CHAPTER IX

THE LUCK IN THE HOUSE.

Nothing did happen. None of the traditionary usual experiences overtook the two in the little red house, as November ran out and December stormed in like a lusty viking from northern seas, attended by tremendous winds and early snow.

In the first place, the marriage of Anthony Adriance, Junior, somehow escaped the sensational journals, as a pleasing theme. There were no headlines announcing: "Son of a millionaire weds a nursemaid." No reporters discovered the house on the Palisades, to photograph its diminutive Gothic front for Sunday specials. Adriance had written a letter of explanation, so far as explanation might be, to his father. That was on the morning of his marriage, and as he had given no address, naturally he had received no answer. There were no reproaches and no pursuit.

Nor was Tony Adriance gnawed by vain regrets. According to every rule of romance and reason, he should have suffered from at least brief seasons of repining; at least have been twinged by memories of things foregone, yet desired. But he felt nothing of the kind. Masculine independence was aroused in him, and held reign in riotous good spirits. With a boy's triumphant bravado he faced down cold and hard work, delighting in the victory. He rose early and built Elsie's fires before permitting her to rise, while she sat up protesting in the four-posted bed as he bullied and loved and mastered her. He walked two miles to and from work morning and evening, and drove his big motor-truck eight hours a day. Moreover, he gained weight on the regime, and the springing step of a man in training. He never had suspected it, but his whole body had craved outdoors and employment of its forces; Nature had built him for work, not idleness. The atmosphere in which he had been reared was, by a trick of temperament, foreign to him.

"I'm plain vulgarian," he laughed to his wife one morning as he started to work. "I would rather drive one of my father's trucks and come home to your pork-chops, than I would to dawdle around his house and dine with a strong man standing behind my chair to save me the fatigue of putting sugar in my own coffee. Are you going to have some of those jolly little apple-fritters with butter and cinnamon on them for supper to-night?"

She made a tantalizing face at him. It was two days before Christmas, and so cold that her lips and cheeks were stung poppy-bright as she stood in the doorway.

"Of course not; now I know that you want them. We will have cold meat. What are you going to give me for my stocking, Anthony?"

"A cold-meat fork," he countered promptly. "How did you know I meant to give you anything?"

"I didn't," she calmly told him. "But I am going to give you something, so I thought it only kind to remind you."

He swung himself easily over the railing and smothered her in an embrace made bear-like by his shaggy coat.

"The chauffeur's peerless bride shall not weep," he soothed her. "For ten days her ruby stomacher has been ordered by her devoted husband. Now let your Romeo depart, or his pay will get docked next Saturday."

She lingered in his arms an instant, her shining dark hair pressed against the rough darkness of his cheap fur coat.

"Anthony, don't they ever notice your name, down there? Didn't they ever ask about it?"

"Surely! The first day I went in, the superintendent asked if I were related to Mr. Adriance. I told him yes, a poor relation. True, isn't it? He was satisfied, anyhow. They call me Andy, down there."

"Andy!" she essayed experimentally. "Andy! It goes pretty well."

They laughed together, then he gently pushed her toward the door.

"Go in," he bade, with his commanding manner; the manner Elsie had taught him. "You will take a royal cold out here, and then what should I do for my meals? I have to eat if I am to labor; besides, I like my food. What did you call those cakes we had this morning?"

"'_Belle cala, tout chaud!_'" she intoned the soft street-cry of old New Orleans' breakfast hours, her voice catching the quaint, enticing inflections of those dark-skinned vendors who once loitered their sunny rounds freighted with fragrant baskets. "Some day I will show you what I call a city, sir; if you'll take me?"

"I'll take you anywhere, but I'll not let you go as far as the next corner. Now, go in-doors, and good-bye."

She obeyed him so far as to draw back into the warm doorway. There, sheltered, she stayed to watch him swinging down the hill through the gray winter morning. It was nearly seven o'clock, but the sun had not yet warmed or gilded the atmosphere. Bleakness reigned, except in the hearts of the man and woman.

They had been married two months. Elsie Adriance slowly closed the door and turned to the uncleared breakfast table. But presently she left the dishes she had begun to assemble, and walked to one of the rear windows. There she leaned, gazing where Anthony never gazed: toward the gray-and-white stateliness of New York, across the ice-dotted river. She contemplated the city, not with defiance or challenge, but with the steady-eyed gravity, of one measuring an enemy.

