THE GLOWING HEARTH
Christened Noel, in honor of the day of his arrival, the puppy thrived
and grew toward young doghood in a household atmosphere of serene
content. From Christmas to Easter the days flowed by in an untroubled
current of time. Day after day, Anthony and Elsie Adriance grew into
closer and fuller companionship. The winter was a hard and long one, but
never dull to them.
They found so much to do. In return for his reading to her, Elsie
sometimes put out the lamp and in the flickering firelight told him
quaint, grotesque legends of Creole and negro lore. Her soft accents
fell naturally into patois; she was a born mimic, and interspersed
fragments of plaintive songs, old as the tragedy of slavery or the
romance of a pre-Napoleonic France. Her voice could be drowsy as
sunshine on a still lagoon, or instinct with life as the ring of a
marching regiment's tread.
She taught him to play chess, too, with a wonderful set of
jade-and-ivory men produced from among her few belongings.
"Do you know these must be mighty valuable?" Adriance exclaimed, the
first time he saw them.
"I know they are mighty old," she mocked his seriousness. "And I
wouldn't sell them, so the rest doesn't matter."
"Tell me about them."
"There is nothing very definite to tell." She regarded him askance from
the corner of a laughing eye. "Can you bear the shock of hearing that
one of your wife's ancestors was suspected of having secret relations
with the notorious LaFitte?"
"Who was he?"
"LaFitte was a pirate and freebooter, sir, who had a stronghold below
New Orleans, where the mouth of the Mississippi widens into the Gulf.
Many a ship paid toll to him, many curious prizes fell into his greedy
hands; and it was whispered that some of these strange, foreign things
mysteriously appeared in the house of Martin Galvez. Negroes were heard
to tell, with breath hushed and eyes rolling, of a swift-sailing sloop,
black of hull and rigged in black canvas, lines, and all. It slipped up
the river at midnight and down again before dawn, past all defences,
they said--and its point of landing was Colonel Galvez's wharf, ten
miles above the city. No one ever knew more than a rumor that ran
untraced like the black sloop. But it was said the ivory-and-jade
chessmen had travelled by that craft, as had great-great-grandmother's
string of pink pearls which are painted around her neck in her portrait.
Loud and often her husband laughed at the tales, inviting all who chose
to watch his wharf between sunset and sunrise, any night. The chessmen,
he declared, were presented to him by a prince of Cairo, whose enemies
had betrayed him into the hands of a slave-trader. The Egyptian noble's
dark skin and ignorance of Western speech had made him a helpless
victim; he faced the final degradation of the lash when Colonel Galvez
saw and rescued him. His gratitude sent the pretty playthings. As for
the pink pearls, they came from Vienna, by lawful purchase. At least, so
the worthy Colonel was fond of relating, with a convincing detail, over
his incomparable French wines and Havana cigars."
"But, what was truth? Which, I mean?" he questioned.
She shut her eyes in droll disclaimer.
"How should I know? The pink pearls disappeared before Josephine Galvez
married Fairfax Murray, sixty years ago. The chessmen are dumb. But I
know of many an old toy from overseas, around our house still. Nothing
of great value! We are as poor as ecclesiastical mice; the family wealth
long ago fled down the wind on the black sails of ill-luck. Yes, the
Murrays usually held poor hands at cards. Will you move first, or shall
I?"
"You," he invited. He looked at her with curiosity. "Why didn't you tell
me before that you were a princess in disguise? I never knew you had an
ancestor on record, and here you have a procession of them. You're a
funny girl."
If you don't like me,
Why do you, why do you,
_Why_ do you stay around?
She sang the very modern verse to him with a mockery altogether
tantalizing; and he upset all the chessboard in answering her properly.
Little by little he learned a great deal about her home; which, he
discovered, had once been the veritable home of the punctilious Mait'
Raoul Galvez of surprising memory. He made acquaintance with her parents
and her sisters, as Elsie brought before him a living simulacra of each
one with her magician-like arts of description and mimicry. There were
five sisters, it appeared: Lee, Roberta, Virginia, Clotilda and
Nicolette.
"Mother named the first three of us and Daddy the last three," she
explained. "Wasn't he right polite to wait so long? Mother is a rebel
Confederate up to this minute, while Daddy altogether indorses the North
and is a professional delver in romantic history."
"'Elsie' is not historical," he objected, much diverted.
"Oh, my truly name is Elcise; I come before Clotilda and Nicolette. But
my grandfather insisted upon calling me Elsie as long as he lived, so in
deference to him the first intention was abandoned. Poor Daddy lost one
of his turns, after all. It happened very well, though! Elsie is more
practical, and I am the most practical member of the whole family
circle."
"Really?"
