Melanie, pale and listless, murmured: “I don’t know, Aunt.”
Rose was moving towards the door. Be quick.
“When Ellen sent me the teapot from England,” said Mrs. Appleby, “she sent some special polish for it. I have it over there in the drawer. Melanie, dear, why don’t you polish it for me this afternoon? You’re so thorough.”
Rose was at the door.
“But be careful.” Mrs. Appleby laughed lightly. “Ellen said in her letter that those old-fashioned English polishes are awfully dangerous. It contains cyanide or something.” Those had been Ellen’s exact words. “If you don’t make sure that all the polish is off the spout you might kill me.”
Rose shut the door behind her. Melanie was looking down at her hands. In a funny little strangled voice, she said: “All right, Aunt. I’ll polish it for you. Where’s the English polish?”
The feeling Mrs. Appleby experienced was almost glee. She was so happy she thought about the bear cub. It had been done. It was as simple as that.
All the rest of the day Mrs. Appleby waited for tea. Trudy and Melanie came and went, bringing with them that blight of animosity which had soured Mrs. Appleby’s days but which no longer could taint them. At three Melanie went off to polish. Sharply at four she brought Mrs. Appleby’s tea tray with the silver teapot glowing magnificently.
“Lovely, dear,” commented Mrs. Appleby. “Now, pour it. And, for heaven’s sake, not too strong.”
Melanie poured the cup with her back to Mrs. Appleby, crouched over the tray like a little grey bat, thought Mrs. Appleby.
Mrs. Appleby accepted the cup. “All right, dear. Run along. Oh—and Melanie, send Trudy to me. I want to talk to her.”
Melanie fled. Mrs. Appleby looked down at the cup of tea. Was there an ever so faint film over it—as if the milk had almost turned?
Trudy stomped into the room. “What is it, Aunt?”
“Oh, Trudy, dear.” Mrs. Appleby smiled at her sweetly. “I want to apologize for this morning. It was shocking of me to make those insinuations about Mr. Jevons. Of course you may go away with your school friend.”
Trudy’s eyes lightened—like a pig’s eyes, reflected Mrs. Appleby, confronted with a full trough.
“Oh, thank you, Aunt Amelia.”
“I know we get on each other’s nerves every once in a while. It’s only natural. Trudy, dear, have you had your tea yet?”
“No, Aunt, not yet.”
“Then why don’t you have mine, I really don’t feel like it today.”
Trudy took the cup and swallowed the tea at a gulp. Trudy always gulped.
Mrs. Appleby had wondered if the poison would be strong enough. But she might have known that Melanie would have used it lavishly. Cyanide works quickly. The cup dropped from Trudy’s hand. Beads of perspiration bubbled on her forehead. She looked astonished and then quite unlike a human being. She staggered and collapsed onto the floor.
Mrs. Appleby screamed. The sight had been terrible. It had quite unstrung her. “Melanie,” she screamed. “Rose.”
And in a moment Rose and Melanie were both running into the room. Melanie looked a doughy grey. Rose stared with eyes button-wide in horror.
Mrs. Appleby tried to stop screaming.
“Rose,” she croaked. “She drank my tea. Miss Trudy drank my tea. This morning … you heard. I warned Miss Melanie about the polish. She did it deliberately. She tried to murder me.”
Melanie had flopped on the floor by her sister. Melanie had always been a fool. She could never keep her mouth shut.
“Trudy,” she moaned. “Oh, Trudy, I never meant it for you.”
Excitement fizzed thinly through Mrs. Appleby’s old blood.
“She’s admitted it, Rose. She’s admitted it. Did you hear?”
“I heard, madam.”
Rose glared at the prostrate, babbling Melanie.
“Murderess,” she cried …
Trudy was taken to the hospital, but she died during the night.
The doctors decided it would be too risky to submit poor old Mrs. Appleby to her niece’s murder trial. Mr. Thomas, the lawyer, read her testimony. With Rose’s evidence it was sufficient.
The day Melanie was sentenced, the sparkling autumn sunlight splashed into Mrs. Appleby’s bedroom. She even spent an hour, wrapped in a bright afghan, on the back porch.
