CHAPTER XVI

THE GUITAR OF ALENYA OF THE SEA

That one day, in a mood of fierce impatience, had seized upon Anthony Adriance and hurried him through a range of feeling and experience such as Time usually brings in leisurely sequence, spaced apart. From Elsie's confidence in the morning, with its moving love and pride and awe he in nowise was afraid to name holy, he had gone to the spectacle of his friend's degradation in the tawdry restaurant. And as a completion, he had been confronted with the new and ugly vision of a father he could not honor.

He always had respected his father very sincerely, and felt more affection for him than either of them ever had realized. He had admired the success of the elder Adriance, and secretly regretted that he was not allowed to work with him or share it except by spending its proceeds. His hope of a reconciliation had not been all mercenary. Now all that was thrown down, an image overturned and shattered. He saw only a selfish, narrow-minded man, scheming to divorce a pretty woman from her husband in order that she might be free to come between his son and the unwelcome wife he had taken. For of course Elsie was judged by the servant's position she had held; there was no one to tell of her gentle birth and breeding. Anthony had understood this, and had looked forward with eager anticipation to enlightening his father, some day when his other plans were quite ready.

He had meant that day to be soon; now he knew that it would never come in the way he had fancied. And the loss of an ideal hurt. Masterson had told him the truth; there was no escaping the logical inference to be drawn from it. Anthony wasted no energy in trying, instead addressing himself still more closely to the work in hand.

He worked harder than ever, at the mill, but the buoyant enthusiasm was gone. Now he dreaded the possibility that Mr. Goodwin might speak to Mr. Adriance of the young man who bore his name and who was making such changes in the shipping department. For Anthony did not content himself with regulating the trucking system. He had inherited his father's ability, although the unused tool had lain undiscovered. His attention aroused, he found other slack lines, and indicated how to tighten them to taut efficiency. Mr. Goodwin visited the underground room more than once, observed and approved. Cook, won by the new man's tact that never slighted or criticised injuriously his former chief and present associate, aided him with warm co-operation. Anthony found his salary increased. When Ransome returned, after his illness, he was given a new position, upstairs.

The evenings in the little red house were no longer entirely devoted to play, after that night spent abroad. Adriance took to keeping a book of records, in the form of cryptic notes and columns of figures. "Chauffeur's accounts," he called them, when Elsie questioned; and she laughed acceptance of the evasion, forbearing to tease him with curiosity.

Long before, there had arrived the replies to the letters of announcement he and Elsie had written to her parents, and Adriance had been touched home by the serious, graciously cordial welcome extended to the unknown son-in-law. He had promised himself, and Elsie, that some time a visit to Louisiana should be paid. Since that, she had described the neighborhood, the countryside and people, with her knack of vivid word-sketching, until all lay as clearly before him as a place seen. Now he recalled this with a new consideration.

"Do you remember the old house and plantation that you once told me about?" he asked her, one Sunday morning. "The deserted place, that had been for sale so long. Do you suppose it is still for sale?"

"It was, the last time Virginia wrote," she replied, regarding him questioningly. "She spoke of a picnic held under the old trees."

"If I--well, was crowded out of here, would you be content to try life down there? I remembered yesterday that I own some rather valuable stuff left me by my mother; nothing very much, just jewelry she had as a girl. I do not like the idea of selling it, but if I am forced into a corner, it would buy such a place for us. I have some ideas I would like to try out."

Elsie set down the salad-bowl with which she was busied; her rain-gray eyes grave, she considered her husband.

"Of what are you thinking, Anthony?"

Adriance looked away. Even to her, he could not bring himself to speak of his lost confidence in his father or to say whom he now feared as an enemy. Mr. Adriance could not divide Anthony and his wife without their consent, but he could make it bitterly hard for them to live together. Anthony had known of men who had incurred his father's enmity, and the memory was not reassuring. Before his interview with Masterson, he would have ridiculed the idea of such a situation between his father and himself; now, he was uncertain.

"Put on your hat and coat," he evaded the question. "Come for a walk; I want to show you something."

"And our dinner?" she demurred.

"Never mind it. We will eat scrambled eggs."

Laughing, she complied.

"What am I going to see, Anthony?"

"A house," briefly.

The walk took them quite away from the neighborhood of such small cottages as their own. In fact, the house before which Anthony finally halted was standing so much away from any others as scarcely to be called in a neighborhood, at all. It stood out on a little spur of the Palisades, delightfully nestled in a bit of woodland and lawns of its own.

"There!" he indicated it. "Pretty?"

Elsie looked, with a satisfying seriousness. The house was so new that the builder's self-advertisement still jostled the sign offering for sale: "this modern residence, all improvements."

"I love it," she pronounced. "Those white cement houses are adorable; it looks as if it were made of cream-candy. What deep porches, like caves of white coral; and how deliciously the light gleams in those cunning, stained-glass windows! I suppose they are set up the stairs? It is a nice size, too; large enough to be quite luxurious, but not so large as to be appalling. How did you happen to notice it, dear?"