"Why, certainly! Lee married a dramatic poet, who is also the editor of
a newspaper," she retorted upon his incredulity. "And one who lets his
two vocations interfere with one another! Roberta has been engaged to an
army officer these five years. He is stationed in the Philippines, where
she is to join him and live in some jungle with him whenever he is
sufficiently promoted to marry. Virginia is a beauty, who has the entire
college full of young men vibrating around our house; and she declares
that she is going into a convent when she is twenty-five. Clotilda and
Nicolette are twin babies of eleven years. They still have plenty of
time to do anything, you see. We were all perfectly happy as we were,
but it became really necessary for someone to relieve Daddy, if only by
supporting herself and leaving more for the others. So I began, and went
as private secretary and companion with the old lady of whom I have told
you. Wasn't that practical? Of course, Lee's husband supports her,
usually.
"But the spring that I came away, Daddy had urged him to resign from the
newspaper and come home for six months in order to write a poetic drama
over which they both were enthusiastic. No one expects it to make much
money, but, as Daddy said, we have always had enough for dignified
simplicity, and it should be our duty as well as our glory to help Lee's
husband to fame."
"Elsie's husband means to support her all the time."
"Oh, I told you Elsie was practical. She married sensibly."
"Should you call it that?" doubtingly.
"Her husband is quite kind to her, you know."
"Well, he is still in love. When that wears off as she grows tired of
feeding him, and ill-tempered----?"
They laughed at one another across the hearth. But presently Adriance
became serious.
"Elsie, I think that I should write to your father. One does not snatch
a man's daughter in this barefaced fashion, without so much as a word to
him, in civilized lands. Why haven't I thought of that before? And I
should like to be welcomed into your family, or at least tolerated
there. Do you suppose we might visit them, some day when our finances
permit? Or perhaps some of my sisters-in-law might come to see us?
George, what a time we could have given those girls with some of the
money that I had, and haven't!"
His wife leaned toward him, her gray eyes quite wet with her
earnestness.
"Anthony, there is nothing in the world that would make me so happy as
for you to write home and tell them that I belong to you. I have so
_hoped_ you would think of it!"
"Why didn't you tell me to do so, long ago?" he asked reproachfully.
"Now, how could I tell you a thing like that?"
"Why not?" he wondered, densely.
She made an expressive gesture with her little hands, resigning the
hopeless task of explanation.
"Never mind. But I shall be so glad! You see, they do not know that I am
married at all. I have not dared tell them, because they have such
stately, quaint ideas that they would be profoundly offended if you did
not write yourself. They would consider it a great slight to me. So I
have just waited."
He gazed at her in utter marvel at such patience.
"Never do it again," he requested. "Please remember that you have
deigned to wed a poor, dull animal who needs your constant guidance.
Even yet, I have failed to grasp the delicate point of your not setting
me to work at this weeks ago. But bring the writing things and sit
beside me as expert critic; we will attend to this before we sleep."
They did so; and were drawn still closer together by the fulfillment of
that act of courtesy and consideration which they unwittingly had
neglected so long.
The warm, gay intimacy of their life together sank deeper into the fibre
of both, as the days went by. They found a comradeship of minds as well
as hearts, never failing in novelty and delight to the man.
"I never before had an intimate friend," he said, one morning, with a
wondering realization of the fact. "I knew so many people that I never
guessed it, Elsie, but I've been lonely all my life. I can't see how I
could be any happier than I am now."
They had just risen from the breakfast-table.
Across it Elsie met her husband's eyes; her own infinitely wise,
splendidly happy as his, yet touched with that delicate raillery which
caressed and laughed at him.
"Oh, yes!" she dissented. "Yes, Anthony."
Puzzled, he searched her meaning in her shining gaze.
"I could be happier?"
"Yes. _We_ could be."
"But----?"
She came around the table and told him the answer, putting her hands
into his. She did not speak shyly, but proudly, with frank courage and
comradeship.
An hour later, when Adriance went down the long hill to his day's work,
he carried himself with a dignity new as the blended exaltation and
dread that paled his face. Once he stopped in the snapping March wind to
bare his head and draw a full, deep breath, looking up at the
bright-blue sky where tufts of white cloud sailed. Although the season
was so far advanced, new-fallen snow overlay road and hills, so that
Adriance seemed to himself as standing between two surfaces of pure,
glinting brightness. His thoughts were only now becoming articulate, yet
a sense of final change had settled through him. His manhood had come to
full dignity. Now he knew what he had done when he snatched Elsie Murray
out of her cross-current of life and took her for himself. He had found
love like a jewel on the road; content had reared a shelter for his
inexperience. Now, he stood as protector and shelter as long as he
should live for the weaker ones who were his. And with responsibility,
ambition sprang fully grown to life and challenged him. Was his wife to
rank as a chauffeur's wife, and nothing more? Was their child to be
reared in that place, and he to give the two nothing better? Anthony
Adriance passed his glance, with his father's cold accuracy of
appraisal, over the great factory lying far down at the foot of the
cliffs, where he himself was awaited to drive a truck.
Presently he went on, down the road. But he went differently.