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THE DREAM-MAKER MAN
[Illustration]
_The_
DREAM-MAKER MAN
_by_
FANNY HEASLIP LEA
_Author of_
WITH THIS RING
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1925
[Illustration]
COPYRIGHT, 1925,
BY FANNY HEASLIP LEA
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY
_To_ ROBINSON CRUSOE--
Who, on a desert shore, found a footprint
PART I
THE DREAM-MAKER MAN
CHAPTER I
The Marchesa was being read to, by Miss Wayne, to whom for this amiable
and not always too enviable service the Marchesa made return of a
certain stipend each month.
Thereby involving, since she was not one to fling good money to the
winds without expecting its reappearance, buttered, so to speak, ...
the Marchesa’s capricious attention.
She sat very straight in a winged chair richly covered with petit
point, her delicate claw-like hands lay lightly folded on her silken
lap, and her eyes ... the eyes of an old lady eagle, who has looked
long and perhaps not too discreetly on the sun ... showed a slight
grayish glaze. Which meant that the reading had lasted very nearly its
appointed two hours and the attention of the Marchesa was teetering.
“‘Carlyle was surely no just and infallible judge,’” read Miss Wayne in
the cool soft contralto which had decided her engagement.
“H’mph!” said the Marchesa.... “Who _is_? ... this side of heaven!”
Miss Wayne continued without controversy. She too had an eye on
the clock, and beside held no brief for the Baltimorean sage whose
pronouncements she was delivering.
“‘... Macaulay was unfair, inaccurate, fanciful, lyrical--yet his
essays live...!’”
“Macaulay, lyrical!... the creature’s a fool!” cried the Marchesa and
swallowed a yawn which spread a thousand tiny wrinkles from her mouth
to her parchment eyelids and back again. “If Macaulay was lyrical
... then Tennyson was a barrel-organ. Well--that’s not so unlikely
either....” She chuckled like a parrot with a biscuit in its claw.
“Where would you put Swinburne, Miss Wayne--among the saxophones?”
Miss Wayne smiled politely, which was expected of her, and murmured
that she had read very little Swinburne, which the Marchesa virtuously
approved.
“He’s strong meat,” said the Marchesa, wagging gray curls above a
withered throat, perennially swathed in a black velvet band.... “Strong
meat, Swinburne,--too strong for your type, Miss Wayne. Just as well
let him be. Read--ah, Wordsworth--if you must!”
Miss Wayne continued doggedly, with a lift of dark eyebrows which
dismissed Wordsworth in silence: “‘... What saved Carlyle, Macaulay
and company is as plain as day. They were first-rate artists. They
could make the thing charming, and that is always a million times more
important than making it true.’”
“There!” cried the Marchesa and lifted a dramatic little old
forefinger by way of ringing down the curtain on the afternoon’s
performance. “Let us stop on that! That’s a very subtle statement,
indeed. I like it. This--Mencken did you say his name was?...”
“H. L. Mencken,” murmured Miss Wayne.
“Never heard of him,” said the Marchesa, “until a nephew of mine left
that book here one day.... Well--this Mencken really has an occasional
idea. Make a thing charming--much more important than making it
true.... His mother must have been a woman!”
“Pardon?” said Miss Wayne.
“You heard me correctly,” said the Marchesa, whose ability to startle
and disturb members of her own sex was all that now remained to her
of a delightful capacity for living--once, upon her own repeated
inference, exercised to the full.
“Women are artists, in charm ... tyros, in truth. Dear me--that’s not
bad! Récamier might have said that.”
Miss Wayne, from whom at this juncture a little tactful applause, at
the very least a murmur of appreciation, might well have been expected,
said nothing at all. She laid down “Prejudices--Third Series”--upon
the somewhat cluttered little table which stood beside the Marchesa’s
chair, picked up her gloves and her bag, brushed a bit of dust from her
blue serge frock and prepared to depart.
The Marchesa watched her sharply.
“Are you tired, Miss Wayne?”
“A little,” said the girl, stiffly. “I hope my reading hasn’t shown it.”
“I had rather,” said the Marchesa, touching her fine thin nostrils
airily with a wisp of yellowed valenciennes and lawn, “have you tired
... than bored.”
“Thank you,” said Miss Wayne. “In either case--I could give
satisfaction.”
“Heavens!” cried the old lady on a note of keen amusement ... “the
girl’s human! Who’d ’a’ thought it? Sit down, my dear--and tell me
what ails you.... Have a cup of tea! Have a glass of sherry and a
biscuit.... Oh, not your boot-legging stuff--my doctor prescribes it
for me....”
“Thank you,” said Miss Wayne again. “I--really haven’t time. It’s very
good of you....”
“Sit down!” said the Marchesa regally.
Miss Wayne sat down.
She was a slim, dark girl with rather somber eyes in a pale
clear-featured face and she looked, in her straight simple blue frock
not at all different from ten thousand other girls who crowd the
subway of a morning, cling to its greasy leather straps of an evening.
She looked--what she was--a competent business girl, neatly dressed,
smoothly coiffed, closely hatted ... as neutral as a mail-order
catalogue, as harmless as her own clacking typewriter--as controlled as
an electric bulb ... and just about as warming.
“Well--well!” said the Marchesa and regarded her reluctant guest with
interest overriding hospitality. “I’d begun to believe you were a
Robot.... Isn’t that what they called ’em in that silly play a year or
so ago? A machine--a piece of female mechanism. I didn’t suppose you
ever got tired or took cold or flew into a temper. You’ve been coming
here Saturday afternoons to read to me, over six months now.... This is
the first time I’ve seen you display a touch of human frailty. Must be
something very wrong, indeed.... Wouldn’t you like to tell me about it?”
For the end of a damp and grayish day, this was doing nicely. The
Marchesa, who had expected nothing better than a doze in her chair
before dinner and a lone hand at patience after it, sat a bit
straighter and felt the air freshen.
“Come, my dear,” she coaxed, with a brightening eye and a gleam of
small yellowed teeth--“Nothing a woman enjoys so much as--confession!”
“Her own--or some one’s else?” inquired Miss Wayne briefly.
“Her own--most of all,” said the Marchesa. “That’s young of you--that’s
young--and gauche, Miss Wayne. However--I forgive you. I hadn’t
supposed you were young--particularly. I am discovering all sorts of
things ... silent upon a peak in.... I can never remember the exact
location of that peak ... but we’ll let it pass. The point is--either
I’ve been stupid or you’ve been very clever. Because where I was
conscious of merely a well-inflected and unusually pleasant voice ... I
suddenly perceive a submerged volcano!”
“Oh, please--” said Miss Wayne in some embarrassment.
“A volcano,” said the Marchesa firmly ... “and I am, in my simple way,
no mean volcanologist. As one--and another--whom I have known--could
have told you.” Observing that Miss Wayne slid forward a little upon
her chair in preparation once more for leave-taking, the Marchesa
abandoned reminiscence and added persuasively ... “Now, my dear--don’t
be so ridiculously reticent ... of course, it’s a man!”
As woman to woman, she beamed and--faintly--simpered.
There were photographs, faded and some of them regrettably outspoken,
all about the room in which the Marchesa sat.
“To Amalie ...” said the photographs, mostly, ... and added love--in
varying degrees of duration. If certain of the pictured heroes were
whiskered, some were quaintly collared and none were of a very
recent vintage, the tribute of their penmanship yet remained. And
the inference it wafted, of a Marchesa, young, pulchritudinous and
irresistible.
“To Amalie....”
The Marchesa had been born Amelia, upon the banks of the Mississippi
River at that--a fact of which the photographs naturally made no
mention. She had married at the tender age of nineteen (and upon
her father’s striking oil, as the then phrase went, in fortunate
quantities) a comparatively impecunious Italian gentleman who had died
during the honeymoon, appropriately enough, of Roman fever, before he
could do more than aristocratize for life the gentle creature he left
to mourn him. She had as a matter of fact mourned him adequately and
with every attention to detail, a decent twelvemonth before she took up
once more the quest of the pearl in the world-oyster ... and began the
collection of those signed photographs which, gazing through the dusk
of that stately firelit room, now waited upon Miss Wayne’s enamored
admission.
Romance lived in that room--and lurked like a splinter of tarnished
starlight in the Marchesa’s knowledgeable glance.
“A man--of course--” said the Marchesa with an ingratiating twinkle....
“What else could it be--at your age? Dear me--the ability to suffer
once more--! What I wouldn’t give for it.”
When the girl neither answered nor questioned these pleasantly
sympathetic ejaculations, the Marchesa continued in a slightly more
practical vein.... “What is it? He’s too poor? There’s no romance in
you children of to-day. You want your cake and a liqueur after it. Now
when I was a jeune fille....”
Of course the Marchesa was congenitally a mondaine, and had never been
a jeune fille at all, even in that straightforward and difficult phase
between the going of the first teeth and the coming of the second ...
between socks and stockings ... between bangs and brow as it were. Some
intuitive understanding and resentment of this may have goaded Miss
Wayne into speech.
She flung back her head and set her chin. Her dark eyes blazed and her
lips trembled.
She said with a trace of huskiness in her controlled low voice: “It’s
nothing to do with a man.... It’s my birthday!”
The Marchesa uttered something feeble and irrelevant about a thousand
thunders. She usually swore in French because her husband had died
before her acquaintance with Italian profanity was more than of the
slightest.
“How old are you?” she inquired presently, regaining her poise and her
curiosity.
“I am twenty-five to-day--” said Miss Wayne doggedly ... “and I wish it
were either seven or seventy ... then I’d feel a little calmer. As it
is--I’m rather low in my mind and I’ve been in a rotten temper since
morning. Really, I think I must ask you to excuse me.... I’m not up to
talking....”
For answer the Marchesa rang a little hand-bell that stood on the table
at her elbow. When a middle-aged and grayly respectable woman in a
black alpaca dress appeared in the doorway that led to the bedroom,
the Marchesa commanded briefly--“Sherry and biscuits, Anna!”--then she
turned back to the reluctant guest and bent upon her a smile which the
serpent might have envied, the dove inspired.
“Now--” said the Marchesa, somewhere between a purr and a coo, settling
her skirts and cuddling her beautiful withered hands closely together
in her silken lap.... “Now we can talk! Go on, my dear.... You’d like
to be either seven or seventy.... _Why_, in heaven’s name? This amuses
me.... I haven’t been so amused in months!”
CHAPTER II
Anna brought sherry in a beautiful old decanter, through whose
faceted roses and vine leaves, the clear brown wine glinted richly
... biscuits, she produced upon an almost translucent platter adorned
with the Napoleonic N ... two slim glasses, obvious offspring of the
decanter, and two lace-bordered, delicate napkins, yellowed with
time....
“Why--” insisted the Marchesa, between avid, bird-like sips and fierce
small crunchings ... “should any woman wish to be seventy? Why--for
that matter, should any woman wish to be seven? Terrible ages ... both
of them! Twenty-five, now ... you’ve got the world in your fingers!”
“If what I’ve got in my fingers is the world ...” said Miss Wayne,
sullen and disdainful ... “I’d give it away for a penny with a hole in
it.”
She drank her sherry and set the glass back on the table. “Thank you,”
she said--“no more.” She also refused a second biscuit.
The Marchesa continued her bacchanalian feastings alone.
“You’ve got magnificent health,” she suggested calmly. “I can see that
for myself. You’re not bad-looking ... though by using a little female
cunning you could be better. You make a decent living--don’t you?”
“What would you call a decent living?” inquired Miss Wayne coldly.
“Why--ah--” The Marchesa looked vaguely about her ... at the darkly
gleaming piano in the farther corner, with a faded Spanish shawl thrown
across it ... at the tea-table, loaded with heavy repoussé silver
and fragile Dresden cups ... at the French prints, ornately framed,
adorning the walls ... at the heart-shaped and circular cushions of
Normandy lace crowding the brocaded chaise longue....
“Why--ah--that depends,” said the Marchesa.
Miss Wayne laughed--a chilly and scornful sound.
“The room I live in,” she explained with elaborate courtesy, “is
about one-half as large as this. It has a bed, a table, a bureau, a
clothes-closet and two chairs. It looks across a grimy brownstone
street.... I’m lucky it doesn’t look into an air-shaft. It’s clean and
entirely respectable. And if there were a gas-jet in it instead of an
electric bulb--I’d go home to-night and shut all the doors and windows
and turn it on.... Does that amuse you, too?”
“Perhaps amuse is scarcely the word--it interests me immensely,” said
the Marchesa, helping herself to yet another biscuit and brushing
a crumb from her bosom with great care. “Why ... if you don’t mind
telling me more, dear Miss Wayne--why would you turn on the gas? Isn’t
that--usually--fatal?”
“I should do it--in that hope,” said Miss Wayne.
“Dear--dear!” said the Marchesa, looking thoughtfully over the rim of
her glass. “I suppose--you owe somebody--money?”
“I don’t owe a cent--to a soul.”
“Well--” said the Marchesa, wiping her lips and leaning back with a
sigh of repletion--“So far as I can see--there’s nothing wrong, then.”
“That isn’t the point,” said Miss Wayne doggedly.... “The point is ...
there’s nothing right!”
She flung out the words like a flag of defiance. She leaned forward in
her chair and locked her hands together between her knees. In spite of
her blue serge frock and her small black hat, her smooth brown hair
and her neat brown oxfords she was all at once a flaming figure of
rebellion--clear as a scarlet maple-branch against a pale autumnal sky.
“I’m twenty-five,” she said--“and there isn’t a thing in my life that
I really want. I’ve worked like a galley-slave since the time I left
school ... and I’m no nearer--happiness now--than I was then. That’s
too much for any one to bear--quietly. My life’s stupid--and ugly--and
dull. It’ll never be anything else. It’ll only get stupider and uglier
and duller--as I get older. Twenty-five is a sort of half-way place.
That’s why I see it all to-day--spread out--and it’s too much. It
isn’t like a birthday--it’s like a door--closing. I hate ugliness....
It isn’t what I want ... and I’m being shut in with it--gradually....
No matter how much I struggle and quarrel and dream--I’m being shut
in--with the things I don’t want. Away--from the things I’d give my
soul for....”
“Ha!--” said the Marchesa with unexpected sharpness--“And what are
those?--if I may ask.... Diamond bracelets and chinchilla coats? Little
brown dogs and expensive French cars for them to ride in?”
“Beauty!” said the girl savagely. “I want beauty in my life--and for
myself. I want the right background--to be--what I could be--against
it. So that when some one comes--for whom I--could care ... who could
give me my world ... he’ll be able to recognize me!”
“I said it was a man!” cried the Marchesa, and chuckled deeply.
“A man I’ve never seen, then,” said Miss Wayne. “A man I have no
earthly hope of seeing ... while I live as I live, and where I live....”
“Of course,” the Marchesa told her calmly, settling the black velvet
band about her throat with a preening turn of the head and a fastidious
thrust of the fingers. “... Of course, the man one’s never seen is the
perfect lover--you know that, my dear!”
Miss Wayne said clearly with no false modesty over the words: “I know
nothing at all about lovers. I never had one.”
“With your eyes?” objected the Marchesa politely. She added with
critical frankness: “Your eyes are unusually good. So is your hair.
There’s too much control about your mouth, however. It wants a touch
of--well, say, emotional uncertainty.”
“I’ve had a good deal more need for control than--whatever it is you
mean,” said Miss Wayne and smiled faintly.
“Now there!” said the Marchesa with a touch of pleasurable excitement
... “--why don’t you do that oftener? You have a really delicious
smile.”
“I know it,” said Miss Wayne.
“What?--You shameless creature!”
The slim, blue-serge shoulders lifted in a shrug.
“I know more about myself than you could ever tell me. I know what
possibilities I’ve got--and what I could do with them. I could
be--rather nice--in soft clinging frocks--with a good deal of fur and
lace. I ought never to wear a small hat, because I could be exceedingly
effective in a wide one. I have good hands--if I could keep them
properly ... the typewriter ruins my nails. I have good ankles ... and
very pretty feet ... thin stockings and narrow shoes with buckles would
make them quite lovely. I am slender--but I’m not thin.” She finished
with a strange and disarming candor--“I could be almost beautiful.”
“Eh, mon Dieu--I believe you could!” said the Marchesa. “Not that I
ever heard a woman discuss herself so coldly before.”
“What difference does it make?” inquired Miss Wayne with immense
weariness. “The sort of thing I always have worn and always shall wear
is the sort of thing I am wearing right now. It hides the person I
really am as completely as fog hides the sea. But I’ll never get out of
it--I’ll die in it sooner or later.... There are ships that go down in
the fog, you know. And I shan’t leave a trace ... because ... no man
has ever known me.”
The Marchesa stared at her curiously. She said with a dry, small cackle
... “Your parents and guardians, I take it, don’t count.”
“Both my parents died,” said Miss Wayne without apparent regret--“when
I was a child. I’ve been on my own for years. There’s no one--to whom I
really matter. No one who knows anything about me, beyond the fact that
I am a fairly good office woman and pay my bills regularly.”
“Do you go to church?” asked the Marchesa.
“Why should I?” said Miss Wayne. “It’s no good praying for the things I
want. And I’m not sufficiently thankful for the things I’ve got.”
“You--ah--might meet people.”
“I’m not quite lonely enough to go with that in view.”
“Well, dear me--” said the Marchesa rather crossly, “I don’t see
what you can do about it. It must be a dreadful sort of life....
I understand you absolutely. You feel that within your nice tidy
respectable working-girl shell--there’s a--siren, asleep, as it
were....”
“Something like that--if you will have it!” said Miss Wayne doggedly.
“H’m’m ... and you think if you could let her out ... as one may say
... she’d find the foot of the rainbow for you ... or at least the pot
of gold.”
“Yes,” said Miss Wayne--“I do.” She added, rising abruptly--“But she’ll
never be let out--she’ll probably die--in her sleep. And nobody’ll
know--or care. It’s very good of you to have--”
“Nonsense!” said the Marchesa, interrupting with the most engaging
rudeness whatever thanks her guest was about to offer.... “As I said
before--this amuses me. And I’m not so well amused as I once was.” The
film on the eagle eyes grew thicker while they blinked and scowled at
shadows gathering in the farther corner of the room.
“It isn’t very comfortable,” mused the Marchesa, “keeping a siren in
any sort of shell ... even the shell of--supposed senility.”
Miss Wayne made a courteous sound of dissent.
“Don’t contradict me!” snapped the Marchesa. “This is a moment of
rare frankness on my part. Do you suppose I don’t know I’m no longer
beautiful? Do you suppose I don’t know that my voice is cracked and
my face looks like the corner of an old silk shawl? Bah! I used to
have a skin like a tea-rose. I used to have a voice like a wood-dove.
I used to have a figure like ... well, not in the least like these
languishing lead-pencils one sees at the Opera or slinking up and down
Fifth Avenue nowadays! It makes me laugh!” She gave a mournful little
sniff in proof thereof. “My dear, I’ve had men at my feet since”--she
stopped discreetly and finished with the wisp of lawn covering a slight
cough--“since about a year after my husband’s death. I understand
you--absolutely. You want a beautiful setting against which to draw the
eye of critical observers.”
“You’ve been very sympathetic,” said Miss Wayne. She drew on her prim
brown gloves once more.
“I know how necessary background is,” said the Marchesa pensively.
“Even Cleopatra--in a room with brown wall-paper--dear me, what a
ghastly thought! Must you go?--Next Saturday, then, at the same
hour--good evening, Miss Wayne.”
“Good evening,” said Miss Wayne quietly and went out, closing the door
behind her with taper fingers.
The Marchesa sat in the dusk for some time without stirring. Once she
nodded her careful gray curls. Once she laughed to herself, like a
ruminant witch in a chimney corner. Eventually she rang sharply for
Anna and issued a reproof.
“I want a fire,” said the Marchesa--“and all the lamps lit. The days
are getting horribly short. Anybody but a fool would have noticed it!”
CHAPTER III
Melissa Wayne went home in the subway. The Marchesa had her being
in the Eighties ... just off Riverside ... and the room which had,
unfortunately, as its owner described it, no gas-jet, occupied a small
and none too airy part of the fifth floor front of a grimy brownstone
house on Sixty-third ... near Columbus.
It was, take it by and large, or any way you like, exactly like an
enormous number of other houses, whose dingy curtains hang limp forever
behind bleared, deep windows; whose steps lead up to dark distasteful
doorways; and whose halls reek unceasingly of the less inviting sorts
of food. Melissa lived there because her room was cheap and most of her
life was spent, after all, in an office; but she ate, when she could,
in tea-rooms, so as to obtain a certain amount of variety, and upon
such occasions as she couldn’t eat in tea-rooms, she used the thrifty
hospitality of her boarding-place with her eyes upon her plate and a
forbidding expression about her mouth.
“High-hat stuff,” her fellow-diners considered it and let her be,
accordingly with of course an occasional exception.
There was, for example, a pleasant enough young salesman, expert in
gentlemen’s toggery, who would gladly in the beginning have favored
Melissa with graceful attentions. His place was next hers at the
table--when she sat there. But she disposed of him summarily.
“Ah,” said he, upon their initial encounter, his name was Curtis ...
not that it matters ... Arthur Curtis, originally of some sweet Auburn
in southern Iowa.... “Ah--I see we are to be neighbors--too bad we
haven’t been introduced!”
“Is it necessary?” asked Melissa with frosty significance.
The unhappy young man, accustomed to eventual if not earlier
capitulation on the part of the selected fair, rather rushed upon his
fate.
“I don’t need it if you don’t,” he assured her blithely.
“I fancy no one is going to need it,” returned Melissa, unsmiling, and
continued her dinner in silence.
When Mr. Curtis some moments later arrived at her meaning, he was
silent as well and flushed darkly above his rice pudding with currants.
He thought of withering Melissa with a few trenchant words. He couldn’t
however think of the words. So their acquaintance began and ended just
there. Melissa’s fault entirely. He was a harmless and not unpleasing
person, if one hadn’t a prejudice against perfumed brilliantine and
stubby fingers. Melissa, of course had. Which settled the whole thing
out of court.
He would have taken her to the movies--and to dance ... perhaps even to
an occasional show. He wasn’t in the smartest shop in town but he had
ideas--and prospects.
However, after Melissa’s unpardonable rudeness, he passed her on the
stairs with a justifiably clipped G’morning--and G’d evening--and that
was that!
Other dwellers in the brownstone place passed her frequently with
no salutation at all. Perhaps, one reason Melissa stayed there. If
she couldn’t have the things she wanted ... as she had said to the
Marchesa--she wasn’t in any case going to want the things she could
get. That meant deterioration. And Melissa preferred loneliness,
isolation, even absolute ostracism, to that.
