Luke was recklessly happy, as Melissa’s lover.
He might have been coming to it all his life. It changed him in a way
that Melissa almost hid her face to see. Because she hadn’t, as she
very soon knew, any right to have worked such a change in him. She
loved him--but not enough. And he loved her too much. Poignantly too
much, for Melissa’s peace of mind. His old casual whimsicality, his
airy smartness, his half-cynical, half-rebellious attitude toward life,
melted imperceptibly, shifted subtly but undeniably into unguarded
acceptance of happiness. Into unreserved belief in the reality of love.
The old Luke she could have laughed with, trifled with, gently derided.
The new Luke looked at her with his heart in his once-mocking eyes ...
and she left her hands in his ... said what he waited for her to say.
With her own heart curiously tormented.
Between shadow and substance.
She had turned to Luke when, in the first dragging days of her
convalescence Mister Roderick seemed gone for good. With strength
returning in her, Mister Roderick came back. And Mister Roderick,
unseen, unheard, untouched, by Melissa’s mortal senses, was yet realer
than Luke ... in the flesh beside her. Where Luke left off, Mister
Roderick began. Poor Melissa! She remembered sometimes with a dim sense
of panic, the “woman wailing for her demon lover....”
It didn’t seem possible that phantasy could so far override the actual.
And yet ... she turned from Luke’s arms to a dream in the darkness.
Perhaps, in the back of her mind was always the surety that others had
seen him if she had not. That the Marchesa vouched for his reality--and
Kathleen. That before very long he would be coming back from whatever
far places he had wandered in ... and that then....
Unfair--unfair and ungrateful! Untrue to Luke who was now so
passionately true to her. Luke who told his soul, with a smile, when
she looked at him.
“I wish--” said Melissa uncertainly, “I wish you’d sometimes be
rude--and insulting--and scornful--as you used ... do you remember? You
said once I was out to marry money. Have you forgotten that? Aren’t you
afraid....”
“Of what?” asked Luke pleasantly, rapping with his stick upon the
window of the taxi and motioning the driver to go round the Park again.
A dark wide silent dusty Park, in whose midnight depths there might
conceivably lurk hold-up men and bandits, but where there was at least
small audience and none to overhear.
“Aren’t you afraid,” insisted Melissa, “that it may be your money that
I’m after?...”
“No--” said Luke with the most disarming candor, “not any more.”
“How can you be so sure, Luke?”
“Don’t know--too happy to tinker with it.”
“But if it were true--at first--why isn’t it true, now?”
“Don’t know. Why does June come after May?”
It was past June then and heat like a fog had lain all day upon the
town.
“Luke--” said Melissa in an odd, hushed voice, “it was October a year
ago I came to the apartment--wasn’t it?”
Luke replied with some irrelevant phrase-making as to the unimportance
of time and the impossibility of measuring it.
“That first night--” said Melissa, “I heard you whistling--‘Somebody
loves me ... I wonder who?’”
“Never whistle it any more,” said Luke with the amazing banality of a
clever man in love.... “I know now....”
“Do you?” asked Melissa wistfully.
“Don’t I?” said Luke.
The taxi lurched over a rut and he tightened his arm about her. He
quoted softly--“‘Where the apple reddens, never pry--Lest we lose
our Eden, Eve and I.’ Introspection--between lovers--both futile and
dangerous.”
“It’s getting on to a year, now,” said Melissa, half to herself, “and I
feel as if it had been ten.”
“Influenza,” Luke reminded her, “is apt to leave one that way. Never
mind ... you’re coming out of it fast! You smiled twice at the most
awful slapstick to-night. Next week I’m going to take you to see Dante
in the movies. If you react to that--I’ll know you’re all well again.”
“React how?” asked Melissa. Luke’s nonsense comforted her strangely.
Life couldn’t be either too real or too awkwardly earnest before that
lazy low-voiced observer of its inadequacies. She forgot that flippancy
is frequently the chain armor of an acutely sensitized soul. When Luke
laughed she thought him amused--which he wasn’t always.
“If the Inferno doesn’t cheer you--back you go to bed!” he assured her.
“Oh, I’m cheered--so far as that’s concerned,” Melissa insisted.
“But not--inebriated, spiritually speaking,” said Luke--“and I’d like
you to be ... mere matter of personal vanity! You don’t seem to find
our affair the ... well, the spring in the desert--that you should.
Melissa ... I love you!”
“I love you, too,” said Melissa, close against his cheek--a remorseful
whisper.
She did love him--but not enough. In a way that would never satisfy
him ... when he came to know. She had known--the first time he told
her. And she had not stopped his telling her. So many kinds of
love in a woman’s life ... how to be sure of a great love at the
end--when one has sent all the little loves packing? People lie and
steal--emotionally--from the blackest fear in the world--the fear
of loneliness. Not one woman out of many women finds the man who was
born to be her lover ... this one passes--and that one--she looks and
listens, soon she hears Time muttering round the corner and puts her
hand in the first warm hand outstretched--so as not to encounter that
grisly shade--alone. So many reasons--for taking love--and all of them
unworthy, evanescent, foredoomed to decay--except the perilous reason
of desiring to give it back....
“What are you thinking?” asked Luke softly.
“Introspection between lovers--no, thank you!” said Melissa and
made him take her home, saying she was sleepy. A lie sufficiently
pretty--but not too white.
She didn’t sleep--ever--when she first got into bed. She lay straight
and still, with her eyes shut, her hands folded over her heart and
dreamed her dream awake. She had willed to do it at first; latterly she
had small choice. Mister Roderick came to her, now, uncalled. There was
not a moment of her day when the thought of him didn’t color her mind.