Two months, and the victory was still with her! Yet, she warned herself, surely some day New York would call. She never quite could forget that. She herself was not unlike a city preparing for defence, feverishly grasping at every stone to build her ramparts. How she envied Lucille Masterson her beauty, the elder Adriance his wealth, since those possessions might have bound Anthony closer to her! She recalled Mrs. Masterson's exquisite costumes, colored like flowers and as delightful to the touch; the costly perfumes that made all her belongings fragrant; the studied coquetry that kept her like Cleopatra, never customary or stale. To oppose all this, Anthony's wife had only--her hearth. For she never would keep her husband against his will; Elsie Adriance never would claim as a right what she had held as a gift.

The kitten, a black-and-white midget suggestive of a Coles-Phillips drawing, rubbed insistently against the girl's foot. She picked up the living toy and nestled its furry warmth beneath her chin, as she turned in quest of milk. She thrust forebodings from her mind with resolute will. It was too soon to think of these things; Anthony loved her, Anthony was content.

She had no conception of how fervently glad Anthony was to be rid of harassing thoughts and complications, or how gratefully the luxury of peace enfolded him and dwarfed the mere physical luxuries of idleness and lavish expenditure. Nor, being a woman, did she sufficiently value his pride in the possessions he had bought with his own labor. Tony Adriance never had noticed the table service in his father's house; he had been known to overturn a whole tray of translucent coffee-cups set in lace-fine silver work, without a second glance at the destruction. But he knew every one of the cheap, heavy dishes he and Elsie had added to their equipment on Saturday evening shopping orgies at a five-and-ten-cent store. Knew, and admired them! When Elsie would call from her "kitchen corner;" "Bring me the Niagara platter, honey," he could locate that ceramic atrocity at a glance. And when he let fall the Whistler bread-plate--it had a nocturnal, black-lined landscape effect in its centre--he was truly grieved. Indeed, it was he who selected their china, Elsie's taste being inclined toward a simplicity he refused as monotonous. He never had realized the pleasure of purchasing until he went shopping with his wife, chose with her, overruled her or indulged her in some fancy, then drew out his newly-received wage and paid, magnificent.

He could not have explained his emotions to Elsie. But his candid delight in those expeditions came to her memory, as she poured the kitten's milk into a saucer enamelled with blue forget-me-nots. She lifted her head and again glanced toward the distant city; but this time she smiled with certain triumph. He was her husband; better still, he was as eagerly her playmate as any lonely boy who first finds a chum. She knew Lucille Masterson did not possess the art of comradeship among her talents; it was an art too unselfish.

"When he begins to tire of just playing this way," she half-unconsciously addressed the kitten, "we will find something else. There will always be something for us to think of, together. It will come when it is needed. Perhaps----"

Arrested, her breath failed speech. It was as if her own words had thrown open a door before which she faltered, her eyes sun-dazzled, yet glimpsing a wide horizon.

Soothed by her silent neighborhood, the kitten finished lapping its milk and went to sleep against her skirt. But the girl stood still for a long time, steadying her heart, which seemed to her to be filling like a cup held under a clear fountain.

Later in the day a boy brought wreaths and sprays of holly to the door. Elsie bought recklessly, so Adriance came home that night to a house Yule-gay with scarlet and green, spicy with the cinnamon fragrance of the apple-fritters, and holding a mistress who showed him a Christmas face of merry content.

"I could not wait two days," she explained to him. "We'll begin now and work up to it gradually."

But after all, Christmas morning came as a surprise, and achieved a final defeat of doubts and forebodings that drove them out of sight for many a day. For, kissing his wife awake at dawn, Anthony made his gift first, forestalling hers.

"You never had an engagement ring," he reminded her. "I'll have to make a tremendous record as a husband to live down my blunders as a fiance! Here, let me put it on for you. What clever dimples you've got in your fingers! I noticed them our first night here, remember?"

She frankly cried in her great surprise and passionate joy in his thought of her. It really was a spectacular ring, and glittered bravely in the early light; an oval of dark-red stones like a shield set above her wedding ring.

"They're only garnets," he stilled her protest of extravagance. "But they are the color of rubies; and the promise of them. Don't--please don't! Come, what have you got for me? Give it up."

The diversion succeeded. Laughing before her eyes were dry, she answered:

"He is in the wood-box. I had to keep him in the house where it was warm, and I was so afraid you would hear him and spoil the surprise. But he was as good as possible; he never said one word. Open the lid, dear."

"He?" echoed her husband. "Him?"

The wood-box yielded him; a small, jovial, bandy-legged puppy.

"He is _almost_ a Boston bull," Elsie explained conscientiously. "If he had been quite one, I couldn't have afforded to buy him. But he is a love. Anthony, he is the watch-dog, you know."

Finding both faces within reach, as he hung over Anthony's arm, the puppy licked them with fond impartiality.