Geoffrey had a quick vision of Melissa arrogantly enlarging on the subject of religion. He could see all her gestures, hear her clear and fanatical voice. He laughed. What a child it was. Then, a moment later, he was angry with her.
He went in search of his sister. Arabella was gravely reading what Geoffrey saw was some edifying tome suitable for the Sabbath. She had, also, dressed herself in a thin black silk, to match her reading matter. Her eyes were red, he saw, when she self-consciously removed her spectacles. Had he felt less annoyed just now he would have asked why she had been crying, but the necessity not to ask made him irritable. With hardly forty-five minutes in which to drive to Midfield and catch his train, he had no time for women’s tears. So he said abruptly:
“I’ve got to leave, and at once, Bella. A matter of importance. No, I really must go. There was a telegram. Where is Melissa?”
“Melissa?” asked Arabella, in a tone of wonderment. She searched his face sharply. She could read in it nothing but irritation. But for some reason her despondent spirits rose, and she smiled eagerly. “I thought Melissa was with you.”
“I haven’t seen her for hours,” replied Geoffrey impatiently. “Does she often go off like this, without a word to anyone?”
Arabella closed her book with hands unaccountably trembling. She did not remove her fixed gaze from Geoffrey. But her voice was very casual and indulgent: “Oh, yes, quite often. There are times when I suspect that Melissa does not know it is polite to leave word. She is so—engrossed.” She paused. Geoffrey did not seem happy, or content, or triumphant. He was only a large, hurried and irate man. “Ravel’s poem has, I hear, reached a significant state, very acute. At least, that is what Melissa tells me.” Her smile became maternal, but she watched him.
“Damn Ravel!” said Geoffrey. Then he was silent. He looked at his sister. She smiled serenely at him, and her reddened eyes glinted with sly malice. There was an utter quiet, now, on the terrace.
Then, very slowly, an ugliness crept into Geoffrey’s expression as he looked at his sister with a rising hatred. He said, almost softly: “Don’t be malicious, Bella, and childish. I don’t know what you are trying to say, but you know it is a lie. You know that as well as I do.”
Arabella stood up, her book falling to the floor. Tears rushed to her eyes. “Geoffrey! I do not understand you! What do you mean, speaking to me so? What have I done? Is there to be no peace between us, undisturbed by suspicions and cruelty? I have said nothing! I have done nothing, except to be kind to the miserable girl you in your folly have married, except to be her friend, and to display a sisterly affection for her.” She pressed her kerchief to her eyes, and turned away from him with a very loud and dramatic sob. “It is no use!” she exclaimed. “I am continually misunderstood and abused, and the vilest motives are attributed to me! It is more than I can bear.”
Fuming, Geoffrey stood and listened to her. He felt a fool. He had no time to be sorry for his sister, though he had the impulse and was angrily ashamed of himself. He said: “Bella, don’t be ridiculous. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.” He waited. But Arabella’s sobs racked her with increasing vehemence. Geoffrey pulled out his watch, and groaned. He put it back. What had Arabella said, in truth? Nothing. Nothing more than she had said this morning. He had imagined a viciousness in her smile.
He said, with more impatience: “Do stop caterwauling a moment, please. I’ve said I am sorry. I haven’t the time for. lavish apologies. You must accept this or not, as you wish.”
Arabella’s sobs slowly lessened. She wiped her eyes. She said, her back to him. “I accept your apology, Geoffrey. After all, I have accepted so many, haven’t I? One more is of no moment.”
“You make me sound like an execrable brute,” remarked Geoffrey. “You aren’t much of a martyr, really, Bella. You can be quick with your own abuse. Well, never mind. I must go at once. But I shall return the middle of the week. Please tell Melissa that I must have her answer then.”
Arabella caught her breath. She stood in silence, still turned from him. But her eyes stared before her with a sudden intense glow. Then it was not too late! Everything was not yet lost; she still had time. The gardens swam before her in a dazzle of light and brilliance. Slowly she turned about and faced Geoffrey, and her face was illuminated. She stretched out her hands to him in a wide gesture.
