THE DARING ADVENTURE
They were married at two o'clock the next day. The wedding was in
church, at Elsie Murray's desire. With a certain defiance expressive of
his attitude toward all the world, Adriance, after obtaining their
license, took her to the rector of that costly and fashion-approved
cathedral which the Adriances graced with their membership and
occasional attendance. Of course the two were met with astonishment, but
there was a decision in the young man's speech and bearing that forbade
interference. The clergyman did not find the familiar, easy,
good-natured Tony Adriance in the man who curtly silenced delicate
allusion to the wedding's unexpectedness and the surprising absence of
Mr. Adriance, senior.
"I am over age, and so is Miss Murray," was the brief statement, whose
finality ended comment. "Will you be good enough not to delay us; we are
leaving town?"
There were no more objections. Of course the bride was not recognized as
Mrs. Masterson's nurse; she simply was an unknown girl. And she did not
in any way suggest that Mr. Adriance was marrying out of his world.
Adriance himself entirely approved of her in this new role. He liked her
dark-blue suit with its relieving white at throat and wrists, and her
small hat with a modest white quill at just the right angle. And she
wore the shining, Spanish-heeled, small shoes of his choosing. He
noticed how large her gray eyes were, when she lifted them to his,
large, and clear as pure water is clear under a still, gray sky. But her
heavy lashes threw shadows across them, as he had once seen lines of
shadow lie across a little lake in Maine on an autumn day. He wondered
if she was happy, or frightened. He could not tell what she was thinking
or feeling.
So they were married before the imposing altar of cream-hued marble, and
the conventional notice went to the newspapers:
Adriance-Murray. Elsie Galvez Murray to Anthony Adriance, Jr.,
by the Rev. Dr. Van Huyden, at St. Dunstan's Cathedral.
It was very simply done, for so daring an adventure.
When they stood outside, in the sparkling autumn sunshine, Elsie
Adriance asked her first question.
"Where are we going?" she wondered, in her soft, blurred speech that now
Adriance recognized as of the South. Her middle name had caught his
attention also. There once had been a governor of Louisiana called
Galvez; New Orleans has a street named for him.
But he was not thinking of ancestry now. He looked doubtfully at his
companion. In spite of his repressed bearing, he was suffering a
terrible excitement and a tearing conflict of will and desire. He was
acutely conscious of the finality of what had been done; and one part of
him wished it undone. He thought of his father and Lucille as a man in a
fever thinks; glimpsing them in a confusion of remembered pictures,
conceiving their future attitude with the exaggeration of his
unreasoning sense of guilt and belated regret. He felt himself in bonds,
and the instinct of escape gripped and shook him. But he kept himself in
hand.
"Where do you wish to go?" he temporized, withholding his own wish. It
became him to consider her first, now and hereafter.
She shook her head.
"I follow you," she reminded him, quite simply and gravely. "Where
would--it be easiest for you? You spoke of going out of town; perhaps
that would be best. I think, it seems to me, that we should start as we
mean to go on."
"Yes!" he exclaimed eagerly. She had offered him his inmost desire; in
his gratitude he caught her hand, stammering in the rush of words
released. "Yes. If you will go, I have a house--our house. Let me tell
you. Yesterday, after meeting you at Masterson's the night before, I was
at the limit. I had to keep out of doors and keep moving, or go to
pieces. I kept seeing Fred, and Holly. Well, I took a long drive; across
the river, I went, perhaps because you were always looking over there as
if it were some kind of a fairyland. And on the way back, on the road
along the Palisades, I saw the house. It was--I stopped and went in. It
looked like a place you had made a picture of. I can't explain what I
mean, but I sat down there and thought things out. You won't be angry?
I bought it. Not that I was so sure of you! You see, if you refused to
take me, I knew I had money enough to buy fifty like it for a whim. And
if you would come, it was the house."
There was no anger in her glance, only a heartening comprehension and
cordial willingness.
"Let us go there," she agreed. "I should like that best of all."
Reanimated, he put her into the waiting taxicab, gave the chauffeur his
directions, and closed the door upon their first wedded solitude.
