A Man's Hearth
Copyright© 2024 by Eleanor M. Ingram
Chapter 9: 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 régime, 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.
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