“And no one,” she sighed happily, “will ever know how much I cried when it got too big and had to be given away to the Albany zoo.”
“Oh, what a cute story,” cried the pleasant young paid companion. “A little bear cub! How adorable!”
LOVE COMES TO MISS LUCY
They sat around the breakfast table, their black coats hanging sleevelessly from their shoulders in the Mexican tourist fashion. They looked exactly what they were—three middle-aged ladies from the most respectable suburbs of Philadelphia.
“Mas café,” demanded Miss Ellen Yarnell from a recalcitrant waitress. Miss Ellen had travelled before and knew how to get service in foreign countries.
“And mas hot—caliente,” added Mrs. Vera Truegood, who was the oldest of the three and found the mornings in Mexico City chilly.
Miss Lucy Bram didn’t say anything. She looked at her watch to see if it were time for Mario to arrive.
The maid dumped a tin pot of lukewarm coffee on the table.
“Don’t you think, Lucy,” put in Ellen, “that it would be a good idea if we got Mario to come earlier in the morning? He could take us out somewhere so we could get a nice hot breakfast.”
“Mario does quite enough for us already.” Miss Lucy flushed slightly as she spoke of the young Mexican guide. She flushed because her friends had teased her about him, and because she had just been thinking of his strong, rather cruel Mexican legs as she had seen them yesterday when he rowed them through the floating gardens of Xochimilco.
Miss Lucy Bram had probably never thought about a man’s legs (and certainly not at breakfast time) in all her fifty-two years of polite, Quakerish spinsterhood. This was another disturbing indication of the change which had taken place in her since her cautious arrival in Mexico a month before. The change, perhaps, had in fact happened earlier, when the death of an ailing father had left her suddenly and bewilderingly rich, both in terms of bonds and a release from bondage. But Miss Lucy had only grown aware of it later, here in Mexico—on the day when she had found Mario in Taxco.
It had been an eventful day for Miss Lucy. Perhaps the most eventful of all these new Mexican days. Her sense of freedom, which still faintly shocked her sedate soul, had awakened with her in her sunny hotel bedroom. It had hovered over her patio breakfast with her two companions (whose expenses she was discreetly paying). It had been quenched neither by Vera’s complaints of the chill mountain air nor by Ellen’s travel-snobbish remark that Taxco was sweet, of course, but nowhere near as picturesque as the hill towns of Tuscany.
To Miss Lucy, with only Philadelphia and Bar Harbor behind her, Taxco’s pink weathered roofs and pink, feathery-steepled churches were the impossible realization of a dream. “A rose-red city half as old as time….”
The raffish delight of “foreigners,” of being her own mistress, had reached a climax when she saw The Ring.
She saw it in one of the little silversmith shops below the leafy public square. It caught her attention while Vera and Ellen were haggling with the proprietor over a burro pin. It wasn’t a valuable ring. To her Quaker eyes, severely trained against the ostentatious, it was almost vulgar. A large, flamboyant white sapphire on a slender band of silver. But there was something tempting in its brash sparkle. She slipped it on her finger and it flashed the sunlight back at her. It made her mother’s prim engagement ring, which was worth certainly fifty times as much, fade out of the picture. Miss Lucy felt unaccountably gay, and then self-conscious. With a hurried glance at the stuffy black backs of Vera and Ellen, she tried to take it off her finger.
It would not come off. And while she was still struggling Ve
ra and Ellen joined her, inspecting it with little cries of admiration.
“My, Lucy, it’s darling.”
“Pretty as an engagement ring.”
Miss Lucy flushed. “Don’t be foolish. It’s much too young for me. I just tried it on. I don’t seem to be able …”
She pulled at the ring again. The Mexican who owned the shop hovered at her side, purring compliments.
“Go on, Lucy,” said Ellen daringly. “Buy it.”
“Really, it’s annoying. But since I can’t seem to get it off, I suppose I’ll have to….”
Miss Lucy bought the white sapphire ring for a sum which was higher than its value, but which was still negligible to her, while Ellen, who handled all the financial aspects of the trip because she was “so clever” at those things, settled with the proprietor. Miss Lucy said to Vera, “I’ll get it off with soap and water back at the hotel.”
