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 shell 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 pussy-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 passed 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 tasselled cap to small leggings. The child's dimpled, ruddy-bright cheek was pressed against the man's worn and sallow young face, the shining 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 attitude.

"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 cushions, passive 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 cushions of the high-backed chair. "Well, I refused."

"Of course!"

"You knew I would? Then you grant me more grace than she did."

"She? You said Mr. Adriance offered----"

He glanced keenly at her face, then turned his own face aside that it might not guide her groping thought.

"I must go," he said, again. But he did not move, nor did Elsie.

The pause was broken by Anthony's whistle, the signal which always advised his wife of his return.

But to-night it was not the blithe hail of custom. The clear notes were shaken, curtly eloquent of some anger or distress. Acutely sensitive to every change or mood of his, Elsie caught both messages, the intentional and the one sent unaware. Dropping upon the table a box of matches she had taken up, she ran to the door.

It opened before she reached it. Anthony, his face dark with repressed anger, his movements stiff with the constraint he forced upon them, appeared outlined against the soft, clear dusk of April twilight. He looked behind him, and, holding open the door of his house formally ushered in a guest.

"My wife, sir," he briefly introduced to his father the girl who drew back, amazed, before their entrance.

Mr. Adriance showed no less evidence of inward storm than his son. But he stopped and saluted his daughter-in-law with precise courtesy.

"Mrs. Adriance," he acknowledged the presentation, his voice better controlled than the younger man's.

"Light the lamp, Elsie," her husband requested, dragging off the clumsy chauffeur's gloves he had worn home. "It seems that we are under suspicion of child-stealing. My father has done us the honor of looking us up, to accuse me of conniving at the kidnapping of Mrs. Masterson's boy. I have not yet gathered exactly what interest I am supposed to have in the lady or her affairs, or whether I am presumed to be engaged in a bandit enterprise for ransom. But I understand that there is a detective outside, who probably wishes to search the house."

Elsie made no move to obey the command. In the indeterminate light Masterson's presence had been unnoticed, shadowed as he was by the deep chair in which he sat. She was not afraid, or bewildered so far as to conceive keeping him concealed, but she was not yet ready to act.

"My son is inexact, as usual," Mr. Adriance gave her space, aiding her unaware by his irritation. "Mr. Masterson is known to have crossed the Edgewater ferry with the child, and we know of no friends he would seek in this place except Tony and you. His brain is hardly strong enough, now, to plan any extended moves. Surely it needs no explanation that we wish to rescue a two-year-old child from the hands of a drug-crazed incompetent?"

Elsie laid her hand over the match-box, wondering that the other two did not hear, as she did, the very audible breathing of the man in the arm-chair.

"He is hardly that," she deprecated. "But, if you find him, what will you do?"

"To him? Nothing. We want the child. If he persists in annoying the lady who was his wife, however, he must be put in a sanitarium."

"Elsie, why do you not say that we know nothing of all this?" Anthony demanded, harsh in his strong impatience. "Why do you feed suspicion by arguing? I don't say that I would not shelter Holly Masterson, if he were here--in fact, I should! But I do say that he is not here, sir, and I expect my word to be taken. Elsie----"

His wife put out her hand in a quieting gesture.

"Now I will light the lamp," she stated, in her full, calm voice.

Oddly checked, the two angry men stood watching her. The flame-touched wick burned slowly, at first, the light rising gradually to its full power; the circle of radiance crept out and up, warmed by the crimson shade through which it passed. It crept like a bright tide, shining on the figure of the woman who stood behind the table, rising over the noble swell of her bosom, submerging the curved hollow of her throat where a small ebony cross lay against a surface of ivory, flooding at last her face set in generous resolution and glinting in her gray, serenely fearless eyes. She looked, and was mistress of the place and situation; perhaps because of all those present she alone was not thinking of herself.