"But this is one of the things we must not do," she told him, bringing
the relief of humor to the situation. "We must not take taxis and let
them wait for us with a price on the head of each moment. It is more
than extravagant; it is reckless."
He laughed out, surprised.
"So it is. I am afraid you will have a lot to teach me."
"Yes," she assumed the burden. "Yes."
They rode down to the ferry, and the taxicab rolled on board the broad,
unsavory-smelling boat. When the craft started, the vibration of the
engine sent a throbbing sense of departure through Adriance such as he
never had felt in starting a European voyage. This time he could not
return. He was humbly grateful for Elsie's silence, which permitted his
own.
On the Jersey side their cab slowly moved through the dark ferry house,
then plunged out into a sun-drenched world and swung blithely up to the
long Edgewater hill. They left the river shipping behind, presently. The
sunlight glittered through the woods that still clothe the long,
rampart-like stretches along the summit of the great cliffs; a forest of
jewels like the subterranean woods of the Twelve Dancing Princesses,
only instead of silver and diamonds these trees displayed the red of
cornelian and brown of topaz all set in copper and bronze. The storm of
the night before had littered the ground with the spoils of Lady
Autumn's jewel-box; the air was spicily sweet and very clear.
The village on the first slope of the hills had been dingy and poor.
Here above, on the heights winding up the river, there were few houses,
with long spaces between. Elsie leaned at the window, her wide eyes
embracing all. Adriance leaned back, seeing nothing.
The taxicab finally stopped, nevertheless, at his signal, before a
little red cottage set far back from the road.
"Here?" the chauffeur queried, with incredulous scorn.
"Here," Adriance affirmed, swinging out their two suit-cases and his
wife. He laughed a little at the man's face. "How much?"
The toll pointed Elsie's warning. She made a grimace at her pupil. His
spirits mounting again, Adriance answered the rebuke by catching her
hand to lead her up the absurd, staggering Gothic porch in miniature.
"I'll come back for the baggage," he promised. "Come look, first."
"Is there anything inside?"
"Oh, yes. I----" he looked askance at her. "I bought things, at a shop
in Fort Lee, early this morning. I suppose they're all wrong."
She met his diffidence with a smile so warm, so enchanting in its sweet,
maternal raillery and indulgence that his heart melted within him. And
then, as he fumbled with the key, she took from her hand-bag a book and
a small glass bottle, and gave them to him.
"What----?" he marvelled.
"Don't you know?" she wondered at him. "'Where was you done raised,
man?' Don't you know there is no luck in the house unless the first
things carried into it are the Bible and the salt?"
He did not know, but he found the superstition of a singular charm.
"Give me the salt, then, and you take the other," he divided the
ceremony.
"No," she denied quietly. "You should carry the Book, because you will
make the laws. I will take the salt, because I shall keep the hearth."
So they went in, he oddly sobered by the dignity she laid upon him.
There were only two rooms on the ground floor. The one into which they
stepped was large and square, with a floor of brick faded to a mellow
Tuscan red, and walls of soft brown plaster. A brick fireplace was built
against the north side; the furnishings comprehended two arm-chairs, a
round Sheraton table and china closet, a tall wooden clock, and four
rag rugs in red and white. In one corner, modestly retired, a plain deal
table supported an oil cook-stove, with an air of decent humility and
shrinking from observation. The open door beyond revealed a bed-chamber,
also rag-rugged, furnished with a noble meagreness, but displaying a
four-posted bed of carved and time-darkened ash. Elsie took a long, full
look, then regarded her husband with widening eyes.
"Anthony, _where_ did you buy them? And what did you pay for them?"
No one within his memory had ever called Adriance by his unabbreviated
name. It came to him as part of this new life where he was full-grown
man and master. And he welcomed the frank comradeship with which she
used it, without a sentimental affectation of shyness.
"At a little place with a sign 'Antiques'," he confessed. "I had passed
it in the car. I thought they might do as well as new things, since we
have got to economize. I never bought any furniture before; if they
won't do----"
"They are perfect." The mirth in her eyes deepened. "But you had better
let me help you, next time we shop economically. Hadn't we better build
a fire, first, to drive away the chill? Oh, and is there anything to
eat?"
