CHAPTER XI
THINGS THAT WERE NOT ALL ON THE CARD
After that first night in the garden Alan Massey did not try to make open love to Tony again, but his eyes, following her wherever she moved, made no secret of his adoration. He was nearly always by her side, driving off other devotees when he chose with a cool high-handedness which sometimes amused, sometimes infuriated Tony. She found the man a baffling and fascinating combination of qualities, all petty selfishness and colossal egotisms one minute, abounding in endless charms and graces and small endearing chivalries the next; outrageously outspoken at times, at other times, reticent to the point of secretiveness; now reaching the most extravagant pitch of high spirits, and then, almost without warning, submerged in moods of Stygian gloom from which nothing could rouse him.
Tony came to know something of his romantic and rather mottled career from Carlotta and others, even from Alan himself. She knew perfectly well he was not the kind of man Larry or her uncle would approve or tolerate. She disapproved of him rather heartily herself in many ways. At times she disliked him passionately, made up her mind she would have no more to do with him. At other times she was all but in love with him, and suspected she would have found the world an intolerably dull place with Alan Massey suddenly removed from it. When they danced together she was dangerously near being what he had claimed she was or would be—all his. She knew this, was afraid of it, yet she kept on dancing with him night after night. It seemed as if she had to, as if she would have danced with him even if she knew the next moment would send them both hurtling through space, like Lucifer, down to damnation.
It was not until Dick Carson came down for a week end, some time later, that Tony discovered the resemblance in Alan to some one she knew of which Carlotta had spoken. Incredibly and inexplicably Dick and Alan possessed a shadowy sort of similarity. In most respects they were as different in appearance as they were in personality. Dick's hair was brown and straight; Alan's, black and wavy. Dick's eyes were steady gray-blue; Alan's, shifty gray-green. Yet the resemblance was there, elusive, though it was. Perhaps it lay in the curve of the sensitive nostrils, perhaps in the firm contour of chin, perhaps in the arch of the brow. Perhaps it was nothing so tangible, just a fleeting trick of expression. Tony did not know, but she caught the thing just as Carlotta had and it puzzled and interested her.
She spoke of it to Alan the next morning after Dick's arrival, as they idled together, stretched out on the sand, waiting for the others to come out of the surf.
To her surprise he was instantly highly annoyed and resentful.
"For Heaven's sake, Tony, don't get the resemblance mania. It's a disgusting habit. I knew a woman once who was always chasing likenesses in people and prattling about them—got her in trouble once and served her right. She told a young lieutenant that he looked extraordinarily like a certain famous general of her acquaintance. It proved later that the young man had been born at the post where the general was stationed while the presumptive father was absent on a year's cruise. It had been quite a prominent scandal at the time."
"That isn't a nice story, Alan. Moreover it is entirely irrelevant. But you and Dick do look alike. I am not the only or the first person who saw it, either."
Alan started and frowned.
"Good Lord! Who else?" he demanded.
"Carlotta!"
"The devil she did!" Alan's eyes were vindictive. Then he laughed. "Commend me to a girl's imagination! This Dick chap seems to be head over heels in love with you," he added.
"What nonsense!" denied Tony crisply, fashioning a miniature sand mountain as she spoke.
"No nonsense at all, my dear. Perfectly obvious fact. Don't you suppose I know how a man looks when he is in love? I ought to. I've been in love often enough."
Tony demolished her mountain with a wrathful sweep of her hand.
"And registered all the appropriate emotions before the mirror, I suppose. You make me sick, Alan. You are all pose. I don't believe there is a single sincere thing about you."
"Oh, yes, there is—are—two."
"What are they?"
"One is my sincere devotion to yourself, my beautiful. The other—an equally sincere devotion to—myself."
"I grant you the second, at least."
"Don't pose, yourself, my darling. You know I love you. You pretend you don't believe it, but you do. And way down deep in your heart you love my love. It makes your heart beat fast just to think of it. See! Did I not tell you?" He had suddenly put out his hand and laid it over her heart.
"Poor little wild bird! How its wings flutter!"
Tony got up swiftly from the sand, her face scarlet. She was indignant, self-conscious, betrayed. For her heart had been beating at a fearful clip and she knew it.