"You see," she broke the pause, "there was much excuse. It is always wiser and kinder to listen to the excuse for actions; I think usually there is one. Mr. Masterson loves his little son very dearly, and that they have been separated is terrible to him. But he was patient, he did not interfere until to-day; he saw Holly struck and roughly treated by the nurse. He could not bear that, and just look on. No one could! So Mr. Masterson, obeying his first impulse, snatched up the baby, and he did bring him here. It was only a little while ago, Anthony; a very little while."

Before either Adriance could speak, the third man lifted himself out of the shadows into the light. He was laughing slightly, all his reckless, too-feminine beauty somehow restored as he faced them.

"Here is your drug-crazed incompetent, Mr. Adriance," he mocked. "Have you succeeded so well in training your own son that you want to undertake bringing up mine?"

The insult changed the atmosphere to that of crude war. Elsie drew back, recognizing this field was not for her. Mr. Adriance considered his antagonist with a deliberation cold and very dangerous.

"I think a comparison between my son and yourself is hardly one you can afford to challenge," he said bitingly.

"Now, no," Masterson admitted. He laughed again. "But a year ago--who was the best citizen, then? Fred Masterson, with all his shortcomings, or Tony Adriance, dangling after Masterson's wife? Hold on, Tony! I'm not saying this for you; you quit the nasty game as soon as you saw where it was leading. I'm only explaining to your father, here, that the difference between you and me is chiefly--our wives. Of course we ought not to lean on our women; we ought to be strong and independent. But I was not born that way, and neither were you. Lucille wanted me down, and I am down; Mrs. Adriance wanted you up, and you're standing up. Be honest, and out with the truth to yourself, if you never speak it, Tony. As for your father, if our guardians had started us differently, it might not have been this way with us. I don't know, but that is the chance I am giving Holly. He shall not have to pick up his education on the road. I have brought him here, and here he stays with Mrs. Adriance until I take him away with me. She has given me her promise."

"You forget that the court has given the child to its mother," Mr. Adriance reminded him, before Anthony could reply. "And let me tell you I have nothing except contempt for a man who foists off his responsibilities upon a woman's shoulders."

"Neither have I," retorted Masterson. "Did you imagine I had any vanity left, or that my self-respect still breathed? You are dull, Mr. Adriance! But all that is aside from the case. Holly stays here, unless Anthony turns him out, and then he goes with me, not with his mother. Do you think I fail to understand why she wants him, and you want her to have him? It is because he is a social vindication; her possession of him brands me as the one found lacking in our partnership. Well, he is not to be so sacrificed."

"May I ask how you intend to enforce this?"

"You may, and I will tell you." He looked return in full measure of the older man's irony and determination. "I can enforce it because you care about the public at large, and I do not; because it would make a beautiful sob story: how Holly's reprobate father rescued him from neglect and ill-treatment, taking him away from a brutal nurse in the Park; and how Mr. Adriance, _the_ Mr. Adriance, pursued and recaptured the child. The newspapers would be interested in learning that Mr. Adriance had managed the whole Masterson divorce case; with his usual tact and success. They might wonder why he had done it. I have wondered, myself, you know. That is, I might have wondered, if I had not known how much you once approved of Mrs. Masterson as a possible daughter-in-law, before Tony disappointed you by marrying to please himself. You have the reputation of never admitting a defeat; and, after all, two divorces are as right as one! I beg your pardon, Mrs. Adriance."

Elsie uttered a faint cry, abruptly confronted with the hideous thing Masterson had shown her husband on the night that had changed Anthony from her playfellow to her defender and fightingman.

"Fred!" Anthony exclaimed indignant rebuke, springing to the girl's side.

She caught his arm fiercely, as it clasped her. Suddenly she was one with the men in mood, burning with defiance and alert to make war for her own. And Anthony was her own, as she was his. Pressing close to her husband she held him. Arrayed together, the three who had youth stood against the man who had everything else.

But Mr. Adriance had reddened through his fine, gray, slightly withered skin like any schoolboy. His dark eyes lightened and hardened to an unforgiving grimness of wrath that dwarfed the younger men's passion and made it puerile.

