by Pamela Kent
She backed away from him, and her eyes became enormous.
“Rick! What are you talking about?” she demanded.
His black eyes blazed with unnatural humor. “I’ve just told you. I’m getting out—I’m being, kicked out!—and unless you want to share the ignominy we’ll say good-bye here and now!”
“Oh, Rick!” she whispered, and appeared to be utterly overcome. She looked appealingly at Jake. “What does he mean?”
Jake shrugged his shoulders, and looked anywhere but at Rick.
“It’s rather a delicate subject. Rick’s a bit upset.”
“A bit upset!” thundered Rick’s father. “And so he ought to be! And so am I! If you take my advice, my girl,” addressing the goddaughter of an English duke, “you won’t have anything more to do with that son of mine! You’ll follow my example and wash him up as a useless blot on the landscape—an expensive blot, mark you, who’ll have to curb his tastes in future, because I won’t do anything to pander to them!”
But this was too much for Melanie, who up till this time had sat silent but wildly concerned at her desk. And when she saw with what remark, able placidity Diane accepted the banishing of a man she had been planning to marry until only a few short minutes before, and the way she once more appealed to Jake with her huge corn-flower blue eyes—and the encouraging way he looked back into them—she knew that she had to do something—say something—to put things right for Rick. And one thing she could do was unmask this pair who fell into one another’s arms under cover of the night, and wrote letters to one another about their future plans.
Their future plans!...
All at once it was all quite clear to her, and she was amazed that it hadn’t been absolutely clear to her before. She had believed Diane was deceiving Rick, and she had disliked Jake, and mistrusted him; but now she knew they had been working together to bring about Rick’s downfall. To get him out of the way altogether! And that was the very thing that was happening—or would happen—if she didn’t prevent it.
She had been able to tell by Rick’s face that he was speaking the truth about the insurance. She was quite certain, also by a look in his face, that he would shake off the dust of his parent’s home, with the minimum loss of time if she didn’t hurry. She took advantage of a lull in the abusive exchanges to interpose quietly, as she stood up: “Will you permit me to go upstairs to my room, Mr. Vandraaton? There is something in my possession I would like you to see—I would like you all to see!” She looked round at them. “It’s important, and I’ll be as quick as I possibly can.”
She didn’t wait for permission to be granted, but slipped from the room and flew up the stairs as if affairs of State were dependent on the speed with which she moved. When she returned to the study she was a trifle breathless, and as she handed over the fragment of letter to Mr. Vandraaton she had the feeling that she was doing something she would have preferred not to do, but in the interests of Rick she no longer had the right to withhold it.
Diane looked pale and disdainful, but at the sight of the familiar notepaper her eyes widened. Jake stared, and then apprehension was written all over his face. Rick looked aloof and bored, and his disdain was of a more telling quality than Diane’s.
Mr. Vandraaton looked up at last. His eyes went questioningly to Melanie.
“How did this come to be in your possession?” he asked. “And where did you find it?”
She explained exactly how and where she had found it, and before the criticism in his look she felt herself flushing.
“I had no intention of making use of it. Sooner or later I would have destroyed it. Only today—this morning—it seemed all at once highly important that I should produce it.”
Lucas looked hard at his son, and then his look passed on, and concentrated on Jake and Diane. There was no doubt about the consternation in both their faces now.
“You recognize this, Miss Fairchild?” he asked. And since the emphasis was on the Miss Fairchild she knew there was no point in denying it. Lucas was far too shrewd to be impressed by evasions.
“I recognize my own notepaper,” she answered coolly. “But I can’t think what it was doing in that young woman’s possession.”
And she looked balefully at Melanie.
Lucas fixed Jake’s uneasy eyes with his own.
“I don’t think you need to re-read it, Crompton,” he said. For the second time that morning his eyes were as pale as ice. “I shouldn’t think there’s the slightest doubt about it that Miss Fairchild is your ‘darling Di’! And that being so, the pair of you will like to get together as quickly as possible—but outside my house! Well away from my house!” He bit out the words with as keen an anger as had possessed him before. “And as for you, Rick—” the eyes coming slowly to life, and pleading with him a little—“you must make your own decisions, but so far as I’m concerned everything is as it was. I accept your explanation about the insurance.”
“Thank you,” Rick replied, but there was no coming to life in his Indian-black eyes, and his voice was hard and bleak. “Thank you very much!” And then he held out his hand. “May I see the letter?”
His father passed it across with noticeable unwillingness, as if he would have spared him this if he could.
But Rick merely smiled in a very unpleasant way, with his thin, taut lips, and then handed the fragment to Jake.
“Keep it,” he advised, “if only as a reminder that for once you were not quite clever enough! I’ve suspected this for some time, and I’ve known you were planning to get me out of the way when the moment was ripe. Well, the moment is ripe, and I’m getting out—right out!—and my father can promote you, or demote you, as he thinks best!” He sent one straight look at his father that had the reproach of a wounded animal in it, and then for an instant he glanced at Melanie before moving briskly to the door. “Good-bye everyone! I’ll feel better when I, also, get outside this house!”
