Chapter XXVIII

Telling Luke, however, was by no means a thing to be casually undertaken. Even if Melissa hadn’t been wretchedly ashamed of the way she had let things drift, of accepting at Luke’s hands a depth of feeling and a poignancy of emotion she knew she could by no means return ... even if it hadn’t been for that--she would still have shrunk from dealing him such a wound. To first convince him of the authenticity of love--then all at once, to slip from his hands and take her proofs otherwhere.... Melissa couldn’t, in long unhappy hours of considering how to say it, arrive at any decent way of stating her case.

She had not played fair--with Luke. And that was the core of it.

She had salved her loneliness with his love. And she had had no right to do so. She had made him absurdly happy--and she was now going to make him proportionately miserable. All because she hadn’t known her own mind.

The commonest womanly attribute.

She grew thin and white, lost what little color she had regained, groping to find a way out of the maze. Doggedly and blindly she obeyed some inward compulsion which would not let her rest with things as they were.

Brazenly she admitted to herself, that Mister Roderick’s return was at least to find her unhandicapped....

She felt at times that she had no more choice in what she was doing than a moth, blundering through the darkness toward a lighted house.... She felt, always the veriest marionette in the Marchesa’s frail jeweled hands. Man after man, of Melissa’s collecting the Marchesa had discarded, settling now by a whim merely--one didn’t quite dare believe in any more altruistic motive--upon the absent nephew, as the true hero.

Willing to sacrifice her nephew, the Marchesa was, to the dramatic exigencies of the situation which her own polissonnerie had created.

Willing and anxious.

Goethe, with a breathing Marguerite to lead into the garden on her way to a living Faust, could have felt no more exquisite if vicarious thrill than the Marchesa, planning her little supper “... just the three of us....”

But what the Marchesa felt or didn’t feel ... what she was or wasn’t getting out of the moment ... mattered very little, in the final estimate, to Melissa.

All Melissa wanted was to have Luke know that she couldn’t marry him ... without the wicked cruelty of telling him so.

He told himself--as she might have foreseen. He hadn’t missed noticing the shadows under her eyes; the nervous quiver about her mouth; the way her hand lay in his, with no answering tension ... the way she winced from his arms, if she hadn’t time to evade them.

He brought things to a focus, one night, soon after Melissa’s conversation with the Marchesa, standing at the sitting-room window, looking down into the Park, one hand in his trousers pocket, the other playing with an old cigarette-holder of which he was inordinately fond. Melissa sat in a deep chair and watched him unsmiling. There had been queer long silences between them that evening ... taut, dangerous hiatuses.

“And so--” said Luke suddenly--nothing at all to do with his last remark which had dealt in the lightest fashion with the superiority of black-checkered taxi-cabs over red ... “and so--they didn’t, after all, live happy ever after ... did they, Lissa?”

Melissa held her breath for a miserable moment, as if a wave toppled above her, or the earth slipped under her feet. Then she called upon her courage and said looking up at him white-faced ... “I don’t know what you mean.”

“That’s unworthy of our united intelligences, my dear,” said Luke and came and sat upon the arm of her chair and held her eyes with his own. “You do know what I mean--don’t you?--and you’re making yourself sick again trying to let me down light. What’s the good? I’m not so fragile as all that ... once it’s over I shall undoubtedly pick myself up and go on to the next--fata morgana....”

“Once what’s over?” asked Melissa--as if she did not know.

(“Coward!” she said to herself bitterly--“coward--and liar--and sneak!”)

“Why--you and me,” said Luke simply. “What else?”

“Is that--over?” said Melissa huskily.

“Isn’t it?” said Luke. He put his hand under her chin and lifted it.

She shut her eyes. Her mouth twisted.

“Poor little Lissa!” said Luke and drew her head against his arm and laid his cheek upon her hair without another word.

“Luke--” said Melissa after a while--an unsteady whisper--“I’d give anything--to love you--enough....”