"You will restrain yourself in speaking of the lady who had the misfortune to marry you," he signified, with a clipped precision of speech more menacing than any threat. "Since yesterday she has been my wife."

Of all the possibilities, this most obvious one never had occurred to any of the three who heard the announcement. The effect held the group dumb. All thought had to be readjusted, all recent experience focussed to this new range of vision. In the long pause, Anthony's dog yawned with the ridiculous sigh and snap of happy puppyhood; ticking clock and singing kettle seemed to fill the room with a swell of commonplace, domestic sound derisive of all complicated life. After all, men were simple, and involved evil usually a chimera. Plots and counterplots resolved into a most natural happening; thrown into companionship with Lucille Masterson by Anthony's flight, Mr. Adriance had fallen in love. Probably at first he had aided her through sympathy, as Anthony himself had done. There was no mystery in the rest.

The reckless challenge and false gayety died out of Masterson's face, leaving it dull and bleak as a stage when the play is over and the artificial light and color extinguished. Quite suddenly he looked haggard and appallingly ill. Circles darkened beneath his eyes as if dashed in by the blue crayon of an artist. He was conquered; with his fancied right to resentment and contempt he also lost all animation. The fire was quenched, apparently forever.

"I apologize, of course," he said, his lifeless ease a poor effort at his former manner. "Certainly I would have been--well, less frank, if I had understood. Pray convey my congratulations to Mrs. Adriance. No doubt you will be happy, since you can buy everything she wants. But neither you nor she can care to keep Holly Masterson in your house. I want him. After all, I am his father, you know, and entitled to some direction of his future. No? Come, I'll bargain with you! Leave him here, and I will do what I refused to do for money: I will quit public dancing and drop out of sight."

The unexpected offer allured. The wrath in the eyes of Mr. Adriance did not lessen, but speculation crept into his regard. His abhorrence of scandal urged him to grasp at this escape from having his wife's name constantly linked with the escapades of her first husband. There could be no question of Masterson's genius for spectacular trouble-making. Moreover, Holly would still be with the Adriances, so that dignity was assured. He did not believe that Masterson really intended to burden himself with the child. Lucille Masterson had formed his opinion of the other man; he credited him with no intention good or stable.

"Of course I must consult Mrs. Adriance," he answered stiffly. "But I have no doubt that she will meet your wishes in the matter, since Tony is now the child's step-brother. That is, if my son and his wife are willing to undertake the charge you thrust upon them?"

He turned toward the two, as he concluded. For the first time, the Adriance senior and junior, really looked at each other as man at man. For "Tony" no longer existed; in his place was someone the elder did not yet know. Indeed, he and Tony had been merely pleasant acquaintances; he and this new man were strangers.

"Why, yes," Anthony replied to the indirect question. He had regained his composure as the others had lost theirs. His cool steadiness and poise contrasted strongly with the strained tension of his guests; he spoke for both himself and Elsie with the assured masterfulness she had nursed to life in him during these many months. "We will take charge of Holly until his father claims him, unless it is going to be too difficult for me to take care of my own family. As you may see, sir, we are not rich."

"Is that my affair?"

"It has not been. But it is going to be."

"As a question of money----"

Anthony checked the sentence with a gesture. Gently freeing himself from Elsie's clasp upon his arm, he drew from a pocket of his rough coat that notebook which had absorbed so many of his leisure hours.

"Let us say a question of business," he suggested. "Six months ago I entered your employ as a chauffeur. You will find my record has no marks against it. I did not think at that time of drawing any advantage from the fact that the mill belonged to you; I worked exactly as I must have done for any stranger. I was not late or absent, I accomplished rather more each day than the average chauffeur in the place. Cook and Ransome can tell you whether I gave them satisfaction. I only speak of this, sir, because I should like you to understand that I was in earnest. It was not until months had passed at this work that I began to think of changing my position. One day Ransome fell sick. I asked for his place to try out a better system of checking the shipping that had occurred to me. I was given this at first tentatively, then permanently. In fact, the system worked so successfully that--Mr. Goodwin came to see me." He hesitated. "I wish you would ask Mr. Goodwin to tell you himself something of what has happened."