Upon the evening of her twenty-fifth birthday, therefore, she stopped
at a tea-room, a block or so away from her fifth floor front, and did
herself sensibly, if not too luxuriously, with soup, a veal cutlet,
potatoes and tapioca.
She didn’t enjoy it. What she really wanted was a shrimp cocktail,
guinea-hen en casserole, an artichoke, perhaps--perhaps not--in any
case some very delicate ice, and black coffee in a tiny, fragile cup
... “with one lump, if you please!” ... to a bowing waiter.
The girl who served Melissa’s soup and tapioca had a spot on her apron
and talked through her nose--also too much.
She said--“It’s a grand night if you don’t care what you say ...”
and, slopping a glass of water as she set it down, she observed
airily--“Butter-fingers!”
She was the friendliest creature imaginable but what is so superfluous
as an undesired friend?
Melissa made no answer beyond paying her check and leaving a ten-cent
tip, whereupon the butter-fingered one uttered a maidenly oath and went
on to the next prospect.
It wasn’t the sort of tip Melissa would have preferred to give, but
it was the sort she had learned to. Tips mount up--when one hasn’t
Golconda in one’s pocket. A quarter takes on, at times, noticeably
nearing the end of each month, the roundness and general aspect of the
moon. A dime is smaller--not to say thinner.
Quarters, dimes and nickels! Melissa would have liked never to have
to count her change again ... to say merely, of anything less than a
dollar--“You may keep it!” to the world of service at large.
However--it wasn’t what she would have liked that set her fashions.
She passed her landlady in the hallway, having come at last to the roof
she called home and the landlady, a gray-haired, rather tired-faced
person forever hurrying after something and not finding it, stopped for
a gentle reminder.
“I left your bill in your box, Miss Wayne.”
Melissa took out her purse and paid.
“I have it just here, Mrs. Robinson.”
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Robinson--“if everybody was as prompt as you!”
But it left Melissa’s purse distinctly flat--not that it had been
rotund, before.
In her own room, with the door shut, she stood before the bureau,
taking off her hat and calculated unwillingly.... “That’s the rent
paid up for next week. If I go to the Symphony, Thursday night
... and to see Simone ... I can’t have new gloves--and I should.
Wednesday night is cheaper ... but Thursday they’re playing Ravel--and
Tschaikowsky--Thursday it is! White hyacinths, again!”
She put her hat away in the closet which was narrow and dark and for
all her best efforts smelt of mice. She took off her shoes and put them
on trees; put on a pair of soft slippers and getting out of her frock
put that away in the closet too; carefully, upon a hanger, between a
warm but uninteresting gray coat and a serviceable but quite uninspired
black taffeta.
Then she sat down in the rocking-chair at the foot of the bed
and put her hands over her face and cried. Very softly--and very
unwisely--since crying gets one nowhere. Cried because the room she sat
in and the life she was living were neither the room nor the life of
her dreams. Yet the dreams persisted--cruelly.
“Oh, Lord!” she said to herself at last, with a long shaky
sigh--“what’s the use!”
She washed out a pair of black silk stockings and hung them across a
chair-back. She loathed washing out stockings, but she did it every
night. Otherwise they couldn’t have been silk. She looked after her
nails and her hair and her face. She was in her nightgown at last,
a sensible affair of Philippine embroidery on white muslin, with a
corduroy dressing-gown over it.
She looked, even in that unimaginative attire, rather well. Her dark
soft hair hung in waves about her shoulders--real waves--she couldn’t
have afforded so perfect a marcel ... and her eyes, in the mirror, were
wistful and shadowy.
“You poor little fool!” she said to her frowning image--by way of good
night--“Spilling your soul to the Marchesa--just because she asked you.
Won’t you ever learn--to keep yourself--inside yourself? Won’t you ever
learn--that nobody cares? She’s probably chuckling over you, now--the
poor working-girl--with a siren-complex!... Oh, Lissa--if only you
didn’t know what you wanted! Or could be happy without it....”
She opened the window and stood there, looking out across the street.
It was as she had said--nothing but dingy brown houses, as like the one
she lived in as one ant-hill is like another.
The sky above the houses hung misty and far--no stars showing. A mere
sliver of sky with a cold wind in abeyance.
“Somewhere,” thought Melissa, clenching her fingers in the curtain,
lifting her rebellious eyes to that inverted abyss--“there’s a window
I could stand in and look--clean across heaven. I’ll never see it, of
course! I’ll never love anything but Beauty--my whole life long ... and
that I’ll never have.... Oh, God,--wherever you are--what pleasure do
you get out of such a world?”
She added, because with even a sliver of sky He might after all
overhear.... “It’s all right--I suppose You know what it’s about--_I_
don’t!”
Then she went to bed and after a long, dragging hour, to sleep ... the
drab-walled room cradled her as a tree cradles a dryad.
CHAPTER IV
Waking, Melissa always wondered just what repaid one for the
repetitional effort involved in beginning a new day. Days, after all,
were so hopelessly alike ... one opened one’s eyes on the same unlovely
prospect on which one had aloofly closed them, the night before ...
dull walls, dull ceiling, sunless, grayish window ... one’s clothes in
a neat, limp heap on a straight-backed chair ... one’s shoes straightly
placed on the floor. One yawned--and stretched--and felt one’s courage
fainting within one.
After which, one got out of bed and did all the usual things in the
usual way. Because that was life.
Melissa used to say over to herself, sometimes, between putting on
the stockings she had washed out the night before, and brushing her
blue serge frock and inspecting her gloves for wear and tear, a quaint
dispassionate bit of verse she had found in a volume of Housman’s. It
made her feel no happier but she inferred from it that somewhere her
misery had company--that certain others no less than she failed of
achieving a morning face.... She cared deeply for Mr. Housman, she went
about her room with almost a tenderness in her heart for him while she
murmured sardonically:
“‘Yonder see the morning blink;
The sun is up, and so must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why!’”
Melissa didn’t know why. But she made haste just the same. Out of bed
morning after morning at seven. Into her clothes, groomed to a hair, by
eight.... Why? To what end? Like a squirrel on a wheel--or a donkey on
a treadmill! Mr. Housman said it neatly:
“‘Oh, often have I washed and dressed
And what’s to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest;
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.’”
Coffee and a roll at eight-fifteen, in the alien precincts of the
dining-room downstairs--that long, narrow, cheerless dining-room where
if a stain appeared on the cloth on Monday, it abode ruthlessly till
Wednesday ... where the ghosts of legs of lamb wrestled waveringly but
undyingly with the ghosts of Hamburger steak and pork chops, from one
week-end to another.... Melissa loathed that dining-room. And ate her
breakfast in it every morning.
On the Monday after her astounding outburst before the Marchesa, she
was out of the place and down the brownstone steps by twenty-five
minutes of nine--which gave her an easy margin. At nine precisely she
removed the cover from her machine, laid a newly sharpened pencil
on the table within reach, ran her fingers through her hair with a
small, swift desperate gesture and dove into the day’s work ... a mute,
inglorious rebel, with a speed of many words a minute.
Not that she disliked her work particularly ... only she felt in
more definitely bitter moments, as if she fed herself daily into a
hopper ... cut herself daily into neat small pieces for the purposes
of feeding ... and saw nothing come out, ever--except a weekly
pay-envelope, none too full, at that.
There were letters to be taken that morning, a dull, uninteresting
sheaf of them, beginning largely, “Re yours of the seventeenth
instant--” and ending for the most part ... “We would appreciate the
courtesy of an early reply”--or something as dramatic.
Melissa was good at letters. The junior member of the firm for which
she worked--(it was a prosperous book-shop, with a publishing business
of its own, on the side) always insisted upon having her and if she
stayed away a day or so in case of colds or other ailments, was
flatteringly inclined to be aggrieved about it. However, his grievance
was of the most impersonal and unalluring sort--concerned chiefly with
the fact that Melissa could both spell and punctuate, unassisted ...
and as he himself was blond, stout and perceptibly bald, with a wife
and three children somewhere in Yonkers, Melissa took small comfort
from his attachment.
He was to her, to be quite frank about it, a commercial primrose upon
the brim of the river of finance--nothing more. Not even conspicuously
yellow.
She took his letters, therefore, with one ear, as it were. Efficiently
enough at that. But scarcely conscious of his plump, ruddy,
English-tailored person. As he, she felt, was scarcely conscious of her.
“That will do, thank you, Miss Wayne,” he said, when the clock showed
noon.
Melissa rose, notebook and pencil in hand.
“Can you have those ready for me by three o’clock?”
“Yes, Mr. Bennett.”
“Good! Are you going out to lunch, now?”
“If you don’t mind--it’s my regular time.”
“H’m’m!” said Mr. Bennett--“very well.”
He wasn’t going to ask her to lunch with him--not being a tired
business man out of one of his own books. He merely asked for the sake
of knowing her approximate working-time between then and three o’clock.
As Melissa very well knew.
Putting on her hat in the outer office, dusting a bit of powder over
her straight well-bred nose, she wondered vaguely why men in stories
always endeavored to turn their unsuspecting typists from the path of
virtue--why men in offices so seldom did.
Not that she wanted to be turned--or would remotely have considered
such a man--but the question presented itself.
Beside her at the next desk, a brown-haired young woman with more
opulence of outline than the present-day fashion demands, inquired
amiably: “Going out to lunch, Miss Wayne?”
“Yes,” said Melissa.
“Wait half a second and I’ll go with you.”
Melissa waited half a second, five minutes, to be exact, and the
brown-haired one eventually went with her, to a little place around the
corner.... “Luncheon, Tea and Dinner.... Southern Cooking.”
It wasn’t in the least Southern Cooking, as Melissa, who had been born
in Alabama and lived there till she was twelve, very well knew--but it
sufficed.
Pea soup, fricasseed chicken, an apple dumpling, a cup of tea.
“I’m putting on pounds,” said Melissa’s companion
mournfully--“yes--cream--no lemon for me!”
To Melissa she added with obvious respect--“Don’t have to diet--do you,
Miss Wayne?”
Melissa said briefly that she didn’t.
Miss Martin sighed unaffectedly.
“I bet you can go into a store, put on a sixteen-year-old model and
walk out in it--without an alteration.”
“When I can find a sixteen-year-old model worth putting on,” said
Melissa.
The other stared--“Aren’t the flappers snappy enough for you?”
“Oh, quite!” said Melissa--disdaining to elucidate.
“Well--I’ve always worn a thirty-eight,” said Miss Martin frankly, “but
it’s got to be a forty, pretty soon.” She added with a look in which
coyness and modest pride were inextinguishably blent--“Lucky my best
young man is from the country....”
“Why?” asked Melissa politely.
“Oh,” said Miss Martin, “country boys always like a girl to
be--well,--_you_ know! ... kind of fine-looking.”
“Of course,” said Melissa. She ate her luncheon doggedly.
“That darned office!” said Miss Martin. “I get so hungry working all
morning, I eat too much every day of my life--and that’s a fact.”
It was a fact--obviously.
“You don’t care much for men, do you, Miss Wayne?” asked Miss Martin
suddenly.
“Why?” fenced Melissa, curiously startled.
“Oh--_you_ know--you can kind of feel when a girl does--or doesn’t. You
have that sort of indifferent, up-stage look, when a man’s around.”
“Do you mean--I look like--an old maid?” asked Melissa directly.
“Oh, no--nothing like that, I’m sure!” Miss Martin denied with
earnestness a trifle overdone.
Conversation during the rest of the luncheon sagged unhappily but
irretrievably.
Melissa was painfully certain, although she insisted to herself it made
no difference one way or the other, that Miss Martin had meant just
that. Coming on top of a twenty-fifth birthday like the one of the day
before, such comment was fairly disconcerting.
Indifferent ... upstage ... Melissa! With the heart in her breast
one dully thudding ache for beauty and romance she wanted, and was
apparently never to attain.
She went back to the office outwardly cold and quiet--inwardly fevered
with an unbearable discontent. She finished Mr. Bennett’s letters
and took them in to him. She worked till six over other letters,
unexpectedly thrust upon her. She finished the day with her head
tired and her hands shaking. And as a crowning ignominy, Miss Martin
apologized.
“Of course--anybody can see you’re young enough,” said Miss
Martin--(she was thirty, herself). “I expect you’re just what they call
a woman’s woman.”
“It doesn’t matter in the least,” said Melissa. She could have
slain the stylish stout girl by slow torture, the most approved
methods--involving thumbscrews if necessary.
All the way back to her room, through the chilly gathering dusk she was
thinking in a kind of tired fury--“I’m a fool to go on with it.... I’m
a fool to let life choke me, this way....”
She shut her door at last, took off her hat and flung it on the bed,
dropped in a chair and pressed the tips of her fingers hard upon
her aching eyes.... There was a letter for her. It lay in her lap
unopened till the tide of her wretchedness ebbed a little. It appeared
eventually to be a crested letter, written in a fine thin spidery
hand--across two pages of bluish note-paper.
“My dear Miss Wayne”--it said--“Won’t you come in and see me, Wednesday
afternoon, about five o’clock. I have something I should like to
discuss with you. If this is not convenient you might suggest a time
which will be. Cordially ...” of all people in the world ... the
Marchesa di Ricci.
“You see--” said Melissa to herself unhappily--“you shouldn’t have
talked...! She wants to do something for you now--get you into a
working-girls’ club--or something of the sort ... give you good advice.
This is terrible! And it’s all my own fault.... I’m going to be
patronized ... she wants to cheer me....”
Melissa hadn’t, of course, the least idea what form the cheering might
take. She shrank from it--purely on instinct.
Nevertheless she wrote the Marchesa a note in reply, in which she
said--“I shall be very glad to come Wednesday” ... and groaned as she
mailed the thing.
Between Monday and Wednesday she visualized every kind of philanthropic
ghastliness without, however, acquiring courage to say she wouldn’t go.
Wednesday or another day ... why not Wednesday?
“I can always refuse--whatever it is,” thought Melissa grimly--and went
forward in her most forbidding manner to meet it.
CHAPTER V
“The Marchesa,” said Anna, “is having a manicure ... please sit down,
Miss Wayne--she’ll be out in a moment.”
Melissa sat down. It was just after five of the cryptic Wednesday and
she had worked abominably hard in order to clear up her desk and leave
the office thus early. She thought the Marchesa’s manicure might have
been earlier concluded--or postponed.
The room was, as usual, slightly disordered. A scarf of delicate
blonde lace lay across the silly little cushions of the chaise longue
... and there were fallen petals on a table beside a jar of yellow
roses. It was, however, in spite of its just perceptible stuffiness
and overcrowdedness, a very charming and unusual room. The room of a
wayfarer whose feet had touched more shores than one, whose hands had
been gracefully acquisitive. Even the plethora of photographs had its
distinctive touch. There wasn’t a woman’s face on the walls. Melissa
noticed this for the first time and vaguely wondered why. She was
standing before the picture of a dark young man in quaintly demoded
evening clothes with several orders on his coat and the words--“Toute
a vous, Amalie” scrawled boldly across his trouser-leg, when she heard
the sound of the Marchesa’s absurd little heels and felt that lady’s
hand upon her arm.
“Ah,” said the Marchesa--“good afternoon, Miss Wayne! I see you are
admiring one of the most fascinating men I ever knew ... poor dear
Paolo!... aide to the King of Italy. Wonderful eyes--as you see.
He was quite, quite mad about me--for years ... after my husband’s
death, of course. Used to cry like a child--every time I refused him.
Tried to elope with me once--against my will--but he’d no executive
ability--poor darling! I kept him for tea--and talked him out of it.
Have you had your tea--by the way?”
Melissa said thank you, she didn’t care for any.
“Just as well,” said the Marchesa pleasantly, “--Anna hasn’t been very
nice to-day and I’d rather not give her anything else to do--at the
moment. Do sit down, Miss Wayne ... take that chair over there. Should
you mind handing me my scarf--a bit chilly, isn’t it! I suppose you
came up in the subway?”
She settled herself in the winged chair, drew the lace scarf which
Melissa gave her about her shoulders, looked at her polished nails,
incongruously rosy at the ends of those small shriveled fingers, and
drew a long, satisfied sigh.
“I always come in the subway,” said Melissa briefly.
“H’m’m!” said the Marchesa and flung her a curiously bright-eyed
glance--“not because you prefer it, I fancy.”
“I dislike it very much,” said Melissa.
“Of course,” said her hostess. “Nasty smelly place--full of people
with no manners. I was in it once myself. My nephew took me over to
Brooklyn--just for the experience.”
Melissa said nothing at all. She was interested in neither the
Marchesa’s experiences nor her nephew. And the subway as a unique
experiment appealed to her but slightly.
Across her moody silence the old lady’s voice came briskly.
“You’ve no idea, of course, why I sent for you, to-day?”
“Not the least,” said Melissa.
“No faintest shred of an idea?”
“I thought,” said Melissa, fastening the button of her left-hand glove
which had somehow come undone, “that you might wish to discontinue my
reading.”
“I do,” said the Marchesa crisply.
“I--see,” said Melissa. Not too wildly remunerative, the Saturday
readings--still something. She added as coolly as she might--“I fancied
that was it.”
“You don’t ask the reason--” said the Marchesa.
“Why should I?” said Melissa. “Reasons so seldom matter.”
“Well--well!” said the Marchesa, looked down at her nails once more
and indulged in a chuckle. “You _are_ an extraordinary person. I like
you, Miss Wayne--and I don’t like most women--I think I may say that
I have never sincerely liked any woman. Except, of course, my mother.
I might have liked my daughter--if I had had one. But that’s neither
here nor there. The point is--you interest me--and I dare say, for all
that unshakable poise of yours, I shall interest _you_, when I tell
you that I have been thinking over our conversation--of last Saturday,
you know--and I have conceived the most charming idea--oh, extremely
charming!”
“Really?” said Melissa.
“Really!” mocked the Marchesa with a touch of falsetto. “At least have
the goodness to look attentive.”
“I am,” said Melissa--and she was. Something in her had leaped to
attention--and defense--more swiftly than the Marchesa dreamed. If
this were the preface to a working-girl’s club, or a scholarship in a
business college, Melissa was ready to decline it--rather definitely.
“I am going,” said the Marchesa, “to be a fairy god-mother to you.”
“Yes?” observed dispassionate Melissa.
“The girl’s made of wood,” said the Marchesa irritably. “Don’t forget,
dear Miss Wayne, that I’ve seen you in reverse, so to speak. Aren’t you
curious--in the least?”
“I’m sorry,” said Melissa--as well, she thought stubbornly, to have the
thing out and get it over with--“but it doesn’t seem to me that there
is anything to which our conversation of last Saturday could lead....”
“Oh, isn’t there!” cried the Marchesa.
“Not--that I can see,” said Melissa firmly.
“Oh, very well!” said the Marchesa. She leaned back in her chair and
assumed an expression of delighted malice.... “You don’t then care--to
hear what I’d thought of?”
To her own distinct surprise, Melissa retorted--“I didn’t say that.”
“Ah-ha!” said the Marchesa in triumph--“then you do care to hear it?”
“Cat-and-mouse,” thought Melissa bitterly. Aloud she said without a
smile--“I shall be glad to listen, of course.”
“Royalty, itself!” commented her hostess--“Well, my princess in
disguise--”
“Please!” said Melissa proudly.
The Marchesa waved her to silence and continued: “Fetch me four white
rats and a pumpkin!”
Melissa looked as if she thought the Marchesa had gone suddenly out of
her head. That small, coquettish gray-curled head on its once-lovely
neck.
“The Cinderella motive, of course,” explained that lady delightedly.
“Perhaps the most hackneyed in existence--but who cares? We shall give
it a new and amusing twist--we shall play it with a kind of romantic
absurdity....”
Melissa objected justifiably--“I don’t understand.”
“Of course not,” said the Marchesa--“I haven’t yet explained. Never
mind--here it is--to go back to the beginning--I have decided, dear
Miss Wayne--to make you a gift.”
“Thank you,” said Melissa--with her mind full of philanthropies and
uplifts she added clearly--“I’m afraid I can’t accept it.”
“You don’t even know what it is!”
“Nevertheless,” said Melissa firmly....
“A gift,” said the Marchesa, interrupting her without compunction--“of
a year....”
“I have already twenty-five,” said Melissa, with an unexpected glimmer
... sardonic but still a glimmer.
“Of a year, I said--in your own world--to use your own phrase.”
Then suddenly Melissa’s heart began to stumble. Her tongue as well.
“My own world--how can you--possibly?”
“I am a very clever woman,” said the Marchesa modestly. “I have thought
it all out.”
“But--my own....”
“I am going,” explained the Marchesa, “to present you with a
background.”
“I don’t see....”
“Don’t talk so much,” said the Marchesa--“and you will very likely see
more. Listen to me--and don’t sit with your mouth open, child--it’s not
your type. I hate women whose teeth show--like guinea-pigs or rabbits.
Where was I?--oh, yes--I’m going to give you a year--in an apartment
which you will select--with a dress allowance which will enable you to
be at home in it--”
“Why?” asked Melissa--strangely breathless.
“Because,” said the Marchesa, licking her lips daintily and settling
the black velvet neck-band with her most characteristic gesture--“it
amuses me. All my life--I have asked merely to be amused. I am finding
it, for some reason or other ...” (she looked at Melissa sharply as if
daring her to suspect the reason)--“a trifle difficult ... of late.
Life doesn’t seem so--subtle--as it used. It seems, somehow ... not
quite so--intriguante....”
“Yes,” said Melissa--no more. She was afraid to show the warmth of
understanding she felt for the small defiant figure in the winged
chair. Understanding was not the thing the Marchesa had demanded ... of
life. It was written on none of those romantic and ardent specimens of
photography scattered over the tables and walls of that memory-ridden
room.
“You amuse me,” continued the Marchesa with a wave of one
heavily-ringed hand.
“I’m very glad,” said Melissa.
“You’re such an absurd rebel,” said the Marchesa--“back of that cool
immobile face of yours. I am determined to see--if you’re really the
creature you think you are ... inside.”
“You talk,” said Melissa, a trifle resentfully--“as if I were a doll
you could take to pieces.”
The Marchesa laughed abruptly. She flicked the lace at her wrist into
prettier folds and arched a still-shapely ankle, crossing her feet on
the Aubusson carpet.
“A doll,” she corrected--“which I am going to put together! If my ...
offer, shall I call it? ... doesn’t interest you,--if your pride can’t
bear it ... you have only to say so ... and I won’t detain you any
further.”
Melissa sat a long moment in silence, staring down at her
tight-clenched hands, quiet in her lap. The room wavered mistily about
her. The Marchesa’s wise small smile, a faintly malicious thinning of
the lips and creasing of the eyelids, grew and diminished--grew again
as Melissa lifted her head.
