A Man's Hearth. Eleanor M. Ingram
a bit of sewing or a book. He never had imagined so quietly monotonous a life as hers seemed to be.
It was at the end of the first week after their meeting that Adriance, riding slowly along the bridle-path through the park, saw an itinerant vendor of toy balloons and pinwheels wander into the pavilion where girl and baby were ensconced.
The sunlight glittered bravely on the gaudy colors of fluted paper wheels, the plump striped sides of bobbing globes, and the sleepy, brown face of the Syrian pedler who mutely presented his wares. The girl lifted her smiling eyes to meet the man's questioning glance, and shook her head with a pretty gesture that somehow implied admiration and a gay friendliness which made her refusal more gracious than another's purchase. The pedler smiled, also, and lingered to hoist the straps supporting his tray into a new position upon his bent, velveteen-clad shoulders, before moving on his way.
The baby had not been consulted. But his attention had been none the less enchained. Those pink and yellow things set spinning by the fresh morning breeze, those red balloons tugging at their cords like unwilling captives hungry for the clear upper spaces of blue—to see all this radiance departing was too much! He spread wide both chubby arms and plunged in pursuit.
"Holly!" the girl cried, arresting his flight from the coach. "Why, Holly?"
Holly hurled himself into magnificent rage. Halted by the outburst, the Syrian turned back with an air of experienced victory.
"Now you buy?" he interrogated.
The girl shook her head, struggling to appease the young insurrectionist.
"No, no. Please go away, and he will forget."
The man took a step away. The baby's screams redoubled; he stamped with small, fat feet and brandished small, fat fists.
"You buy?" the pedler blandly insisted.
"No!" the girl panted. "Please do go. I cannot; I have no money with me. Holly, dear——!"
Adriance had found a boy to hold his horse, and came up in time to overhear the last statement. He halted the Syrian with a gesture.
"I have," he made his presence known to the combatants. "Won't you let me gratify a fellowman? Here, bring those things nearer. Which shall it be, young chap—or both?"
The girl turned to him with candid relief warming her surprise.
"Oh!" she exclaimed her recognition. "You are very good. I am afraid, really afraid it will have to be both. Oh——!"
Holly had deliberately lunged forward and clutched a double handful of the alluring wares.
By the time calm was re-established and the amused Adriance had paid, it seemed altogether natural that he should take his place on the seat beside the girl; as natural as the pedler's placid departure. Holly lay back on his cushions in vast content, two balloons floating from their tethers at the foot of his coach and a pinwheel clasped in his hand.
"I should like to say that he is not often like this," remarked the girl, gathering together her scattered sewing, "But he likes having his own way as much as Maît' Raoul Galvez; and everyone knows what he raised."
"I don't," Adriance confessed. He noticed for the first time a softening of her words, not enough to be called an accent, far less a lisp, but yet a trick of speech, unfamiliar to him. "What did he raise?"
"Satan," she gravely told him. "Maît' Raoul knew more about voodooism and black magic than any white man ever should. It is said he vowed that he would have the devil up in person to play cards with him, or never be content on earth or under it. And he did, although he knew well enough Satan never gambles except for souls."
"Who won?"
"Satan did. Yet he lost again, for Maît' Raoul tricked him in the contract so cleverly that it did not bind and the soul was free. There is a great split rock near Galvez Bayou where they say the demon stamped in his rage so fiercely the stone burst."
"Then Maître Raoul escaped Hades, after all?"
"Oh, no! He went there, but merely as a point of honor. He was a gambler, but he always paid his losses."
Adriance laughed, yet winced a little, too. A baffled, helpless bitterness darkened across his expression, as it had done on the evening of their first meeting. He looked down at the pavement as if in fear of accidentally encountering his companion's clear glance.
"I never read that story," he acknowledged. "Thank you."
"I fancy it never was written," she returned. "There is a song about it; a sleepy, creepy song which should never be sung between midnight and dawn."
He watched her draw the thread in and out, for a space. She was embroidering an intricate monogram in the centre of a square of fine linen, working with nice exactitude and daintiness.
"What is it?" he wondered, finally.
Her glance traced the direction of his.
"A net for goldfish," she replied.
It was not until long afterward he understood she had told him that she sold her work.
The river glittered, breaking into creamy furrows of foam under the ploughing traffic. The sunshine was warm and sank through Adriance with a lulling sense of physical pleasure and tranquil laziness. How bright and clean a world he seemed to view, seated here! He felt a pang of longing, keen as pain, when he thought that he might have had such content as this as an abiding state, instead of a brief respite. How had he come to shut himself away from peace, all unaware? How was it that he never had valued the colorless blessing, until it was lost?
After a while he fell to envying Maître Raoul, who had gone to the devil honorably.
A long sigh from Holly, slumbering amid his trophies, awoke Adriance to realization that his companion possessed the gift of being silent gracefully. He had not spoken to her for quite half an hour, yet she appeared neither bored nor offended, but as if she had been engaged in following out some pleasant theme of meditation. A sparrow tilted and preened itself on the rail, not a yard from her bent, dark head. Over at the curbstone, the boy who guarded Adriance's horse had slipped the bridle over one arm and was playing marbles with two cheerful comrades who made calculated allowances for his handicap, based on his coming reward from the rider.
"I am afraid I am very dull," Adriance presently offered vague apology.
"Are you?"
"I mean, I am not entertaining."
She lifted her eyes from her sewing to regard him with delicate raillery.
"No. If you had been the entertaining sort of person, I could never have let you talk to me," she said. "But I think you had better go, please, now. Two imported nursemaids in bat-wing cloaks have been glowering at us for some time as it is. Holly and I shall be grateful to you a thousand years for this morning's rescue."
He rose reluctantly, with a feeling of being ejected from the only serene spot on earth.
"Thank you for letting me stay," he answered. "You are very kind. I——"
His lowered glance had encountered her little feet, demurely crossed under the edge of her sober skirt. They were very small, serious shoes indeed; not a touch of the day's capricious fancy in decoration relieved them. But what struck to the man's heart was their brave blackness, the blackness of polish that could not quite conceal that they had been mended. Of course, he at once looked away, but the impression remained.
"I hope Holly will not imitate Maît' Raoul any more," he finished lamely.
The girl frankly turned to watch him ride away. Her natural interest seemed to the man more modest than any pose of indifference.
But it seemed that she was appointed by Chance to make Tony Adriance dissatisfied and restive. It was altogether absurd, but the fanciful legend she had told him taunted and hunted his sullen thoughts. He took it with him to his home, when