“Except enough love!” said Luke gently. “Stop crying, Melissa, and sit up and powder your nose. I’ve seen it coming. I think perhaps I knew it all along. I had no right to crowd you--the night I came back. You were so tired and lonely--you’d have listened to any man ... except, perhaps, our friend Austin.... I like to think you wouldn’t have listened to Austin, even then....”

“I had refused to see him--he telephoned--more than once. Murdock too. I saw Murdock for the first time last Thursday. You see it wasn’t just--loneliness....”

“Whatever it was,” said Luke, “it wasn’t as you’ve just observed--enough. And I knew it. And tried to pretend I didn’t. For which, justly, I now get my come-uppance! Lissa--don’t lie, darling--that doesn’t get us anywhere--has there been one moment when in your heart and without reservation--you wanted it to be _me_?” Even his stubborn lightness stumbled over that. The break in his voice tightened Melissa’s hands upon his arm as if to save him--from herself. He made her tell....

“Not one--was there?”

“Not one,” said Melissa wretchedly.

“That’s what I thought,” said Luke. He stood up and walked over to the table, fingered delphiniums and roses, in a bowl there, blindly.

Melissa followed him. Stood beside him aching to comfort him. Knowing for her own desolation, that the only help she could offer was the withholding of hands and lips not his.

“What taught you better?” asked Luke suddenly. He settled his tie and turned an immobile face. “Or is that an indiscreet question? I might have taught you, myself, you know--if there hadn’t been something in the way....”

Melissa twisted her hands together in silence. Could even Luke understand an obstacle as impalpable as Mister Roderick?

“Another man?” insisted Luke--“not Murdock, for God’s sake! You’ll be counting sheep all your life....”

“Not any one you ever saw,” said Melissa desperately. She added quite well aware how absurd she sounded--“Not--any one that _I_ ever saw ... please, Luke! I can’t talk about it--much.”

“Of course--an ordinary casualty’s got small chance against--the unknown soldier,” said Luke quietly. He looked at Melissa long and hard. “I think,” he said at length, “you’ll come an awful cropper, sweet ... some day. Inside your lovely shell you’re so starved and restless--aren’t you? What is it you’re always looking for?”

“I used to think it was--beauty ...” said Melissa.

“We admit disqualification,” said Luke. “Without protest.”

“Don’t--don’t laugh at me! I can’t bear to be laughed at.”

“I’m laughing at myself--not you. Why do you say you _used_ to think?”

“Because--now--I’m not sure--any more. It’s beauty--and something else....”

“I’m going to hurt you--” said Luke ... “you mean--you used to think you wanted money badly enough to marry for it--didn’t you?”

“Yes--it sounds too horrible!”

“That’s why it’s mostly seen and not heard. Well--and now you still want money--but you want the not impossible he, alongside. No?”

“Yes,” said Melissa unhappily.

“Think he exists?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” said Luke--“Of course that tears it!”

He said further, a little later on, that he hoped he hadn’t asked too many questions and made a nuisance of himself, because after all whom a woman loved and where she married were matters peculiarly her own concern, only....

“I think you’re making a mistake,” said Luke. “We’re two of a kind--in a way--we could have amused ourselves....”

“Amusement isn’t all of it,” Melissa implored him.

“It’s the thing you want to pray for when the lights go up,” said Luke a trifle grimly--and went home.

He didn’t ask to kiss Melissa for the last time--he didn’t even shake hands with her ... which left her incongruously forlorn. He merely opened the door, hat and stick in hand, and said, “See you sometime!” and closed it behind him.

This time, however, he didn’t whistle in the hallway. And Melissa, standing in the middle of the floor with a silly little handkerchief clenched between her fingers, knew what she had done. She could have run after him and cried on her knees to be forgiven. Only she was so glad to be free.

One needs to be ruthless, to be free.... Melissa achieved ruthlessness by turning off all the lights, taking the receiver off the telephone and going to bed in the dark.

She said to herself, on the edge of sleep, “It’s no good thinking if this and if that--it had to happen this way.”

But her last thought of all was--without shame, like most thoughts when the guard of the conscious is dropping--“I’ll see the Marchesa, to-morrow! She may have heard by now....”