“I haven’t any pride--” she said huskily.... “I’m starving.”
“For what I propose to give you,” suggested the Marchesa blandly.
“Exactly,” said Melissa--“It’s wonderful. I don’t know--if you want me
to thank you or not.”
“Wait till the year’s up,” the Marchesa suggested with a slightly
sinister gurgle. “Thank me, then--if you still care to. Now, dear Miss
Wayne ... to go into details.... How soon could you leave your present
position? Are you--indispensable--to your employer?”
“Not that I know of,” said Melissa--“I could resign at once--leave at
the end of the week.”
“When could you be ready to move--into your new apartment?”
“Any apartment--would be new to me,” Melissa controlled a nervous
tremor of laughter--“Why--I could move--at any time.”
“Say the first of next week,” said the Marchesa with business-like
clarity.
“Say the first of next week,” echoed Melissa, trembling in every limb.
The Marchesa rang for Anna and ordered lights and a fire, as was her
custom with the coming of dusk.
To Melissa, it was exactly as if upon some strip of stage footlights
suddenly flared. Unreal--the whole of it ... but having bruised
herself against reality for twenty-five slow prisoned years, she
was ready--more than ready, she was passionately eager--to grapple
unreality and see what might come of it.
“I’ll have my agent begin at once to look for ... your air-castle,”
observed the Marchesa, spreading both hands to the newly-flaming fire.
“As for clothes--you have taste. I think--I think one might trust
you--not to break out in imitation ermine and cheap lace.”
“Clothes!” said Melissa, with a flutter in her smooth white throat and
a ripple in her low voice--“Yes--you might trust me--with clothes. I
love them too much--to make mistakes.”
“H’m’m!... Loving too much is an unusual safeguard--against mistakes--I
should say,” mused the Marchesa pleasantly.... “However ... I’ll
open an account for you--at my own bank. You may begin to--dress the
part--at once. From the skin out, my good girl!”
“Naturally,” said Melissa. A slow smile of ineffable anticipation
tipped the corners of her mouth.
“Swallow the canary feathers!” the Marchesa advised her impishly.
“Your air of disdain is half your charm. Of course I shall want to
advise you--about--everything.... I shall want to know everything that
happens to you ... as soon as it happens....”
Melissa murmured that she would be only too happy.
“And at the end of a year,” said the Marchesa, leaning back with a
gesture of finality.... “I’m not adopting you, you understand--at the
end of a year, back you go!--To the old room--and the old work--and the
old life....”
“It doesn’t matter--” said Melissa desperately--“a year’s a year!”
“Back you go--” continued the Marchesa, as if Melissa had not spoken,
“unless ...” she chuckled like Mephisto in black taffeta and pointe de
Venise ... “unless, in the meantime....”
“Yes--” said Melissa, her reckless soul in her eyes.
“Unless you’ve caught your man,” affirmed the Marchesa--“delicately
speaking. Of course, that’s what I’m really giving you--a chance to
acquire the kind of thing you want--with benefit of clergy. Horrid
idea, h’m’m? Want to withdraw your acceptance?”
“No,” said Melissa hardily. “I hadn’t quite thought it out--I’ve been
so taken off my feet, you see ... still ... no--I don’t withdraw!”
“Good!” said the Marchesa with a slight yawn patted out of sight.
“I’m afraid I’ve stayed frightfully long,” said Melissa, rising
hurriedly.
“You have, as a matter of fact,” returned her hostess--“but I rather
led you on. Go home and dream about me--riding a broomstick in a
pointed black bonnet.... I shan’t be insulted. To-morrow--I’ll call for
you at noon and take you to my bank....”
“But my work--” began Melissa uncertainly. “I suppose I could tell
them....”
“Tell them nothing at all,” said the Marchesa with immense
indifference--“they’d never believe the truth--and a lie is such a
bore.”
As Melissa said good-by, the telephone on a little table in the corner
of the room trilled wildly.
“Anna!” cried the Marchesa and struck her bell into startling discord.
“Anna ... I expect that’s my nephew! Have him come up at once!” To
Melissa, she added, with a nervous wave of dismissal.... “He’s leaving
for Japan, to-night ... good-by, my dear--don’t let me keep you any
longer!”
CHAPTER VI
Melissa went home, from her session with the Marchesa, walking on air,
as the saying goes. She might have been suspicious of that elderly
marplot’s motives; she chose not, she chose with her eyes shut and
her hands out to take what the fates were apparently ready to offer.
It couldn’t be worse than the stagnation of her present existence.
Anything was better than living in a void.
If living on the Marchesa’s inscrutable bounty involved a certain
gulping down of Melissa’s pride, a certain stifling of her feeling for
independence ... pride and independence have gone into the discard
before this when a woman’s hunger for beauty was concerned.
“If _she_ wants to experiment--why shouldn’t _I_?” ... thus Melissa,
climbing the steps of her brownstone horror with a wild high song in
her heart.
At the thought of deliberate man-hunting, she naturally and with
womanly reticence rather paused--on one toe as it were, with the other
pointed for flight. But after all--wasn’t that what she had cried for?
A place in which to be her actual inner self, her loveliest self, ...
so that when the man came along whom her soul desired, he should see
her--and know her.
Didn’t one, after all, have always, gently, to focus the masculine
attention, when it came to a matter of seeing and knowing?
“Give me a year--” thought shameless Melissa ... she added in
unconscious imitation of a certain northern constabulary--“and I’ll get
my man!”
The Marchesa, of course, had corrupted her. The Marchesa would have
shrieked with wicked laughter, to see Melissa, locked in her room that
night, after an uncommonly distasteful dinner (corned beef and cabbage,
no less!) ... trying a gray chiffon veil about her slim bare shoulders
... trying her hair, demurely parted, drawn low over her ears, with
an artificial camellia set just where a young man’s heart might
look--before it leaped.
Strange Melissa! Already in process of transmogrification. Already
feeling her eyelids grow heavier, her smile slower, her voice deeper,
... her hands more subtly tensed.
She slept and dreamed of--the office--which hardened her determination
to get away from it ... and from everything else that was hers. At
noon, the next day, incredibly but punctually, the Marchesa called
in a large gray limousine and took Melissa to the bank she commonly
designated as her own. There, formalities were engaged in involving
the opening of an account in Melissa’s name, the preparation and
presentation of a check-book ... other inoffensive red tape.
“Now--” said the Marchesa, once again within her equipage--“you may do
yourself nicely on that.”
“Oh, quite!” said Melissa, languid as a water-lily.
At which the Marchesa dissolved into ribald cackles of appreciation.
“Even with me--” she gasped--“Even with me ... already! You’re to the
manner born, my dear! ... now nothing remains but to set the jewel.”
She drove Melissa home and left her, with a reassuring hint of speedy
action.
“To-morrow, perhaps--we’ll look at one or two places my agent has in
view. You might see about street things, at once--I’d like you to be
well turned out when I take you castle-hunting.”
“I shall be ready,” Melissa assured her.
She was. She was a downright picture in smoky grays, with a wide
simple gray hat and slim simple gray shoes--the costliest kind of
simplicity--when just before dusk of the third day thereafter, she once
more entered that large purring car, sat down at the side of a sweetly
leering Marchesa, and was mysteriously snatched through ambient, if
soot-laden airs, along the city streets.
“There are one or two places--” explained the Marchesa, “which my agent
thought might interest us.” She had given the chauffeur an address on
Central Park West. “Let me look at you--turn your head this way!” She
might have been speaking to a mannequin. A slow flush spread to the
silken dark wave above Melissa’s ears.
The Marchesa continued unmoved. “Not bad--a little more rouge,
perhaps.... Gray would take the color from a Venus.... What are you
blushing about?”
“I’m not--a Venus,” said Melissa--“and I prefer very little rouge.”
“For moral reasons--or artistic?” inquired the Marchesa with interest.
“Artistic, of course,” said Melissa coolly. “What have morals to do
with it?”
“My own point of view exactly,” sighed the Marchesa. She patted
Melissa’s arm--then pinched it.... “Just on the right side of
thinness!” she concluded with curious satisfaction.
Melissa gently withdrew from that prodding touch. She had a fleeting
unpleasant recollection of a man in a butcher’s apron, poking and
prodding a denuded fowl....
The place on Central Park West was interestingly indistinguishable from
a number of other places, except by two moon-globed lamps standing
either side of the entrance. Melissa followed the Marchesa up the steps
and over to the desk, in the wide cool lobby, with a slight catch
in her breathing, a mad question singing through her head--“_Is it
here?... Is it here?_”
She scarcely listened to the Marchesa, suavely demanding a key. They
rose in the elevator, past one blackly numbered floor after another ...
eight, nine, ten....
“It’s at the top of the world, you see,” said the Marchesa ...
“however--there are two others--somewhere across the Park--if we don’t
care for this.”
The clerk who went up with them, opened a door, at the end of a long,
quiet passage, beyond the dignified and mirror-lightened stillness of
a small square entresol.
“It’s a very attractive apartment,” he volunteered politely.
The Marchesa entered it with business-like brusqueness. Melissa,
following more slowly, stood in the doorway, a double French doorway
closely curtained in dull creamy silk--and felt her hand go, groping to
her heart.
It was--so inevitably--in that first moment of seeing, that first vague
silent, twilit moment, before even the lights were on, or the windows
opened ... Melissa’s room!
She knew it, as she might have known with almost a pang of recognition,
after weary years of separation, the face of a friend ... more than
that--the face of a lover.
Very quietly, without a word, she followed the Marchesa; stood in the
center of the floor and looked about her critically.
“H’m’m!” said the Marchesa--“Not bad! ... good high ceiling ... open
fireplace ... what do you think of it, Miss Wayne?”
Good high ceiling! It rose to a gracious and lofty height, a fair
half-story above the ordinary room. An open fire-place!... An utter
dream of a fireplace, wide and dark and deep with logs, beautiful rough
scaly-barked logs, on shining brass andirons ... with a mantel-shelf
of dimly-gleaming marble ... with a rug of wonderful faded blues and
purples and scarlets ... with a deep delicious couch beyond the rug,
cushioned not like a couch in a harem--but adequately! ... with two
slim, curving lilac-and-amber-shaded lamps above the couch ... with a
long narrow table just behind it....
“Well!” said the Marchesa a trifle impatiently--“what’s wrong?”
Melissa, with a gasp, came back to reality. She had been strewing books
upon that table ... though with no visible hands ... setting black-red
roses in a crystal bowl beneath the farther lamp ... touching a match
to those logs ... watching the golden sparks stream up the chimney....
She said simply--“It’s a dream!” And spoke the truth.
The Marchesa looked pleased. “I’d like a little light!” she told the
clerk, imperative as a minor deity.
He pressed a button near the door. Candles bloomed softly around the
walls. Their light disclosed rich mellow tapestries, tall chairs with
carven backs, a big inviting desk set crosswise in a corner and bearing
yet another lamp ... a small round table before a window ... those
windows--four of them in a row--almost as high as the room itself!
Melissa went toward them like some one enchanted. She heard herself
say--“This looks across the Park--doesn’t it?” Then she stood with
both hands gripping the cold rough stone of the balustrade outside and
stared--wordless.
Here was the place which looked clean across Heaven.
A sweep of sky from north to south, from the east to the wall at one’s
back. A sweep of trees in the Park below, gray-green and misty and
vague. Stretches of turf laced by ribbony winding roads ... where
motors forever swirled in a fluctuant tide.
Around the horizon in a vast irregular fretted arc, the tall towers of
Manhattan, pierced by a firefly legion of blinking yellow lights. Over
all, the dusk, dropping, grayly ... over a magic city.
Said the Marchesa, appearing suddenly at Melissa’s elbow, the silver
flowers on her hat quivering alertly--“I once had an apartment in
Paris, looking down on Montmartre ... this reminds me of it.... I was
madly in love with an artist--well! There’s a bedroom,--not bad--and a
passable bath. Shall we look any farther?”
“Oh, this!” said Melissa--“--_this!_” Her hands actually trembled. The
Marchesa with a knowing snicker turned back into the room.
Melissa lingered, watched those far-flung incredible lights, and while
she stood there, somewhere, a caressing baritone began--softly, yet
with a kind of hardy gayety ... “Somebody loves me.... Who can it be?”
A silly little song--with a recurrent minor that was like a small,
slim, shining knife-blade in one’s heart ... a song from some gaudy
revue ... hardly a song at all, just a catch-penny tune ... unbearably
sweet!
Melissa felt that the man who sang it was probably at the moment tying
his tie before a mirror.
Making ready to go out and see--who loved him.
Also, she guessed that he couldn’t be more than a wall or so away.
He would be dark--with a voice like that--smooth, shining dark hair ...
cool, laughing dark eyes....
She went back into the wonderful room. The Marchesa was concluding
arrangements with the clerk.
“As your nephew said--” the clerk was observing garrulously.
“Yes--yes! Of course--Oh, very well!” cried the Marchesa and waved
him brutally into silence. “This will do. No need for any further
discussion. Miss Wayne would like to move in to-morrow.” She turned to
Melissa--the merest formality.... “You’d like to move in to-morrow, my
dear?”
Swift steps went down the hall outside--a lilting whistle. “There’s
some one in the next apartment,” explained the clerk. “A gentleman from
the Hawaiian Islands--a sugar planter, I believe.”
The whistle rose and fell, impudently clear, while the gentleman from
Hawaii waited for the elevator.
“Somebody loves me ... who can it be? ... may-be it’s--you!”
“I wish I could move in to-night!” said Melissa.
The Marchesa broke into cracked and tinkling laughter. She put up two
white-gloved fingers and nipped Melissa’s hot cheek.
“Now, now!” said the Marchesa--“where’s Lady Disdain? You’ll need a
cool head--if you’re to sit by _that_ fire!”
PART II
CHAPTER VII
“Yonder see the morning blink,
The sun is up and so must I....”
Melissa’s matins!
The little song she used to say to herself, arising at grayish seven,
to be dressed by a still grayish eight, breakfasting at a cheerless
eight-fifteen, office-bound at the stroke of nine....
She said it again on the first morning of her awakening within the
air-castle ... began to say it, rather, and broke off with a smile and
a sigh of sybaritic ecstasy, curling the tips of her cool white fingers
against the linen sheets, digging her doubting toes yet deeper beneath
a drift of fleecy blanket.
A flood of sunlight came in at three eastern windows--clear thin gold,
a riotous wash of it.
Sunlight--in a bedroom--in the city!
Windows--looking across a park!
Sky--all one wanted of it--to be had, merely by turning on one’s side,
opening one’s drowsy eyes, and staring--across a room.
Melissa hardly believed in the thing which had happened to her.
“You’d like to move in to-morrow, my dear?” the Marchesa had asked.
And upon that to-morrow, Melissa had moved in. It was simple as that.
Although in the matter of whys and wherefores it wasn’t simple at all.
Melissa didn’t yet know, was (she sometimes felt) never to know, just
what the Marchesa was getting out of the whole affair. Of course money
was--as the phrase goes--no object to the Marchesa. She might, if she’d
cared for that especial sort of exercise, have rolled in it. Her wealth
had outlasted her opportunities of enjoying it ... but even so ...
rich old ladies didn’t commonly select worthy young women ... Melissa
was beyond doubt a worthy young woman ... to help them dissipate their
unearned increment. Much more often, rich old ladies selected more--or
less--worthy young men. Married them, even. The Sunday papers gave
frequent space, colorfully embellished to just such May-and-December
unions. Withered hands snatching at youth. Futilely snatching.
Not that the Marchesa was given to futilities of any sort. And, except
for the frequently-mentioned and not always flatteringly-referred-to
nephew--not that the Marchesa was given to young men.
Much too clever, the Marchesa, to tolerate fortune-hunters. On the
other hand--much too scornful of women, the Marchesa, to be doing a
thing like this out of sweet-lavenderish altruism.
Whatever Melissa was receiving would some way, sooner or later, have to
be given back.
As a pound of flesh ... or a gill of heart’s blood ... or what-not.
“Who cares!” thought Melissa, stretched white arms above her head,
linked smooth hands at the back of her neck and stared at the ceiling
rapturously. She was living in the moment--nothing more ... trusting
not even her own senses.
She rather expected to have those wide clear windows shrink, as one
looked at them, into the dim-paned, narrow-silled apertures of the
room on Sixty-third Street. To have the beautiful simple mahogany
bed in which she lay, resolve itself suddenly into the white-painted
thin-mattressed couch that had cradled her insurgent dreams this last
half-dozen years.
If there had come a knock at the door and Mrs. Robinson’s voice had
said plaintively--“I left your bill in the box, Miss Wayne ...” Melissa
would have gotten up quite unsurprised and fetched her pocketbook.
However no knock came, and from moment to moment, it appeared more
incredibly plausible that the thing was real.
Utterly real, the walls of that quiet, delightful bedroom. Cream walls,
and cream silk at the windows, beneath a valance and side-curtains of
some velvety, wine-colored fabric. Mahogany dressing-table and chest
of drawers. One or two prints about the room, neutral and pleasant.
Landscapes--but without nymphs. Nothing more human than a sheep or so.
All at once, Melissa knew the reason of that ordered simplicity, the
reason of those fine open spaces ... it was undeniably a masculine
apartment--sub-let by the Marchesa’s efficient and intuitive agent!
Through Melissa’s blood, a tiny ripple widened at thought of the man
in whose room she lay, thus innocently. At whose pictures she gazed
thus appreciatively. Had he kept his ties in the topmost drawer of
that highboy? Or were ties kept in any drawer at all? Melissa didn’t
know. She had never had a brother. Her father had died when she was
still a little girl. Men were to Melissa, at once, the romance and the
commonplace of existence.
The romance--because she knew nothing about them.
The commonplace--because for a number of years, from nine of a morning
to six of an evening, she had known all too much.
At that, her experience wasn’t unique.
Too little and too much is all that most women know of men.
Anyhow--if he hadn’t kept his ties in that top drawer, he had kept
something else there. Some other article of masculine apparel.
Which rendered subtly more interesting in the course of Melissa’s
lazy musings, the fact that her own stockings and handkerchiefs now
resided--as it were--at the same address.
“Absurd!” she felt. But the fact remained. Facts do.
She couldn’t rid herself of a certain misty consciousness of broad
shoulders against the light; of a strong hand drawing those Burgundian
curtains; of keen eyes scowling at the traditional run-away stud. But
when it came to the lift of a shadowy chin before the bathroom mirror,
a foamy shaving-brush following the line of a clean-cut lower lip ...
Melissa’s sense of humor lifted a derisive head.
“He’s most likely some smug old thing in spats,” she decided coldly,
“who goes south for the winter, and that’s why....”
But what smug old thing would have known just how to lay that mellow
rug before the fireplace--that day-dream couch beyond the rug--that
long, book-hungry table behind the couch--those fairy lamps at either
end?
“Any clever decorator might have done it,” argued Melissa, while subtly
knowing no decorator had.
The room bore the imprint of somebody’s fingers.
Some one had set that scene for love--not pay.
Upon Melissa’s consciousness took shape like shadows falling across a
wall the picture of another room, a cluttered, scented, dimly-lighted
one ... with by-gone adorers in tarnished silver frames standing
faithfully about ... watching lace cushions turn yellow, and
rose-leaves fall, a fire, lit at dusk, sink to ashes....
The Marchesa, of course, was clever enough for anything. Between
delicious hazardings and wonderings, Melissa experienced a small, cold
tremor of distrust.
Hadn’t the Marchesa happened upon this perfect place a little too
quickly for absolute chance? Hadn’t she--although the thought disturbed
and vaguely alarmed one--hadn’t she perhaps had it in mind from the
first? Even while convincingly observing that if this didn’t serve
there were one or two others just across the Park ... hadn’t she
all the time been holding in her delicate ivory claw the key to that
silk-hung door?
What--in plain words--was the Marchesa’s object?
But if it came to that--what was Melissa’s own?
“Not much to choose between us!” thought Melissa, wryly smiling, and
slipped out of bed and turned on a hissing hot bath.
She breakfasted at the small table before the sitting-room windows; in
a welter of autumn sunlight; on coffee and rolls set forth in the most
satisfying fashion by a black-browed French boy from the restaurant
downstairs. And she wore, for that breakfasting, alone though she was,
a charmingly impractical rag of bluish lilac chiffon, with a dragging
hem of silver lace, with a twisted string of silver about the slender
hips....
Like a creature out of a poem, Melissa looked that morning--with no one
there to see.
“And it wants--some one to see!” she murmured, smiling faintly--then
had the grace to blush.
The grace and good luck. For no art is more quickly forgotten nor more
impossible of recapture than the simple and effective sending of blood
to the female face.
While she blushed, therefore, distinctly enjoying the sensation, the
telephone, which stood on a little table near the door, rang crisply,
and she answered it at her leisure in a cool slow voice ... a little
cooler and a little slower, no doubt, than it might have been, a day or
so before.
“Yes?”
Across the wire, reply sputtered briskly, just touched with an
indefinable suggestion of subservience: “Miss Wayne--may I speak to
Miss Wayne?”
“This,” said Melissa, “is Miss Wayne.”
“Oh--Miss Wayne, this is Anna speaking....”
“Yes--” quite kindly, “Anna?”
“The Marchesa di Ricci wishes to know if you will be at home this
afternoon?”
“I think so.”
“The Marchesa would like to come in, about tea-time.”
“Say I shall be very happy to see her.”
“Thank you,” said Anna.
“At tea-time,” said Melissa and stood frowning for a long indeterminate
moment after she had broken the connection.
So the hand of steel was at once to inhabit the velvet glove! And the
air-castle to be open without delay, to the step and the stare of a
landlady.
“What did you expect, my dear?” muttered Melissa, shrugging, “she’s
bought you--for a year. She’s within her rights ... after all, what
difference does it make? When you had freedom--you had nothing else.”
Like lightning scribbling a quiet sky, a wild thought crossed her:
“If only I had some one--a man--to tea with me--at the very start
... what a shock for the lady! If he were here--before her ... some
one very cool and charming. I can’t bear that cracked little laugh
of hers--those wise, cruel eyes--as if she watched me wriggling on
a pin!... If there were some one--at once ... I could do a bit of
laughing, myself....”
Some one--all very well--but who?
Young men to be had to tea didn’t grow on bushes. Unless one had
previously cultivated just such quaint shrubbery.
Melissa thought of the junior partner. Too fat, too pale, too
blond, too dull ... besides, having left her position abruptly,
without explanation of any sort other than that she was leaving, her
ex-employer would scarcely care to share a cup that cheered with his
ex-employee.
