He gave Maria Angelina a directly smiling glance whose boldness made her shiver.
Then he turned to Mrs. Blair. "You know my uncle had a little shack built on Old Chief Mountain--not so far from you at Wilderness. I always like to run up there----"
"Oh, no, you won"t, Barry," said Mrs. Blair, laughing incomprehensibly.
"You"ll be running where the breaking waves dash high, on a stern and rock-bound coast."
He met the sally with answering laughter a trifle forced.
"I"m flattered you think me so constant! But you underestimate the charms of novelty. . . . If I should meet, say, a _pet.i.te brune_, done in cotton wool and dewy with innocence----"
"You"re incorrigible," vowed the lady. "I have no faith in you!"
"Not even in my incorrigibility?"
"I"ll believe it when I see you again. . . . Love to Leila."
He made a mocking grimace at her.
Then he stooped to clasp Maria Angelina"s hand. "_A rivederci_, Signorina," he insisted. "Don"t you believe a thing she tells you about me. . . . I"m a poor, misunderstood young man in a world of women.
_Addio_, Signorina--_a rivederci_."
And then he was gone, so gay and brown and smiling.
Sudden anguish swept down upon Maria Angelina, like the cold mistral upon the southlands.
He was gone. . . . Would she really see him again? . . . Would he come to those mountains?
But why would he not? He had spoken of it, all of himself . . . he had that place he called a shack. That was beautiful good fortune--all of a part of the amazing fairy story of the New World. . . . And he had looked so at her. He had made such jokes. He had pressed her hands . . .
ever so lightly but without mistake. . . .
And his eyes, that shining brightness of his eyes. . . .
"Why rub it in about York Harbor?"
Cousin Jim was speaking and Maria Angelina came out of her dream with sudden, painful intensity. Instinctively she divined that here was something vital to her hope, and while her young face held the schooled, unstirred detachment of the _jeune fille_, her senses were straining nervously for any flicker of enlightenment.
"Why not rub it in?" countered Cousin Jane briskly. "He"ll go there before long, and he might as well know that he isn"t throwing any sand in our eyes. . . . This sulking here in town is simply to punish her."
"Perhaps he isn"t sulking. Perhaps he doesn"t care to run after her any more. He may not be as keen about Leila Grey as you women think."
Maria Angelina"s involuntary glance at Mrs. Blair caught the superior a.s.surance of her smile.
"My dear Jim! He was simply mad about her. That last leave, before he went to France, he only went places to meet her."
"Well, he may have got over it. Men do," argued Cousin Jim stubbornly.
"Yes," echoed Maria Angelina"s beating heart in hope, "men do!"
Cousin Jane laughed. "Men don"t get over Leila Grey--not if Leila Grey wants to keep them."
"If she wanted so darn much to keep him why didn"t she take him then?"
"I didn"t say she wanted to keep him _then_." Mrs. Blair"s tones were mysteriously, ironically significant. "Leila wasn"t throwing herself away on any young officer--with nothing but his insurance. It was Bobby Martin that _she_ was after----"
"Gad! Was she?" Cousin Jim was patently struck by this. "Why, Bobby"s just a kid and she----"
"There"s not two years" difference between them--in _years_. But Leila came out very young--and she"s the most thoroughly calculating----"
"Oh, come now, Jane--just because the girl didn"t succ.u.mb to the impecunious Barry and did like the endowed Bobby----! She may really have liked him, you know."
"Oh, come now, yourself, Jim," retorted his wife good-humoredly. "Just because she has blue eyes! No, if Leila really liked anybody I always had the notion it was Barry--but she _wanted_ Bobby."
For a long moment Cousin Jim was silent, turning the thing over with his cigar. Maria Angelina sat still as a mouse, fearful to breathe lest the bewildering revelations cease. Cousin Jane, over her second cup of coffee, had the air of a humorous and superior oracle.
Then Mr. Blair said slowly, "And Bobby couldn"t see her?"
He had an air of asking if Bobby were indeed of adamant and Mrs. Blair hesitated imperceptibly over the sweeping negative. Equally slowly, "Oh, Bobby _liked_ her, of course--she may have turned his head," she threw out, "but I don"t believe he ever lost it for a moment. And after he met Ruth that summer at Plattsburg----"
The implication floated there, tenuous, iridescent. Even to Maria Angelina"s eyes it was an arch of promise.
Ruth was their daughter, the cousin of her own age. And the unknown Bobby was some one who liked Ruth. And he was some one whom this Leila Grey had tried to ensnare--although all the time Mrs. Blair suspected her of liking more the Signor Barry Elder.
Hotly Maria Angelina"s precipitous intuitions endorsed that supposition.
Of course this Leila liked that Barry Elder. Of course. . . . But she had not taken him. He was an officer, then--without fortune. Maria Angelina was familiar enough with _that_ story. But she had supposed that here, in America, where dowries were not exigent and the young people were free, there was more romance. And now it was not even Leila"s parents who had interfered, apparently, but Leila herself.
What was it Mrs. Blair had said? Thoroughly calculating. . . .
Thoroughly calculating--and blue eyes. . . .
Maria Angelina felt a quick little inrush of fear. If it should be blue eyes that Americans--that is, to say now, that Barry Elder--preferred----!
And then she wondered why, if this Leila with the blue eyes had not taken Barry Elder before, Cousin Jane now regarded it as a foregone conclusion between them? Was it because she could not get that Signor Bobby Martin? Or was Barry Elder more successful now that he had left the army?
She puzzled away at it, like a very still little cat at an indestructible mouse, but dared say not a word. And while she worried away her surface attention was caught by the glance of candid humor exchanged between Mr. Blair and his wife.
"Ah, Jane, Jane," he was saying, in mock deprecation, "is that why we are spending the summer at Wilderness, not two miles from the Martin place----?"
Mrs. Blair was smiling, but her eyes were serious. "I preferred that to having Ruth at a house party at the Martins," she said quietly.
At that Maria Angelina ceased to attend. She would know soon enough about her Cousin Ruth and Bobby Martin. But as for Barry Elder and Leila Grey----! Had he cared? Had she? . . . Unconsciously her young heart repudiated her cousin"s reading of the affair. As if Barry Elder would be unsuccessful with any woman that he wanted! That was unbelievable. He had not wanted her--enough.
He could not want Leila now or he would not have spoken so of coming to the mountains to see _her_--his direct glance had been a promise, his eyes a prophecy.
Dared she believe him? Dared she trust? But he was no deceiver, no flirt, like the lady-killers who used to come to the Palazzo to bow over Lucia"s hand and eye each other with that half hostile, half knowing swagger. She had watched them. . . . But this was America.
And Barry Elder was--different.
She was lost to the world about her now. Its color and motion and hot counterfeit of life beat insensibly upon her; she was aware of it only as an imposition, a denial to that something within her which wanted to relax into quiet and dreaming, which wanted to live over and over again the intoxicating excitement, the looks, the words. . . .