The Innocent Adventuress Part 24

"Oh--I've been here a few days," he gave back vaguely.

She glanced about the shadowy room. "So alone?"

A wry smile touched his mouth. "I came for alone-ness. I had a play to write--I wanted to work some things out for myself," and indefinably but certainly Maria Angelina caught the impression that all the things he wanted to work out for himself in this solitude were not connected with his play.

His linked hands had slipped over his knees and he looked ahead of him very steadily into the fire, and Maria Angelina had a feeling that he looked that way into the fire many evenings, so oddly, grimly intent, with oblivious eyes and faintly ironic lips.

He was quiet so long, without moving, that she felt as if he had forgotten her. He did not look happy. . . . Something dark had touched him. . . .

"Is it something you want that you cannot get, Signor?" she asked him in a grave little voice.

He turned his eyes to her, and she saw there was smoldering fire beneath their surface brightness.

"No, Signorina, it is something that I want and that I can get."

"There is no difficulty there," she murmured.

"No?" His tone held mockery. "The difficulty is in me. . . . I don't want to want it."

His eyes continued to rest on her in ironic smiling.

"Signorina, what would you do if you wanted a cake, oh, such a beautiful cake, all white icing and lovely sugar outside . . . and within--well, something that was very, very bad for the digestion? Only the first bite would be good, you see. But such a first bite! And you wanted it--because the icing was so marvelous and the sugar so sweet. . . . And if you had wanted that cake a long time, oh, before you knew what a cheating thing it was within, and if you had been denied it and suddenly found it was within your reach----?"

He broke off with a laugh.

Slowly she asked, "And would you have to eat the cake if you took the first bite?"

His voice was harsh. "To the last crumb."

"Then I would not bite."

"But the frosting, Signorina, the pretty pink and white frosting!"

So bitter was his laugh that the girl grew older in understanding. She thought of the girl she had seen by his side in the restaurant, the girl whose eyes had been as blue as the sea and her hair yellow as amber . . . the girl who had angled for Bob Martin's money.

She remembered that Barry Elder had of late inherited some money.

Impulsively she leaned towards him, her eyes dark and pitiful in her white face.

"Do not touch it," she whispered. "Do not. I do not want _you_ to be unhappy----"

Utterly she understood. His absurd metaphor was no protection against her. She remembered all Cousin Jane's implications, all the bald revelations of Johnny Byrd.

Somehow he had come to know that the heart of Leila Grey was a cheating thing, yet for the sake of the beauty which had so teased him, for the glamorous loveliness of those blue eyes and rosy tints, he was almost ready to let himself be borne on by his inclinations. . . .

Barry Elder looked startled at that earnest little whisper and his eyes met hers unguarded a full minute, then a whimsical smile touched his lips to softness.

"I'm afraid you have a tender heart, Maria Angelina Santonini," he said.

"You want all the world to have nice wholesome cake, beautifully frosted--don't you?"

Her gravity refused his banter. "Not all the world. Only those for whom realities matter. Only those--those like you, Signor--who could feel pain and disillusionment."

"In G.o.d's green earth, what do you know of disillusionment, child?"

"I am no child, Signor."

"I don't believe that you are." He looked at her with new seriousness.

"And I am horribly afraid," he continued, "that you have an inkling into my absurd symbols of speech."

That brought her eyes back to his and there was something indefinably touching in their soft, deprecating shyness. . . . Barry's gaze lingered unconsciously.

He began to wonder about her.

He had wondered about her that night at the restaurant, he remembered--wondered and forgotten. He had been unhappy that night, with the peculiar unhappiness of a naturally decisive man wretchedly in two minds, and she had given him a half hour of forgetfulness.

Afterwards he had concluded that his impressions had played him false, that no daughter of to-day could possibly be as touchingly young, as innocently enchanting.

But she was quite real, it seemed. And she sat there upon his hearth rug with her eyes like pools of night. . . . What in the world had happened to her in this America to which she had come in such gay confidence?

What was she trying to hide?

What in all the sorry, stupid world had put that shadow into her look, that hurt droop to her lips?

He could not conceive that real tragedy could so much as brush her with the tips of its wings, but some trouble was there, some difficulty.

His pipe was out but he drew on it absently. Maria Angelina snuggled closer and closer into her pile of cushions and went to sleep.

After she was asleep he rose and stood looking down at her, and he found his heart queerly touched by that scratched cheek and the childish way she tucked her hand under the other cheek as she slept.

Also he was fascinated by the length of her black lashes.

Very carefully he covered her with blankets.

Then he yawned, looked at his watch, smiled to himself and with a blanket of his own he stretched himself upon the fur rug at her feet.

CHAPTER XI

MORNING LIGHT

Maria Angelina had no difficulty at all in recollecting where she was when she came to herself next morning, for her dreams had been growing sharper and sharper with reality. In those dreams she was forever climbing down mountain sides, tripping, stumbling, down, down, forever down, until at last there surged through her the warmth of that cabin fire and the memory of Barry Elder's care.

She opened her eyes. The warmth of the dream fire was a blaze of sunlight that fell across it. The fire itself a charred ma.s.s of embers upon a mound of gray ashes. Upon the hearth stood the disreputable remnants of her sodden shoes.

For a few moments she lay still, her consciousness invaded with its rush of memories. She felt very direfully stiff when she thought about it, but after the first moment she did not think about it.