Remained the gent’s-furnisher, Mr. Arthur Curtis of southern Iowa and
West Sixty-third Street. On every count, impossible.
What Melissa needed was some one very perfectly accoutered, very
casually impeccable, as to look and manner and garment--heart no
object, mind no object--just a hand accustomed to juggle a plate and
cup, a foot accustomed to cross from rug to rug without skidding.
“It isn’t much to ask!” sighed Melissa.
Came (as the more colorful stylists have it) a knock at the door.
More fairy-tale stuff! If Prince Charming had entered in person,
glass slipper and all ... the moment might almost have been termed
psychological.
It was, however, merely the maid. A fresh-faced, brown-haired,
blue-eyed Irish woman, in a starchy white apron over a blue cotton
frock--with a smile, to disarm Medusa.
“Good mornin’,” offered this pleasant creature, in the softest Celtic
croon, “--if I’m not early to do the rooms....”
“No--no ... come in!” said Melissa.
She stood at the window, looking out across the Park while in bathroom
and bedroom like a new Sinfonia Domestica, the gentle swishing clatter
of mop and broom began.
CHAPTER VIII
“Tea for two--lemon and cream--and cinnamon toast--if you please!” said
Melissa.
Shading three o’clock of that first afternoon,--preparations for the
Marchesa’s advent going forward.
Downstairs in the restaurant a dark gentleman with pointed mustachios
swept a bow and laid one hand upon his heart--such at least was the
impression conveyed through the telephone.
“At half-past four, madame?”
“At half-past four.”
“Tea for two--madame?”
In some dim convolution of Melissa’s brain a fiber stirred.
She corrected, utterly without intention.... “Tea for _three_!”
“Tea for three,” repeated the one below-stairs ... and Melissa’s
bridges burst into flame behind her.
There is neither excuse, explanation nor apology for what followed.
Merely it seemed to Melissa, in some odd way, inevitable, that having
said tea for three she was thereafter bound to produce three for tea
... so set at once about it.
She left the telephone, went into the bedroom and put on a misleading
black hat ... misleading, because it looked ingenuous and wasn’t. She
wore already a slim black frock to which she added gloves and all the
rest of it. For signature to the portrait--like Whistler’s immortal
butterfly--a pale camellia, subtly disposed between turn of the
shoulder and prideful lift of the chin.
“I am going out into the highways and byways--” said Melissa to
herself, locking the door of the apartment with slim chilly fingers.
She added to cover a certain amateurish uneasiness.... “It’s been done
before!”
And so it had--beginning with a person in the Bible who once gave a
party and thus recruited his guests. Not ending there, of course.
Her impetus flagged when she came to the street.
“After all--I can’t just pick up somebody--girls do ... but it’s too
horrid--too dreadfully cheap. Let the Marchesa eat it all!”
(Thinking, in that moment, of course--of the cinnamon toast.)
“It isn’t humanly possible that I don’t know a man I could ask....”
Possible or not--there it was!
“Even a cousin--” She had never had one.
“Or the husband of a friend--” She who had evaded friends, now
pitifully wishing for them, with husbands appended!
Absurd as it may sound--fantastic, even--Melissa plumbed, while she
walked from Sixty-seventh to Sixty-eighth Street and across into the
Park, the wretchedest, grayest depths. Because to be a woman, to be
young, to be reasonably fair and quite unreasonably romantic, with no
one of the opposite sex for friend ... that is isolation in its essence.
Siberia, compared to that, would be as Broadway on New Year’s Eve.
Melissa could have cried--except for a certain distaste for publicity.
She thought: “I ought to be back in the office--it’s where I belong....”
But even to visualize the office chilled her to the marrow. That at
least she had escaped from--temporarily. Remembering which, her courage
flared and having come to a bench upon which a young man was sitting,
reading a book, Melissa, abhorrent as the thing may seem, sat down
beside him.
If he had looked up with a leer and addressed her in a hoarse,
amorous voice she would no doubt have sprung to her feet and gone on
again--hurriedly--safe for all time from the lighter forms of impulse.
He didn’t, however, do anything of the sort. He didn’t look up at all.
So Melissa, with surprising technique, while appearing to consider
a squat green bush across the path, regarded him closely and was
presently convinced of his birth and breeding, therefore of her ability
to handle the situation, unscarred.
He was tall and dark, slim and smooth-shaven--well-shod, yet hatted not
too slavishly like the Prince of Wales; and his clothes, though good,
were as a gentleman’s should be--not absolutely new.
Moreover, the book he was reading, bore in gold letters, upon its
dusky back, Something Something by Michael Arlen--which between members
of the authentic upper class is as good as an introduction any day.
Observing all of which....
“Jerry!” said Melissa suddenly--soft as Jeritza, sighing out Vissi
del’Arte from the floor of Scotti’s dining-room.... “Aren’t you going
to speak to me? Or shall I slip away and let you go back to China for
another seven years--without seeing--?”
“Pardon?” said the reader of Arlen, with an upward inflection, and
lifted exceedingly pleasant brown eyes from the page which had been
holding his attention.
Directly those eyes met Melissa’s, she saw at once and of course, that
she had made a most embarrassing mistake.
“Oh, do forgive me!” she stammered, “I _am_ so sorry....”
And she half rose from her seat but sank back again before the fact
that the young man had at once removed his hat and was now looking at
her with the most respectful interest.
“You thought I was some one you knew,” he suggested with reassuring
calm.
“I thought,” said Melissa with delightful aloofness yet a touch of
apology, “that you were some one I hadn’t seen in a fearfully long time
... a man named Jerry Tarleton. I looked at you several times before I
spoke--I--I thought I was quite sure....”
“That’s odd--that’s very odd, indeed,” he told her, (his smile was
engaging)--“because I’ve often been taken for Tarleton, before this.”
“Oh ... have you?” asked Melissa, slightly breathless.
“Yes--isn’t it strange!” said her companion.
He went on looking at her in the friendliest way, yet not without a
deferential tinge of appreciation.
“In China, wasn’t he?”
“Why--yes,” said Melissa. “He--went out there, seven years ago.”
“Peking,--or Shanghai? I’ve often wondered. You see, I’ve been a good
bit in Shanghai, myself--and it was there I ran across one or two
people who mistook me for him....”
“He--I heard from him once or twice from Peking,” said Melissa.
“That would have been it,” said her companion easily. “Well--please
don’t be distressed about this, because as I say, it’s happened before
... and with friends of his who’d seen him much more recently than you
have. Matter of fact--I’m always rather flattered by it. From all I can
gather he’s no end of a decent sort--one of the best.”
“He was always that,” said Melissa briefly yet, she couldn’t help
feeling, with considerable poise.
“Did you know him very well?--Never mind--of course that’s rather an
impertinent question!... I was only wondering if you’d heard.... I dare
say you have ... about his wife....”
“His wife?” said Melissa--“Please tell me....”
“I don’t want to shock you....”
“Is she dead?” asked Melissa gently--and added, with subtle caution--“I
never knew her.”
“Divorced,” said the young man regretfully. “Very unhappy business all
’round. I heard it on the boat coming over--these T.K.K. boats, you
know--can hear almost anything ... all the gossip of the Orient--well,
she left him. Left him flat, poor chap! Ran off with an English
novelist.... Pretty rough on Tarleton, they said. He wasn’t looking for
it, d’y’ see! Probably hadn’t supposed that any one _could_ run off
with an English novelist.”
“Except--” said Melissa, “the one you’re reading!”
They exchanged glances. The stranger blinked and smiled.
“Like him?”
“Un-con-trollably!” said Melissa.
“Lineal descendant of Ouida ... isn’t he? With a draft from Lady
Windermere’s fan. Odd stuff to come out of England--to-day! Your friend
Jerry Tarleton, now--might have walked out of one of his stories.”
“Mightn’t he just!” said Melissa. She rose with languid grace. “Some
day when you’re back--in Shanghai--if you meet Jerry, himself--you
might tell him ... about this ... about seeing me....”
He rose as well, stood there smiling down at her, the low sun glinting
darkly on his uncovered head. “And whom shall I tell him I saw?”
“Just say--Lissa ... he’ll know!”
“L-i-s-s-a?”
Melissa nodded.
“No other message?”
“None--and I shall be late for tea if I stop any longer. You do forgive
me, don’t you--for my silly mistake?”
“Not if you’re going to leave it at that.”
“What else can one do?”
“One might let Jerry Tarleton’s double see one to one’s doorstep. Isn’t
he any sort of credential at all?”
Melissa murmured moving off--“My doorstep’s only a bit away.”
He walked beside her swinging an idle stick. “Sorry--but half a loaf,
you remember--great deal better than dieting.”
“I really shouldn’t do this--as you know,” said Melissa.
“And I feel very strongly,” he asserted, “that I _should_. So there’s a
deadlock.” He added hopefully, “Why don’t you ask me to tea? There’s a
lot about Tarleton I haven’t told you....”
“Are you quite mad?” asked Melissa sweetly.
“Not quite, but I’m off to a flying start ... and I wish _you_ were!”
“That’s very nice and unselfish of you....”
“Not unselfish at all--it was your speaking of tea that did it. I can
smell the buttered toast....”
“Cinnamon toast. This is where I turn.”
“Central Park West? Oh--cinnamon toast!” he accepted cheerfully.
“That’s better, if anything. Honestly--you’ve no idea how hungry I am--”
“But I don’t know you,” said Melissa in delicately amused protest.
“You know Jerry Tarleton--don’t you?”
“I do ... but you don’t! So there isn’t even that.”
Momentarily it floored him. He recovered amazingly.
“If I promise to look him up the instant I get back to China ... won’t
that do?”
“Beautifully--for next time. You may bring me a letter.”
“You look like Shelmerdene or Virginia,” he told her, “but you’re
behaving like Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage-Patch. Is it possible that just
because we haven’t said How-do-you-do before witnesses ... you’re going
to pretend that we’re strangers....”
“Here is where I live,” said Melissa, inclining a gracious head,--“and
thanks, so much, for seeing me home.”
She stood between the two moon-globed lamps and smiled a little--just
enough.
“_Here?_” said the young man incredulously. “Here!--Why--what a little
way!”
“Good-by,” insisted Melissa, suddenly panicky. Adventure in the Park
was one thing--adventure on the hearth, quite another. She might really
have succeeded in sending him off, but for the Marchesa, who mounting
the steps behind them, at that moment, in an aura of Peau d’Espagne,
put a hand on Melissa’s arm and demanded introduction.
“So glad I’m not late,” purred the Marchesa ... “now we can all go up
together. I’d no idea you’d another guest, Melissa....”
“I do so wish he could come in,” said Melissa and looked the other
guest squarely in the eye.
“Thanks--I think, after all, I will,” decided the recipient of that
mute refusal, pleasantly.
“Delightful!” said the Marchesa, leading the way to the elevators. “Do
tell me his name again, Melissa--I didn’t quite get it.”
Which was in no way remarkable because Melissa, while achieving an
introduction of sorts, yet hadn’t quite said it.
She felt herself chilling, she felt herself flaming, while across
her shrinking shoulder the other guest’s voice broke in with casual
amusement: “It isn’t surprising ... most people don’t. Always having to
spell it. K-e-n-e-a-l-y.... Luke. Luke Kenealy.”
“How odd!” said the Marchesa.... “I once knew a man of that name--in
Venice, I think it was ... who had the most heavenly tenor voice....”
“My uncle,” said Mr. Kenealy suavely--“He sang at Covent Garden.”
“Why--so he did!” said the Marchesa. “Melissa--this is too amusing!
Fancy--on the first afternoon I have tea with you--you produce the
nephew of a man who was once madly in love with me!”
Melissa disclaimed the credit of that production with a polite word or
so and little smiling shrug. Catching the nephew’s eye as she turned
the key in her silk-hung door, she murmured poignantly--“If Jerry
Tarleton were only here, too--it would be quite perfect--wouldn’t it!”
CHAPTER IX
After a certain famous Tea-Party at which a March Hare and a Mad
Hatter assisted, Melissa felt fairly sure hers led the rest--in bland
absurdity.
Entrenched behind a battery of cups and plates and saucers--hospitably
engrossed with matters of lemon or cream--she managed to be in the
party but not of it, for a saving quarter of an hour, in which time she
rallied her startled forces and was able to present to any possible
inquisition, the unfearing front of innocence.
She listened, still as Mona Lisa, while the Marchesa inquired
vivaciously of the young man beside her if his uncle had ever
married....
“Well, yes--and no!” replied Mr. Kenealy thoughtfully.
The Marchesa gave vent to a thin arpeggio of laughter, very like a
cynical spinet touched by ghostly fingers. “You mean, more than once?”
“And less! He--well, frankly--” said the young man, helping himself
with a sigh to a second piece of toast, “it was rather a grief to the
family that he seemed to lose in Europe his--ah--sense of continuity,
if you see what I mean? It was at times very difficult to know if my
Uncle Luke were married--or not.”
“Nonsense!” said the Marchesa irritably. “He was an artist.”
“You put it much better than I do,” said Mr. Kenealy, bowing.
“I have never forgotten his voice! Melissa--”
“Yes?” said Melissa, coming sweetly back from illimitable musings.
“You may have noticed the photograph of a very handsome man in the
costume of _Rodolpho_, standing on the little table beside the Sèvres
bowl?”
“Yes,” said Melissa again.
“That--was Mr. Kenealy’s uncle,” said the Marchesa graciously.
“I should like very much to see it,” said Mr. Kenealy.
“Melissa,” conceded the Marchesa, “may bring you--some afternoon.”
“Please!” said Mr. Kenealy.
“Of course,” said Melissa.
She wouldn’t meet his look, but she smiled. It was a smile that
flickered out when the Marchesa demanded abruptly:
“How long have you two known each other?”
And cocked a curious eye above the rim of her tea-cup.
“Not fearfully long,” said Melissa slowly.
She felt her heart stumble and scorned herself with a savage intensity.
Afraid--of that small, malicious creature in the deep chair across the
tea-table? Afraid of those shrewd, burnt-out eyes, that withered mouth?
Of course, she was! Subtly and humiliatingly afraid. What chance had a
dreamer like Melissa before the garnered disillusion of the Marchesa’s
glance? No chance whatever, save to be seen through and stared at--and
mocked....
Mr. Kenealy was saying, while he presented his cup to his hostess
with an imploring look: “We met through a chap named Tarleton--Jerry
Tarleton--whom I had known in China, and Lissa ... sorry--let _me_!...”
for at this casual introduction of her most intimate name Melissa
dropped a teaspoon with a small, incriminating crash. “As I was
saying--thanks, two lumps!--Lissa had known him--”
“In Alabama--when I was a child,” said Melissa gravely, not to be too
inadequate.
She rather liked the look he gave her then--keen with mischief, warm
with approval. It spurred her to further daring.
“So, when--Luke--came into the office, the day before I left, with a
letter from Jerry--”
“We hadn’t far to go, to be friends,” finished Mr. Kenealy.
“So I should say,” accepted the Marchesa. “That’s very good toast. I’ll
have another piece.” Crunching it with the unashamed appetite which her
meager frame made almost grotesque, she inquired amiably, “What do you
think of Melissa’s windfall?”
“Pardon!” said Mr. Kenealy. His quick sidelong glance warned Melissa to
keep silent and wait the cat’s jumping. An odd moment! A moment full of
prettily covered pitfalls and dimly gleaming traps.
“Her legacy!” explained the Marchesa impatiently. “Hasn’t she told you
about it? You said you saw her at the office--didn’t you? Why did you
suppose she was leaving there? Retiring, on a stenographer’s salary?”
Color surged across Melissa’s face. She set her teeth in a rigor of
wounded pride.
“I didn’t inquire,” said Mr. Kenealy gently. Upon an even note he
continued--“I didn’t feel it concerned me.”
“Very pretty!” said the Marchesa, set down her cup and wiped her lips
with an air of finality. “However--you must have wondered ... being
Luke Kenealy’s nephew....”
“Oh, I say, now!”
Chuckling outrageously, the Marchesa waved his protest down. “Never
mind ... I knew him rather well, remember! And I say you must have
wondered just where all this ...” she swept Melissa’s darling room with
a gesture ... “was coming from. Stupid of the girl not to tell you!”
“I had so much rather,” said Melissa at this juncture in a voice of
exquisite coolness and detachment--“that _you_ told him.”
But the blood ran fast in her veins. Like cobwebs she felt the
straining of multiple unseen webs against her flesh. If she had
known--if she had guessed, what vistas of intrigue ... intrigue was
in the Marchesa’s blood ... of course!... Wasn’t that, in itself, the
thing she wanted of Melissa? Puppet-play--for her sensation-starved
old age--“a doll I am going to put together.”... Whatever she wanted,
she had paid to have it. Remembering which debt, Melissa held herself
steady and said again: “Do tell him, Marchesa!”
Thus urged.... “Her grandfather,” said the Marchesa dryly, “died
in--Alabama, was it?--a little while ago. Left her something. Not very
much. She’s taking this way to get rid of it.”
“She’s wise,” said Mr. Kenealy. He smiled at Melissa and, sweetly
reckless, she smiled at him.
“Money,” said Mr. Kenealy, “is worth only what it’ll buy.”
“Did Luke Kenealy leave you anything?” asked the Marchesa sharply.
“Not even a high note,” averred the regretful heir.
“Ha!” said the Marchesa--“I’m not surprised. Well ... you must come and
see his picture....”
“If I may,” said Mr. Kenealy.
The Marchesa rose with amazing agility. Melissa and Mr. Kenealy rose
too. Twilight was gathering in the long, high-ceilinged room. Beyond
the four tall windows, lights were blossoming along a cloudy sky.
Melissa twitched tasseled strings and lit the two lovely lamps beside
the couch.
“Lord--what a set!” said Mr. Kenealy, then bit his lip and grinned. He
begged of the Marchesa--“Let me see you to your car!”
She gave him her hand and a grimace of complete understanding.
“Thoughtful of old ladies--of course--you didn’t inherit _that_! He
couldn’t bear ’em!”
To Melissa a stroke of the velvet paw--“Not bad for a first at-home, my
dear.... I congratulate you!”
“Oh--I hope to do it rather better!” said Melissa.... She yielded her
fingers to Mr. Kenealy’s close hold.... “Good-by,” she told him--“nice
to have seen you ... my love to Jerry--when you write.”
“I’ll see you again before that!” said Mr. Kenealy.
Melissa closed the door, softly but very definitely upon his parting
smile. Too full of understanding, entirely! What did he think her?--An
adventuress? For all the Marchesa’s spurious grandfather, dying
in--Alabama, was it?--and providing for purposes of respectability, a
legacy! What could any man think Melissa but an adventuress? Sitting
down beside a stranger in the Park--speaking to him, as if he were some
one she thought she knew. _That_ hadn’t fooled any one a moment.
Witness the staggering reply--“I’ve often been taken for Tarleton
before this....”
When he knew and Melissa knew--and each knew quite well that the other
knew--there wasn’t any Tarleton!
Was there actually a Luke Kenealy? How could one tell? And even if
there had been such a man--in the Marchesa’s amazing and man-spangled
past--was this one really his nephew? Or merely the quickest-witted,
most convincing liar in the world?
The Marchesa believed him--or did she? Impossible to predict the
Marchesa. Melissa felt the invisible threads draw tight. Fear touched
her for a moment....
Then, because at the very most she had nothing to lose, she shrugged
the whole involved question away from her.
“I’m not backing down, now,” thought Melissa. “Hardly!”
She went over to the desk at the farther end of the room and lit the
lamp, gold-shaded and mellow, which stood there. A letter lay waiting,
sealed and stamped, addressed to Sixty-third Street ... something about
handkerchiefs, forgotten in a drawer.... Melissa had intended that
afternoon to mail it.
She thought: “There’s a mail chute out by the elevators--” and turned
her step that way.
It was perhaps the most startling, the least expected, the maddest of
all that mad day’s happenings, that just beyond her door, letter in
hand, a whisper of song on her lips, she should come face to face with
Mr. Kenealy, advancing quietly.
“You!” cried Melissa in a horrified undertone.... “_You!_--Why on
earth...?”
And stood with her back to the wall and stared at him, frozen.
He put out a reassuring hand. He smiled his engaging smile.
“This--” said Melissa and could not for all her most gallant
effort control a betraying tremor--“This--is taking an outrageous
advantage....” She really was shaking with apprehension.
“Of what?” inquired Mr. Kenealy very reasonably.
“Don’t pretend not to know!--You _are_--a gentleman--aren’t you?”
“Why--I don’t as a rule make a song about it....”
“Then--I don’t have to tell you how horrid this is of you!”
“But you do have to tell me--that is, if I’m going to know.”
Melissa moved back along the wall with a kind of sliding swiftness till
she stood just at her door and drew it to behind her.
“Please go away, at once!” she said with all the dignity of which she
was capable. “I admit it is partly my fault--for speaking to you as I
did. You had every reason to suppose that I wasn’t--quite nice--”
“Good Lord!” said Mr. Kenealy with a groan.
“But I assure you I am ... and you need not expect me--to ask you
in--now....”
“I’m not suggesting it, am I?” he protested with a touch of annoyance.
“Then what are you doing here?” insisted Melissa coldly. “What possible
excuse could you have...?”
“Well--if it comes to that--” said Mr. Kenealy ... his brown eyes
narrowed with sudden and uncontrollable amusement ... “--I--ah--I
live in the next apartment--d’y’see? And the only way I can get to it
is through this little hall--I’m sorry ... the whole thing’s a bit
unusual--I can see that myself!”
Melissa’s hands dropped limp at her sides--she stared--she caught her
breath in a long, staggered silence. At last:
“You--” she stammered--“you ... you....”
“In the next apartment, yes,” repeated Mr. Kenealy patiently.
“Did you know....”
He disclaimed that hurriedly.... “Give you my word, I nearly dropped in
my tracks, when you brought me here....”
“_I_--brought _you_! I deserve that, of course,” said Melissa proudly.
“Oh, please--don’t be so unkind! Mere figure of speech. Let’s say
we brought each other ... shall we? Anyhow--isn’t it, honestly, the
darnedest thing that ever happened--outside a Vajda comedy?”
Wave after wave of poignant recollection broke over Melissa’s head....
“You were singing--‘Somebody Loves Me’--”
He admitted modestly. “I do--a little. When was this?”
“The evening I came here first--why--it was only two days ago! You
whistled it--waiting for the elevator.”
“One’s got to do something at such a time,” said Mr. Kenealy.
“Oh--!” said Melissa--“I remember! You are the sugar planter--from
Hawaii.”
“Anybody, from Hawaii, is a sugar planter--the minute he sets foot on
the mainland. Who gave you my dossier?”
“The clerk from downstairs.”