“Dear Geoffrey! Are we not very foolish, brother and sister, quarrelling so absurdly! We shall forget it, shall we not?”
He took her hands. They were damp and hot. She beamed at him with an expression he could not read. But the minutes were running out very fast, so he kissed her, patted her shoulder, called her a fool, and himself a bigger one. She passionately denied that he was guilty of any folly, and accused herself of being a silly and sensitive female. He must forgive her, he truly must.
On this fond note, she went with him to the doorway where the carriage waited. She waved to him as long as she could see him. There was no one about, when the carriage was out of sight, and Arabella executed a few capers which could have been called nothing but a frenzied dance of joy.
Then she ran into the house, calling for Ellis, and her voice was shrill with excitement and glee.
CHAPTER 48
Long before the sun struck the river, the milky mists began to rise, cool and spectral, from the water. As the darkness rushed away over the hills, the sky also became milky, streaked with opaline colors, and the birds cried out. The east sprang into flame and threw a vivid pink light over the river, a strong breeze turned every tree white in its passing, died down, and the earth exhaled her long, sweet breath. Moment by moment the shadow, like a tide retreating, crept away from hollows and banks and stones, and each object lost its nebulous outline and became sharp and clean with morning. The willows bowed their green fountains; the ferns dripped moisture. And now the sun struck the tops of the highest trees in a rain of golden light.
The long night was gone. Melissa saw the approach of morning, from where she sat on the wide flat stone with her black shawl huddled over her shoulders. A small canvas bag lay near her feet. It had lain there all night, as she had sat there all night, unmoving. It contained a few of the coarse things she had brought to Geoffrey’s house: her comb and brush, a muslin nightgown and petticoat and other garments, and a pair of cotton stockings. The stained brown frock she wore had been her own, and the damp boots. Her hand was bare of the ring Geoffrey had given her.
She was very still and quiet, as she watched the sunlight flow over the river. Her sleepless eyes gazed before her, not stirring. Her arms were folded on her knees. Her pale mouth was as motionless as a mouth that slept. Her attitude was not one of resignation or despair; everything about her was spent and tranquil, as if she had done with all suffering and could suffer no more.
She had come here the evening before, to meet Ravel, after leaving Geoffrey’s house. Never once had he failed to come, though she often had failed to appear. But there had been an agreement between them that, no matter what happened, they would meet here on Sunday evenings. So she had come. She had waited numbly all through the summer twilight. The moon had come up, had invaded the field of stars. It had floated overhead, had wheeled down the long dark slope of the sky, had falllen into the pale cavern of the west. But Ravel had not come to meet Melissa, and he would never come again. She had known that for hours. He was gone.
She had come to meet him, for he had promised to help her, to take her away to find work and life in Philadelphia or New York. She had never doubted that he would give her that help. She had no money of her own. She had nothing but what she had left behind, and this bag that she had brought with her.
She had not been able to think at all until midnight, when the anesthetic of pain had lifted and complete awareness had fallen upon her. Then, she had not noticed the passing of the hours. She had not moved from this position in which she now sat. She had not been conscious that she was alone by the river in the night chill and damp. She had been thinking and f
eeling as she had never thought or felt before, with a terrible, calm reality and acceptance, without the self-delusion of a lifetime of innocence, without a single strong emotion or fierce denial. She had seen all that she had always refused to see, and she saw it in the clear hard light of a passionless agony.
Had she been less than she was, she would have cried out in self-pity and maudlin protest. She would have seen herself as a piteous victim of betrayal. She would have tried to the last to find some protective delusion, would have found in an utter and abandoned despair some consolation and relief. In the vision of herself, unwanted, despised, homeless and friendless, there would have been the comfort of self-conscious martyrdom. But Melissa was not of this breed. She blamed nobody, not even her father. She accepted what she had to accept, and her anguish was without voice or tears.
