CHAPTER V.

THE LITTLE RED HOUSE

The next day it stormed. A biting north wind hunted across river and city; a wind that carried the first ice-particles of the approaching winter. There were no children on the Drive or in the park, except a few sturdy urchins neither of the age nor class attended by nurses. No one uncompelled cared to face the grim, gray, scowling day whose breath was freezing.

In the Adriances' breakfast-room, an effort had been made to offset the outside cheerlessness by aid of lamps glowing under gold-colored shades. But only an optimist could have deluded vision into accepting the artificial sunshine as satisfactory. Tony Adriance was even irritated by the feeble sham, and snapped out the lamp nearest to him as he took his seat.

The action was trifling, but Mr. Adriance, seated on the opposite side of the round table, glanced keenly at his son and read an interpretation of it. He believed that Tony wished to shadow the pale exhaustion of his face. In this he was wrong; Tony Adriance was quite past thoughts of his appearance. Not having looked in a mirror, he was not even aware of the traces left by the last night. He did not at all appreciate the significance with which his father presently inquired, courteously concerned:

"You are not well, this morning?"

"Quite well, thank you," Tony replied; he glanced up from his plate somewhat surprised at the question.

Mr. Adriance met the glance with sincere curiosity. His first hazard failing, he sought for a second. Indeed, he knew very well that Tony had none of the habits which lead to uncomfortable mornings, although to a casual regard his present bearing suggested a white night. Fortunately, he had not perceived the innuendo within the older man's question and was not offended. Mr. Adriance detested being in the wrong.

Tony was too listless to pursue the subject at all. After vainly waiting a moment for his father to explain the inquiry, he proceeded with the business of breakfasting more or less indifferently. He was conjecturing as to his own ability to set forth his trouble for the calm inspection of the gentleman across the table. He had come down-stairs with that intention, born of the night's bitter experience of solitude in unhappiness. Now he felt that the project was impossible. His father and he were not on terms of sufficient intimacy. He suffered an access of discouragement and weariness. His only idea had failed, yet something must be decided, some course followed.

"You dined at the Mastersons', last night, I believe?" Mr. Adriance had found his second hazard. Unconsciously his voice sharpened; it would be intolerable if Tony and Masterson had made some clumsy scene between them. Occasionally Mr. Adriance wondered what so clever a woman as Lucille Masterson had seen in either of the two.

"No," Tony denied.

"No? I had understood----?"

"I dined down-town."

That was the first deliberate lie the younger man had told the older in all their life together. But Tony confronted an utter impossibility; he could not confess that he had sat until midnight in a park pavilion, with no more thought of life's common-sense routine than a sentimental boy. Nevertheless, his voice sounded unconvincing to his own ears, and humiliation swept over him like a wave of heat. The desire to get away from everyone and everything familiar made it difficult for him not to spring up and leave the room and the unfinished breakfast.

But Mr. Adriance was convinced and appeased. In his relief, he felt a really kind desire to relieve Tony from his evident depression.

"You appear to have something on your mind," he observed. "If it is anything I might remove, pray call upon me, Tony."

"Financially?" queried his son, drily.

"Certainly, if you wish. You are not in the least extravagant. In fact, you are a charming contradiction of a great many popular conceptions concerning those not forcibly employed."

"Thank you. But I wish you would employ me, sir, if not forcibly. I want to go away for a time; not just--for amusement. Can you not send me somewhere to take charge of your interests instead of a hired agent? I could learn to help you, perhaps."

The last expression was unfortunate. Mr. Adriance's brow contracted and the cordiality left his gaze.

"I am not yet superannuated," he signified. "When I am in need of help, I will ask it, Tony. Naturally I intend training you to take charge of your own affairs after my death. You will find that quite enough to occupy you, some day. I am sorry if you are unable to amuse yourself, already. Next year, if you like, we will take up the matter of your business education. This year, I shall be too busy. You are young and I am not old."