“Sounds like it. I wonder who gave it to _him_? Just as a matter of
public interest--my people are ranchers.”
“But you _are_ from Hawaii?”
“Born and raised there--as you say in--Alabama, was it?”
“One thing more,” insisted Melissa desperately, ignoring the matter of
her natal state--“Was he really your uncle--the tenor?”
“Of course,” said Mr. Kenealy. “Why not?”
“I don’t know--the whole thing--it’s so like a movie scenario!”
“Don’t sneer at the movies--I write for ’em.”
“Stories?” gasped Melissa.
“No. Cut-ins. _You_ know the kind of things ...” he quoted with
expression--“And as the dawn broke, a woman’s soul was born....”
“I know!” said Melissa hurriedly.
“Some better than that,” said Mr. Kenealy judicially--“some--not so
good.”
He put out his hand once more and this time Melissa gave him hers.
He said with charming sincerity--“You _will_ let me come again?”
“I’m sorry,” said Melissa--“I mean I’m sorry I was so atrociously rude
to you ... and of course you may come again ... soon!”
She continued upon her way to the mail-chute and watched her letter
flash down with a queer little smile on her lips.
“Ranchers--” she was thinking--“and sugar planters--it’s much the
same thing.” It isn’t, at all, of course, except from a financial
standpoint--which, regrettably enough, was the one Melissa momentarily
considered.
Slipping off to sleep that night, she muttered drowsily--“Not a bad
beginning, for a man-hunter!”
The Marchesa herself might have said it.
CHAPTER X
Woman, more than any known creature except the chameleon, reacts to her
environment. Except for a sensitive little lizard going gray upon a
rock and green upon a bush, there is nothing in nature more delicately
responsive to background than the female soul. It is interesting to
consider in Mr. Strachey’s wake, that Queen Victoria sans Windsor and
Balmoral might have been any pleasant old person in a rocking-chair,
with a bit of knitting between her fingers. That du Barry if born again
into Hollywood might very well turn her temperament upon the silver
screen and excite the easy emotions of a nation, while remaining as
spotless, personally, as a hound’s tooth. What one means to say is--the
difference between a desirable feminine citizen and a doubtful one, is
sometimes merely the difference in their respective addresses ... the
denizen of an exclusive dwelling on Park Avenue having no incentive to
become a bobbed-hair bandit, and the inhabitant of a Harlem flat having
neither inspiration nor opportunity to lead the social world around by
the nose.
That isn’t socialism--it’s what every woman understands.
Melissa knew she wasn’t herself, on Sixty-third Street--she hadn’t
guessed how quickly and in what vastly different ways, herself would
develop once beauty and ease were round her.
She hadn’t, for instance, guessed, how idleness would grow upon her.
Lying in bed of a morning, watching the sun stream through those
eastern windows--that was, in no time at all, part of the daily ritual.
Breakfast at ten, after a leisurely bathing and dressing--that didn’t
leave much of the morning ... not that it mattered ... when, even
supposing a morning were saved--what was one to do with it?
The old years when nine saw her typewriter unhooded, for work--and
five, sometimes six, saw it still in action, receded in no time almost
past remembering. Melissa didn’t seem to herself, at all the same
creature who had drudged through dull days, and slept through tired
nights--in a room on a grimy brownstone street....
She forgot--wonderfully--what she had come from. She
lived--beautifully--in the moment. She wouldn’t ask herself where she
was going, because she meant in any case to go--and the answer mightn’t
have been too edifying.
“Here I am--” that was all she admitted ... “where I never hoped to be.
It’s my chance. It will be my own fault if I fumble it.”
So she hardened herself, deliberately and coolly. She made herself a
shell of deliberate and considered allure. She bought her clothes and
arranged her rooms, even set the flowers in her gleaming crystal bowls,
with an unswerving consideration of the appeal to be conveyed.
To masculine eyes.
It isn’t, after all, so far-fetched a picture, even in this day of
economic independence for the ladies. At least half the female world
still goes husband-hunting, between the ages of eighteen and ... well,
shall we say between the ages? Also, the paraphernalia of the chase,
while deriving more, perhaps from sport-shops and tobacco-shops and so
on than it formerly did, is still--the paraphernalia of the chase. He
who denies it deludes himself--and is thus merely twice doomed.
Melissa denied not even to herself the elemental starkness of her
motives. Everything she did, looked one way, had one sole end in view.
Of course the extenuating fact in her man-hunting was, that it wasn’t
so much the man she wanted as beauty which he was to be able to give
her. Beauty which all her life she had wanted and never until now come
near. At that, when she allowed herself to realize how coolly, how
almost dispassionately she was conducting her search for a husband--she
had her moments of revulsion ... deep-seated.
“You’re an odd creature,” the Marchesa told her crossly about a week
after the amazing episode of Luke Kenealy.... “--I have to remind
myself, from time to time that I have seen you distressed--that I have
heard you talk of killing yourself--except of course that there wasn’t
any gas-jet in your room.... It’s hard to realize you ever wore plain
little hats and blue serge frocks ... and read aloud to me by the hour.”
“I still wear fairly plain hats,” said Melissa calmly--“and I shall be
very happy to read aloud to you again--at any time you like.”
“H’mph!” said the ungracious Marchesa. “I wouldn’t have it! It affects
even _me_--that Vere de Vere manner of yours. I’d be uneasy, all the
time, wondering if perhaps you weren’t bored,--”
“Sorry!” murmured Melissa, dropping white eyelids.
“There!” cried the Marchesa in a species of irritable triumph--“You
might be Lady-What’s-Her-Name herself! As for your hats--you’ve
got an absolute genius for clothes and you know it. I was nervous
at first--I’ll admit. It isn’t every woman you could turn loose
in the shops with a sizable allowance--for the first time in her
life--and have her come out looking presentable. You’re more than
presentable--nom d’un pipe!--you’re seductive--in a perfectly well-bred
way!”
“I have no intention of being seductive,” said Melissa.
“Yes, you have! Or if you haven’t you’re a bigger fool than I take
you to be--” the Marchesa emitted a disconcerting little whinny of
laughter. “You know your type, my dear--you knew it before you were
able to dress it--a siren in a working-girl shell--that’s what you
were.... When I look at you I feel as if I’d cracked a chrysalis--or
however you open ’em--and let out a Great Peacock Moth.”
“Thanks,” said Melissa, smiling faintly.
“Upon my word,” said the Marchesa, “you amuse me so, I feel twenty
years younger.”
They were driving along Riverside, in the Marchesa’s palatial gray
limousine, and against the windless shadows of that swiftly moving
interior, Melissa’s flush showed clear.
“Hate to amuse anybody, don’t you!” continued the inquisitor placidly.
“Proud as the devil--well, I don’t know that pride’s a bad thing for a
woman. Helps to keep her mouth shut when she’s hurt--and she’s bound to
be hurt sooner or later,--looking for a lover.”
“I am not looking for a lover,” said Melissa.
“Aren’t you?” replied the Marchesa blandly. “Well--well! Tell me more
about this Mr. Kenealy of yours. Have you seen him since your very
charming little tea-party the other afternoon?”
“I see him almost every day,” said Melissa languidly and watched
curiosity quicken in those old-eagle eyes with a wicked satisfaction.
“Every day--? Not very discreet of you, my dear. The man will be fed up
in no time.”
“It really isn’t my fault. There’s no way to avoid it.”
“Fiddlesticks--you can always say you’ve another engagement.”
“Not very well--you see, we go up and down, quite a bit, together.”
“My good girl--what are you talking about--? Up and down what? A stick?”
Melissa answered sweetly as if unaware of anything startling in her
statement: “He lives in the apartment next mine.”
“Ciel!” said the Marchesa.
She added, feeling the need perhaps of a rounder oath---“Mon Dieu--it
can’t be true!”
“I assure you,” said Melissa.
The Marchesa inquired sharply--“Did you know it when he brought you the
letter--from your friend in--India?”
“China, it was,” said Melissa, and finished casually--“You forget--he
brought me the letter two days before I left the office. I wasn’t at
that time living in the place myself.”
“Of course--of course,” said the Marchesa. Upon the heels of a vibrant
silence, she suddenly snapped--“Did he bring you a letter at all?”
“No,” said Melissa and looked out of the window--because it took all
her courage to bring out that one flat word, without parrying the
Marchesa’s glance.
“Ha!” said the Marchesa. “I thought not!” She bristled with intentness
like a terrier at a rat-hole. “Where did you really meet him?”
So Melissa disdaining to withhold, when payment was requested of her,
related very briefly, with no attempt at extenuation, the happening in
the Park and the later happening at her door. Between these two scenes,
the listener might make her own liaison--from memory.
At the end of the story, the Marchesa burst into a sequence of ribald
chucklings.
“You have the soul of an adventurer!” she said at length.
“I think I have the soul of a hussy,” returned Melissa somberly.
“Nonsense! Don’t spoil the whole thing with a conscience. You are
delicious. You are better than Scheherazade. I thought there was
something tricky in that little affair of yours.... I caught a look
or so ... something in the air.... I have a very keen nose,” said the
Marchesa modestly. “Well--I can’t tell you how intrigued I am--you
have seen him again? Oh--not only in the elevator--if you please!
Tête-à-tête, of course!”
“I have been to dinner and to a theater with him,” said Melissa ...
“and last night to a party--in his apartment.”
“A party! You have been to a party? What gown did you wear?”
“I wore the almond green georgette.”
“With pearls?”
“Earrings and the long string.”
“Good! Exactly the thing I should have selected. What sort of people
did you meet?” The filmed gleam of the Marchesa’s eyes, the excited
quiver about that rouged old mouth! Melissa felt herself shrinking and
so put on a yet more indifferent front.
“One or two rather nice men.”
“No women?--Do you mean to say there were no women there?”
“There were women, of course--I didn’t notice them.”
The Marchesa caught up the speaking-tube and instructed the startled
chauffeur shrilly--she turned back to Melissa with a positive warmth on
her wrinkled cheeks, the purplish flush of a dying rose.
“I am taking you home to dinner with me,” she announced and settled
her velvet neck-band and tossed her curled gray head in its invincibly
smart bonnet.
“One or two rather nice men--I want to hear all about it, my dear! And
you didn’t notice the women? This is too delicious! You are without a
doubt--the most amusing creature I have ever met!”
CHAPTER XI
When Melissa admitted to the Marchesa that she had met one or two
rather nice men at the party in Kenealy’s apartment, she confined
herself meticulously to the truth. And although the Marchesa’s hunger
for details was insatiable, yet at dinner (even in the midst of all
those uniformed and tail-coated photographs, with autographed emotion
striking the eye from every side, with the very cupids on the Dresden
urn on the dinner-table, gesturing rosy indiscretion) Melissa held
herself down to the simplest facts and said nothing at all of her own
personal reactions ... which would, beyond doubt have interested the
Marchesa immensely ... but Melissa felt she needn’t quite strip her
soul, to appease that aged gourmande.
“There was a man who wrote plays,” said Melissa--“Not bad-looking. A
little heavy....”
“Successful?” probed the Marchesa.
“They said so,” said Melissa. “He has a place at Mamaroneck and a house
on Washington Square.”
“Then he must write those silly bedroom things,” the Marchesa
decided--“or perhaps what my nephew calls small-town stuff. This
country has no drama, in-between.”
Melissa forbore to break a lance for American playwrights. “There was a
blond artist,” she continued dispassionately ... “and toward the end
of the evening a man dropped in, from another party....”
“That,” interrupted the Marchesa taking a sizable mouthful of Broccoli
Hollandaise and assuming immediately afterward an expression of
beatific satisfaction--“that is usually the man who sees one home.”
“He did,” said Melissa, playing with her fork.
“Do you remember his name--by any chance?”
“Why shouldn’t I?--Murdock Fleming.”
“Thousand thunders!” cried the Marchesa, with a look of the liveliest
horror.... “What does one call him--in tender moments?”
“I can’t tell you--yet,” said Melissa.
“Murdock!--it sounds like a granite tombstone.”
“He was rather nice. Big and clean-looking. A polo-player, I think ...
and a stock-broker.”
“You’re as good as Bradstreet, my dear,” approved the Marchesa
mockingly. “Do you see him again--?”
“Mr. Fleming?”
“Obviously! since he appears to have been the one eligible of your
evening.”
Melissa smoothed an already exquisite eyebrow with the tip of an
indolent finger. “He asked me to dine with him--some night this week.”
“You accepted?”
“For some night, _next_.”
“Ah--you have it in you!” sighed the Marchesa blissfully. “I knew it!”
“I told him I was fearfully crowded--over the week-end.”
“Exactly the phrase! And the excuse! How do you do it?”
Melissa explained gently--“There are one or two magazines one can find
that sort of thing in.... I am reading them very carefully. And Milne
is rather a help ... and Lonsdale. What they call drawing-room comedy,
I think.”
“Of course,” said the Marchesa delightedly--“that’s not what it’s
called in the drawing-room. But you couldn’t do better, for text books.
Really--it’s amazing ... you seem to have such an instinct ... were
your people--ah--well-born?”
The blood swept over Melissa’s face, and her head went up. She said,
returning the Marchesa’s stare with a look of furious resentment:
“Yes. Were not yours?”
At which the Marchesa laughed herself very nearly into hysterics,
choked over her thimbleful of black coffee, had to be patted upon the
back by the grimly immobile Anna, and continued for half an hour after
to snicker feebly.
“_Dear_ Lady Disdain!” said the Marchesa. “Or should one call you
Frankensteina?”
Whatever one called her, Melissa’s life was now sufficiently released
from dullness, sufficiently full of suave excitement, to satisfy even
her exacting temperament. Her days in the sunny bedroom, in the other
room with the deep fireplace and the lamps and the _dolce-far-niente_
couch, passed in a pageant of colorful ease. Daily she settled deeper
into luxury, like an orchid rooting itself in the mossy bark of a
tree. Daily it became more impossible to consider that she should ever
give this up--not these especial walls, but the world they stood for.
Daily she laid her plans and devised her silken stratagems for keeping
her place in the sun.
Murdock Fleming was, as the Marchesa had suggested, obviously the chief
eligible of Kenealy’s presenting, so quite coolly and without any sort
of scruple Melissa went about attaching him.
He asked her to dine, and she put him off for days--then wore her
loveliest frock, smiled her most languid and caressing smile--and he
asked her to dine again. At the most exclusive place in town. With
an anxious head-waiter in attendance. Flowers at Melissa’s plate. A
Hispano-Suiza waiting.
It was significant of Melissa’s acutely sympathetic mentality, that in
no time at all, she understood what a Hispano-Suiza stood for--was able
to refer to its finer points, intelligently. She, who a month or so
before had made her wildest flights on the top of a bus....
“I like a woman to know a good car when she sees it,” Murdock Fleming
had mentioned.
So Melissa spent hours poring over motor advertisements. She pretended
to be about to buy one and had eager young salesmen instruct her, whole
weary afternoons, in the essentials of a machine.
It bored her--beyond description--but the result brought her quarry to
her feet.
“I like a woman to be a good sport,” said Murdock Fleming.
He soon perceived Melissa to be one of the best. His flowers crowded
Melissa’s bowls and jars. He kept her telephone humming. His clean,
straight-featured, sunburned face beamed in her doorway at the most
unexpected hours.
“You’ve got the lad going,” said Luke Kenealy pleasantly--“in exactly
no time at all from the day you met him. Quick work, Lissa! My white
plume is off to you! How did you do it? He’s had the pack at his heels
for years. I thought he was a fox....”
“Aren’t you being rather--vulgar?” asked Melissa and shuddered slightly.
“If I am ...” said Kenealy without apology ... “let’s stick to the
subject. I ask--_how_ do you do it? _Why_ do you do it? And what will
you do with it, when you’ve got it? Because,” he added, taking out his
cigarette-case, selecting one and lighting it with some care--“after
all--you don’t really like him--now, do you?”
“I shouldn’t say that,” said Melissa.
“If you did, I’d have hope for you,” said Kenealy.
She smiled into his scowling eyes--“Luke--don’t you like me any more?”
At which he got up--they were sitting together on the couch after some
play to which he had taken her, and mended the fire noisily.
“_Like_ you?--what’s that?” he demanded, slouching with his back to the
resultant blaze in the time-honored masculine attitude. “I never liked
a woman in my life--always either loved or loathed ’em. You pays your
money and you takes your choice.”
“Is that an offer?” inquired Melissa in a hesitant murmur.
“Would it interest you if it were?”
“I--don’t--know.”
“Then it wouldn’t! I’m not to be haggled over. I may as well tell you
frankly--Fleming could buy and sell me--before breakfast.”
“That’s brutal,” said Melissa rather low.
“Not unless the inference is true.”
“That I’m gold-digging?”
“That you’re out to marry money. Don’t look so maidenly. It’s been done
before, Melissa of the White Hands!”
Melissa said nothing for a comparatively long time. She sat looking
into the fire and Kenealy stood looking down at her. His eyes were too
keen for her to meet. Her mouth was too sweet for him to scorn.
He offered presently: “Got any confessions to make?”
“No,” said Melissa slowly. Her face grew a little hard. “Why--Luke?”
“Nothing ... just wondered.”
“You don’t really know me very well--do you?”
“I couldn’t know you better in a million years. Been hearing about you,
all my life.... ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?...’”
“Don’t make fun of me!”
“I’m not!... Want to hear more?
“‘I met a lady in the meads,’ ...
(Central Park, you see?)
‘Full beautiful--a faëry’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild....’”
“Please, Luke!--I can’t bear to be laughed at.”
“I’m not laughing,” he told her--and it appeared, strangely enough,
that he wasn’t. Presently he added, sheering off from deep waters--“I
wouldn’t mind knowing what hold the aged playmate of my late uncle has
over you? That bothers me--somewhat.”
“What makes you think....”
“My head makes me think, Melissa--and my heart makes me hurt. How about
_you_? Isn’t that the way your wheels go round? Well ... it’s getting
late ... and I’m working to-morrow....”
Melissa asked with a long glance from under lowered lashes---“Do you
really work, Luke?”
He told her quizzically. “Save the Lorelei look for young men with
waxed ears, Melissa--! Yes--I really do.”
“But I thought you said--that first day....”
“Ah--the ranching stayed in your mind! Well--I may ranch in my old
age--not now, thank you!”
Melissa explained, stripping the petals from a rose she held and
crushing them in the palm of one hand, sniffing them delicately and
crushing them again.... “I mean--you don’t really _need_ to work ...
unless you like.”
“Any one needs to work,” said Kenealy. The laugh left his voice and his
eyes. He added grimly: “You women make me sick!”
Melissa looked at him dumbfounded. She had no words to answer the
startling bitterness of his change of mood. He said after a moment,
still rather sullenly: “Work’s the only thing that keeps your soul
alive ... and it’s got to be work that you choose ... not that somebody
else chooses for you.”
“Did they want you to stay on the ranch?” asked Melissa softly. She
thought she understood, now.
“They did. They don’t see yet why I’m not satisfied to be out in the
great open spaces--with my own blooded cattle around me. They can’t
understand what I want of a city--while there’s a horse to ride or a
trail to follow....”
“Who are _They_, Luke?”
Kenealy answered that sympathetic murmur slowly, his eyes on Melissa’s
face: “They--is my wife.”
“Oh,--I see,” said Melissa. And she spoke slowly, in her turn, stifling
a curious qualm of disappointment.
“Make any difference?” he asked her.
“What difference should it make?”
“None--with Fleming coming up. That’s why I hadn’t mentioned it before.
My domestic--blunders are--of no particular interest to any one else.”
“Luke--is it just that she wants to be _there_--and you want to be
_here_?”
“That’s all,” said Kenealy. “And we about to die assure you--it’s
enough! We’ve been married six years. The Great Mistake became apparent
in six months.... She’s an Island girl, you see--she was born with
a passion for the place. I wasn’t. But she’s a Catholic--and I am a
strict respecter of other men’s faiths ... so....”
“You mean there’ll never be a divorce?”
“Not unless she turns Mormon--which I think most unlikely. She runs
the ranch herself, you see--gives her plenty to do. I keep the Pierian
spring flowing in various critical periodicals ... and there you are! I
go back from time to time ... à la Ulysses ... a mere formality. We’re
both relieved when it’s over. But it pacifies the neighbors.”
“I didn’t guess,” said Melissa, throwing her rose-leaves into the
fire--“that you were unhappy.”
“I’m not,” said Luke Kenealy, gathering up his hat and stick and
putting out a hand for good-by--“but I could be ... if I had the time.”
CHAPTER XII
Melissa rather wondered, thinking it over from day to day, just
how much intention lay behind the mingled grimness and nonsense of
Kenealy’s avowal. Did he mean it to warn her away from any but the
lightest sort of relationship? That hurt her pride unspeakably.
Or would have, if she hadn’t felt fairly certain that he had spoken on
impulse and from the man’s inescapable desire to lay his sorest trouble
in a woman’s lap.
Because for all his flippancy, the kind of airy smartness which was
second nature to him (and to most others of his craft at that moment),
Melissa sensed an unhealed wound. Kenealy seemed to her like one
of those Pierrots, made in Paris and treasured in the photographed
bedrooms of cinema stars ... a gay yet wistful creature, with
knowledgeable eyes, a smiling mouth, and a tear painted on one cheek.
As for her own secret feeling toward him--whatever it may have been to
begin with--a married man had little place, more frankly none at all,
in the collection of possible futures which Melissa was making.
A friend--perhaps.
Nothing more!
And that from the most utilitarian standpoint.
Melissa felt rather proud of her cool head and her manageable heart.
She moved Kenealy back upon the board to a position of comparative
unimportance. She brought Murdock Fleming well forward--ignoring the
fact that Kenealy drew her a dozen different ways, while Fleming for
all his niceness, his devotion, his eminent eligibility, was never
other than a cold contact.
The playwright whom the Marchesa had sapiently suspected of bedroom
farce (his name, blackly set forth upon one program and another of
consecutive seasons, was Austin Beall) took second place, shortly;
perhaps, even before he knew it.
“A creditable field,” was the Marchesa’s satisfied comment. “You will
enlarge it, I expect.”
“One meets new people all the time,” said Melissa, with just the right
note of indifference. “Mr. Beall--I forgot if I told you--is having a
little party for me next week.”
“More drawing-room comedy?” inquired the Marchesa and sniggered in a
filmy handkerchief. “Don’t be too amiable, my dear--till you make sure
that new play of his attracts more than the critics!”
Melissa said she understood the new play was an established success.
But when she went home a little later, she sat down before her fire and
hid her face in her hands because that last little bit made her feel
indescribably tawdry....