She knew how frightful her betrayal had been, and she studied it with detachment and with emptiness, and with all the intellectual thoroughness of which she was capable. Like a judge, unmoved by superficial emotions, she saw herself and her father, and she knew all the evil that he had been, and what he had done to her. All through the night, she had held his letter to Geoffrey in her hand. It was like evidence against him, but it was quiet evidence, not to be offered vehemently but as a fact to be accepted. She had read and reread it, until she could not read any longer. For a moment or two, she had cried out wildly against Charles’ description of her. And then she knew he had lied, that he had always lied. Now memories had come back, vivid and irrefutable, a whole lifetime of evidence against Charles, evidence she had suppressed because to have looked at it clearly would once have been unendurable, would have destroyed the whole world for her. But he had indeed destroyed the world for her, after all, she told herself quietly. There was nothing left. Her reason for living was gone; it had never really existed. It had all been a lie and an illusion. She had not been necessary to Charles, except that he had needed someone to hate. He had hated Amanda, and Andrew, and Phoebe, but they had not loved him as she, Melissa, had loved him, so that to the last he had been impotent to harm them as he had harmed her.
Melissa saw herself as she had been in her father’s house and, for a little, agony had given way to a profound contempt, a cold disgust. She did not denounce herself; she merely looked at herself as one looks in a fully revealing mirror, and would not turn away. She had been a fool and an idiot, as Charles had said in his letter to Geoffrey, and she had deserved his disdain. It was not possible, she reflected, to hate someone, and have that one fawn upon you, without complete loathing. Amanda had known of that loathing, and had warned her daughter. Phoebe and Andrew had known; Phoebe had thrown the knowledge in her sister’s face; Andrew had tried to tell her. She had even, in turning suddenly, often caught swift glints in Charles’ own eyes, had seen his faint and derisive half-smile. She had been uneasy after these occasions, though the uneasiness had been without a name. But it had all been there for her to see. Nothing, really, but herself, had concealed from her the full evil of her father. She had been an egotistic fool. If she had been a victim, she had been an eager one, willing, even anxious to be deceived, because she had had in her mind a picture of herself, trenchant, consequential, valuable, absolutely necessary to a man of tremendous import to the world.
But even then she did not denounce herself. She merely accepted what she saw. She did not hate Charles. She called up his face, the sound of his voice, his eyes, his thin marbled hands, his gestures, his smiles and quiet laughter, and she felt no rage against him. She felt nothing at all. Then she let all that he had been sink into the ground and be lost forever. There was not even one last call to him, begging him to deny the truth she knew. He was dead. He had, in fact, she said to herself, never really existed as she had known him, and so, for her, he now had no reality. What he had really been was no part of her. It never had been a part. She had been a prisoner, but she herself had built the prison and had locked herself in.
She remembered all her father’s books, and it seemed that they lay open before her. She read page after page, chapter after chapter. And then she said to herself: He was a poseur and a fraud, a miserable digester of other men’s thoughts and scholarships, without originality, without color or grandeur, without validity. He knew it. Mama knew it; even Phoebe and Andrew knew it. But I did not know it.
Geoffrey, she thought, knew all about Papa and me. Now, for the first time, heat flowed into her cold face and she felt a twist of pure torment. How could he help despising me, the grovelling thing I was, the blind and stupid thing? Yet he thought he could help me, out of pity he even married me. But pity is not enough. It was Mama who asked him to help me, knowing me for an idiot beyond hope. And he thought that through me he could help my sister and brother. Did I not ask him to marry me? I must never forget that.
She put her chilled hands to her cheeks, and bit her lips in her pain and humiliation.
Arabella was right; she had always been right. She, Melissa, had been a shame and a burden to a man who had known everything and had yet been kind. He was free of her now. She would never disgrace or humiliate him again. She would never let him see her again, and he would forget what she was and what she had done to him.
When she reached this stage in her thoughts, she dropped her head on her knees and sat very still. There was agony in her now, not impersonal, but emotionless, wild and enormous, more awful than any pain she had ever known, even the pain of her father’s death.
