CHAPTER XVIII

THE CHALLENGE

Each day found Anthony less willing to leave the place he had chosen. He did not want to abandon the work commenced in the factory; he had attained an active personal interest in his progress there. He was well aware that he would soon know more about some possibilities of the mill than did Mr. Goodwin himself. His father never had concerned himself at all with such matters. Mr. Adriance was the converging-point of the many lines forming a widespread net of affairs in which this factory was but one strand. He did not even find time to notice Mr. Goodwin's advancing years and the desire for retirement the old man was too proud to voice. But the strand whose smallness was disdained by the greater Adriance might well prove able to support the lesser.

An accident still further determined his wish to remain. One day Mr. Goodwin came down to the lower room; occupied the chair in Adriance's enclosure for a quarter-hour and watched the proceedings. These occasional visits had done much to establish firmly "Andy's" authority, yielding as they did the manager's sanction to the new order of things. But this time Mr. Goodwin had something to say to the young man whom he and Cook had grown to regard as a fortunate discovery of their own.

"Andy," he began, using the nickname as Adriance himself had suggested on observing the positive reluctance with which the old gentleman handled familiarly the revered name of the factory's owner; "Andy, to-morrow there will be a meeting at the office of Mr. Adriance in New York City; I shall be present." He cleared his throat a trifle importantly. "I shall have pleasure in mentioning the excellent, the really excellent, work you have done here. I shall mention you personally."

Anthony carefully put down the papers he held and stood still, trouble darkening across his face. He saw what was coming, and he saw no way to stop it. He did not want his father to learn of his presence here from an outsider, or at a public meeting. He wanted to tell Mr. Adriance his own story, with their kinship to help him. He wanted to explain Elsie to the man who was championing Mrs. Masterson; he wanted to tell him of the new Adriance to come. He hardly thought it possible that his father would deny him the simple opportunity he asked, or try to force the monstrous wrong of a separation between man and wife, if he understood. But if the bare fact that Tony was secretly in his employ were flung before him, Mr. Adriance was quite capable of regarding this as an added defiance and even mockery of himself. Mr. Goodwin's speech flowed placidly on:

"Your abilities are really exceptional, exceptional; I am sure that they will be suitably appreciated. You are doing much better work than Ransome. I shall advise that I be allowed to create a new position for you at a new salary. I should like you to supervise the entire shipping department on this floor, not merely the trucking."

"You are very good," Adriance murmured; "I am not quite ready perhaps for that. By the time the next meeting is held----"

"I have said that you were competent," Mr. Goodwin reminded him with some stiffness. "I am accustomed to judge such matters, pray recollect. I am quite sure Mr. Adriance will feel pleasure that a connection of his, even a distant connection, should thus distinguish himself from the ordinary employee."

"No! That is--I should wish----" Adriance caught himself stumbling, and colored before the astonished eyes of the other. "I mean to say, family influence cannot help me in that way. Can you place the matter before Mr. Adriance without using my name?"

The older man chilled in severe amazement. Very slowly he took off his _pince-nez_ with fingers a trifle uncertain.

"Certainly not," he said, rigidly. "Why should I do so remarkable a thing?"

That challenge was not easily answered. The silence persisted unpleasantly. Through the breach it made trickled a thin stream of doubt, which rapidly grew to a full current of suspicion. Still Adriance could find nothing to reply, and the situation became more than embarrassing. Mr. Goodwin at last arose.

"I regret that I made this proposition," he said. "Of course it was not in my calculations that you had anything to conceal, especially from Mr. Adriance. We will of course drop the matter for the present."

"You mean that I may continue here as I am?"

"I hope so. You will comprehend that it becomes my duty to set this matter before Mr. Adriance. It is not right that I should employ in his name a man who fears to have his presence here known to his employer. I will bid you good-morning."

This condition was worse than the first. Recognizing himself as cornered, Adriance cast a hurried glance around him, found no one within ear-shot of his little enclosure, and took a step toward the man about to leave him.

"Wait! Mr. Goodwin, I am Tony Adriance."

The little old gentleman stared at him blankly.

"My father does not know that I am here, no one knows except my wife. Will you not sit down again and listen to me?"

Still Mr. Goodwin stared at him, dumb. Smiling in spite of his vexation and anxiety, the young man quietly fronted the scrutiny. He was quite aware that in his working clothes, his hands evidencing his winter of manual labor, his face dark with the tan of months of wind and sun, he hardly looked the part he claimed; that is, if Mr. Goodwin knew anything of the former Tony Adriance. But he kept the candid honesty of his eyes open to the other's reading, and waited. Perhaps if those rather unusual blue-black eyes he and his father had in common had confronted Mr. Goodwin in the brightness of daylight, he might before this have been identified. At any rate, they convinced now, even in the deceptive light.

"There is a resemblance," murmured Mr. Goodwin.

"To my father? Yes, I think so; I have been told so."

"But--why----?"

One of the usual interruptions called Adriance away before he could reply. The old gentleman sat dazed, watching him. When the vehicle had passed on, Adriance turned back to the other man.

"I married without consulting my father, last autumn," he said quietly. "Will you dine with me to-night, Mr. Goodwin, at my own house up the hill, and let me explain to you what I am doing and why I am doing it? If you have any doubt of my identity, you may easily fix it by asking my father when you see him to-day whether his son is at home or not."

Mr. Goodwin found his voice with some difficulty.

"No, I would prefer to understand before I see Mr. Adriance. Come up to my private office now; Cook can manage here for an hour without you. I am astounded, even bewildered, Andy--Mr. Adriance----"

"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 gratitude, 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 identity. 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 shipping 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 identity 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 pass, 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 pass without comment. Either Anthony's position would be assured 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.