For her, illusion had overspread reality.
One way of fixing Luke’s claim, of fighting off his ghostly rival
presently occurred to her. In pursuit of which she went to see the
Marchesa and having for half an hour or so made desultory conversation
upon various quite unimportant matters, converged at length upon the
always engrossing subject--among women--of amatory entanglement, and so
arrived, stammering a little and flushing, at the pronouncement of her
news.
The Marchesa sat back in her winged chair dumb for once--but not for
long.
“Mon Dieu!” she gasped eventually and called upon a saint or so as
well. “Are you telling the truth?”
“I don’t lie,” said Melissa--but so much her pride had failed her that
she added bitterly--“when there’s any other way....”
“You are actually engaged to Kenealy?”
“I have just told you.”
“You didn’t know--I have it from Murdock--that he refused to inherit
from his wife--that he has only his own holdings?”
“Of course I knew,” said Melissa coldly. “He told me, himself--when he
had just returned.”
“You little idiot!” said the Marchesa and sniffed and laughed--a high,
thin, scornful sound. “You unutterable little idiot--why couldn’t you
have waited?”
“Why should I have waited?” asked Melissa. She was frightened and
ashamed of the way in which her hand tensed to strike that insulting
smile from the Marchesa’s overly crimson mouth.
“I thought you were to consult me in everything?” insisted Granny’s
twin, leaning forward to stare into Melissa’s face.
“I am sorry,” said Melissa stiffly.
“Are you indeed! Not half so sorry as you will be when I tell you what
you’ve done....”
“I have done nothing--except--promise to marry Luke.”
“After a decent length of time--I hope! How long has his wife been
dead--two months--isn’t it?”
“Four,” said Melissa, frozen. She added, against her will--“They had
not lived together for four years. She did not believe in divorce....”
but she could not somehow bring herself to bare for the Marchesa’s
relentless inspection, Luke’s conjectures that Iwalani’s death had been
Iwalani’s choice.... “I shouldn’t think of marrying him yet--” she
said--“I told you, so soon, only because--as you say--I was to tell
you--everything.”
“You’re a bit late in the day at that, I think,” observed the Marchesa
caustically. “Milles tonnerres! ... if I had dreamed....”
Melissa reminded her mordantly, “I had no reason to suppose you
wouldn’t approve.”
“That was months ago,” retorted the Marchesa with airy change of front
... “before your illness ... before I had heard you calling day after
day for my nephew....”
“_What?_” cried poor Melissa, drowned in shame. “I didn’t know--that’s
unbearable!”
“Don’t trouble to be so dramatic about it,” the Marchesa implored her.
She preened her dry little hands and arched her ankles in a kind of
irritated enjoyment of the moment. “I said I heard you. You were out of
your head--with fever. It was most enlightening. I can’t think where
you got the idea but it was obvious--to both Miss Kenning and me....”
“Please!” said Melissa and put both hands up over her burning face.
“Well--” said the Marchesa, “why be ashamed of it?” Amazing concession
for one bearing pincers and thumbscrews about her! “I’ve a good deal
more respect for you now than I ever had before. I didn’t think you
were capable of a grand passion ... and for a man you’ve never seen....
I was completely charmed by the thought--” (scalpels if not pincers!)
“so much so that I cabled him at once....”
Melissa’s hands dropped back in her lap. She lifted a tortured look.
“You--cabled--Mister Roderick--about _me_?”
“Why on earth do you call him that?” inquired the Marchesa pettishly.
“Like a sentimental parlor-maid!”
“It was what Kathleen called him,” said Melissa. She persisted
doggedly.... “You say you cabled....”
“He’ll be here any day,” said the Marchesa. “And in the meantime,
you’ve gone and got yourself engaged to somebody else. Upon my
word--I’m almost tempted never to do any one a kindness again!”
“What did you tell him?” begged Melissa.
“Oh,--nothing--ah--tangible,” the Marchesa waved a guilty
recollection of waiting Propositions away from her. “Your name wasn’t
mentioned--naturally. You see he’s never heard of you. He’s a romantic
creature, however--and when he learns that just from living in his
rooms and hearing his servant talk about him, you’ve conceived a
hopeless affection for him....”
“I beg of you--” said Melissa. A shiver went over her.
The Marchesa might have been sitting in a crimson-brocaded box upon the
first night of a wonderful play by an unknown author. Melissa’s shame,
Melissa’s uncontrollable shiver sent just such delicious wind-flaws
along her aged veins.
“My good girl!” she cried imperiously, “leave it all to me! Do you
suppose he will ever learn the mechanistics of his love-story? Of
course not! One arranges that you meet--that is all. I shall have
a little supper--just the three of us--here in this room--directly
he returns....” Very nearly the little supper spread itself in that
instant before Melissa’s magicked gaze. Mister Roderick’s half-smiling
eyes across the violets and roses of the Marchesa’s Dresden urn ... the
skeptic arrogance of his mouth ... only arrogance was not all ... that
touch of ardent deviltry ... why there wasn’t a man in the world like
him....
“Luke!” said Melissa suddenly. A rather pitiful cry.
“That--” said the Marchesa settling back with a yawn--she had times
of being suddenly and devastatingly tired and giving way to it with a
kind of contemptuous helplessness.... “That you will have to arrange.
Perhaps the best thing to do....”
“I shall tell him the truth--or nothing,” said Melissa very low.
“As you please!” said the Marchesa. “I was never much of a Sadist,
myself.”