"Very well."

The laconic assent was somehow disconcerting.

"I had to tell him who I was," Anthony resumed, with less certainty, "I had meant to find out what your attitude would be, before that happened, but I had no choice. He was good enough to take me into his office and offer to teach me the management of your factory. Now----"

"Now, since it is a matter of business," said Mr. Adriance, dryly, "what do you want?"

"I want a stranger's chance, and your pull," was the prompt return; Anthony's smile flashed across seriousness. "That is, I want your influence to give me Mr. Goodwin's position as manager, and after that I am willing to stand on the basis of my business value to you. Goodwin is old and anxious to retire. If I hold his place for a year and fail to earn his salary, then discharge me and I'll not complain. I know this end of your business as you do not, sir. You are brilliant, a genius of big affairs; I have discovered in myself a capacity for meticulous attention to detail. Will you take this little book home with you? It contains a collection of notes and figures for which you would gladly pay an outsider. Mr. Goodwin and I have found the plant is enormously wasteful; every department contributes its quota of mismanagement, except the office under his own eye. I want a chance to do this work, to buy a house I like up on the hill, here, and put my delicate Southern wife in a setting suitable for her. Will you let me earn all this?"

"I am not aware that it has been my custom to interfere with you," retorted Mr. Adriance. He eyed his son with icy disfavor. "Between you and Mr. Masterson it appears to be established that I am the typical oppressor of fiction and melodrama. Kindly look at the other side of the shield. Last autumn you chose to marry and leave my house. You did both, without paying me the trifling courtesy of announcing your intentions. I knew of no quarrel between us. The rudeness appeared to me quite without warrant. Nevertheless, I tied all the loose ends you had left behind. I kept your marriage from furnishing a sensation to the journals. The lady who is now my wife helped me in convincing our friends that your wedding was in no way unusual or unexpected, if a little sudden, and that you had met the young lady from Louisiana at her house. In short, I smothered curiosity, a task with which you had not concerned yourself. You choose to enter this place as a truck driver. You did not ask if that were pleasant to me. It was not, but I made no objection. Oh, yes; of course I have known what you were doing! Why should I not know? Now, you meet me with the air of a man hampered and pursued. Why?"

"I was wrong," admitted Anthony, simply. He had flushed hotly before the rebuke, but his eyes met his father's frankly and with a relief that gladly found himself at fault rather than the other. "I did not understand. I am sorry."

They shook hands. A constraint between them was not to be avoided. The marriage of the older man had thrust them apart. Unforgiveable things had been said of Lucille Adriance; things that had the biting permanence of truth.

"I will arrange for Goodwin's retirement," Mr. Adriance remarked. "You will take his place, and this winter's work may pass as your whim to study the business from the bottom. I spent an hour discussing your affairs with him, on my way here, to-night. I had called on him to ascertain your exact address. He has agreed to remain as your adviser and assistant for a month or two, until you have quite found yourself. And of course I will be at your service. That is enough for this evening; I have already stayed here too long. Come to my office to-morrow."

When he turned toward the door, Elsie was awaiting him. A moment before she had slipped away from the two men.

"This is the first time you have been in Anthony's house," she said, her soft speech very winning. "You aren't going without taking our hospitality?"

She held a little round tray on which stood a cup and plate. The action was gracious and graceful, quaintly alien as her own legends. Mr. Adriance gazed at her, then bowed ceremoniously, lifted the coffee and drank.

"I think I had forgotten to congratulate Tony," he regretted. "Allow me to do so, most warmly."

Anthony closed the door behind his guest; presently the sound of a starting motor ruffled the calm hush of the spring evening.

"I want my supper," Anthony announced, practically. "I shall not have any more of your cooking, Elsie. What are you going to do with your idle time--learn to play bridge?"

She ran into his arms.