FANTASY
She awoke to fright--some great hairy beast of the forest was nosing
her.
Then a light flashed in her eyes, and as she closed them, drifting off
to exhaustion again, she half saw a figure stooping towards her. Then
she felt herself being carried, while a barking seemed to be all about
her.
The next thing she knew was light forcing its brightness through her
closed lids and a great warmth beating upon her.
She dragged her eyes open again. She was lying on a black bear skin rug
before a roaring fire, and some one was kneeling beside her, tucking
cushions beneath her head. She had a glimpse of a khaki sleeve and a
lean brown wrist.
The warmth was delicious. She wanted to put her head back against those
pillows and sleep forever but memory was rousing, too.
Sleepily, she mumbled, "What time is it?"
The khaki shirt sleeve had withdrawn from view and the answering voice
came from a corner of the room.
"It's about two."
Two o'clock! The night gone--gone past redemption.
"Oh, Madre mia!" whispered Maria Angelina.
She struggled up on one elbow, her little face, scratched and stained,
staring wildly out from the dark thicket of hair. "But where am I? Where
is this place? Is it near the Lodge--near Wilderness Lodge?"
"We're miles from Wilderness," said the voice out of the shadows. "This
is Old Chief Mountain--on the Little Pine River."
Old Chief Mountain! Vaguely Maria Angelina recalled that stony peak, far
behind Old Baldy. . . . They had climbed the wrong mountain, indeed.
. . . And she had plunged farther away, in her headlong flight.
She stared about her. She saw a huge fireplace where the flames were
dancing. Above it, on a wide mantel, was a disarray of books,
cigar-boxes, pipes and papers, the papers weighted oddly with a jar of
obviously pickled frogs.
Upon the log walls several fishing rods were stretched on nails and a
gun, a corn-popper, a rough coat and cap and a fishing net were all hung
on neighboring hooks.
It was the cabin of some woodsman, and she seemed alone in it with the
woodsman and his dog, a tawny collie--the wild animal of her awakening.
Quietly alert, he lay now beside her, his grave, bright eyes upon her
face.
The woodsman she could not see.
"Now see if you can drink all of this." The khaki sleeve had appeared
from the shadows and was holding a steaming cup to her lips.
It was a huge cup made of granite ware. Obediently Maria Angelina drank.
The contents were scalding hot and while her throat seemed blistered the
warmth penetrated her veins in quick reaction.
"Lucky I didn't empty my coffeepot," said the voice cheerfully. "There
it was--waiting to be heated. Memorandum--never wash a coffeepot."
The voice seemed coming to her out of a dream. Thrusting back the
tangled hair from her eyes Maria Angelina lifted them incredulously to
the woodsman's face.
Was it true? . . . Those clear, sharp-cut features, those bright, keen
eyes with the gay smile! . . . Was it true---or was she dreaming?
Instinctively she dropped her hand and let her hair like a black curtain
shield her face. The blood seemed to stand still in her veins waiting
that dreadful instant of recognition.
Confusedly, with some frantic thought of flight, "I must go--Oh, I must
go----"
She sat up, still hiding, like Godiva, in her hair.
"You lie down and rest," said the authoritative voice. "If there's any
going to be done I'll do it. Is there some other Babe in the Woods to be
found?"
"Oh, no--no, but I must go----"
"You get a good rest. You can tell me all about it and who you are when
you're dry and warm."
She yielded to the compulsion in his voice and to her own weakness, and
lay very still and inert, her cheek upon her outflung arm, her eyes
watching the red dance of flames through the black strands of her hair.
It was the final irony, she felt, of that dreadful night. To meet Barry
Elder again--like this--after all her dreams----
It was too terrible to be true.
And he did not know her. He had come to that place of his, in the
Adirondacks, of which he had spoken, and had never given her a thought.
He had never come to see her. . . .
A great wave of mortification surged over Maria Angelina, bearing a
medley of images, of thoughts, of old hopes--like the wash from some
sinking ship. What a fool of hope she had been! How vain and silly and
credulous! . . . She had dreamed of this man, sung to the thought of
him--quickened to absurd expectancy at every stir of the wheels. . . .
And then she had pictured him at the seashore, beneath the spell of that
gold-haired siren--and here he was, quite near and free--utterly
unremembering!
She had suffered many pangs of mortification this night but now her
poor, shamed spirit bled afresh.
But perhaps he had just come. And certainly he would remember to come
and see his friends, the Blairs, and possibly he would remember that
foreign cousin of theirs that he had danced with--just remember her with
pleasant friendliness. She would give herself so much of balm.
And who indeed was she for Barry Elder to remember? Just a very young,
very silly goose of a girl, a little foreigner . . . some one to
nickname and pet carelessly . . . a girl who had been good enough for
Johnny Byrd to make love to but not good enough for him to marry. . . .