His glance turned toward a mirror set in a buffet opposite. The face reflected was clear in outline, firm to the verge of hardness; the eyes full and alert, the carefully brushed hair so abundant that its grayness gave dignity without the effect of age. Self-appreciation touched Mr. Adriance's lip with a smile, as he gazed, smoothing away his slight annoyance. His son, tracing that glance, felt a movement of kindred admiration and a renewed sense of his own personal inadequacy. Tony Adriance had accomplished nothing, yet he was already tired. How would he look when he was thirty years older? Hardly like that, he feared. Nor would Fred Masterson! Whose was the fault, and what the remedy?

Mr. Adriance, returning to his coffee, surprised the other's observation of him, and shrugged an unembarrassed acceptance of the verdict.

"We have plenty of time, you see," he remarked. "Moreover, you are hardly ready for abstract affairs. You are not sufficiently settled. After you are married that will come. I myself married young. Marriage makes private life sufficiently monotonous not to interfere with the conduct of outside matters of importance."

"Does it?" speculated Tony, doubtingly.

"It should. Monotony is closer to content than is agitation, would you not say?"

"Doesn't that depend on the kind of monotony?"

"Surely. That is why each man should choose his own wife."

"I see. If I ever choose a wife, I shall remember the advice."

This time Mr. Adriance was astonished. He did not miss the significance of the remark, or the alteration in Tony since the previous day, when he had last seen him. It was not possible to be explicit in a matter so delicate, especially with servants present; but his curiosity was not to be denied.

"You have not--reached that point? I had fancied----"

"I have no such engagement at present," was the steady reply.

Mr. Adriance pushed away his finger bowl and allowed his cigar to be lighted by the deferential automaton behind his chair.

"I am sorry," he said.

His son did not misunderstand him; in fact, he understood more clearly than perhaps did the older man himself. Mr. Adriance had chosen the hostess he wanted for his house, or rather, he had been enchanted by Tony's supposed choice. Lucille Masterson filled his ideal of his son's wife. Her loveliness would be a point of pride; her social experience would make her competent for the position; moreover, she was too clever not to have courted and won the genuine liking of Tony's father long ago. Fred Masterson was hardly considered, except as an obstacle readily removed, when the proper time came. And now, Tony himself was overturning all the pleasant family life that Mr. Adriance had planned. He knew that his father never willingly relinquished a perfected plan; rarely, indeed, was he turned aside from a purpose on which his mind was fixed.

"Perhaps you will reconsider that statement later," Mr. Adriance presently suggested.

"I think not, in the sense you mean," he made slow reply.

Mr. Adriance raised himself abruptly.

"I hope so," he said, with a touch of sharpness; "I hope you are not going to grow irresolute and changeable, Tony. I detest weakness of character. Perhaps you had better take a trip somewhere and get yourself in tone."

"Perhaps," Tony agreed; his voice was not yielding, but sullen and desperate.

Indeed, he was as near illness as a man may be without physical injury or disease. After his father had left the breakfast-room he sat for a long time in utter mental incapacity to undertake any line of effort. Finally he arose, oppressed with a sense of suffocation in the rich, sombre atmosphere; of imprisonment and helplessness. He wanted air and solitude, the solitude he had come to the breakfast-room to escape, and he could think of no place where he could be so well assured of both as in his motor-car.

In his abstraction he walked bareheaded and without an overcoat across the frozen stretch of lawn between the house and the garage. He was quite indifferent to the weather; his chauffeur put him into furs and passed him his gloves and cap as a matter of course, or he might have fared forth poorly equipped to meet the wind and storm.

He swung his machine from the cement incline into the street and turned across Broadway. He did not wish to pass Elsie Murray ensconced in the park pavilion with Holly Masterson at her knees; yet his thoughts were so swayed by her that when he reached One Hundred and Thirtieth Street he turned west again and took the ferry across the Hudson. He had no better reason for doing so than the tranquillity and content she seemed to draw from contemplating the opposite shore.