But she didn’t take it off. Somehow her new disturbing happiness had become centered in it.
In Taxco Miss Lucy’s energy seemed boundless. That evening, before dinner, while Vera and Ellen were resting aching feet in their rooms, she decided upon a second trip to the Church of Santa Prisca which dominated the public square. Her first visit had been marred by the guide book chatter of her companions. She wanted to be alone in that cool, tenebrous interior, to try to get the feeling of its atmosphere, so different from the homespun godliness of her own Quaker meeting house at home.
As she stepped through the ornate wooden doors, the fantastic Churrigueresque altar of gold-leaf flowers and cherubs gleamed richly at her. An ancient peasant woman, sheathed in black, was offering a guttering candle to an image of the Virgin. A mongrel dog ran past her into the church, looked around and ran out again. The splendor and the small humanities of the scene had a curious effect upon Miss Lucy. This stood for all that was popish and alien and yet it seemed to call her. On an impulse which she less than half understood, she dropped to her knees, in imitation of the peasant woman, and crossed herself, the sapphire ring flashing with some of the exotic quality of the church itself.
Miss Lucy remained kneeling only a short time, but before she rose she was conscious of a presence close to her on the right. She glanced around and saw that a Mexican youth in a spotless white suit had entered the church and was kneeling a few yards away, the thick black hair shining on his reverently bent head. As she got up, his gaze met hers. It was only a momentary glance, but she retained a vivid impression of his face. Honey-brown skin and the eyes—particularly the eyes—dark and patient with a gentle, passive beauty. Somehow that brief contact gave her the sensation of seeing a little into the mind of this strange city of strange people. Remembering him, her spontaneous genuflection seemed somehow the right thing to have done. Not, of course, that she would ever speak of it to Vera and Ellen.
She left the church, happy and ready for dinner. The evening light had faded, and as she passed from the crowded Xocalo into the deserted street which led to the hotel, it was almost night. Her footsteps echoed unfamiliarly against the rough cobblestones. The sound seemed to emphasize her loneliness. A single male figure, staggering slightly, was coming up the hill towards her. Miss Lucy was no coward, but with a tingle of alarm she realized that the oncomer was drunk. She looked around. There was no one else in sight. A weak impulse urged her to return to the Xocalo, but she suppressed it. After all, she was an American, she would not be harmed. She marched steadfastly on.
But the seeds of fear were there, and when she came abreast of the man, he peered at her and swung towards her. He was bearded and shabby and his breath reeked of tequila. He started a stream of Spanish which she couldn’t understand. She knew he was begging and, trained to organized charities, Miss Lucy had no sympathy for street beggars. She shook her head firmly and tried to move on. But a dirty hand grabbed her sleeve, and the soft whining words continued. She freed her arm more violently than she intended. Anger glinted in the man’s eyes. He raised his arm in an indignant gesture.
Although he was obviously not intending to strike her, Miss Lucy recoiled instinctively, and as she did so, caught her high heel in the uneven cobbles and fell rather ungracefully on the ground. She lay there, her ankle twisted underneath her, while the man stood threateningly, it seemed, over her.
For a moment, Miss Lucy felt panic—blind overwhelming terror completely unjustified by the almost farcical unpleasantness of the situation.
And then from the shadows, another man appeared. A slight man in a white suit. Miss Lucy could not see his face but she knew that it was the boy from the church. She was conscious of his white-sleeved arm flashing towards the beggar and pushing him away.
She saw the beggar reel backward and shuffle mutteringly off. Then she was aware of a young face close to her own, and a strong arm was helping her to rise. She could not understand all her rescuer said, but his voice was gentle and concerned.
“Qué malo,” he said, grinning in the direction of the departing beggar. “Malo Mexicano.” The teeth gleamed white in the moonlight. “Me Mario, from the church, yes? Me help the Señora, no?”
He almost carried Miss Lucy, who had twisted her ankle painfully, back to the hotel and right into her room where she was turned over to the flustered administrations of Vera and Ellen.
As Mario hovered solicitously around, Ellen grabbed at her pocketbook with a whispered: “How much, Lucy?”
