Chapter XX The Cornerstone
When they looked for Fred Masterson, he was not there. Elsie remembered, then, that he had gone into Holly’s room while Anthony and his father were intent on each other. On the bed where the baby was asleep they found an envelope upon which was scrawled a message.
“I’m off for the present,” Anthony read. “I’ll drop in to-morrow or next day, when Holly is awake. Thank Mrs. Adriance for me. I’m going to be old-fashioned, Tony—God bless you both.”
“He never will come, I know it!” Elsie exclaimed, her heavy lashes wet. “Can’t we do something? Can’t we go after him?”
“I will go after him,” her husband agreed. “But not to-night.” He crumpled the envelope and flung it aside. “Fred Masterson is not going under without a fight. If doctors, sanitariums, his love for Holly and our help can set him on his feet again, he shall be cured and do all he dreams of doing. To-morrow I will find him.”
“Not to-night?”
“Not to-night. Elsie, don’t you understand? He loved his wife. If I lost you so—if you married someone else——”
She put her small fingers across his lips, stilling the sacrilege.
“No! Do not let our little house even hear you say it!”
“Nor any house of ours! To-morrow I will buy the house we looked at together, and you shall have an orgy of shopping to furnish it. Oh, yes, you shall, and I’ll help you. Have lots of dark red things and brown leather in that front room where you told me about Alenya of the Sea. And—do nurseries have to be pink?”
“Of course not, foolish one. We might make ours sunshine-color, like the satiny inside of a buttercup or a drop of honey in a daffodil. Anthony——”
“Yes?”
The rain-gray eyes laughed up at him, demure and daring.
“Please, I want a cloak all gorgeous without and furry within; a shimmery, glittery, useless brocaded cloak like those in the cloak-room of that restaurant. I—I just want it!”
“How do you know?” he wondered at her. “How do you always know the gracious way to delight me most? What a time we are going to have, girl! I’m going to drag Cook out of his rut and start him up the ladder, for one thing. If he hadn’t given me a chance, and then brought Mr. Goodwin down to see how I handled it, who can tell how much I might have missed? I shall bring him here for you to see, before we move, too. You won’t mind?”
“Try it and see.”
“And we will spend my first vacation in Louisiana! Can’t we take a trunkful of junk to each girl—including your mother? Let’s bribe a publisher to bring out the poetic drama, if it’s ever finished. Ah, be ready to come to Tiffany’s next week. I’m going to buy you a ruby as big as the diamond advertisements on the backs of the magazines.”
“Anthony!”
“Two of them!”
“Dear,” she hesitated, “are we going to have so much money? I do not quite see——”
Her husband looked at her, and laughed.
“You haven’t learned to understand your father-in-law. I have not mastered that study, myself, but I know some branches. He is not a half-way man. He will expect Tony and Mrs. Tony to proceed precisely as Tony used to do. And we will offend and disgust him with our small-mindedness if we do not take this for granted. When I remember the things I allowed Fred to make me believe of him! Elsie, I always could have earned our living somehow; I think the best news to-night was that my father is as fine as I grew up to believe him. By George, I never told him——”
“What, dear?”
“Don’t you know?”
They had almost finished their delayed supper, an hour later, when Adriance set down his cup with an exclamation and stared across the table at his wife.
“I have just thought of something! Now I understand what Lucille Masterson wanted of me, that day, in the tea-room. She made me give my word never to tell anyone that she had been willing to marry me. I was angry enough that she should suppose such a promise necessary. But now I can see the reason: she feared I might tell my father enough of that affair to prevent his falling in love with her. You do not know him, Elsie. If he had suspected her attachment to him was greed, and that she had been willing to marry either Adriance for the Adriance possessions, he would have suffered nothing to bring them together, nothing whatever. I suppose she told him she never thought of me except as a pleasant young fool. Think of us!” He pushed back his chair and took an angry turn across the room. “Fred, and I, and my father—all puppets for her to move about!”
“Holly has Mrs. Masterson, and I have you,” Elsie demurred, her mouth curling into a smile as her glance followed him. “And I do not believe she has your father, Anthony; I think he has her. You know—excuse me, dear—both you and Fred Masterson were too young and inexperienced. And your father heard, in spite of himself, Mr. Masterson’s story, this evening. I’m going to borrow a sentence from Mike: ‘She’s got her a boss.’ Let the mills grind; we know what grain we put in! Anthony, did you notice that I gave your father coffee in the Vesuvius cup? If he noticed its five-cent atrocity, he will ostracize me; and you know who bought it.”
“It is a good cup!” He dropped into his chair again and leaned across the table to catch her hands in his. “Elsie, we will never sell this house, or change anything in it, will we? We can come back to it, often, for just a day. It was the beginning place, however far we go.”
“Yes. Oh, yes! Anthony, our hearthstone is our cornerstone; on it we’re going to build, build splendidly, eternally——”
Her voice faltered before the vision. Silent, the two looked into each other’s eyes, seeing a happiness strongly secured, closing them around like folded wings.
Finis