A girl who had thrown her name recklessly to the winds and who,
to-morrow, would be a byword. . . .
These thoughts ached in her with her bruised flesh.
Meanwhile Barry Elder had been making quick trips about the room and now
he threw down an armful of garments beside her and knelt at her feet,
tugging at her sopping shoes.
"Let me get these off--there, that's better. Now the other one. . . .
Lordy, child, those footies. . . . Now you'd better get into these dry
things as quick as you can. Not a perfect fit, but the best I can do.
I'll take a turn in the woods and be back in ten minutes. So you hurry
up."
He closed the door upon the words that Maria Angelina was beginning to
frame and left her looking helplessly at a pair of corduroy
knickerbockers, a blue flannel shirt, a strange undergarment, plaid golf
stockings and a pair of fringed moccasins.
They were in an untouched heap when her host returned, letting in a cold
rush of the night with him.
"What's this?" he flung out in mock severity. "See here, young lady, you
must get into those clothes whether they happen to be the style or not!
Little girls who get wet can't go to sleep in their clothes. Now I'll
give you just ten minutes more and then if you are not a good girl----"
To her own dismay and to his Maria Angelina burst into tears.
"Oh, come now," said Barry helplessly. "You poor little dud----"
The sudden gentleness of his voice undid the last of the girl's control.
She sobbed harder and harder as he sat down beside her and began to pat
her shaking shoulders.
"You shan't do anything you don't want to," he comforted. "You're tired
out, I know. But you'd be so much more comfy in these dry togs----"
"Oh, please, Signor, not those things. Do not make me. I will get
dry----"
"You don't have to if you don't want to," he told her gently, looking
down in a puzzled way at her distress. Her face was buried in a crook of
her arm; her black hair streamed tempestuously over her heaving
shoulders. "Come closer to the fire, then, and dry out."
He threw more wood upon the flames and piled on brush that shed a swift,
crackling heat.
"Give that a chance at those wet clothes of yours," he advised.
"Meanwhile we'd better wring this out," and with businesslike despatch
he began gathering that dripping black hair into the folds of a Turkish
towel. Very strenuously he wrung it.
"That's what I do for my kid sister when she's been in swimming," he
mentioned. "She's at the seashore now--no getting her away from the
water. She's a bigger girl than you are. . . . Now when you feel better
suppose you tell me all about it. Did you say you came from Wilderness
Lodge?"
"Yes," said Maria Angelina half whisperingly.
Had he no memory of her at all? Or was she so different in that wet,
muddied blouse, hair streaming, and face scratched--she looked down at
her grimy little hands and wondered dumbly what her face might look
like.
And then she saw that Barry Elder, having finished with her hair, was
preparing to wash her face, for he brought a granite basin of hot water
and began wetting and soaping the end of a voluminous towel with which
he advanced upon her.
"I can well wash myself," she cried with promptness, and most thoroughly
she washed and scrubbed, and then hung her head as he took away the
things.
She felt as if a screening mask had fallen and her only thought now was
to make an escape before discovery should add one more humiliation to
this night of shames.
"You are very good," she said shyly. "I cannot tell you how I thank you.
And I feel so much better that if you will please let me go----"
"Go? To Wilderness Lodge? It's miles and miles, child--and it's pouring
cats and dogs again. Don't you hear the drumsticks on the roof?"
She hesitated. "Then--have you a telephone?"
"No, thank the Lord!" The remembered laughter flashed in Barry Elder's
tones. "I came here to get away from the devil of invention and all his
works. There isn't a telephone nearer than Peter's place--four miles
away. I'll go over for you as soon as it's light, for I expect your
mother's worrying her head off about you. How did you ever happen to get
lost over here?"
Helplessly Maria Angelina sought for words. Silence was ungrateful but
there seemed nothing she could say.
"It was on a picnic--please do not ask me," she whispered foolishly.
In humorous perplexity the young man stood looking down upon the small
figure that chance had deposited so unexpectedly upon his hearth, a most
forlorn and drooping small figure, with downcast and averted head, then
with that sudden smile that made his young face so brightly persuasive
he dropped beside her and reached towards her.
"Here, little kiddie, you come and sit with me while I warm those feet
of yours----"
Swiftly she withdrew from his kindly reaching hands.
"Signor, it is not fitting that you should hold me, that you should warm
my feet," she gasped. "I am _not_ a child, Signor!"
Signor . . . The word waked some echo in his mind. . . . The child had
used it before--but what connection was groping----?
He repeated the word aloud.
"You do not recall?" said Maria Angelina chokingly. "Though indeed,
there is no reason why you should. It was but for a moment----"
She glanced up to see recognition leap amazedly into his face.
"The little Signorina! The Blairs' little Signorina!"