"I took this road for a short cut, one day. Look what a view you have up here. One must see twenty miles up and down the river, and over half New York. But it is open to inspection; let us go in."

"As if we were considering buying it," she fell in with the sport. "Yes, and we will be very critical indeed; find flaws and finally reject it. Really, Anthony, it does not at all compare with our present residence."

"You'll do," he approved, drawing her up the broad, lazily-low steps.

It really was an enchanting house; a house that developed unexpected charms to the pair who wandered through its empty, echoing rooms and halls. It indulged in nooks, and inconsequential little balconies; it displayed a most inviting window-seat halfway up the stairs that could only have been designed for lovers.

"But none have been there, yet," Elsie observed, lingering on the stairs to contemplate this last allurement. "Just think, Anthony, that it is a mere debutante of a house with its ball-book all unfilled. No one has sat before its hearth, or nestled in its window-seat, or opened its door to let in love or give out charity. It is an Undine house whose soul has not yet entered its cool whiteness. Oh, I hope the people who buy it are both fair and good, and respect its innocence!"

"Coral caves and Undines--your sentiment is all deep-sea, to-day," he teased her. "Elsie, doesn't all this make you want something?"

"Yes," she promptly returned looking over her shoulder at him as she descended. "I want something that I saw in the Antique Shop, yesterday. Will you buy it for me?"

"That depends. What is it?"

"A guitar. A guitar that might have been made to go with our ivory and jade chessmen, for some heavy-lidded slave-girl to touch while her master and his favored guest moved the pieces on the board. It is _El Aud_ of Arabia; all opalescent inlay of mother-of-pearl, pegs and frets marked with dull color. I am quite sure it belonged to some Eastern princess; perhaps Zaraya the Fair or Alenya of the Sea. It will sing of court-yards in Fez where fountains splash all the hot, still days, of midnight, in the Alhambra gardens, and the nightingales of lost Zahara. And the antiquarian person will sell it for five dollars!"

Adriance threw back his head and laughed, beguiled from serious thoughts.

"What a peroration! We will buy the thing on our way home, Sunday or no Sunday. That is, if you can play it for me, and if it will come West enough for the sleepy, creepy song about Maitre Raoul Galvez that should never be sung between midnight and dawn? I have never heard that one, yet."

"You shall," she promised. "And also the song with which Alenya of the Sea charmed the king from his sadness."

"Tell me first who Alenya was."

"To-night----"

"No, now." Lightly, but with determination he drew her across the threshold of the room that opened beside them. Opposite its rawly new, rose-tiled fireplace he pushed a tool-chest, forgotten by some careless workman, and spread over it his own coat, making a fairly comfortable seat. "Sit here," he bade. "You're tired, anyhow; and I have a fancy to see you here."

Surprised, but yielding to his whim with that cordial readiness he loved in her, Elsie obeyed. Adriance established himself opposite, on the comparatively clean tiles of the hearth.

"Shoot," he commanded, lazily and colloquially imperious. "Your sultan listens."

She made a mutinous face at him and slowly removed her hat, laying it beside her upon the chest. Her gaze dwelt meditatively upon the broad ray of sunlight that streamed across from the nearest window and glittered between them like a golden sword. Watching, Adriance saw her gray eyes grow reminiscent.

"Very well, I will try to tell the story as my father once told it to me. But whether he drew it from those strange histories in which he is so learned, or whether he drew it from his own fancy, I do not know. For he is more poet than professor, and more antiquarian than either--and more dear than you can know until you meet him, Anthony. Now imagine yourself in our neglected old garden, and listen.

"Long, long ago, before the beauty of Cava brought the Moors across Gibraltar into Spain, there lived in the East a king named Selim the Sorrowful. The name was his alone. His kingdom was as rich as vast; his people were content; it seemed that all the country laughed except its ruler. Upon him lay a vague, sinister spell, and had so lain from the hour of his birth.

"For always he grieved for a thing unknown, a want undefined and unsatisfied. Royalty was his, and youth, and absolute power, yet, because of this great longing of his he moved like a beggar through his splendor and knew hunger of the heart by night and day. Wise men and temples were questioned in vain, rich gifts vainly sent to distant oracles; none could tell the king's desire, or cure it. And his dark, wistful face came to be accepted by his people as a thing usual and royal.

"One day, when the king walked alone in his garden by the sea, a strange mist crept over the land and water, silvery, opalescent, wonderful. He stood, watching. Suddenly a gigantic wave loomed through the haze and swept curling and hissing shoreward to his very feet, where it broke with a great sound. When the glittering foam and spray fell away again, a girl was standing on the sands before him; a girl clad in the floating gray of the mist, girdled and crowned with soft, dim pearls. Her lustrous eyes were green as the heart of the ocean, and when the king gazed into them his sorrow shrank and fled.

"'Who are you, desire of mine?' asked Selim.

"'Alenya of the Sea,' she answered him, and her voice was the lap of waves on a summer night.

"Then the king took her in his arms and bore her to his palace."

"And she cured him?"