And Melissa didn’t enjoy feeling tawdry. She who had been even in the
old drab days, so royally fastidious. Had she no longer any right to
resent what affronted and repelled her in the Marchesa’s tutoring?
Was she buying her mess of pottage just a trifle too dear? Late in the
day to ask? And nothing to be gained by asking but a bad quarter of an
hour for one’s self.
That was the day, on which, with fate smirking over her shoulder,
Melissa found the picture in the drawer of the desk.
She considered afterward, looking back along the sort of road she
traveled, that for her soul’s need and her heart’s contenting the thing
happened none too soon.
It wasn’t, at that,--as a portrait--impressive, in proportion nor
artistry.
She was looking for stamps when she found it ... jerking open with
reckless fingers, one drawer after another, feeling in shadowy
pigeon-holes.... Out of the last and farthest drawer which stuck and
gave with disconcerting suddenness, the picture slipped, in a clutter
of dusty receipts and lay there ... looking up at her.
A snapshot slightly faded, of a man, down on one knee, with a cigarette
between his fingers, looking straight into the eye of the beholder.
In which eye, by platitudinous testimony, was always beauty’s home.
Melissa sat, and stared down at it for a long time without moving.
It gave her back--equally without moving--the quietest
straight-shooting regard in the world. Out of level eyes, coolly
amused, under level brows. His mouth firmly unsmiling had yet some
way a lovable twist ... his chin the arrogant contour which bespeaks a
lordly will.... Not, by common standards a pretty man--nor yet a homely
one. Something beyond either good looks or the lack of them. Something
which called for a wrist with a ruffle and a flickering rapier ... a
gray uniform, gold-buttoned, and the crimson of a silken sash---not
that his look was war-like ... only ... gallant, amazingly! Like
Cyrano--with a straight nose. Tom Sawyer come to manhood....
Melissa, sitting in that dusky corner by the desk felt the blood sting
her cheeks ... just to conjecture the sort of man he would be.
She went back to the couch taking the picture with her.
She studied it at her ease, curled up against the cushions with
little-girl abandon. Melissa--whose every pose had come to be
considered and contrived. She was sitting there when the door clicked
open gently and Kathleen, the friendly Irish maid came in with an
armful of fresh towels, for the bathroom.
Melissa had grown rather fond of Kathleen. That soft husky voice, those
beaming blue eyes always made the apartment seem pleasantly homelike
... a housekeeper in black silk and hair-wreath brooch could have done
no more ... and been no more motherly in doing it.
“Oh, ye’re home, Miss Wayne!” said Kathleen. “I hope I don’t disturb
ye. I’m late gettin’ off to-day....”
“Kathleen,” said Melissa abruptly--“I was looking for stamps in the
desk and I ran across a handful of old receipts....”
“I’ll just burn ’em,” said Kathleen comfortably. “Things gets left,
like that, sometimes....” She patted the topmost towel and smiled at
Melissa warmly.
Melissa smiled back in a sweet abstraction--what became of old receipts
concerned her at that moment but vaguely. “This--” she held out the
snapshot for Kathleen to see ... “this was with them ... some man’s
picture. Who is it, Kathleen--do you know?” (An off chance but worth
taking.)
Kathleen shifted her towels from one arm to the other and squinted,
pleasantly.
“Sure!...” said Kathleen.... “That’s Mister Roderick! Him that’s in
Japan, now ... the old lady’s nevvew. He’s a fine man, too--as ever
was. When he left the apar-r-tment....”
Melissa caught her breath and leaned to look again.
“He leased this apartment--before I did?” (The Marchesa--with her talk
of agents--the sly, secret Marchesa!)
“Leased it!--He _owned_ it. He owns the whole buildin’,” said Kathleen,
then added doubtfully--“Ye didn’t know? Maybe I’m talkin’ too much. The
old lady was here, the day before Mr. Roderick left--I thought sure ye
knew....”
“It doesn’t matter--perhaps, in a way, I did,” Melissa assured her.
“Have ye wood enough fer yer fire?” asked Kathleen.
“Yes, quite,” said Melissa. “Quite--thank you, Kathleen!”
Her fire ... Mr. Roderick’s fire! Mr. Roderick who was not only the
Dream Lover come true on a bit of cardboard ... but--here spoke
the Marchesa’s voice--an eligible as well, a more than eligible--a
desirable--from every standpoint. With a whole gray-stone building of
his own ... an air castle on the topmost floor! A man to let oneself go
about, indeed!
They were his ties then which had lain in Melissa’s top drawer.
Somewhere at least, in that sun-smitten room.
She curled closer among the cushions, smiling down into those pictured
eyes, that looked back at her steadily ... compellingly....
“Your desk--” she mused and sighed deliciously, without just knowing
why. “Your table ... your lamps ... your couch ... your windows ...
your windows!... You used to stand there, didn’t you?--looking across
the Park, at dusk, as the lights came on ... all that sky!”
She got up and went to the window--dusk coming on, now--lights,
already, in the Plaza’s stately mass, more lights scattered, east,
north, south....
“Good night, Miss Wayne,” said Kathleen, coming out of the bedroom.
“Good night, Kathleen,” said Melissa softly. She stood with her hand
upon her breast, not turning. She had slipped the picture inside her
frock.
An incurable romanticist, Melissa!
PART III
CHAPTER XIII
Following the finding of Mister Roderick’s picture in the drawer of
Mister Roderick’s desk, Melissa spent an afternoon with the Marchesa.
She had her qualms, did Melissa, before she set sail. Avowedly, the
visit possessed one object--pure sociability. Indirectly, of course,
one purposed to obtain whatever information concerning nephews in
general--Mister Roderick in particular--the Marchesa might be jockeyed
into imparting.
And, of course, as Melissa very well knew, the Marchesa couldn’t be
jockeyed into anything. She was all too apt to discern at a glance
whatever ulterior motive a guest might have about her person and
proceed from discernment to dissection and downright destruction of
that same.
Sniggling meantime cruelly but enjoyably behind a lacy shred of
handkerchief, a little painted fan, or some other entirely feminine and
so incontestable weapon.
Melissa, setting forth, with Mister Roderick’s picture, a small
faded square of paper crisp above her heart (her sense of humor had
declined so far) was careful to wear her thickest frock ... a dark one,
buttoning smartly at the base of her lovely throat.
Through any less careful covering, the Marchesa’s keen eye might
readily observe....
It simply didn’t bear thinking about--the form the Marchesa’s
observation would take!
That thin contemptuous mirth ... the lift of those scant penciled
eyebrows! Melissa loathed herself for being afraid, and loathing
lessened fear not at all.
She went, nevertheless; stopped at a florist’s on the way and presented
violets, dewily fragrant, by way of an opening wedge.
“Violets!” commented the Marchesa doubtfully. “Very sweet!... Anna, put
these in the Venetian glass before that picture of Leftenant Carmichael
...” she added when Anna had departed for water to fill the Venetian
glass before depositing the offering therein ... “--one of the most
charming men I ever knew--poor Hubert! Killed in the Hazara expedition.
They sent me back a miniature he was wearing at the time--”
“Of you?” asked Melissa, unexpectedly encouraged. She fingered the
button nearest her heart.
“Who else?” inquired the Marchesa, with a flicker of
annoyance. “Set in seed pearls. Not bad. One of those
rose-in-the-hair-and-tulle-around-the-shoulder things ... impossible
to date, if the hair’s just simply done.” She emerged from a moment
of revery to comment abruptly: “Flowers, from one woman to another,
always a sign of chicanery. Greeks bearing gifts. What is your object,
Melissa?”
“I--I saw them in a window,” said Melissa, unpleasantly startled.
“I have no doubt you did,” returned the Marchesa, regarding her
closely and effecting a slight grimace. “I didn’t ask you where you got
them ... they seem to be fairly fresh.... I asked you why you gave them
to me. However--we won’t go into that. You’d hardly tell and I’m not
feeling well enough to get it out of you.”
Melissa murmured, filled with a mute chill rage, that she was sorry the
Marchesa should be indisposed.
“A touch of indigestion,” explained the Marchesa crabbedly. “My fool of
a doctor has put me on a diet ... soft eggs and milk toast ... bah! I’m
no octogenarian!”
When Melissa only looked her sympathy....
“Well--” said the Marchesa and kicked away the footstool, covered
in petit point to match her winged chair,--“I said--I’m no
octogenarian...! Don’t sit there like a mummy--without agreeing with
me--!”
“It seemed so obvious,” offered Melissa, stiffly.
“That I am--or I’m not?” snapped the Marchesa.
At her darkest, she veered like a weather-cock--broke into a cracked
cadence of laughter.
“Never mind! I feel better--for having annoyed you. It worries me ...
that swanlike poise of yours. I want to throw things at you--just to
see if you’d scuttle ... like all the rest of ’em....”
“I have no doubt I could--scuttle--” said Melissa ... “if that seemed
necessary.”
She rose to go, filled with a cold distaste for the overcrowded room,
the mincing French prints on the walls, the small, rouged, perfumed
withered creature before her....
“Sit down!” said the Marchesa crossly. “You haven’t been here ten
minutes. I don’t mind your bringing me violets--if you’d just say what
it’s about....”
“I have a fitting--” lied Melissa.
“Oh, sit down, _do_! I’m so bored I could scream!” said the
Marchesa--and Melissa sat down.
She had, after all, to render unto Cæsar value received.
“Now,” said the Marchesa ... “Anna--put another log on the fire--I
haven’t been warm to-day!... Now ... how about Kenealy? And the person
with the rock-bound name?--Has the impresario given his party--and....”
“Not an impresario--if you mean Austin Beall, he is a playwright,”
corrected Melissa coolly. She sat back in her chair and felt a faint
influx of confidence. In the rôle of Scheherazade she was at least
accustomed. “Luke Kenealy,” she said, “has a wife.”
The Marchesa did not gasp. She merely gave vent to an odd shrill sound
of amusement and touched a silvered curl above one ear.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “How did you find it out--so soon?”
“He told me,” said Melissa. “I thought perhaps I’d mentioned it before.”
“You knew quite well you had done nothing of the sort,” said the
terrible Marchesa suavely--“no matter! ... it doesn’t surprise me. And
I’m not disappointed. He’s not what you’re looking for--Kenealy isn’t.
Very good material for an affair ... but nothing to tie to. His sort of
man makes a charming lover but a frightfully unsatisfactory husband.”
“He’s married,” repeated Melissa stubbornly.
“He’s not living with his wife, is he?” pointed out the Marchesa and
gave a little snort of triumph.
“I wonder,” said Melissa with an effective touch of wistfulness, “just
what sort of man does make a--satisfactory--husband?”
“My dear,” said the Marchesa blithely--“No man does ... because there
is no such thing. However--like alchemists, trying to make gold from
baser metals, we poor women continue our hopeless research....” she
spoiled her own eloquence with a snicker and concluded suddenly ...
“Personally I have always preferred research to discovery ... it lasts
longer.”
“But there must be men who--last,” insisted Melissa. She could feel the
picture smooth against her flesh. Without shutting her eyes she could
see those other eyes, clear and clean and straightforward--smiling a
little, disconcertingly cool.
“Oh, I dare say!” conceded the Marchesa, frankly swallowing a
yawn,--“men like your Murdock what’s-his-name ... men like my
nephew....”
Melissa’s heart plunged out of time. She said, acutely conscious of a
racing pulse ... “Is your nephew--married?”
The Marchesa looked at her sharply, sniffed and applied her
handkerchief.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever shown the remotest interest in
Roderick ... what’s happened, now?”
No good bandying words with the Marchesa! Truth might as well climb out
of her well first as last.
“Why, Kathleen--” said Melissa languidly, to cover a vast
uneasiness--“Kathleen--the maid who....”
“I know all about Kathleen,” interrupted the Marchesa with a touch of
pleasurable anticipation ... “don’t tell me Roderick’s been making love
to her!”
“Oh, no--no!” cried Melissa.
“Well--well!” said the Marchesa, sitting forward in her chair and
peering closely into Melissa’s face, “and suppose he had! Would that
keep you awake at night? You’ve never seen him--have you?”
Melissa sat silent, panic in her breast. If the Marchesa knew of
the picture ... but what _could_ she know of a faded old snapshot,
forgotten in a drawer of her nephew’s desk? Somehow--Melissa couldn’t
quite bring herself to speak ... it seemed so secret a thing ... so
sweetly her own, in a world of sordid reasonings and disillusionments.
So long as no one knew ... sanctuary was somehow in that picture--for
Melissa....
“I say you’ve never seen him, have you?” insisted the Marchesa rudely.
“My good girl--don’t sit there mooning over nothing! You can’t have
seen him--he left for Japan a week before you....”
Melissa caught her cue: “Oh, no--” she said quickly. “I’ve never met
him, of course ... but Kathleen happened to speak, a day or so ago, of
his owning the apartment....”
“Very discursive ... I suppose she added that he owned the entire
building?”
“Yes--she did,” said Melissa.
“And occupied the apartment before you.”
“Yes,” said Melissa. “I--gathered that.”
“Ruth,” commented the Marchesa, “among the alien corn! Gathered is just
the word. So we add Roderick to your list of possible sheaves, now--do
we?”
Melissa retorted coldly--and listened breathless for the answer. “He is
in Japan--is he not?”
“Yes,” said the Marchesa, “--oh, yes! But he wasn’t born there--and
wouldn’t deliberately die there, I think. He’ll be coming back--in
about a year.”
“I see,” said Melissa.
“We both see,” chuckled the Marchesa. “Eye to eye,
Melissa!--Well--that’s enough about Roderick ... what about the Murdock
man? I fancied you were making some headway there. Flowers twice a
week, you said? What kind of flowers?”
Melissa wrinkled her smooth white forehead: “Chrysanthemums ... autumn
leaves ... and the last time orchids.”
“Wait for roses,” counseled the Marchesa with business-like brevity.
“When a man’s in love he sends smelly flowers--not showy ones. Never
take orchids seriously--except from a poor man. What does he say on the
card?”
“Usually the same thing,” Melissa admitted--she quoted, flushing, in
spite of herself ... “‘Thinking of you’ ... ‘Hello, Melissa’ ... ‘see
you soon’ ... something like that.”
The Marchesa adjusted the black velvet band about her neck with
coquettish finger-tips. “What my nephew calls stalling,” she observed
dispassionately. “You haven’t quite got him yet, I should say ... don’t
take him for granted!... At his stage that would be fatal.”
“I never take any man for granted,” returned Melissa haughtily.
“No?” said the Marchesa with thoughtful interest--“Then, my dear, you
should be stuffed and put in a Museum of Natural History with a card to
that effect on one ankle--it’s so unusual, you know.”
For the second time within the hour, Melissa rose to go. She could not
endure the Marchesa’s baiting. It left her cold with fury--and quite
defenseless. Until the shank of the following night when she was apt to
wake and evolve, lying in the darkness, endless conversation in which
she bore the brighter part. Long cut-and-thrust dialogues in which
the Marchesa wilted and sank into silence before Melissa’s incredible
repartee.
That sort of thing, however, although vastly consoling, later on, did
one little good at the moment of contact. Flight and flight alone,
sufficed.
“Must you go?” asked the Marchesa with an air. And added in
disgust--“You’re so ridiculously sensitive!”
“I shall be late--I’m dining out,” said Melissa, with an air of her
own--charmingly distant.
“Dining out?... With whom? You hadn’t told me.”
Again the terrier at the rat-hole ... the setter, pointing a bird!
“With Murdock,” said Melissa and set her teeth till she should be well
away from further questioning.
“Ah-ha!” said the Marchesa slowly, nodding like a mandarin on a
mantelshelf. “I wish I could go with you! Do you let him do the
ordering, Melissa? Always let them order for you. Men hate a woman who
knows just what she wants for dinner. It destroys their manhood at
the roots. And if he mixes the salad, watch him as if he were Chopin
creating a nocturne....”
She seemed to forget Melissa completely. She sat with her too-pointed
chin in her shriveled pink palm and stared across the room at the
violets in the Venetian glass before Leftenant Carmichael’s faded
splendor. “The night he left London,” said the Marchesa, a little
crooked smile playing about her mouth, “--we dined at his rooms. It was
most indiscreet. There were roses in all the vases. He was up to his
ears in debt.... I wore a gown he adored--Chantilly flounces over ivory
satin. He put a rose in my hair ... and I gave him the miniature....
We had grouse from his father’s estate in Scotland ... claret and
strawberries, an old French recipe....”
All at once the crooked smile vanished. A spark leaped in the faded
eyes. “I’m having a poached egg, to-night--” the Marchesa said
bitterly ... “a poached egg and boiled custard ... that’s life!”
She swore--but always in the purest French, as was her custom.
Melissa slipped away. The air outside was dank and biting. Twilight
coming on. Mists rising from the river.
It was heaven to know that high place waiting--the couch before the
fire, shadows drowsing on the walls.
Melissa signaled a prowling taxi. It bore her home all too slowly.
She thought as she went: “If _he_ were there ... it’s his, too, isn’t
it?--after all!”
CHAPTER XIV
Luke Kenealy took Melissa to Austin Beall’s party--under protest.
“I know,” he said--in the car, on the way to Beall’s house--“you met
him in my apartment. I know he’s interesting--he’s got a good line and
a better cellar--but I don’t like him--for _you_--and that’s that!”
“Which shall I avoid--his line or his cellar?” asked Melissa in a
docile voice with an impertinent whiplash of laughter.
“No fooling,” said Luke Kenealy, “he’s not your kind, my dear! As for
the cellar ... if I thought you needed supervision on that score--I
wouldn’t be taking you out. I may not be clever but I know what I
like--and I don’t like bacchanalian females. Vine-leaves on the hat if
you will--but not in the hair. It isn’t pretty. It blurs the complexion
and the morale. Both of which are most important in a lady....”
“Don’t be silly,” said Melissa with languid sweetness. “You know I
never drink anything at all. I don’t like it.”
“Your control sometimes terrifies me,” he told her gravely.
“Then it _is_ his line you’re afraid of--for me?”
Kenealy laughed. He took Melissa’s slim-fingered cool white hand, lying
idle on her silver lap and kissed it lightly. When they had passed
beneath a streetlamp and into comparative obscurity, he kissed it once
more and gave it back to her.
“Beall’s old at the game,” he said pleasantly. “You’re not. I think if
you’ll forgive my mentioning it, you’re about to burn your fingers.
He collects burnt fingers, so I’ve been told. Has whole rows of ’em
hanging up in his work-shop. Some with rings and some without. New kind
of Bluebeard--d’y’see?”
“Luke--are you jealous?” asked Melissa gently.
“Perhaps,” said Kenealy, “but it doesn’t affect my eyesight. Nor my
memory. I’ve known Austin a long time. I knew his first wife--and his
second--if that doesn’t constitute auld acquaintance--what does?”
“Two wives!” cried Melissa, forgetting to be a woman of the world who
accepted such things as she found them.
“Two wives. Count them! One dead--one divorced....”
“I hadn’t known--not that it matters.”
“Stay with that point of view and see where it gets you,” Kenealy
advised her.
The taxi slid down Fifth Avenue with interminable waits for cross-town
traffic, sharp bursts of speed in between.
“Are we late?” murmured Melissa.
“Not late enough,” said Kenealy. With, for him, incredible earnestness,
he added--“I’m trying to tell you--this’ll be a wild party--and you’ve
got no business on it ... you’d be a good bit better off at home, with
a bound volume of--something safe and improving. Le Rire--for example.”
“Why, Luke--the party is being given for me!”
“I know,” said Kenealy stubbornly ... “--and you put cheese in a trap
when you entertain a mouse ... very well! I’ll be around some fine
morning in less than a month to say What Did I Tell You?”
“How absurd--what could he possibly....”
“You’re under the microscope--at the very least--if you enjoy that.”
“You mean--his plays? But, Luke, he’s never done anything about my kind
of woman.”
“Stick around next winter. See him try something new!” said Kenealy,
and rode the rest of the way in silence.
Beall met them at the door, put a hand on Luke’s shoulder and caught
Melissa’s fingers close. He had a charming grin, frank as a schoolboy’s
but his eyes were too light and exceedingly wary. Also, his silver-gray
hair, brushed back from a splendid forehead in a stubbornly rippling,
close-cut cap gave him an odd suggestion of classic immobility--which
the full, smooth lips, deep-dented at the corners, were far from
bearing out.
“Thought you’d thrown me over!” he said warmly. Somehow, in a moment he
had gotten Luke out of the way and was taking Lissa up the stairs to
the dressing-room, with a hand on her arm, an approving whisper at her
ear.
“Look like a million, Lissa!”
“I’m so glad,” said Melissa coolly. She faintly smiled, in a way she
had found appealed to him. It inferred deeper sophistication than she
possessed but she hoped he hadn’t guessed it and for the matter of that
she rather hoped in time to acquire such sophistication as she needed.
She told him softly--“You said you liked this frock.”
“I adore it!” said Beall. “Don’t be long, will you?--the party’s no
good without you.”
The feel of his fingers closing on her arm, lingered while she sat
before the mirror, running a comb through the soft dark wave of
her hair, retouching cheeks and lips. She looked rather lovely and
recognized the fact with a physical tremor of exultation. A long way
to come, from the Melissa of Sixty-third Street and the office ...
from the Melissa of a haberdashery salesman’s abortive attentions ...
the Melissa of hole-and-corner tea-rooms--of stockings washed out at
night and hung over chair-backs to dry ... from all that fell into the
shadows out of which this Melissa emerged, radiant, luminous, poised....
The other women chattered in high, affected voices, laying aside their
gorgeous furs and brocades, smoking feverishly while they waited their
turns at the mirror. Melissa took her time, stood up at last, quite
satisfied, picked up handkerchief and bag--
“Never smoke, do you?” suggested a slender blonde person in vivid
scarlet with hair cut close to a round young head, and a matadorish
curl at each ear. Her name was Em’ly Armistead--at least that was
what Melissa had heard her called, one place and another--and she
cherished openly an inordinate affection for Luke Kenealy, which was
why she always singled out Melissa to talk to in dressing-rooms and on
stairways.
“Luke adores you,” she frequently said.
And Melissa usually replied: “Oh, do you think so?--We’re fearfully
good friends.” Which seemed in a way to alleviate Em’ly’s uneasiness
where Luke was concerned.
She offered to-night, going down the wide shallow stairs with her hand
through Melissa’s arm: “You came with Luke, didn’t you? He looks black
as your hat. Whatever have you done to him? Did you quarrel--coming up?”
“I never quarrel,” said Melissa coolly.
Em’ly Armistead bored her. Most women bored her. She remembered just
at that moment a saying of the Marchesa’s ... “I have never sincerely
liked any woman--except my mother.”