"In the cupboard over there; everything the grocer could think of," he
said meekly. "I'll go get anything else you say. First, though, I'll run
down to the gate and bring in our suit-cases."
"Do," she approved. "I want an apron. Do you know, you never asked me if
I could cook."
"Can you?"
"Wait and see. What woman thought of the oil-stove?"
"The antiquarian's wife. She said the fireplace was more bother than it
was use and suggested stuffing it with paper to keep the draughts out."
"Well, we will stuff it with fire," she declared.
They built the fire; or rather, Adriance built it, aided by the girl's
tactful advice. When the flames were roaring and leaping, she sent him
to the nearest shop where lamps could be purchased, the trifling
question of light having been overlooked.
When he hurried back from the village, the need of light was becoming
imminent. Dusky twilight came early here under the edge of the hills.
Climbing the steep road, Anthony Adriance looked across the
violet-tinted river toward the chain of lights marking the street where
Tony Adriance had lived and idled. Already he knew himself removed,
altered; he was interested in keeping on with this thing. Of course, he
must keep on, he had set a barrier blocking retreat; he had taken a
wife.
He opened the brown door of the shabby little cottage, and stopped.
The fire on the hearth had settled to a warm, rosy steadiness, filling
the room with its glow and starting velvet shadows that tapestried the
simple place with an airy brocade of shifting patterns. In the centre of
the room stood the round table, robed in white and gay with the antique
shop's ware of blue-and-white Wedgewood. The perfume of coffee and
fragrance of good food floated on the warm air. The fire snapped at
intervals as if from jovial excess of spirits, and a tea-kettle was
bubbling with the furious enthusiasm of all true tea-kettles. It was the
room of his fancy, the unattainable home that Elsie had pictured on the
first evening he had spoken to her out of his sick heart.
Elsie herself stood beside the hearth. Elsie? He never had seen her like
this. But then, he scarcely had seen her at all except in the severe
black of a nurse's livery.
She had merely taken off her jacket, now, although he did not realize
the fact. Her soft white blouse rolled away from a round, full throat
pure in color and smoothness as cream. She was no sylph-slim beauty, but
a deep-bosomed, young girl-woman, fashioned with that rich fulness of
curve and outline that artists once loved, but which Fashion now
disapproves. Her mouth, too, curved in generous, womanly softness;
neither a thin line nor a round rosebud. Her dark hair rippled of itself
around her forehead and was lustrous in the firelight.
His entrance caught her off guard. He surprised herself in her eyes,
before she masked feeling in gayety. And he saw a wistful, frightened
girl whose trembling excitement matched his own.
The latching of the door behind him ended the brief instant of
revelation. At once she turned to him the cordial comrade's face he
knew.
"Dinner is served," she announced merrily. "At least, it is waiting in
the oven. We have hot biscuits, scrambled eggs, a fifty-eighth variety
of baked beans, and strawberry jam. There is no meat, because you only
shopped at a grocery, sir. Do you really adore canned oysters, Anthony?"
"I never tasted one," he slowly replied, putting down the packages he
had brought, without taking his gaze from her.
"Well, you bought six tins of them," she shrugged.
He made no pretense of replying, this time, moving across the room
toward her. He was remembering that she was a bride, who by her
confession loved him, and that he had given her nothing except the gold
ring compelled by custom; not a caress, not a flower, even, to speak of
tenderness and reassurance. He was astounded at himself, appalled by
his degree of selfish absorption. All day she had given him of her
understanding, her warm companionship, her gracious tact and heartening
cheerfulness, exacting nothing--and he had taken. Oh, yes, he had taken!
Troubled by his silence, her color mounting in a vivid sweep, the girl
tried to turn aside from his approach.
"We must have a little cat," she essayed diversion. "I hope you like
kittens? Purrs should go with crackling logs. Not an Angora or a
Persian; just a pussy."
Her voice died away. Very quietly and firmly Adriance had taken her into
his arms.