"How dare you touch me like that, Alan Massey? I detest you. I don't see why I ever listen to you at all, or let you come near me."
Alan Massey, still lounging at her feet, looked up at her as she stood above him, slim, supple, softly rounded, adorably pretty and feminine in her black satin bathing suit and vivid, emerald hued cap.
"I know why," he said and rose, too, slowly, with the indolent grace of a leopard. "So do you, my Tony," he added. "We both know. Will you dance with me a great deal to-night?"
"No."
"How many times?"
"Not at all."
"Indeed! And does his Dick Highmightiness object to your dancing with me?"
"Dick! Of course not. He hasn't anything to do with it. I am not going to dance with you because you are behaving abominably to-day, and you did yesterday and the day before that. I think you are nearly always abominable, in fact."
"Still, I am one of the best dancers in the world. It is a temptation, is it not, my own?"
He smiled his slow, tantalizing smile and, in spite of herself, Tony smiled back.
"It is," she admitted. "You are a heavenly dancer, Alan. There is no denying it. If you were Mephisto himself I think I would dance with you—occasionally."
"And to-night?"
"Once," relented Tony. "There come the others at last." And she ran off down the yellow sands like a modern Atalanta.
"My, but Tony is pretty to-night!" murmured Carlotta to Alan, who chanced to be standing near her as her friend fluttered by with Dick. "She looks like a regular flame in that scarlet chiffon. It is awfully daring, but she is wonderful in it."
"She is always wonderful," muttered Alan moodily, watching the slender, graceful figure whirl and trip and flash down the floor like a gay poppy petal caught in the wind.
Carlotta turned. Something in Alan's tone arrested her attention.
"Alan, I believe, it is real with you at last," she said. Up to that moment she had considered his affair with Tony as merely another of his many adventures in romance, albeit possibly a slightly more extravagant one than usual.
"Of course it is real—real as Hell," he retorted. "I'm mad over her, Carla. I am going to marry her if I have to kill every man in the path to get to her," savagely.
"I am sorry, Alan. You must see Tony is not for the like of you. You can't get to her. I wish you wouldn't try."
Dick and Tony passed close to them again. Tony was smiling up at her partner and he was looking down at her with a gaze that betrayed his caring. Neither saw Alan and Carlotta. The savage light gleamed brighter in Alan's green eyes.
"Carlotta, is there anything between them?" he demanded fiercely.
"Nothing definite. He adores her, of course, and she is very fond of him.
She feels as if he sort of belonged to her, I think. You know the story?"
"Tell me."
Briefly Carlotta outlined the tale of how Dick had taken refuge in the Holiday barn when he had run away from the circus, and how Tony had found him, sick and exhausted from fatigue, hunger and abuse; how the Holidays had taken him in and set him on his feet, and Tony had given him her own middle name of Carson since he had none of his own.
Alan listened intently.
"Did he ever get any clue as to his identity?" he asked as
Carlotta paused.
"Never."
"Has he asked Tony to marry him?"
"I don't think so. I doubt if he ever does, so long as he doesn't know who he is. He is very proud and sensitive, and has an almost superstitious veneration for the Holiday tradition. Being a Holiday in New England is a little like being of royal blood, you know. I don't believe you will ever have to make a corpse of poor Dick, Alan."
"I don't mind making corpses. I rather think I should enjoy making one of him. I detest the long, lean animal."
Had Alan known it, Dick had taken quite as thorough a dislike to his magnificent self. At that very moment indeed, as he and Tony strolled in the garden, Dick had remarked that he wished Tony wouldn't dance with "that Massey."
"And why not?" she demanded, always quick to resent dictatorial airs.
"Because he makes you—well—conspicuous. He hasn't any business to dance with you the way he does. You aren't a professional but he makes you look like one."
"Thanks. A left-hand compliment but still a compliment!"
"It wasn't meant for one," said Dick soberly. "I hate it. Of course you dance wonderfully yourself. It isn't just dancing with you. It is poetry, stuff of dreams and all the rest of it. I can see that, and I know it must be a temptation to have a chance at a partner like that. Lord! Tony! No man in every day life has a right to dance the way he can. He out-classes Castle. I hate that kind of a man—half woman."