"Maria Angelina Santonini," she told him soberly. "Yes, that is I."
"Why of course I remember," he insisted. "A little girl in a white
dress. A big hat which you took off. Your first night in America. We had
a wonderful dance together----"
"And you said you would come to the mountains," she told him childishly.
He stared a moment. "Why, so I did. . . . And here I am. And here you
are. To think I did not know you--I've been wondering whom you made me
want to think of! But I took you for a youngster, you know, a regular
ten-year-old runaway. Why, with your hair down like that---- Of course,
it was absurd of me."
He paused with a smile for the absurdity of it.
Gallantly she tried to give him back that smile but there was something
so wan and piteous in the curve of her soft lips, something so hurt and
sick in the shadows of her dark eyes, that Barry Elder felt oddly
silenced.
And then he tried to cover that silence with kind chatter as he moved
about his room once more in hospitable preparation.
"It was Sandy, here, who really found you," he told her. "He whined at
the door till I let him out and then he came back, barking, for me, so I
had to go. I was really looking for a mink. Sandy's always excited about
minks."
Maria Angelina put a hand to the dog's head and stroked it.
"I was so tired," she said. "I think I was asleep."
"I rather think you were," said Barry in an odd tone. He glanced at her
white cheek with its scarlet scratch of a branch. "And I rather think
you ought to be asleep now but first you must eat this and drink some
more coffee."
Maria Angelina needed no urging. Like a starveling she fell upon that
plate of crisp bacon and delicately fried eggs and cleaned it to the
last morsel.
"I had but two bites of sweet chocolate for my dinner," she apologized.
"So you were lost before dinner--no wonder you were done in."
Barry filled a very worn-looking little brown pipe with care. "Where
were you going, anyway, for your picnic?"
"It was to Old Baldy."
"Old Baldy, eh? Let me see--what trail did you take?"
"On the river path. Then--then we got separated----"
"I see. But it's a fairly clear trail. Did you try another?"
"We--we crossed the river the wrong time, I think, and so got on the
wrong mountain. We----"
Maria Angelina's voice died away in sudden sick perception of that
betraying pronoun.
Quite slowly, without looking at her, Barry completed the lighting of
that pipe to his satisfaction and drew a few appreciative puffs. Then he
turned to inquire casually, "And who is 'we'?"
He saw only the top of the girl's tousled head and the tense grip of her
clasped hands in her lap.
"If you would not ask, Signor!" she said whisperingly.
"A dark secret!" He tried to laugh over that but his keen eyes rested on
her with a troubled wonder.
"And then you got lost--even from your companion?" he prompted quietly.
"Yes, I--I came away alone for he--he refused to go on," faltered Maria
Angelina painfully, "and then I seemed to go on forever--and I could do
no more. But now I am quite well again," she insisted with a ghost of a
brave smile. "If only--if only my Cousin Jane could know that I'm trying
to get back," she finished in a tone that shook in spite of her.
"You weren't trying to get lost, were you?" questioned Barry lightly,
groping for a cue. There was no mistaking the flash of Maria Angelina's
repudiation and the candor of her suddenly upraised young face.
"Oh, no, Signor, no, no! It was only that I was so careless--that I
believed he knew the way."
"And was he trying to get lost?"
"Oh, no, Signor, no, it was all a mistake."
"This is a very easy neck of the woods to get lost in," Barry told her
reassuringly. "Old residents here often miss their way--especially in a
storm. Mrs. Blair will worry, of course, but she is very sensible and
she knows you will come to light with the daylight. Just as soon as it
is clear enough for me to find my way I'll strike over to Peter's place
and phone her that you are safe and sound, and I'll get a horse for you
to ride out on--you won't care for any more walking and the motor can
only come as far as the road."
"But you must not tell them _you_ have found me," said Maria Angelina,
overwhelmed with tragedy again. She seemed fated, she thought in
dreadful humor, to spend the night with young men! And to have been lost
by one and found by another!
"It will be so much worse," she said pleadingly. "Could you not just
show me the way and let me go----?"
"So much worse?" His face was very grave and gentle. "So much worse? I
don't think I understand."
"So _very_ much worse. To have been found like this--Oh, promise me to
say nothing about it. I know that I can trust you."
"I think you had better tell me all about it, Signorina."
He saw that dark misery, like a film, swim blindingly over her wide
eyes.
"I cannot."
He considered a moment before he spoke again.
"If you really do not want any one to know that I found you I am willing
to hold my tongue. But don't you see what a lot of ridiculous deception
that would involve? You would have to make up all sorts of little
things. And then, after all, you'd be sure to say something--one always
does--and let it all out----"
Maria Angelina looked at him pathetically and a sudden impulse stabbed
him to say hastily, "I'll fall in with any plan you want to make. Only
wait to decide until you feel rested. Then perhaps we can decide
together. . . . And now, if you are really getting dry----"
"Truly, I am, Signor Elder. I am indeed dry and hot."
