Wild Wings Part 18

"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 d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k chap seems to be head over heels in love with you," he added.

"What nonsense!" denied Tony crisply, fas.h.i.+oning 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 Ma.s.sey? I detest you. I don't see why I ever listen to you at all, or let you come near me."

Alan Ma.s.sey, 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 d.i.c.k Highmightiness object to your dancing with me?"

"d.i.c.k! 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 d.i.c.k.

"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 h.e.l.l," 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."

d.i.c.k and Tony pa.s.sed 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 d.i.c.k 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 ident.i.ty?" 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 superst.i.tious 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 d.i.c.k, 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, d.i.c.k had taken quite as thorough a dislike to his magnificent self. At that very moment indeed, as he and Tony strolled in the garden, d.i.c.k had remarked that he wished Tony wouldn't dance with "that Ma.s.sey."