"There isn't anything of a woman about Alan, Dick. He is the most virulently male man I ever knew."
Dick fell silent at that. Presently he began again.
"Tony, please don't be offended at what I am going to say. I know it is none of my business, but I wish you wouldn't keep on with this affair with Massey."
"Why not?" There was an aggressive sparkle in Tony's eyes.
"People are talking. I heard them last night when you were dancing with him. It hurts. Alan Massey isn't the kind of a man for a girl like you to flirt with."
"Stuff and nonsense, Dicky! Any kind of a man is the kind for a girl to flirt with, if she keeps her head."
"But Tony, honestly, this Massey hasn't a good reputation."
"How do you know?"
"Newspaper men know a great deal. They have to. Besides, Alan Massey is a celebrity. He is written up in our files."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that if he should die to-morrow all we would have to do would be to put in the last flip. The biographical data is all on the card ready to shoot."
"Dear me. That's rather gruesome, isn't it?" shivered Tony. "I'm glad I'm not a celebrity. I'd hate to be stuck down on your old flies. Will I get on Alan's card if I keep on flirting with him?"
"Good Lord! I should hope not."
"I suppose I wouldn't be in very good company. I don't mean Alan. I mean—his ladies."
"Tony! Then you know?"
"About Alan's ladies? Oh, yes. He told me himself."
Dick looked blank. What was a man to do in a case like this, finding his big bugaboo no bugaboo at all?
"I know a whole lot about Alan Massey, maybe more than is on your old card. I know his mother was Lucia Vannini, so beautiful and so gifted that she danced in every court in Europe and was loved by a prince. I know how Cyril Massey, an American artist, painted her portrait and loved her and married her. I know how she worshiped him and was absolutely faithful to him to the day he died, when the very light of life went out for her."
"She managed to live rather cheerfully afterward, even without light, if all the stories about her are true," observed Dick, with, for him, unusual cynicism.
"You don't understand. She had to live."
"There are other ways of living than those she chose."
"Not for her. She knew only two things—love and dancing. She was thrown from a horse the next year after her husband died. Dancing was over for her. There was only—her beauty left. Her husband's people wouldn't have anything to do with her because she had been a dancer and because of the prince. Old John Massey, Cyril's uncle, turned her and her baby from his door, and his cousin John and his wife refused even to see her. She said she would make them hear of her before she died. She did."
"They heard all right. She, and her son too, must have been a thorn in the flesh of the Masseys. They were all rigid Puritans I understand, especially old John."
"Serve him right," sniffed Tony. "They were rolling in wealth. They might have helped her kept her from the other thing they condemned so. She wanted money only for Alan, especially after he began to show that he had more than his father's gifts. She earned it in the only way she knew. I don't blame her."
"Tony!"
"I can't help it if I am shocking you, Dick. I can understand why she did it. She didn't care anything about the lovers. She never cared for anyone after Cyril died. She gave herself for Alan. Can't you see that there was something rather fine about it? I can."
Dick grunted. He remembered hearing something about a woman whose sins were forgiven her because she loved much. But he couldn't reconcile himself to hearing such stories from Tony Holiday's lips. They were remote from the clean, sweet, wholesome atmosphere in which she belonged.
"Anyway, Alan was a wonderful success. He studied in Paris and he had pictures on exhibition in salons over there before he was twenty. He was fêted and courted and flattered and—loved, until he thought the world was his and everything in it—including the ladies." Tony made a little face at this. She did not care very-much for that part of Alan's story, herself. "His mother was afraid he was going to have his head completely turned and would lose all she had gained so hard for him, so she made him come back to America and settle down. He did. He made a great name for himself before he was twenty-five as a portrait painter and he and his mother lived so happily together. She didn't need any more lovers then. Alan was all she needed. And then she died, and he went nearly crazy with grief, went all to pieces, every way. I suppose that part of his career is what makes you say he isn't fit for me to flirt with."
Dick nodded miserably.