He sped up Fort Lee hill with a crowd of other cars, turned west and north to escape their companionship and all the landmarks he knew. He avoided the main highway and chose mere cross and hill roads and lanes. Always he had before him the vivid, pretty face of Lucille, the tired young face of Masterson and the gray eyes of Elsie Murray.

A nurse-maid! The girl who had told him the legend of Raoul Galvez, the girl by whose standard he had come to measure himself and his companions and who had fixed the sluggish attention of his conscience upon the mischief being wrought by his yielding good nature--that girl was Lucille's nurse-maid. That amazement of the night before remained with him, coloring all other emotions. He had come out to arrange his thoughts, but the hours passed and they remained in chaotic condition.

Near noon he was running through a narrow woodland track when a bend in the road suddenly revealed his way blockaded by an enormous wagon that stood before him. It was a moving van; its canvas sides distended by bulky furniture and household fittings, its rear doors tied open to allow a huge old-fashioned cupboard to stand between. Adriance brought his machine to an abrupt halt.

"Clear the way there," he impatiently shouted to the invisible driver; "what is the matter--broken down?"

The answer came, not from the concealed front of the van, but from the bank bordering on the side of the road.

"All right; but ain't it a shame that you blew in at dinner-time!"

The reply was unexpected; Adriance looked towards the complainant's voice. In the shelter of a big boulder that gave some protection from the wind, three men were seated, each with a leather lunch-box on his knee. Two of them wore the striped aprons of moving-men; the third evidently was the spokesman and the driver. All three held various portions of food and stared down at the intruder in the attitude in which his advance had arrested them.

"It ain't as if we could just turn out," the driver pursued, not resentfully but with an impersonal disgust. He put the apple in his hand back into his lunch-box and stood up. "We've got to go on a mile before there's room for you to pass. Come on, boys."

"No," Adriance aroused himself from self-absorption to forbid the upheaval. "I am in no hurry; finish your lunch, and I will wait."

The three on the bank stared harder.

"You're a sport," complimented the driver; "but it ain't more than five minutes after twelve."

"What has that to do with it? Oh, I see; you mean that you rest until one?"

"You're on."

"Well, I said that I was not in a hurry," he accepted the delay he had not contemplated. "Take your rest and I will smoke."

The three men regarded each other, then the driver slowly sat down. The munching horses were blanketed against the cold, but the men appeared careless of temperature. They obviously were constrained by the presence of the man in the automobile, however.

"This road ain't much used," the driver ventured presently. "We're taking this load to a farmhouse up here a ways. That's why we thought we could stop traffic without being noticed."

His round, bright eyes asked a question that Adriance answered with doubtful truthfulness.

"I lost my way."

"Oh!" The driver paused, then suddenly slid down the bank.

"Ain't we the hogs," he observed deprecatingly, coming up to the side of the car and offering his lunch-box. "Won't you eat?"

The tired, dark-blue eyes of Tony Adriance met the cheerful, light-blue eyes of the other man. The two men were about the same age, and one of them was desperately lonely and sick of his own thoughts. They both smiled involuntarily.

"Thanks, I will," said Adriance; and took a thick, rye bread sandwich from the box presented. The driver sat down on the running-board of the automobile and there ensued a well-employed silence.

The sandwich was excellent. Adriance had eaten little breakfast; yet, left to himself, he would hardly have thought of food in his bitter preoccupation; but it did him good. The ham smeared with cheap mustard had a zest of its own, a little brutal, perhaps, but effective. It was a generously designed sandwich, too, not a frail wafer. He ate it all, even the acrid crust.

"'Nother?" invited the host.

"No, thanks; but that one tasted good." Adriance drew out his cigar-case. "Won't you all have a smoke with me, now?"

The cigars were passed and lighted. Before returning the case, the driver frankly inspected the fine leather toy with the tiny monogram in one corner.

"That's all right," he approved, returning it to its owner. "I was afraid you'd pull out a little gold box of cigarettes."

"Why?" amused.

"Oh, I don't know, my luck, I guess."

"You don't like them?"

