Chapter XXVII

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.”