"It isn't very pleasant for me to think of, either," admitted Tony. "I don't like it any better than you do. But he isn't like that any more. When old John Massey died without leaving any will Alan got all the money, because his cousin John and his stuck-up wife had died, too, and there was nobody else. Alan pulled up stakes and traveled all over the world, was gone two years and, when he came back, he wasn't dissipated any more. I don't say he is a saint now. He isn't, I know. But he got absolutely out of the pit he was in after his mother's death."
"Lucky for him they never found the baby John Massey, who was stolen," Dick remarked. "He would have been the heir if he could have appeared to claim the money instead of Alan Massey, who was only a grand nephew."
Tony stared.
"There wasn't any baby," she exclaimed.
"Oh yes, there was. John Massey, Junior, had a son John who was kidnapped when he was asleep in the park and deserted by his nurse who had gone to flirt with a policeman. There was a great fuss made about it at the time. The Masseys offered fabulous sums of money for the return of the child, but he never turned up. I had to dig up the story a few years ago when old John died, which is why I know so much about it."
"I don't believe Alan knew about the baby. He didn't tell me anything about it."
"I'll wager he knew, all right. It would be mighty unpleasant for him if the other Massey turned up now."
"Dick, I believe you would be glad if Alan lost the money," reproached Tony.
"Why no, Tony. It's nothing to me, but I've always been sorry for that other Massey kid, though he doesn't know what he missed and is probably a jail-bird or a janitor by this time, not knowing he is heir to one of the biggest properties in America."
"Sorry to disturb your theories, Mr.—er Carson," remarked Alan Massey, suddenly appearing on the scene. "My cousin John happens to be neither a jail-bird nor a janitor, but merely comfortably dead. Lucky John!"
"But Dick said he wasn't dead—at least that nobody knew whether he was or not," objected Tony.
"Unfortunately your friend is in error. John Massey is entirely dead, I assure you. And now, if he is quite through with me and my affairs, perhaps Mr. Carson will excuse you. Come, dear."
Alan laid a hand on Tony's arm with a proprietorial air which made Dick writhe far more than his insulting manner to himself had done. Tony looked quickly from one to the other. She hated the way Alan was behaving, but she did not want to precipitate a scene and yielded, leaving Dick, with a deprecatory glance, to go with Alan.
"I don't like your manner," she told the latter. "You were abominably rude just now."
"Forgive me, sweetheart. I apologize. That young man of yours sets my teeth on edge. I can't abide a predestined parson. I'll wager anything he has been preaching at you." He smiled ironically as he saw the girl flush. "So he did preach,—and against me, I suppose."
"He did, and quite right, too. You are not at all a proper person for me to flirt with, just as he said. Even Miss Lottie told me that and when Miss Lottie objects to a man it means—"
"That she has failed to hold him herself," said Alan cynically. "Stop, Tony. I want to say something to you before we go in. I am not a proper person. I told you that myself. There have been other women in my life—a good many of them. I told you that, too. But that has absolutely nothing to do with you and me. I love you. You are the only woman I ever have loved in the big sense, at least the only one I have ever wanted to marry. I am like my mother. She had many lesser loves. She had only one great one. She married him. And I shall marry you."
"Alan, don't. It is foolish—worse than foolish to talk like that. My people would never let me marry you, even if I wanted to. Dick was speaking for them just now when he warned me against you."
"He was speaking for himself. Damn him!"
"Alan!"
"I beg your pardon, Tony. I'm a brute to-night. I am sorry. I won't trouble you any more. I won't even keep you to your promise to dance once with me if you wish to be let off."
The music floated out to them, called insistently to Tony's rhythm-mad feet and warm young blood.
"Ah, but I do want to dance with you," she sighed. "I don't want to be let off. Come."
He bent over her, a flash of triumph in his eyes.
"My own!" he exulted. "You are my own. Kiss me, belovedest."
But Tony pulled away from him and he followed her. A moment later the scarlet flame was in his arms whirling down the hall to the music of the violins, and Dick, standing apart by the window watching, tasted the dregs of the bitterest brew life had yet offered him. Better, far better than Tony Holiday he knew where the scarlet flame was blowing.
His dance with Tony over, Alan retired to the library where he used the telephone to transmit a wire to Boston, a message addressed to one James Roberts, a retired circus performer.