"Me? I got a pipe three years old that holds _some_ tobacco--that for me. But this cigar is all right. Ever try a pipe?"

"Yes."

The driver leaned back comfortably against the spare tire strapped beside the car, gazing up at the gray, cold sky.

"A pipe, my feet on the kitchen stove, the kids and the missus--me for that, nights."

Adriance looked at him with startled scrutiny. Almost he could have imagined that Elsie Murray had come to the man's side and prompted him. What, was it then real and usual, that homely content she once had painted so vividly? Did most men have such homes?

"You're married?" he vaguely asked.

"Sure, these five years; we got two kids." The boyish driver chuckled and shook his head reminiscently. "Darn little tykes! What they ain't up to I don't know. Dragged a big bull pup in off the street last week, they did, and scared the missus into fits. Pete--he's four--had it by the collar bold as brass, and it ugly enough to scare you. Say, I'm trying one of those schemes for training kids on him; exercising him, you know. You ought to see the muscles he's got already, arms and legs hard as nails. Think it will work all right?"

Adriance looked down into the eager face.

"Yes, I do," he said slowly. "You cannot be more than twenty-five or six----?"

"Twenty-five is right."

"You must have worked pretty hard?"

"Ever since I was fourteen," was the cheerful assent. He pulled out a watch of the dollar variety and looked at it. "One o'clock it is! We'll get along again, boys. Yes, I've been busy. But the missus and I are saving up. Some day I'm going to have a trucking business of my own; there's good money in it. Well, we're sure obliged to you for waiting for us."

The other two men were coming down the bank. Adriance drew off his glove and held out his hand to his acquaintance.

"I am glad I met you. Good luck!"

"Same to you!" He pulled off his mitten to give the clasp. "Are you going to the ferry?"

"I--I--? Yes."

"Well, turn off when you get to the next road. It's a poor one, but it's a short cut to the Palisades road."

The horses were unblanketed and the bags which had held their luncheon removed. The men climbed into their places, and presently Adriance's lusty machine was rebelliously crawling on behind the moving-van.

At the end of a mile they came to the side road, and parted with cheerful shouts of farewell.

It was impossible to measure the good that interlude of healthy companionship had done to Tony Adriance. It had swept aside vapors, cleared his mind to normality, invigorated him like a pungent tonic. Yet it had laid a reproach upon him. He contrasted himself with that boyish husband and father; yes, contrasted Mr. Adriance, senior, with that driver who was anxiously training his son's body by his own efforts after the day's work. He could not recollect his father ever playing with him or seriously advising him. Even Fred Masterson was doing better.

The road debouched abruptly upon the main highway. A passing automobile momentarily delayed Adriance, and looking idly across the way, he perceived a house. After the other car had passed and the way was open, he sat quite still in his machine, gazing.

There was nothing about the house before him to catch the eye except a certain air of quaint sturdiness that had survived desertion. It was rather a cottage than a house, bearing a sign "For Sale," and unoccupied. It was a red-painted cottage, built in that absurd Gothic fashion once favored by some insane builders. Its ridiculous roof and windows were highly peaked; its high, narrow porch had a pointed top like a caricature of the entrance to _Notre Dame de Paris_. It stood quite back from the road with an air of abandonment; but it was unconquerably cheerful, even against the gray sky. It was a house that wanted to be cosy.

Suddenly Adriance realized that he was very tired. He was not ready to go home; he even thought with abhorrence of going there. Yet he was weary of guiding his machine along the highway. He left his seat and walked up the wood path--two planks in width--leading to the cottage. The windows gaped, uncurtained; he looked in, then deliberately seated himself upon the step and lapsed into heavy revery.

There were few passers-by on such a day. Those who were compelled to the road lingered in the cold to look curiously at the automobile standing by the gutter and at the young man who sat on the old wooden step.

It was four o'clock when Tony Adriance rose and went back to his automobile. He did not turn down to the ferry, but looked again at the signboard on the house; then turned his machine about and drove to an address which was seven miles inland.