Melissa had never sincerely liked any woman--yet. She barely remembered
her mother.
“You’re so cold!” objected Em’ly and gave Melissa’s arm a little
squeeze.
Melissa withdrew it gently but definitely.
“To-night’s going to be good,” went on Em’ly, quite unrebuffed.
“So Luke says,” murmured Melissa.
“Prob’ly why he’s so black. He hates a wild party--and yet--he’d be
marvelous,” sighed Em’ly wistfully--“if he’d once let himself go. Is
it because he doesn’t want to--or doesn’t dare?”
“How should I know?”
“He’s sweeter to you than I’ve ever seen him. He’s been running around
with this crowd for a couple of years, and you’re the first woman he’s
ever seemed really to care about. You know, Melissa--he’s one of the
biggest men in town--at his kind of thing. None of the others come near
him. He’s had marvelous offers from syndicates.”
“He doesn’t do--anything for the movies?” asked Melissa with careful
indifference.
“Luke!--For the movies? Somebody’s been spoofing you!” cried Em’ly.
She added, pausing at the foot of the stairway and putting out a hand
to Beall who turned to meet them, “If it were Austin--Austin would be
marvelous in Hollywood ... he’s just the type!”
“Let my past alone!” retorted Beall good-humoredly. “I’m hitching my
wagon to a star, now--” he drew Melissa down with a smile and a touch.
“--Then all I say is--the star had better hitch itself in heaven!” said
Em’ly with a burst of derisive laughter and took her scarlet gown and
her fair head and her long amber cigaret-holder off into the heart of
the party.
CHAPTER XV
It wasn’t, at that, and on the surface, the orgy Luke had seemed to
apprehend. A very average sort of party, Melissa thought, dropping down
on a cushioned window-seat somewhere about one or two o’clock, with
her eyes faintly heavy, her feet beginning to long for a pair of mules
instead of their shining silver slippers.
Since dinner the rooms had been crowded with ardent dancers. People
dropping in all evening. People coming, people going. Music never
stopping. A babel of laughter and shrill voices over deep. A riot of
color and sound and scent. But all parties were that--as Melissa had
come to believe. Just foam on the crest of the wave. One said and
did and allowed a great deal one wouldn’t ordinarily have considered
saying and doing and allowing. There was something in that muted
jazz--something infinitely insidious ... indubitably also there were
other things....
Melissa hated a silly laugh. And Em’ly’s laugh--for one--was apt to be
recklessly silly--after midnight.
Luke had been rather out of sight most of the time--not dancing much.
Murdock had dogged Melissa’s footsteps. He was coming toward her,
now, his face a trifle flushed, his eyes a burning blue in that clean
weather-beaten face.
“Oh, here you are,” he cried fatuously. “Been looking all over the shop
for you. Care to dance?”
“I’m so tired,” said Melissa in a plaintive drawl. “I want to go home.”
“Let me take you!” he suggested instantly.
“Sorry--I came with Luke.”
“Let me find him for you.”
“If you only would!”
But he didn’t. He sat down beside her instead and played with a spray
of green buds on her gown. “Been a good party--hasn’t it?”
Did all the world say the same stupid thing over and over in the same
stupid words?
“A wonderful party,” agreed Melissa.
“I hate parties,” he told her unexpectedly ... “never see anything of
you. Always a lot of other birds around. Why can’t we have a party of
our own sometime?”
“I shouldn’t mind,” said Melissa and smiled--the least slow flicker on
lips and eyes.
It spurred him as she meant it should.
“Tell you what,” he leaned forward and put an arm along the window-sill
behind her. “Tell you what--let’s have a house-party--not too big--next
week--no, next week’s pretty well dated up--week after next, say--I’ve
got a place just outside of Baltimore ... nice old farm ... we could
drive down, you and I....”
“Nice!” said Melissa indolently. “Only--week after next’s no good for
me. I’m fearfully busy. Until ...” she sighed--“let me see!--Really,
Murdock--I couldn’t make it before the first of next month.”
“Couldn’t you?” asked Murdock, frankly disappointed. “Well--save that,
then. Is it a promise?”
“Why--yes--I think so,” said Melissa. “Now--do find Luke for
me--there’s a dear boy! I want to go home!”
“You’re the only woman I know that ever does,” said Murdock reverently.
He departed beaming.
Beall happened along, however, before Murdock’s big shoulders were out
of the doorway.
“What’s this?” he inquired with deep concern. “The Lady of the Evening,
all by herself? How come?”
“I’m going home,” said Melissa--“in just a moment--Murdock’s gone to
find Luke. I’m getting sleepy.” She lowered drowsy eyelids.
“Murdock,” said Beall very gently, “can take Luke and keep him amused
till I’ve had one more dance....”
“I’m tired,” said Melissa sweetly. “I don’t want to dance any more.”
“A last cigaret, then....”
“You forget--I don’t smoke.”
“Nor drink. Strange woman you are, Melissa--to be running around the
world, to-day. What’s your outlet? Have you got a big sin? You’re so
scornful of all the little ones.”
“I’m not scornful--they just don’t amuse me,” said Melissa and hid a
yawn--not quite.
“That’s what makes you so dangerous.”
“Am I?”
“Aren’t you?”
“No-o ...” said Melissa.... “I wish--I were!”
“Well--all that you wish comes true,” said Beall with a short laugh.
“Ever read a book, called ‘The High Place’?”
“I--don’t think so. Who wrote it?”
“Mr. Cabell of Virginia. I’ll give it to you. It’s all about a man who
got his heart’s desire ... and learned better.”
“It must be rather depressing.”
“On the contrary--it’s very encouraging. Showing how silly it is to
dream dreams--when the real thing’s all around you--waiting....”
“Oh!” said Melissa rather doubtfully.
“Come along--I’ll get it for you,” said Beall. “Take it home with
you--read yourself to sleep.” He drew Melissa to her feet. They made a
devious way between dancers to the library at the farther end of the
house. “This is my work-shop. You’ve never been in this room before,”
said Beall.
There were books all around the walls, a fire in a deep fireplace;
above the mantelshelf a glowing yet somber Zuloaga of a black-haired
woman in a full-skirted black gown, with pearls in her ears, a sweetly
treacherous smile on her mouth, a little dog under one arm....
“That’s not bad,” said Melissa, tilting her head to look at it.
“No, my dear,” said Beall with an irrepressible touch of
amusement--“that’s not half bad! I’m glad you like it. Sit down--” He
put one hand on the back of a deep chair and shoved it nearer the fire.
“Thanks,” said Melissa--“I think not. Just give me the book and I’ll
go. I’m really determined.”
“In that case--” said Beall with a shrug. He prowled along his shelves,
one hand in his pocket, the other touching and shifting odd volumes as
he came to them. Melissa stood before the fire and looked up at the
woman with the dog. She had said what seemed to her the properly casual
thing to say. But she had never seen a Zuloaga before. She didn’t as a
matter of fact know that it was a Zuloaga and the rich darkness of it,
its almost sinister beauty, moved her like music.
Not the sort of music that came dulled by intervening walls from the
other part of the house ... not that throbbing, wooing, insensate
clamor ... but music of woods and brasses subtly commingled; of
stateliness and struggle and heartbreak, divinely blent ... she stood
and gazed, rapt in a delicious wonder.
“Here you are!” said Beall, returning, with the object of his search in
hand.
“Thank you so much,” said Melissa. Her eyes coming back to him, were
starry.
“You lovely thing!” said Beall huskily, caught her close, and kissed
her on the mouth--again and again.
As if an animal had broken covert, green sunlit quiet covert, and
leaped at one ... suddenly.
Melissa stood unresponsive as a woman made of clay--so that after a
moment he released her, stared at her and laughed, abruptly.
“Sorry!” he muttered--but it took very little acuteness to see that he
was nothing of the sort, only puzzled--and rather curious.
Shaken with disgust, cold with anger she took the book from the table
where he had dropped it, and turned away.
“Please never do that again,” she said icily. “I loathe being kissed.”
Beall moved a chair from her path with courtesy a trifle mocking.
“Forgive me,” he pleaded--“but I wonder, Melissa--if that isn’t merely
protective coloration?”
(“You’re under the microscope,” Luke had warned her ... and Luke had
known!)
Nothing in Melissa’s experience helped her to answer Beall’s eyes and
his skeptical smile. Her extraordinarily self-cloistered existence
before the Marchesa’s experimenting had not included young men who
kissed one--that way.
From current fiction and drama she knew that outcries of righteous
indignation on the part of young women thus affronted had gone, so to
speak, out of style.
Yet she couldn’t, for the sake of her own lacerated pride, allow him so
to close the episode--allow him so sharp a last word.
She thought of the Marchesa--she thought of what the Marchesa would
say--pausing in the doorway, with her head back, her eyelids scornfully
lowered it came to Melissa--as if the Marchesa had whispered in her
ear--the way to wound her man deepest, to make him smart the cruelest.
She launched her shaft with a steady hand.
“I can’t forgive you,” she drawled ... “for being so clumsy.”
And seeing him redden in surprise, she knew herself a marksman.
CHAPTER XVI
Luke, saying good night at Melissa’s threshold, looked at her hard,
shook his head and sighed deeply.
“Fresh as the mythical daisy,” he commented. “Don’t look as if you’d
ever had a jolt in your life. I take it I did Cassandra for nothing.
Austin was the Perfect Playmate and no more. Well ... I stick to my
story--nevertheless!”
“Good night, Luke,” said Melissa softly.
He kissed the tips of her outstretched fingers: “Good night, Lissa!
You may keep your thoughts but I’d give a penny or so to know your
dreams....”
“Wouldn’t you!” said Melissa ... and closed the door on him very gently.
She was telling no one either thoughts or dreams ... no one, that is,
in the flesh.
All the way home from Beall’s house--where the party still raged, with
unabated enthusiasm--Melissa had sat in a kind of tense abstraction,
going over and over, the things Beall had said, the things he had
looked and the last thing of all which he had startlingly and
disconcertingly done before the Zuloaga lady in his library.
“If only I had some one to talk to about it!” fretted Melissa in
silence. “Some one who could help....”
Not Luke--after his justifiable and disregarded advice.
Not the Marchesa--Melissa shuddered to fancy the Marchesa’s malicious
amusement over Melissa’s discomfiture.
There wasn’t anywhere in the world any one who really cared--_what_
happened to Melissa--nor how she came out of her maze.
Nobody in the world. Loneliness unbelievable!
She flung her cloak on a chair and lit the lamp at the farther end of
the couch beside a bowl of Murdock’s roses. He had gotten to roses,
eventually--deep heavy-headed red ones, which was more than one might
have expected, from him, florally speaking.
Three o’clock! The world was still as death. Hardly a sound came up
from the street below. The lamp made a shallow golden circle--on the
couch, on a bit of the rug.
Melissa touched a match to the fire laid waiting on the hearth and
curled herself up against cushions, bare arms hugging her silver knees,
dark eyes fixed on the flames.
She was hurt--she was sore--she was shamed, in some fair inner place of
her soul, by Beall’s embrace--that fierce and undesired contact, which
had nothing to do with love--or affection--or even friendship--
“I’m not even sure I should want that sort of thing from a man I--cared
for ...” she mused unhappily--“Only--perhaps--from a man I cared
for--it wouldn’t seem--that sort of thing....”
For the first time she began to doubt her ability to go through with
the venture she had undertaken. “There isn’t a chance in a thousand
that the man who can give me the--material--stuff I want ... can give
me ... love ... as well. That’s too much of a fairy-tale! And I don’t
know if I can pay--for the rest.”
She didn’t know when the eyes of the man in the picture came between
her and the fire. She seemed presently to have been looking into those
eyes for a long time and not at the singing blaze at all.
She seemed to be talking to him--and not to herself--his voice was not
strange ... she might have been hearing it for years.
She had of course been wearing the picture about, in the craziest way,
over her heart--looking at it long moments and dreaming over it--the
room held echoes of him perhaps....
Kathleen had said, “Mister Roderick’s been living here, now--oh, eight
or nine years ... ever since he finished college. He’s that fond of the
place and no wonder.”
And no wonder! Melissa’s beloved room. Her air-castle.
Silent in that enchanted lamplight she knew what he would be saying;
with a slight quizzical smile, with a faint indulgent scowl: “My good
child, you’re playing with fire. What did you expect? He’s a man who
knows--as much as any man knows--about women. You know nothing at all
about men--except from books. Inside that pretty shell of yours....”
Melissa fancied herself crying--a small breathless interruption--“You
_do_ think it’s a pretty shell?”
And Mister Roderick replying--casually, with a teasing smile--“Oh, it
will pass ... I’d have let you know if I hadn’t liked it. Well--as I
was saying, from a worldly standpoint, you’re ridiculously--innocent.”
Melissa retorted--always good at a verbal thrust in imaginary
conversation--“You _like_ me to be innocent--don’t you?”
“There’s always one man who likes a woman to be innocent. But even he
knows she’s safer with a little wisdom in her pocket.”
“I didn’t know he was going to kiss me.”
“You might have known it--going off into his work-shop with him--away
from the rest of the crowd. You knew what he was like. Luke Kenealy
had told you. You knew he was attracted by you. You could feel it.
Women can. No, no, Melissa--I’m not at all sorry for you! You asked for
trouble--and you got it. One good thing--you’ll know better next time.
You know now, he isn’t a prospect--only a prospector.”
“Please!--that’s horrible!”
“Spades, with no bows on the handles! You were gunning for him. He was
gunning for you. He drew first--that’s all. Serves you darned well
right for not selecting your opponents with a little more intelligence.”
“That’s--sordid.”
“So is what you’re doing. And that outrageous old woman, my aunt, is
making it worse all the time. What’s the good of lying to yourself?
It’s a soft berth you want....”
“It isn’t--that isn’t the thing I want most!”
“You don’t want a thing most--when you’re willing to sell it to buy
something else.”
“I want beauty--I’d walk through fire to get it.”
“You’re fooling yourself, Melissa--there isn’t any beauty without love.
Look at a sunset, the day you’ve lost your lover--you won’t see the
rose and gold any more than a blind man. The world you walk in will
have beauty washed out of it by the tears you’ve shed. That’s not a
phrase--that’s the truth. Your eyes will be out of focus. Let alone
your eyes! You won’t be _keyed_ to beauty--and for you it won’t be
_there_!”
The fire, a matter of green wood, doubtless, began to smoke. Flame sank
to ember and smudge. All in a moment a thing of life became a thing of
dissolution and dark unloveliness. Melissa, warm among her cushions,
shivered as if a twitch-nosed rabbit had gone over her grave.
“What about the broken-hearted poets who’ve made the sweetest songs?”
“They were painting from memory, old dear! It’s lovely to look at--but
painful to do. Now run along to bed--and forget about Beall! You scored
at the last....”
“I shan’t tell Luke, and have him crowing.”
“You needn’t tell any one but me.”
“If the Marchesa asks--I promised. That’s really all she gets for what
she’s spending on me.”
“Looking back into life--over your shoulder! Tell her, then. It doesn’t
matter.”
Melissa was asleep before the fire died.
She had no need to dream--asleep.
CHAPTER XVII
Eliminating Beall, then, as seemed necessary, or at least advisable
after that much-revealing moment in the company of Messrs. Cabell and
Zuloaga, Melissa centered her attention closely and with considerable
result on Fleming, who, the Marchesa insisted, was in any case by far
the most desirable young man on Melissa’s horizon.
“Artists--and poets and playwrights--all that tricky lot--” this was
the Marchesa’s pronouncement, “make very fine suitors but doubtful
providers ... of anything but excitement.” She added that she had loved
more than one such in her time and was speaking not without notes. She
said she had had poems written to her and pictures painted of her ...
and all it ever procured her was a little unpleasant notoriety.
“One may love a stockbroker in comparative privacy,” concluded the
Marchesa, not without reason--“but women who bestow their affections
upon Genius have usually found themselves before the thing was
over--fairly conspicuous.”
Melissa said merely that she hadn’t found Beall as interesting as she
expected.
To which the Marchesa replied that in that case it might be well to
expunge him and go on to the next.
“No good wasting time,” said the Marchesa, “on a man who can’t keep
one amused before marriage.... It’s asking too much of oneself to take
on such a handicap. I think you had better--yes--I think you had better
bring this Fleming to see me....”
Melissa writhed but agreed.
“I shall be able to tell everything--the moment I look at him,” the
Marchesa assured her.
Melissa mentioned the projected house-party. It might be rather nice
she said.
Instantly the Marchesa became avid for detail.
“Where is the place--would you go by train--or by motor? There would
be how many others? You must have an especial wardrobe ... these
country-house parties ... I have been on many a one in England ...
unlimited opportunity ... the most delightful intimacy, under the
safest circumstances. Melissa--I have an inspiration--une idée
lumineuse!”
“Yes?” said Melissa politely.
She was by no means enamored of the Marchesa’s inspirations. In fact
she rather shrank from the crooked miles they might wander.
“You shall bring him to see me--and I shall be asked to go with you!”
Worse than Melissa had dreamed! She barely controlled her features.
“Of course--if he did--that would be charming.”
“If he did!” said the Marchesa and laughed like an aged imp, toying
with the pitchfork of its betters. “--But he will! Do you suppose I
cannot arrange a thing as simple as that? I have been the Egeria of
more than one statesman, Melissa--(not Americans, I may add!) I was
born with a flair for diplomacy.”
Melissa, finding herself up a blind alley said that she would be very
happy to bring Murdock to call ... and did, some four days later.
He went, like a lamb to the slaughter, being distinctly flattered
at Melissa’s suggesting the expedition, and only requesting certain
necessary information before starting forth.
“Is she an aunt of yours, Melissa? Some sort of relation or other?”
“No, Murdock--she’s nothing to me at all. Except”--said Melissa,
swallowing a slight obstruction in her conscience--“a _very_ dear old
friend.”
“Oh--I see! Just wanted to know so as not to pull any boners. If she’s
a very dear old friend we’ll have to be pretty nice to her--eh?”
“I wish you would!”
“I like old ladies,” said Murdock warmly. “Something sort of sweet
about ’em. I like those kinds of cap-things they wear--mostly on the
stage, of course. And I like to see ’em knit. This home-and-mother
stuff gets me every time.”
Melissa thought of the Marchesa’s invincible gray curls, thought of her
rouged and polished finger-nails (clutching a bit of knitting!)--of the
unbending Cupid’s bow of her skillfully painted mouth ... and knew a
moment’s wild despair.
“The Marchesa’s a trifle--foreign--she lived so long abroad, you
know,” she offered, without much hope, however, of suggesting the
surprise in store for him.
As a final attempt at sparing the young man’s filial illusions, she
told the Marchesa on the day before the call:
“Murdock is rather a--conventional person. I’m afraid he expects you
to--wear a lace cap ... and all that.”
“Indeed!” said the Marchesa snippily--“You must have given him a pretty
notion of my age!”
Melissa looked--and felt--exceedingly unhappy.
“Does he also expect me to totter around with a stick and wear a cameo
cart-wheel under my chin?” inquired the Marchesa acidly.
Melissa knowing that such was very likely Murdock’s friendly
expectation, shut her lips tight and said no more on the subject.
When the day arrived, she rang the bell of the Marchesa’s apartment
with a finger, icy in its glove, and turned to Murdock’s ardent murmur
of “Gosh--you look beautiful, this afternoon!”--the vaguest nervous
tremor of a smile.
“Now, do be nice, Murdock!” she implored him.
“I tell you I like ’em,” said Murdock soothingly.
Then the door opened, under Anna’s fingers, upon a new heaven, so to
speak, and a new earth--striking Melissa speechless.
Not a picture on the walls, except for a print of Reynolds’ Innocence,
all white muslin and blue ribbon, above the mantelshelf. Gone all the
faded French naughtinesses in their faded gilt frames. Gone all the
autographed and whiskered young men. Remained the Sèvres bowl--filled
with violets--it is true--but set chastely in the middle of a little
table. Remained the chaise longue piled with cushions; the piano,
Spanish-shawled; the tea-table, Dresden-cupped and silver-laden ... but
lacking the pageant of nineteenth century manhood which had formerly
ambuscaded mantelshelf and wall, the place seemed now merely a calm and
gracious interior, the retreat of an elderly gentlewoman....
Casting about in search of whom, Melissa’s incredulous eyes came to
rest upon the Marchesa.
Such a Marchesa! It took two looks, and then two more, to be at all
sure of her, who sat before them smiling gently, holding out a fragile,
ringless hand in token of welcome.
The lace cap was there--on hair parted in the middle, brushed smooth,
and silverly shining. The cameo brooch was there, fastening a fichu of
exquisite yellowed lace, upon a passionless dove-gray breast ... the
black velvet neckband was there, too ... imperishable, apparently ...
but it, like the Spanish shawl and the violets, now took character from
its surroundings, suggesting only delicate feminine vanity, pleasantly
surviving the years.
“Ah, Melissa,” said the Marchesa--actually the note of a
grandmother--“I am so glad to see you, dear. It’s very sweet of you to
find time for an old woman like me ... and this is Mr. Fleming of whom
I have heard so much?”
Melissa said it was. She found herself incapable of adding anything to
the presentation.
She watched while Murdock, bending reverently over the Marchesa’s
fingers, sat himself almost at once, figuratively speaking, at the
Marchesa’s old-lady slippered feet.
“This is a great privilege,” said Murdock, with endearing simplicity.
“I do so like to have young people around me,” the Marchesa assured
him. “Melissa, my dear, will you ring for tea?”
And at tea she completed an easy conquest. Such a Marchesa--and such
a tea! Plum-cake ... out of an English novel. Half a dozen sorts of
sandwich. Cream to be cut with a knife--very nearly....
Murdock ate enormously. The Marchesa served him like a mother.
“Ah--do let me give you some of this--it’s my own recipe!”
“I know you’re a wonderful housekeeper,” cried Murdock, his soul in his
eyes--and in his mouth.
“I love my home,” said the Marchesa modestly.
Melissa dared not lift her glance. Hysteric laughter seethed within her.
The Marchesa continued with the softest of uncomplaining sighs: “It’s a
little difficult sometimes--living in an apartment--to do as much about
the place, myself, as I’d like. Nothing makes me happier--nothing--let
me give you just a tiny bit of plum-cake....”
“It’s great!” said Murdock and accepted a second slice without question.
“Nothing,” said the Marchesa, “makes me happier than to put a big white
apron over my gown, and go out in the kitchen and beat up a cake ...
like this one.”
“Did you make this?” asked Murdock respectfully. “Best thing I ever
ate!”
“It’s very simple--” said the Marchesa, smiling and patting his hand.
