A Man's Hearth
Copyright© 2024 by Eleanor M. Ingram
Chapter 5: 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.
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