"Then you'd better make up your mind to curl up on that cot over there
and sleep."
"I couldn't sleep."
There was truth beneath Maria Angelina's quick disclaimer. Exhausted as
she was, her mind was vividly awake, now, excited with the strangeness
of her presence there.
Her mortification at his finding her was gone. He was so rarely kind, so
pleasantly matter of fact. He was as gayly undisturbed as if the heavens
rained starving young girls upon him every night! And somehow she had
known he was like this . . . but he was like no one else that she had
known. . . .
Her mind groped for a comparison. For an instant she vainly tried to
picture Paolo Tosti doing the honors to such a guest--but that picture
was unpaintable.
This Barry Elder was chivalry itself; he was kindness and comfort--and
he was a strange, stirring excitement that flung a glamour over the
disaster of the hour.
It was like a little hush before the final storm, a dim dream before the
nightmare enfolded her again.
Her eyes followed him as he turned out the kerosene lamp, which was
sputtering, and flung fresh logs upon the hearty fire. Overhead the
rain droned, like monotonous fingers upon a keyboard, and beside her
Sandy slept noisily, with sudden whimpers.
Barry's eyes, meeting the wistful dark ones, smiled responsively, and
Maria Angelina felt a queer tightening within her, as if some one had
tied a band about her heart.
"You don't have such fires in Italy," he observed, dropping down upon
the rug across from her, and refilling that battered pipe of his. "I
well remember when I ordered a fire and the _cameraria_ came in with a
bunch of twigs."
Madly Maria Angelina fell upon the revelation.
"You have been in Italy!"
"Oh, more than once! But all before the war."
"And you have been in Rome? Oh, to think of that! But where did you
stay? Whom did you know there, Signor?"
Barry grinned. "Head waiters!"
"You knew no Romans, then? Oh, but that was a pity."
"I can well believe it, Signorina!"
"Oh, Rome can be very gay--though I am not out in society myself, and
know so little. . . . What did you do, then? I suppose you went to the
Forum and the Vatican and the Via Appia like all the tourists and drove
out to the Coliseum by moonlight?"
Delightedly she laughed as Barry Elder confirmed her account of his
activities.
"Me, I have never seen the Coliseum by moonlight," she reported
plaintively, adding with eager wistfulness, "And did you buy violets on
the Spanish Stairs? And throw a penny into the Trevi fountain to ensure
your return? And do you remember the street that turns off left, the Via
Poli? From there you come quick to my house, the Palazzo Santonini----"
"And do you really live in a palace?" It was Barry's turn to question.
"A really truly palace? And is your father a really truly prince?"
"Nothing so great! He is a count--but of a very old family, the
Santonini," Maria Angelina explained with becoming pride.
"And is your mother of a very old----"
"My mother is American--the cousin of Mrs. Blair. But Mamma has never
been back in America--she is too devoted to us, is Mamma, and she has so
much to look after for Papa. Papa is charming but he does not manage."
"That makes complications," said Barry gravely.
"And Francisco, my brother, is just like him. He is always running
bills, now that he is in the army. And he was so brave in the war that
Mamma cannot bear to be cross. He will have to marry an heiress, that
boy," she sighed and Barry Elder's eyes lighted in amusement.
"How many of you are there?" he wanted interestedly to know, and
vivaciously Maria Angelina informed him of her sisters, her life, her
lessons, the rare excursions, the pension at the seashore, the
engagement of her sister Lucia and Paolo Tosti.
And absorbedly Barry Elder listened, his eyes on her changing face. When
she paused he flung in some question or some anecdote of his own times
in Italy and Sandy was often roused by unseasonable laughter, and
thudded his tail in sleepy friendliness before dozing off to his dreams
again.
Then like a flash, as swiftly as it had come, the excited glow of
recollection was an extinguished flame, leaving her shivering before a
nearer memory.
For Barry Elder asked one question too many. He brought the present down
upon them.
"And how do you like America?" he asked. "Has it been good fun for you
up here?"
Only the blind could have missed the change that came over the girl's
face, blotting out its laughter and etching in queer, startled fear.
"It has been--very gay," she stammered.
Despairingly she asked herself why she still tried to hide her story
from him since in the morning it must all come out. He would know all
about her then. And what must he be thinking already of her stammered
evasions?
Oh, if only on that yesterday, which seemed a thousand yesterdays away,
she had stayed closely by her Cousin Jane! If she had not let her folly
wreck all her life!
Bitterly ironic to know that all the time Barry Elder was here, at hand.
If only she had known! Had he just come?
She wondered and asked the question.
And at that Barry's face changed as if he had remembered something he
would have been as glad to forget.
"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 God'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.