But here Miss Lucy showed a will of her own. “No. Money would be an insult.”
And Mario, who seemed to understand, said “Gracias, Señora.” And after several sentences, in which Miss Lucy understood only the word “madre,” he picked up Miss Lucy’s left hand—the one with the new sapphire ring—kissed it and then bowed himself smilingly out.
That was how Mario had come into their lives. And having come in, it was apparent that he intended to stay. Next morning he came to the hotel to inquire for Miss Lucy and she saw him squarely for the first time. He was not really handsome. His long-lashed eyes were perhaps a shade too close together. His slight moustache above the full-lipped mouth was perhaps too long. But his figure, though slight, was powerful, and there was something about him that inspired both affection and confidence.
He was, he explained, a student anxious to make a little money on vacation. He wanted to be a guide to the Señoras, and since Miss Lucy could not walk with her twisted ankle, he suggested that he hire a car and act as their chauffeur. The fee he requested was astonishingly small and he stubbornly refused to accept more.
The next day he hired a car at a low price which more than satisfied even the parsimonious Miss Ellen, and from then on he drove the ladies around to points of interest with as much care and consideration as if they had been his three “madres.”
His daily appearances, always in spotless white, were a constant delight to Miss Lucy—indeed, to all three of them. He was full of plans for their entertainment. One day he drove them around the base of Mount Popocatepetl and for several hours they were able to rhapsodize over what is certainly one of the most beautiful and mysterious mountains in the world. And for a moment when they happened to be alone together, staring at the dazzling whiteness of the mountain’s magnificent summit, Miss Lucy felt her hand taken in Mario’s firm brown one and softly squeezed.
It was, of course, his way of telling her, despite the difficulties of language, that they were sharing a great Mexican experience and he was glad they were sharing it together. Under his touch the large sapphire in the ring pressed into her finger painfully, but another feeling, different from pain, stirred in her.
After the Popocatepetl trip, Miss Lucy decided that it was time to leave Taxco and take up their quarters in Mexico City.
She instructed Ellen to dismiss Mario—to give him an extra hundred pesos and to let him know politely yet firmly that his services were terminated. But Ellen might as well have tried to dispel Popocatepetl or bid it remove itself into the sea. Mario just laughed at her, waved away the hundred pesos, and referr
ed himself directly to Miss Lucy. There were bad Mexicans in Mexico City. He threw out his strong, honey-gold hands. He would take care of them. No, of no importance was the money of Señora Ellen (the other two women were always Señora to him, Miss Lucy alone was Señorita). The important thing was that he should show them everything. Here the strong arms waved to embrace the sun, the sky, the mountains, all of Mexico. And the dark eyes with the too-thick lashes embraced Miss Lucy too.
And Miss Lucy, against some deeply rooted instinct, yielded.
Mario went with them to Mexico City.
It was the second week of their stay in Mexico City and they had decided upon a trip to the pyramids at Teotihuacan. As usual Miss Lucy sat in front with Mario. He was an excellent driver and she loved to watch his profile as he concentrated on the road; loved his occasional murmurs to himself when something pleased or displeased him. She liked it less when he turned to her, flashing his dark eyes caressingly on her face and lowering them to her breast.
His gaze embarrassed her and today something prompted her to say to him in English, “Mario, you are what in America we call a flirt. I imagine you are very popular with the girls here in Mexico.”
For a moment he did not seem to understand her remark. Then he burst out, “Girls—muchachas, para me, no.” His hand went into his breast pocket and he brought out a small battered photograph. “Mi muchacha. My girl, mi unica muchacha … Una sola…”
Miss Lucy took the photograph. It was of a woman older than herself with grey hair and large sad eyes. There were lines of worry and illness in her face.
“Your mother?” said Miss Lucy gently. “Tell me about her.”
Mario rattled on, not in the slow careful Spanish which he generally reserved for the ladies, but in a rapid monologue of which Miss Lucy understood but part. She gathered that Mario’s mother was terribly poor, that she had devoted her life in a tiny Guerreros village to raising fatherless children, and was a saint on earth. It was obvious that Mario felt the almost idolatrous love for his mother that is so frequent in young Mexican males.
The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow Page 25