 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 acc.u.mulated 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 coa.r.s.e, 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 bl.u.s.tering 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 and her 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 a.s.sault of a violent swirl of the gale; caught and held her against him, in the curve of his arm.