“It’s all a matter of knowing how. I was taught as a girl that these
things were a woman’s dearest province. That was a long time ago,
you see.... I’m afraid the girls of to-day would find that rather
laughable....” She looked at Murdock almost imploringly.
“They’d make a darned sight better wives and mothers if they’d had your
training,” said Murdock warmly.
“After all,” pursued the Marchesa, “isn’t that what women were sent
into the world for? That and nothing else--just to be good wives and
mothers.” She lowered her eyelids and patted back a little cough with
the tips of her fingers ... from the nails of which rouge and polish
had chastely departed.
“That’s exactly what I feel about it,” Murdock hastened to assure
her.... “I’ve got no time for professional women ... can’t stand ’em in
an office. It takes the bloom off ... if you see what I mean.”
“I do, indeed,” said the Marchesa. “Let me ring for fresh tea!”
“No, thank you--not for me! I’ll take one more shot at that cake--if I
may.”
The Marchesa said he might. She cut him a whopping slice with the
purest maternal enthusiasm, then she laid her fingers on Melissa’s arm
and drew her into the conversation sweetly.
“This dear girl,” said the Marchesa.... “I’m so glad she isn’t one of
those terribly brainy creatures ... just a simple, sincere affectionate
little woman!”
Murdock being for the moment submerged in plum-cake, Melissa flung her
hostess a glacial and murderous look.
“Did you make the gown you have on, dear?” inquired the Marchesa,
fingering the sleeve of Melissa’s smart black satin with loving
interest. She added to her other guest: “You never saw such a child
with her needle!”
Murdock fairly radiated honest satisfaction.
“Why hasn’t Melissa brought me to see you before?” he demanded. “This
has been wonderful.”
“She must bring you again--very soon,” said the Marchesa. “I’m a lonely
old woman and an afternoon like this makes me happy for days.”
“I’ll tell you what--” said Murdock suddenly. The Marchesa waited,
smiling, all home-and-mother in her look. Melissa set her teeth and
drew on her glove with a jerk.
“I’m having a little house-party,” said Murdock eagerly, “first part of
next month ... on an old farm of mine, just outside of Baltimore. The
party’s for Melissa. It would be great if you could come, too....” He
looked from the Marchesa to Melissa and back to the Marchesa again. “Do
come!” he begged, with increasing ardor. “Everybody’d love to have you
... and I’ve got a wonderful old kitchen down there ... big as a house
... you could put on your big white apron and beat up a cake to your
heart’s content. Is that a date? Do say you’ll do it!”
“My dear, dear boy!” said the Marchesa, obviously touched to the heart.
She put her handkerchief to her nose--to one eye--and allowed an April
smile to waver out above it. April, no longer new--but authentic.
“Shouldn’t I be in the way?--a tiresome old woman?”
“It would be like having Whistler’s Mother around,” said Murdock nicely
sentimental and unexpectedly cultural. “Wouldn’t it, Melissa?”
“Exactly,” said Melissa. She jerked on the other glove in sequence and
forced herself to smile.
“We-e-l-ll ... if you really want me so much....” said the Marchesa.
“We absolutely do,” insisted Murdock.
“Of course we do,” said Melissa, politely.
“Dear me!” said the Marchesa, “of all the unexpected and delightful
things! I’ll do it. I’m a silly old creature--but I can’t resist.
There’s just one ... drawback....”
“Now--now--no drawbacks allowed!” objected Murdock.
“If--” said the Marchesa timidly--“I might bring my maid ... she’s been
with me for years ... and I’m so absurdly helpless....”
“Of course bring your maid,” said Murdock at once. “All the room in the
world.”
“Then I shall begin right now to anticipate,” said the Marchesa. “You
don’t know what pleasure you’ve given me.” As Murdock took her wrinkled
little hand in his big brown one, she murmured with subtle pathos--“I
never had a son!...”
* * * * *
“Gosh!” observed Murdock, waiting for the elevator.--“Isn’t she a
wonder! She’s like an old lady out of a book.”
“You noticed that?” said Melissa.
Doubt stirred faintly in Murdock’s breast at the inexplicable aloofness
of his companion’s reply. Had he been too hasty? Was the very dear old
friend not unanimously desired on his house-party?
“You’ll be glad to have her--won’t you?” he inquired with a slight
touch of uneasiness. “I thought of course....”
“Oh, yes--oh, yes, indeed!” said Melissa, pulling herself together, and
smiling reassuringly.
Anna came out of the Marchesa’s apartment.
“Miss Wayne--if you could step back--just a moment. The Marchesa wishes
to speak to you.”
“Sorry!” said Melissa, brushed Murdock’s sleeve with a consoling hand,
and went back into the room of Reynolds’ Innocence.
The Marchesa was sitting very straight in the winged chair, a faint
flush of excitement staining her otherwise guiltless cheeks. She
put out an imperious hand; she drew Melissa down--and although the
door was closed between her and that stalwart figure waiting at the
elevator-shaft--she whispered in Melissa’s ear.
“I’m taking Anna along,” said the Marchesa sibilantly, “in case that
cake should have to be beaten up ... it was hers!”
“I see,” said Melissa. She did.
It was undeniably as simple as that.
CHAPTER XVIII
So the Marchesa went to Four Oaks Farm, which was the unique name of
Murdock’s little place near Baltimore. And Anna went, too, in the
grimmest of tempers.
“She hates the country,” said the Marchesa to Melissa, as the train
drew out of the Pennsylvania station--“but it will do her good--to see
how the other half lives. Do you like my bonnet?”
Melissa replied that it was very sweet--as undoubtedly it was, erring
a little, if anything, on the side of too much sweetness. Pansies--for
thoughts (not itemized)--wreathing a simple black straw, draped with a
black lace veil.
“I feel positively naked--with nothing but rice-powder on my face,”
grumbled the Marchesa. “However--the effect is good--isn’t it?”
Melissa admitted that the effect was excellent.
A black silk gown with a bit of lace at the throat--a convincingly
roomy black coat. Spectacles--in a case. A drop of lavender on a square
of hemstitched linen, four times the size of the Marchesa’s usual
handkerchief.
“I had Anna make me a dozen of these,” said the Marchesa thoughtfully,
“and start a little pink sock....”
“For whom?” asked Melissa in horror.
“What does it matter?” returned the Marchesa pleasantly. She conceded
however--“an afghan might be better--more impersonal.”
“I should think so!” said Melissa.
“Now--” said the Marchesa, “tell me again who these people are.
Kenealy, of course, I know--but the rest....”
She and Melissa were secluded in a Pullman drawing-room with the
reluctant Anna in attendance. It had seemed best at the last moment not
to drive down; spring rains and unalluring roads. Murdock therefore had
gone ahead by a day, to be sure of everything, and Luke Kenealy, Em’ly
Armistead, Beall and a girl called Nelly Rivers were at the moment
playing bridge in a car to the rear.
Melissa named and explained them as best she could.
“Austin Beall is going because Murdock was keen on having him and I
hadn’t any reason I could offer....”
“Why should you? It will amuse me to meet him. I know his kind like a
book. What does the Armistead girl do?”
“Nothing, I think. She would try to marry Luke ... if he were free.”
“Doesn’t speak well for her intelligence. And the other one?”
“Nelly Rivers is a singer. She has a very beautiful voice. She is
studying for grand opera.”
“Ha!” said the Marchesa. “More people have studied for grand opera
than ever got into the chorus. Is she pretty?”
“In a way,” said Melissa.
“Then you have a clear field--with Murdock?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Melissa stiff with distaste.
“Oh, yes, you do! The other two women are negligible; you’ll have only
yourself to thank if he isn’t yours before you leave here. I’ll help
you, my dear--all I know how--you may count on me!”
When Melissa looked out of the window without replying, the Marchesa
adjusted her black lace and pansies, preened herself before a little
mirror which she took from a motherly black silk bag, and hummed an old
song--doubtless by way of rehearsal.
“I shall let him call me Granny,” she mused softly.
Life, for the Marchesa, was unquestionably assuming a livelier iris.
She would thereafter extend an even readier helping hand to worthy
young women. Her thoughts ran pleasantly among such possibilities while
the train hurtled on through a spring-touched landscape.
Presently she fell asleep and thus off-guard, her mouth took on a
tiredness, a drooping and a pallor infinitely pathetic. Like the mouth
of an outworn Columbine, flung down by Some One tired of the toy.
CHAPTER XIX
Murdock met them at Baltimore and drove them out to Four Oaks.
Melissa and the Marchesa he took in his own car, leaving the others
to follow, in a roomier vehicle. It was four o’clock of a heavenly
afternoon when they left the station and in less than an hour they
were standing before the fire in a quaintly delightful old living-room
with dark hand-hewn beams across the ceiling, wide windows, looking
onto a stone paved terrace and thence into a garden ... bowls of lilac
and plum-blossom everywhere ... on the mantelshelf, a model of a
four-masted bark in full sail.
“I hadn’t realized that it was spring--already,” said Melissa to Luke
Kenealy standing at her shoulder.
He replied in an equally lowered voice: “I’m afraid those lilacs grew
aforetime ... for gold and not for love.”
Murdock caught the last smiling word or so. He cut in proudly--“Oh,
lilacs won’t be blooming round here for another six weeks yet.”
“So I was saying,” Luke assured him.
The Marchesa, squired by Murdock into a great arm-chair and relieved of
bonnet, coat and bag, beamed upon the company gently.
Her silvery banded hair, her wrinkled ringless little hands, the
decorous glint of her black silk gown, the brooch in the lace at her
throat, fitted that setting as a canvas fits a frame.
“No one is to bother about me in the least,” she assured them
placidly. “I shall be here by the fire in case of broken heads--or cut
fingers--that’s all!”
“Isn’t she the sweetest old thing!” murmured Em’ly quite audibly and
Nelly Rivers knelt to remove the Marchesa’s goloshes with deferential
fingers. Even Austin Beall, leaning an elbow on the mantelshelf, looked
on with less than the usual skeptic gleam in his eyes ... and Murdock
... might have been at the very least, the Marchesa’s favorite son.
Only Luke and Melissa, drifting toward a window looking out into the
bare, shadowy garden, held themselves callously apart, talked in muted,
distrustful murmurs.
“What’s she done to herself?” said Luke. “The Aged Playmate, I mean.
Seems to me she had curls, when I saw her at your place ... and a
variety of rings on the fingers. Also a goodish bit of frescoing. Where
are the lilies and roses of yester year? ... if it’s a fair question?”
Melissa shrugged. “See for yourself.”
“I see that she looks like Whistler’s Mother.”
“That’s her intention. Murdock likes mothers.”
Luke whistled softly. “The little old minx! One more game, eh? And the
only make-up in which she could play it.”
“It’s making me utterly wretched,” said Melissa suddenly.
“Why? I should think it would amuse you enormously.”
“Oh, Luke ... to see her, sitting there--so exquisitely
saintly--Murdock and the rest standing about adoring her!”
“I dare say she’s had a good deal of adoration in her life--by and
large. Why grudge her one more lick at the spoon?”
“She isn’t real!” said Melissa.
“Are _you_?” asked Luke quietly.
Melissa had no answer for him. Because she knew she wasn’t. She knew
that the clothes she wore and the place she slept in, the food she ate,
the beauty and ease she hugged about her like a garment, were all magic
of the Marchesa’s invocation. Impermanent as sunlight on a wall--or
moonlight on a wave. Frail as cobwebs on the grass of a summer morning.
“No--I’m not real,” said Melissa. “But I wish to God I were!”
“We’re none of us real,” said Luke--“so why worry? All you’ve got
is the world you’re in--and it isn’t my world, nor Beall’s nor the
Marchesa’s. Even the chicken that crosses the road in the grip of a
primal urge, has a world of her own ... and it isn’t the world of the
dog that chases her. You’re inside a bubble of your own blowing, my
dear--so are we all, all honorable men! Just sit tight and pray it
doesn’t burst with you.”
“How unbearably lonely that sounds,” said Melissa slowly.
“Unbearably lonely it is!” Luke told her, taking out his
cigarette-case. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I suppose,” said Melissa, “there isn’t anything--”
“Matter of fact--there isn’t,” said Luke. “Or it would have been done
before this--by some bright lad or other. It’s only fools like lovers
...” he laid his fingers over hers for a moment to take the sting out
of that.... “It’s only fools like lovers that try to come too near each
other ... and find it all ends in a wet soapy smear on the floor of the
universe.”
He blew a smoke ring with great care and some success. It dissolved
against the pane.
“Do I see a fountain in the garden?” he inquired interestedly.
“Go look for yourself,” said Melissa. “You’ve made me exceedingly low
in my mind.”
She went back to the group at the fireplace. Murdock was saying
cheerfully: “--so I thought we’d just have a little bridge to-night ...
maybe to-morrow I can turn up enough people for a dance. Cars in the
garage if anybody wants to explore the country ... and horses, if you’d
rather ride ... the Marchesa....”
“Do call me Granny!” suggested the Marchesa, prettily appealing.
“I’d love to,” accepted Nelly Rivers.
“I saw her first!” said Murdock jealously. There was a shout of easy
laughter.
Beall put in, playing with the sails of the four-masted bark....
“Granny--what bright eyes you’ve got!”
And Melissa looked up at him quickly. But if the words held anything
but jest, his manner failed to show it.
“The better to see you, my dear,” returned the Marchesa sedately--and
every one laughed again.
They separated presently to go to their rooms, and Murdock waylaid
Melissa on the staircase.
“I haven’t had a minute alone with you,” he grumbled. “Don’t bother
about changing yet ... get your coat and slip down again ... let’s go
for a ride before dinner!”
“What about the rest?” demurred Melissa.
She smiled into his upturned face and saw his blue eyes darken. “They
can take care of themselves. I only asked ’em to get you here.”
“Including Granny?”
“Isn’t she a peach!” said Murdock warmly. “She’s going to make us one
of those plum-cake things to-morrow.”
“Did she say she would?”
“If we’d let her have the kitchen all to herself for a couple of hours.”
“She should have Anna to help her,” said Melissa, despising herself for
playing into the Marchesa’s hand. “She oughtn’t to do too much....”
“Oh, Anna always chops the citron,” Murdock explained at once. “Granny
can’t bear the smell of citron. Run along and get your coat--won’t you!
We’ll be too late for that drive if you don’t.”
Melissa fetched her coat.
They drove madly--at first, later dawdling like a country boy and girl
in a buggy--along the pleasantly meandering road between Baltimore
and Annapolis. An early twilight webbed the countryside with shadow,
through which faint earthy scents drifted sweet.
“Trees beginning to come out,” said Murdock. “Kind of a spring
smell, isn’t it?” He displayed a surprising knowledge of the bucolic
existence. His grandfather, he said, had owned Four Oaks--and his
father. “Might settle down on it myself, some day. Breed cattle. I like
a farm.”
It was all a thousand miles away from the sort of thing Melissa had
hitherto seen in him. She sensed a big, good-humored, ingenuous boy
back of that young-man-about-town exterior. Clean as his own fields.
The feel of his tweed-coated shoulder against hers repelled her not at
all. Vaguely she liked it. She tried to fancy a headier reaction ... if
he turned ... if the touch were closer ... she couldn’t feel that it
would hurt or frighten her. At the same time, she couldn’t altogether
make herself feel that she wanted it....
“Do you--like the country?” asked Murdock in the midst of her intent
self-questioning. “I mean really like it ... not just over a week-end,
the way most women do.”
“I think,” said Melissa hesitantly, “that with some one you cared for
... it might be ... rather wonderful.”
“Wouldn’t it!” said Murdock happily. He laughed, sending the car ahead
with an accession of speed that obviously furnished him a momentary
outlet. “Granny _said_ that was the way you’d feel about it!”
“Oh, did she!” said Melissa.
Granny’s amazing perspicacity rather spoiled the homeward ride for
her in spite of earthy fragrance in the nostrils--rush of frosty air
against the upturned face.
To be so anticipated in one’s every move ... humiliating!
Even a lace cap and spectacles couldn’t quite disguise the Marchesan
malice of that.
CHAPTER XX
The house-party at Four Oaks was not--for all its carefree nature--a
success. Almost from the first, something went wrong. Some rift in the
lute proclaimed itself by way of an increasing number of flat notes. As
if the thing had not been properly orchestrated; as if an instrument
somewhere in the ensemble were playing more or less than its necessary
part.
At the bridge-table, dancing, riding, sitting around the fire at
tea-time--no matter where Murdock’s house-guests foregathered, nor for
how harmless a purpose, something jarred and something failed to fuse.
“It’s that Armistead girl,” the Marchesa told Melissa in a bed-time
moment so to speak, when Granny’s cap and brooch having been laid
upon the dressing-table for the night, safe in the seclusion of
a rose-curtained bedroom with a stately four-poster awaiting her
slumbers, the oracle resumed her avocation.
“That Armistead girl’s dangerous ... because she’s a fool and in love.
I think I’ll tell her, she might as well let Kenealy alone. He doesn’t
give her a thought....”
“Please--” cried Melissa in sincere distress--“I hope you won’t do
anything of the sort!”
“Why not? She’s spoiling the whole thing. She’s like salt in
ice-cream,” said the Marchesa thoughtfully, making a comparison, which
by the homely nature of it could have derived only from that period of
her existence before she encountered the Italian nobility. “She won’t
let the rest of you settle to anything. She’s forever maneuvering....”
“And what am _I_ doing?” asked Melissa bitterly.
“Not so much as you might,” the Marchesa assured her. “I must admit you
irritate me, at times. You don’t seem to recognize an opportunity when
you meet it.”
Melissa was sitting before the Marchesa’s fire, in a soft mouse-colored
velvet robe, with her dark hair loose on her shoulders.
“For instance you look extremely well in that thing,” went on the
Marchesa with scientific frankness ... “and a long-haired woman
these days has the lure of the unusual ... but do you take advantage
of either fact? You might slip back to the library for a book some
night--just as you are, now ... but does it occur to you to do so?”
“Don’t you think that’s been fairly well covered in a good many third
acts?” inquired Melissa, restraining a smile.
“If it has--there’s nothing in third acts that hasn’t been done in real
life,” said the Marchesa snappishly. She mused a little, sniffing her
salts and blinking at the burning logs. “Of course--you’d have to be
sure Murdock had stayed up to read.”
“It might be simpler,” offered Melissa demurely--“just to ask him to
wait.”
“Oh, very well, Miss Impertinence!” rejoined the Marchesa--“Anna--what
day is this?”
Anna, busy in another part of the room, with unfolding and refolding
of the Marchesa’s countless garments, replied briefly--“Sunday the
seventh.”
“Seventh,” echoed Anna’s mistress abstractedly. “We’ve been here,
two whole days--with absolutely nothing to show for it.” She turned
sharply on Melissa. “You were in the garden for more than an hour this
afternoon--whom were you with?”
Sooner or later all Melissa’s doings had thus to be accounted for.
“I was with Luke. Nelly Rivers and Austin were with us for a while.
They went walking after that. We sat on a bench and talked.”
“Why do you waste time on Kenealy?”
“Is friendship a waste of time?”
“Don’t fool yourself, Melissa--there’s no such thing as friendship
between a man and a woman free to try anything else.”
“But he isn’t free,” said Melissa. “And his friendship’s all I want.”
She remembered for long after the thing she said then, because in the
moment of her saying it, softly yet with a startling suggestion of
destiny, somebody knocked at the door.
“Give me my cap!” whispered the Marchesa shrilly ... never one to
forget her properties in any scene ... “give me those spectacles--and
a handkerchief....” Melissa having put these things upon the lady’s
head and in her hands, the knock came again, more insistently, and this
time, the Marchesa lifting a gentle voice said, “Anna, open the door!”
It was Murdock. He stood for a second, looking at Melissa, at her loose
dark hair and the whiteness of her slim arms against the smoky shadows
of the things she wore before he brushed a hand across his eyes and
came slowly into the room.
“Sorry--” he said ... his voice betrayed the shock of one sort or
another and his pleasant, high-colored face was very grave.... “I just
took a chance on your still being up ... hoped you hadn’t gone to
bed.... I’ve got--bad news, y’see--Kenealy....”
“Sit down, Melissa!” said the Marchesa crisply, for at Luke’s name,
Melissa had gotten to her feet and stood there, suddenly colorless,
clinging to the back of her chair.
“What’s this about Kenealy?” the Marchesa demanded of Murdock. “You
know how tender-hearted the child is--can’t you see you’re frightening
her outrageously? Tell us at once ... don’t bother about breaking it
gently. Has he been hurt?”
“He isn’t--dead?” said Melissa almost in a whisper.
Something in her cried wildly that she couldn’t bear Luke to be dead.
With his quiet voice--and his laughing moody eyes--his sweet rare trick
of understanding the thing you hadn’t told him....
“Not--_dead_, Murdock?” said Melissa imploringly.
“Good Lord, no!” said Murdock ... “not Luke--his wife!... He’s had a
cable from Hawaii. His _wife’s_ dead. Drowned on some beach or other.
He can get a boat out of San Francisco on the twelfth--if he can make
it. I drove him into Baltimore to catch that one o’clock train. Hadn’t
time to do anything but throw some things into a bag ... he asked me to
say good-by to you all....”
“His wife,” echoed the Marchesa softly--“dear, dear, Melissa!--isn’t
that too dreadful?”
Melissa did not answer. Murdock put out his hand, a big, warm, steady
hand and she took it and clung to it. It sickened her to read the
Marchesa’s thought. Luke, too, now--among the “possible sheaves.”
Could one ever feel clean again, after moments like this?
“He--and his wife owned a ranch--did they not?--in Hawaii?” inquired
the Marchesa, feeling for her handkerchief. “I think Melissa once told
me....”
“A whole flock of ranch-lands--” said Murdock, holding Melissa’s hand
hard. “There’ll be all of hers now--on top of his own. He’ll have a big
estate to settle before he can come back.”
“Poor boy--poor dear!” sighed the Marchesa. She added, having found her
handkerchief and used it with unostentatious effect. “Murdock--I think
Melissa and I had better go in to New York in the morning. It would
seem too heartless--staying on--after this....”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Murdock simply. “Poor old boy--it knocked
him off his feet rather ... coming so rotten sudden....”
“Ah, well,” the Marchesa reminded him gently--“Time softens all
things--except perhaps arteries.”
Realizing at once that the mot was a bit out of character, she took off
her glasses, wiped them and put them on again, sighing.
Mist on the lenses, obviously.
“_I hate her!_” said Melissa, deep in her revolted soul.
Clear as if he stood in the room, Mister Roderick, keen-eyed and
contemptuous, answered that muted cry.
“If you hate her, why do you go on with this disgusting business?...
Tell her you’re through, Melissa!”
But Melissa said nothing at all.
PART IV