Diane made a little running dart at him. “Rick!” she wailed. “Rick, it was all a mistake! ... Rick! you must try and understand!...”
But fastidiously he removed her clutching fingers from his sleeve, and handed them back to her.
“My arm is no longer yours to cling to,” he told her bluntly.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Melanie lay back against the comfortable, padded back of the seat in the aircraft that was to fly her home across the Atlantic, and knew that she had come to the end of a strange and rather feverish interlude.
There had been color and excitement, bustle and hard work, one or two magical moments, and a great deal of disillusionment. The disillusionment pressed on her like something physical as she lay limply relaxed in her seat, and she knew that was one reason why she felt emotionally drained and exhausted. Another was because the past hours had contained so much of repressed emotion, of strain and tension, and a final rather sad farewell.
When she first met Lucas Vandraaton she would not have believed that they would part with so much regret on both sides. True, she had never been in the slightest awe of Lucas, and he had singled her out for friendly treatment he didn’t seem to bestow on anyone else. But when she left his luxurious Long Island home he was a man who was badly crushed by the knowledge that not merely had he been guilty of an error of judgment, but he had driven his son from home, and deprived him of a means of livelihood.
Rick had a small income that had been left to him by his grandmother, but that wouldn’t go far if he made any attempt at all to live the life he was accustomed to.
“Chicken feed,” Lucas had called it, when he and Melanie sat discussing the matter after the others had left them alone. Jake had accepted his dismissal with the apparent indifference of a man who had lived by his wits before, and knew that almost certainly he would have to do so again. But Diane had gone in a storm of ill-repressed rage, thankful no doubt that her mother had already returned to New York, and the humiliation of having to inform her that in the circumstances they must both cease to be the gue
sts of the Vandraatons was spared her.
But Nemesis would almost certainly leap upon Diane when Lady Fairchild learned that not even a minor portion of the Vandraaton millions would be allocated for the purpose of smoothing Diane’s future pathway through life. And as a result of this unhappy termination to brilliant prospects a little pile of bills would go unpaid.
Under other circumstances Melanie might have felt a little bit of sympathy with Diane—who had perhaps been pushed into her affair with Rick. But the knowledge of how badly his association with her had recoiled upon Rick made it impossible for Melanie to feel any sympathy.
Rick had left the house within the hour after his final farewell to them all. He had taken his cream car, piled reasonably high with luggage, and had slid away down the drive just as Lucas was doing his best to convince Melanie, as well as himself, that Rick’s justifiable indignation would die a natural death, and even if he did go he wouldn’t be gone long.
But the roar of his exhaust as he shot away down the drive had a curiously final note about it.
Lucas looked suddenly old and wounded.
“He’s gone!” he said. “He really has gone—without another word!—and short of miraculous intervention by someone with the power to move him I’ve a feeling I won’t see him again for some while.” His face turned a little grey. “Suppose neither I nor his mother ever saw him again!”
“You will,” Melanie said, and all at once she felt so angry with Rick that her voice shook. She felt filled with contempt for him because however unfair his father’s condemnation—so unpleasantly public, too!—had been on the present occasion, in the past he must frequently have been a sore trial to both his parents. He was arrogant and single-minded when he wanted to do something that suited his own purpose, and there was no doubt about it, he had been spoiled from his cradle. The golden spoon in his mouth had become lodged in his throat, as Jake once observed with a good deal of truth, and whether or not he was capable of surviving without the golden spoon only the future would prove.
Whether or not he had ever been in love with Diane—and, as a consequence, how much her defection hurt him—she neither knew nor cared. But she did think that if the boot had been on the other foot, and Diane had been genuinely in love with him, there could have been a good deal of unhappiness there later on.
For there was no question about, it, Rick had never at any time been madly in love with Diane ... And unless Rick loved a woman madly, devotedly, and absolutely, her chances of happiness would be poor, Melanie thought.
And then the realization struck home that he had gone away out of her own life with nothing more than that collective and sarcastic farewell, and the desolation that welled over her was almost frightening. Perhaps she would never see him again!...
She would never see his mocking, twisted smile, and his dark eyes glinting; his white teeth flashing in the sunshine like blanched almonds! His Indian black hair, and the way a lock of it frequently fell across his forehead...
She would never, never feel his lips on hers again—not even for a moment!
“Oh, Rick!” she whispered, to herself, and felt as if real agony seared through her—agony, and a sense of irreparable loss.
And suddenly she heard herself explaining to Mr. Vandraaton that she must go home at once. She thought that he looked at her in a very curious and penetrating manner as she did her best to convince him that her presence was badly needed on the other side of the Atlantic, and that when she left London she had been given clearly to understand that it was only for a few weeks. The weeks were up, and she wanted to go home ... She must go home!
Lucas nodded at last, understanding.
