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!”