"Better! She satisfied him. Never was a change more marvellous; in all the kingdom there was no man so happy as Selim the king. Day and night, night and day, he lingered by the sea-maiden. Riotous prosperity came to the land, the fields yielded double crops; it seemed that the king's smile was a very sunshine of the South.

"But by-and-by superstitious dread fell upon the people, and the jealous priests fostered it. Strange, strange and weirdly sweet was the music that drifted from Alenya's apartments. There came a day when the country demanded that Selim put away the evil enchantress, or die. One month they gave him for the choice."

"The men of the East were poor lovers," commented Adriance. "He banished the sea-princess?"

"Not at all! He chose death, and a month with Alenya."

"Well, if he lived one month exactly as he willed, he had something."

"Very true, cynical person. But never was such month as his, when the lonely man still possessed his love and the wearied king had found an excitement. Intensity is the leap of a flame, and cannot endure. When the end of the four weeks came--" she paused, her dark little head tilted back, her regard inviting his hazard.

"They died?"

"Alenya sang to the king for the last time. There is no record of that lost music; it is so sad that if it were written the paper would dissolve in tears. When it ceased the king slept, and Alenya flitted back to the sea and mist, alone. Later came the people and awakened Selim with their rejoicing, but he stared in cold amazement at the pageant of their returning loyalty. He had forgotten all."

"Forgotten?"

"Yes, for Alenya's last song had swept her image from his mind. From his mind, not his heart; he was again Selim the Sorrowful, yearning for the desire he did not know.

"Often, often he wandered along the shore, suffering, uncomprehending. It is written that his reign was long, and wise. But on the night he died his attendants found the print of a small, wet hand on the pillow where rested the king's white head."

After a moment Adriance rose.

"So he could not keep his own, when he had it!" he said. "Thank you, Madame Scheherazade. Now come outside and I'll tell you why I wanted you to sit at that hearth, for luck."

Laughing, she followed him, carrying her hat in her hand.

"Why, Anthony?"

"Because I want this place for our home," he answered.

She uttered a faint exclamation, genuinely dismayed.

"Want it? Why it must be worth ten thousand dollars, Anthony! See, it even has a little garage. And one would need servants; a maid-of-all-work, at least."

"Yes. I am working for all that. A while ago I thought I was certain of it. Now, I am afraid not. But you are not going to live the way we are now for much longer. Either I shall win my game, and bring you here, or we will go South and try a new venture."

Amazed and hushed, she met his steady, resolute gaze. She had not glimpsed this purpose of his in all their intimate life together.

"Do you--care to tell me about it?" she wondered. "And, you know I am quite, quite happy as we are; as I must be happy with you always, win or lose, my dearest dear."

The place was quite deserted; he kissed her, before the blank windows of the house that never had been lived in.

"I know," he said. "As I must be with you, and am! But I will wait to tell you the rest, until I can tell it all."

She accepted the frank reticence. They walked home more quietly than they had come, each busied with thought.

But Adriance did not forget to stop at the antique shop for the guitar. The proprietor lived in the rear of the shabby frame building and willingly admitted his two customers, after examining them beneath a raised corner of the sun-bleached green curtain.

"The guitar?" he echoed Adriance's request. "For madame? But certainly!"

He produced the instrument from the window with deferential alacrity. He was a thin, bright-eyed French Jew; quite ugly and quite old enough in appearance to justify Elsie's assertion that he was the Wandering Jew and this the very shop of Hawthorne's tale. She smiled at him with a mischievous recollection of this, as she pulled off her gloves to finger the rusty strings.

"It is a good guitar," she approved. "And gay, with all this mother-of-pearl inlay and the little colored stones set in the pegs! But these wire strings must come off, Anthony. They are too loud and too harsh."

"It is so, madame," the old man nodded entire agreement, before Adriance could speak. "The guitar was used on the stage, where loudness----!" He shrugged. "Never would you guess, madame, who brought that instrument in to me last week."

"No?" Elsie wondered, politely interested.

"It was that enormous Russian who formerly rode beside your husband in the motor wagon, madame. He has not a head, that Michael, but he has a heart. About the cines he is mad--the moving pictures, I would say. Well then, into the poor boarding-house where he lives came an actress. She was out of work, or she would not have been there, _bien sur_! The guitar was hers. Michael brought it here to sell for her. I believe she is sick. Because she is of the stage, he is a slave to her."

"He is in love?"

"He, madame? It has not even occurred to him. He would not presume."

"Poor idealist!" said Adriance. "We will take the theatrical guitar, but wrap it up so I can get home without someone tossing me a penny."

He laughed as he spoke, and had forgotten the guitar's story before they reached Alaric Cottage. But Elsie neither laughed nor forgot. That evening, as she sat across the hearth from Anthony, evoking music gay or weird for his enchantment, she thought much of the girl who had last played her decorative instrument.

"Is it my guitar, truly, Anthony?" she questioned, at last.

"It certainly isn't mine," he retorted teasingly.

She made a grimace at him. But she also made a resolve.