“All right, if that’s the way you feel. But you don’t need me to tell you that there’ll always be a job for you at the Nonpareil.”
At that she seemed to recoil a little.
“The Nonpareil? But I couldn’t possibly go back to the Nonpareil! ...” She bit her lip, which was suddenly trembling noticeably. “At least, I’d rather not.”
Lucas nodded even more understandingly. “Then don’t go back, child. There are all sorts of other jobs.” He paused. “How soon would you like to go?”
“At once,” she whispered, and the tears pricked behind her eyes, because she had enjoyed his hospitality, and he had always been particularly kind to her, whatever his attitude to other people. And he had seemed interested in her background, and in so much about her.
“It’s as good as done,” he told her, reaching for the buzzer on his desk. “I’ll see that your air fare is paid back to London, and a seat reserved for you on a plane that is leaving tonight.”
And now here she was, New York already left behind, and nothing but darkening sea below her.
She moved her head restlessly against the back of her seat, and shut her eyes. Then she opened them again to see stars once more hanging like lamps close to the windows of an aircraft. Only this time they were not lighting a stairway to adventure, and the love that all women hope for, but guiding her meekly back to the life she had led before Rick Vandraaton had become imbued with magic. When he was just an infrequently glimpsed employer of the remoter order, hard and dark and callously indifferent—or so most people believed.
But how could one think of a man as indifferent when he had displayed for one’s benefit a softer side? A tender, concerned side ... Even a passionate side!
She moved her head still more restlessly, and saw the stewardess coming down the central gangway. She was making the usual inquiries about extra blankets and final drinks, and Melanie thought mechanically:
It was odd how one clung to a habit like cleaning one’s teeth even when one was flying over miles of ocean.
She made a movement to rise, and instantly someone slid into the vacant space beside her. A pair of dark, brooding, cynical eyes gazed at her, and an unsmiling mouth compressed itself into lines of forbidding grimness.
“Rick!” she exclaimed, and for a moment she was convinced that this was an hallucination ... the result of thinking of him all the time.
“I’ve been watching you,” he confessed. “You’ve displayed so little curiosity about your fellow passengers that it was plain to me you were wrapped in thought. What sort of thought was it, Melanie? Was it tinged at all with regret?”
She gazed at him, and all at once her expression hardened. Her small face grew bleak and remote, her eyes condemning.
“There is always regret when one comes to the end of an episode,” she replied. “My American episode had its pleasant side. Your father was extremely kind to me.”
“Yet now you’re running away from him!” There was a jeering note in his voice.
“I’m not running away.” She corrected the impression with quiet dignity. “Your father understood that I felt the need to return home, and he booked a seat on this plane for me. We don’t all run away, whatever the provocation!” turning her face deliberately away from him, and staring out at the galaxy of stars.
Rick’s face hardened, too, and if she had been looking at him she might have been a trifle dismayed by the slightly sinister glint in his eyes.
“Thank you, Miss Blake, for an uninvited opinion of me!” And then, his voice grating: “What would you have had me do? How would you have had me behave? Take the old man’s hand and tell him it didn’t really matter to me at all how much he insulted me? Or how low his opinion of me was? Tell him I’ve long been aware I’m a hopelessly bad hat, and promise to do better in future?”
“Of course not.” But she gripped her hands tightly in her lap as she continued to direct her gaze away from him, as if she felt the need of some support. “You could, however, have made some allowance for the fact that he himself is an overworked man—” was that a wise description, she wondered, even as she made use of it?—“has recently been very ill, and was upset by the letter from England. You would have been upset by such a letter, wouldn’t you?” She turned to meet his eyes in the softly-lit interior of the aircraft. “Or
if someone you loved and trusted had let you down?—Or appeared to have let you down!”
“Someone I loved—although I don’t think I ever trusted her!—did let me down!” he returned, with such mocking glibness that she felt the color recede right out of her cheeks, and the muscles of her throat contracted as she swallowed hard.
“Yes,” she barely whispered, as she looked down at her hands. “I’m afraid I—I forgot that.”
Suddenly his hand reached out and closed over hers with brutal fierceness.
“Little fool!” he exclaimed. “Little fool! ... Why did you have to hang on to that bit of letter, anyway? And if you wanted to spare me why didn’t you show it to me? Surely there was little point in treasuring it, as you apparently did, as if it was a fragment of something valuable?”
“I suppose I didn’t show it to you because I wanted to spare you,” she admitted at last, after a long moment of silence.
“Thank you.” But his gratitude made his voice sound dry and rasping. “Because I was so violently in love?”
“I—I didn’t know whether you were in love or not ...” She wished he would cease holding her hand so cruelly tightly. “At least, I didn’t know then. But you’ve just said you were.”
“Why put it in the past tense?” he asked, with even more concentrated dryness. “Love doesn’t die just because someone is found to prove wanting, does it?”
“It shouldn’t,” she admitted again, and felt suddenly anguished.
He lay back against the seat and watched her, the bright curve of her head, the slight droop of her shoulders.