And now it was morning, and something had shifted, and she saw the world as it really was, without the shadow of Charles falling across it, and the shadow of all her delusions. I am nothing, she said to herself clearly. I must understand it, and never forget it. I must go on from this place, alone. It is a lonely and terrible place, but I have brought myself to it. The world was like a cold and heavy stone in her hands.
She got up. Her body was without feeling and she had to catch the trunk of a willow to save herself from falling. “I am very tired,” she said aloud. “I must find a place to rest and sleep a little before I can decide what I must do.”
She moved through the grove of willows, carrying her bag. She was exhausted with shock, and she staggered a little. But all the thoughts that had filled her mind during the night were retreating, leaving behind only that complete emptiness. She crept along the hedges of fields; no one saw her. Once, she caught a glimpse of a distant farmer and she shrank back into the woods.
Then, far away, she saw the house where she had been born, and moved towards it, seeing only its barren and abandoned outline against the sky.
The tall lean gray house seemed to see Melissa’s slow and dragging progress towards it. It had been sleeping throughout the night, but it had now become sentient, alive, gathering itself together to watch her with a strange and sinister vigilance. Seven months of desertion had cast age upon its age; it had become a derelict, witchlike and haunted. The high and dusty grass had grown up about it, and as Melissa stumbled through the grass it rattled under her feet, brittle and crackling, filling the air with a pungent odor. It’s dust clung to her skirts, her dragging shawl, her boots, and once, unseeing, she stirred up a flock of yellow butterflies, which fluttered in her gaunt face and then went spinning off over the grass.
The flagged walk was overgrown. Some old rose-bushes of Amanda’s tore at Melissa’s skirts; a few tattered flowers, wizened and almost odorless, clung to the forlorn plants. The old pump had rusted; not a drop of water fell from its spout. Approaching the door, Melissa was startled by a toad hopping dryly near it, and she found herself trembling. She climbed the two sagging steps; in their interstices was green mold. All about lay a profound yet ominous silence, swimming in the hot and brazen light of morning. Even the shadows, sharp and black, seemed breathless with the gathering heat.
No one had bothered to lock the door. It was as if everyone had fled the place, not caring whether a homeless tramp entered here, or any other marauder. Melissa turned the rusted handle; the door fell open b
efore her with a loud and groaning noise. Here was the hallway; the mirror facing the door was so clouded with dust that Melissa’s image in it was the image of a ghost. She stood on the threshold of Amanda’s “parlor.” On the hearth lay the feathery ashes of old fires, and through the blurred windows the sun shone, misty and smothering. All Amanda’s precious old furniture had been powdered with a gritty grayness; the lamps were entangled in swaying webs.
She turned back to the hall. The old clock had lost its voice, and stood mute and dead, its face almost obliterated. She went up the steep stairs, and her footsteps echoed. She passed the closed doors of the bedrooms, and it was like passing the rooms of the dead. She reached the door of the study, and opened it with a hand that was cold and unhesitating.
She entered the study, looked about her with quiet and careful eyes. Her father’s couch was there, his books, his desk, his tables, his favorite chair, her own footstool on which she had sat at his feet. But everything had fallen into decay, silent and remorseless. It was the room of a man who had died, who had never existed.
Melissa stood there for a long time. In this room she had been robbed of the living world, of laughter and of youth, of love and joy, of music and hope. She had thought of it as a place where she had truly lived. She saw it now as the place where she had been murdered.
Now a sick and awful bitterness rose up in her against Charles. Now she saw that what he had done to her had been deliberate and, therefore, unpardonable. Had he done what he had done in ignorance or stupidity, or even in bottomless egotism, she could have forgiven him. But he had done it in full knowledge, and knew why he was doing it. Even if his hatred had been a strong and powerful hatred rising out of a great and defeated mind, he could still have been forgiven, even pitied. But he had done it out of littleness, out of malice, cunningly, and with secret laughter. Even in her bitterness she still could not hate him, but she despised him. “Such a small victory,” she said aloud. “Yet it could satisfy him.”
Melissa Page 48