"I've made a bad beginning," he made grave avowal. "I am learning how
much I need to learn. And I don't deserve my luck in having you to teach
me."
She rested quietly in his arms, as if conceding his right, but she did
not look at him. She was very supple and soft to hold, he found. There
breathed from her a fresh, faint fragrance like the clean scent of
just-gathered daffodils, but no perfume that he recognized. She was
individual even in little things. He wondered what she was thinking. The
uneven rise and fall of her breast timed curiously with the pulse of his
heart, as she leaned there, and the fact affected him unreasonably. He
did not want her to move; warmth and content were flowing into him.
Content, yet---- Suddenly, he knew; a man confronted with a blaze of
light after long groping.
"Elsie!" he cried, his voice sounding through the room his great
amazement. "Elsie! Elsie!"
She looked at him then, putting her two little hands on his breast and
forcing herself back against his arm that she might read his face. But
he would not have it so, compelling her submission to the marvel that
had mastered him. What the church had essayed to do was done, now.
Anthony Adriance had taken a wife.
"I love you," he repeated, inarticulate still with wonder, his lips
against her cheek. "Why didn't you tell me? I love you."
He never forgot that she met him generously, with no mean reminder of
his tardiness. She took his surrender, and set no price on her own. Her
lips were fresh as a cup lifted to his thirst for good and simple
things; he thought her kiss was to the touch what her eyes were to the
gaze, and tried clumsily to tell her so.
When they finally remembered the delayed supper, that meal was in need
of repairs. And because now Adriance would not suffer the width of the
room between himself and his wife, he insisted in aiding her in the
process, thereby delaying matters still further. Nine o'clock had been
struck by the clock in the corner when they sat down to table, lighted
by the new lamp. It had a garnet shade, that lamp, upon which its
purchaser received the compliments of Mrs. Adriance.
She delivered an impromptu lecture on the subject, as the light glowed
into full radiance and illumined her, seated behind it.
"Red, sir, is the color of life. It was the color of the alchemist's
fabled rose, looked for in their mystic cauldrons, because if the ruddy
image formed on the surface of the brew, the bubbling liquid was indeed
the true elixir of youth and immortality. Red is the color of dawn, of
sunset, of a fireside; of bright blood, poured splendidly for a good
cause or daintily glimpsed in a girl's blush. Red are a cardinal's
robes, a Chinese bride's gown, a Spanish bride's flowers. To be kept in
a red-draped chamber, in Queen Elizabeth's time, was believed to cure
beauty of the smallpox without a scar. Lastly, red is the color of the
heart."
"'Lord, keep our heart's-blood red,'" paraphrased Adriance soberly. "I
am not clever like you, but I know red is the color of your own jewels."
"Mine?"
He caught her hands across the table.
"Have you forgotten what stones were likened to the value of a good
woman? Elsie, Elsie, when I can, I will give you--not diamonds or
pearls, but rubies. Rubies, for to-night."
Neither of the two was given to continued sentimentality of speech. But
the deep happiness, the shining wonder that still dazzled them found
expression in plans for this new future; mere suggestions for the
comfort of the house or the pleasure of their leisure together. She
mentioned a much-discussed book, and he promised to read it aloud to
her.
"I've always wanted to read aloud, but I never found anyone who would
listen," he told her, over the strawberry jam and coffee. "You can't
escape, so----! You can embroider, and listen."
"Embroider!" She heaped scorn on the word. "Let me inform you, sir, that
there will be dish-towels to hem, and napkins. Do you know we have only
one tablecloth, and that has a frightful border, with fringe? Blue
fringe? And there are no curtains at the windows. Embroider? I shall
_sew_, and listen."
"Well, so long as you listen!" He lighted a cigar and leaned back
luxuriously. "What little hands you have!"
She spread them out on the table and seriously contemplated them.
"Most Southerners have. Didn't you ever notice it, even with the men?
Down in Louisiana most of us have some French or Spanish blood. But mine
have not been do-nothing hands, and I think they show it a little bit."
He stopped her, with a sudden distasteful memory of certain wax-white,
wax-smooth and useless hands that almost had laid hold on his life.
"I hope that mine may soon show something. To-morrow I will try to
become a wage-earner, and start a pay envelope to bring you."
"So soon?"
"Right away. Am I one of the idle rich? The fact is, our grocer tells me
chauffeurs are badly needed at a certain factory near the foot of the
hill. I think I should rather drive a motor truck than pilot a private
car, open doors and touch my cap."
She nodded agreement.
"Yes, of course. What factory is it, Anthony?"
He regarded her with a whimsical humor.
"Well, to be exact, it is not a factory unfamiliar to us. It is one
whose sign you often have viewed from the aristocratic side of the
Hudson, and it is the property of Mr. Anthony Adriance, senior."
"Oh!" startled. "Is, is that--safe?"
"Why not?" he wondered. "We haven't broken any laws, have we? The worst
he could do, if he wanted to do something melodramatic, would be to
fire me. But he will not. In the first place, why should he? In the
second, he knows a trifle more about the natives of Patagonia than he
knows about the men who drive his trucks. I don't believe he has been in
this factory for ten years. New York is his end. And I'm giving him a
square deal; he will have a very valuable chauffeur, Mrs. Adriance--one
who can drive a racing-machine, if required!"
She disclosed two dimples he had not previously observed. But her eyes
hid from the challenge of his and she rose hastily to clear away the
dishes.
"Let them stand," he commanded, man-like.
There she was firm in rebellion, however. Finally they compromised on
his assisting her.
"We must have a dog, too," he decided, when all was neat once more. He
glanced about the fire-bright room with a proprietary air. "One that
will not eat your kitten."
"With a nice watch-doggy bark?"
"With anything you want!" He turned abruptly and drew her to him.
"Elsie, suppose I had missed you? What a poor fool I've been! Last
night---- Why don't you take it out of me? Why don't you make me pay as
I deserve?"
She smiled with the delicately-mocking indulgence he was learning to
know and anticipate; it sat upon her youth with so quaint a wisdom.
"Perhaps I am, or will."
"I believe now that I loved you from the first day. I know that I kept
thinking about you and considering everything from the point of view I
fancied you would take. You"--with sudden anxiety--"you do not regret
coming with me, Elsie? What were you thinking of, just now, when your
eyes darkened? You looked----"
"Of Holly," she answered simply. "I hope his new nurse will play with
him, and cuddle him."
"The baby?" Her fidelity touched him with a warm sense of promise for
his own future. "Yes, I have taken you from him. But, we left him his
father."
The allusion brought a constraint. The words spoken, Adriance flushed
like a woman and turned his ashamed eyes away from the girl.
"You did not take me from Holly," Elsie hurriedly corrected. "Mrs.
Masterson discharged me, night before last. I was to go to-day,
anyhow."
"You? Why?"
She hesitated.
"She came to the nursery door while you were speaking to me of telling
Holly the story of Mait' Raoul Galvez. You know, Holly is too much a
baby to hear stories, so she understood that you meant--other things.
And it seems that once you had spoken to her of that story. She--made
connections. She accused me of--of flirting with her guests; of
being--an improper person."
"Elsie!"
"It is all over. It does not matter, now. But that was how I knew she
did not send you away. Of course she said nothing to tell me; she is too
clever. But, you see I knew so much already; and when I saw she was
jealous even of your speaking to me----!"
The silence continued long. Both were thinking of Lucille Masterson. As
if she feared the man's thoughts, Elsie shrank away from her husband's
clasp, the movement unnoticed by him. Her clear eyes clouded with
doubt, a creeping chill extinguished their glow.
Adriance spoke first, breaking at once the pause and the barrier.
"Once they must have been like this--like us. She would have left Fred,
left him down and out, for a new man; and she his wife!"
Disgust was in his voice, wondering contempt. He pressed his own wife
hard against his side. But Elsie dragged her arms from the hold that
bound them, and impulsively clasped them about his neck in her first
offered caress.
"You were thinking _that_?" she cried, fiercely glad in her triumph.
"Anthony, you were thinking that?"
He stooped his head to meet her glance; standing together, they looked
into each other's eyes.