After that, Elfrida had been first a charming widow and afterward a popular hostess and woman about town. John’s final burst of energy had brought her income back to a high level for a while, and she had had sophisticated good times with fortune hunters who were less wily than she.
Melanie had learned all this in the past few months. Until just before last Christmas her own life had been unexciting. She had attended a boarding school and gained so many distinctions in piano playing that she had been offered a temporary position with the school as junior music teacher. Vaguely, she had wanted other things; to have done with the school atmosphere, to plunge into the exciting world, to meet people with strange backgrounds and enthralling personalities. Not so very long after her eighteenth birthday the miracle of miracles had happened. Elfrida had come to the school.
In effect she had said winningly, “Hello, Melanie dear. I’ve been thinking about you a great deal lately. It’s awfully hard luck for a girl of your age to have no home, and I’d like you to come and live with me. I’m poor now, you know—I can’t even afford a maid, but I’m sure you’ll help me to keep the apartment neat till the lease is up, and have plenty of spare time to learn shorthand, typing, or something.”
There had never been any chance that Melanie would refuse this offer of freedom in the outside world. As it happened, she had not trained at the commercial school because as soon as she was installed at the apartment the trip to Mindoa was in the air. Elfrida, cool, suave and mistress of her emotions, was nevertheless uneasy about the future. A rich husband was the solution, but she had unwisely cultivated the wrong set. Finally, she had come to the decision to travel across France by way of Paris and the Riviera and make the trip to Mindoa. It would take money, but the possibilities of such a venture were enormous. She had heard that even on Mindoa considerable wealth existed. Melanie, who was ordinary and modest and a wonder with her needle, might be exceedingly useful.
Elfrida underestimated her young relative’s intelligence. Melanie had discovered that as long as Elfrida had her own way in all things she was extraordinarily easy to get along with. She had also learned that unusual situations were best handled by leaving the older woman to take the initiative. Which was why she now sank into a chair at the foot of her bed and bent wordlessly to unstrap her sandals.
Elfrida sat on the side of her own bed and spoke musingly. “Your Mr. Brent is handsome. How, exactly, did you meet?”
“He sort of ... butted in. I suppose I looked pretty raw.”
“You always do, my dear. I rather thought that one of these days some nice man would pity your youth and enter our circle.”
“He didn’t pity me, and he’s not particularly nice, either.”
Melanie bent lower over her shoe. In an awful flash of realization it had come to her that before long Elfrida would demand to know what had become of the two pounds filched by the taxi driver. Oh, heavens, what could she do? Tell the truth and call down upon herself scorn and another of Elfrida’s nervous collapses? Pretend the things had cost more? To stall the moment, she said, “Mr. Brent isn’t likely to trouble us much. He doesn’t care for women.”
“It was he who invited us to share a luncheon table,” Elfrida reminded her. “Seeing me may have changed his ideas. What does he do?”
“He told me he’s a geologist.”
“Sounds stuffy, but he looked dangerous—not to you, of course. He’s twice your age. He’s probably a specialist in his line and fairly well-off. Ah, well,” she signed luxuriously, “he’s going to Mindoa, so in time we shall know all. Show me the native things you bought.”
This was it. Melanie stepped into slippers and carefully opened the small parcel. Elfrida exclaimed. The tiny black bowl was sweet and the ivory temple quite breathtaking. In something of a panic Melanie extracted the amber carving from her bag.
“That’s the best of all!” was Elfrida’s comment as she took possession of it. “Did you have much change from the five pounds?”
Melanie emptied out her bag, recalled with a further sinking of the heart the several shillings she had desperately tossed among the beggars. Upon the bedspread she laid twenty-five shillings belonging to her cousin and her own last ten shilling note. The money was scooped up, dropped negligently into a purse.
“Maybe I’ll feel fit enough to go ashore myself at Bombay,” observed Elfrida. “We’ll prevail upon Mr. Brent to show us the town. And now we’d better get ready for lunch.”
Stephen, when they met him at the opening to the lounge, had paid them the compliment of changing from his bush shirt into a beige drill lounge suit. With it, he wore a brown silk shirt and matching tie.
Elfrida liked his height and the proportionate width of shoulder, and the lean hips that are inseparable from a perfect physical condition. His hair, thick and springy, was nearly as dark as her own, and his face—with those steel-grey eyes that had made her dub him “dangerous” and the high-bridged, arrogant nose—was attractively contradictory at the moment, for a smile slightly softened the hard mouth. There was a suspicion of cynicism about the man, which might mean that he had sought their company purely as an antidote to boredom. But if that were the case it was up to her not only to dispel the boredom but to sharpen his appetite for the tonic.
Melanie hated that meal with Elfrida and Stephen. She was accustomed to her cousin’s idiosyncrasies but she had never before experienced anything resembling Stephen’s mocking worldliness. She felt that he knew all her secrets and was amused by them, that he compared her with Elfrida for his own private amusement. He aroused in her a completely unfamiliar sensation—a cold yet quite intense brand of anger.
When the dessert was brought she asked them to excuse her. Elfrida said, “Why, certainly, Melanie,” but Stephen looked across at her speculatively.
“If you wait a minute we’ll all go into the lounge for coffee,” he said.
“I don’t want coffee, thank you,” she responded politely.
“Then you can sit still like a good girl while we have ours.”
Elfrida broke in, “Let her go. Most days after lunch she goes down to the tourist deck and minds the snoozing children while the nurse slips off on some illegal business of her own. Children and old folk simply adore Melanie.” With calculated humor, she added, “She hasn’t yet found her feet with her own generation.”
“Why is that? Most girls of her age have already experienced their first grand passion.”
“Generally with a most unsuitable man,” agreed Elfrida. “Melanie’s not cut out for high-powered romance.”
Melanie caught Stephen’s glance, returned it steadily and said coolly, “Am I excused?”
He stood up with her, smiled lazily. “Keep a tight rein on those bedtime stories,” he said.
Now what, Melanie asked herself as she left the saloon, had he intended her to infer from such a remark? That he had noticed the fib to Elfrida upon their return from town this morning but did not hold it against her? Had he the least idea how impossible it would be to live with Elfrida if one persisted in the truth and nothing but the truth? And what, she wondered, with an odd shiver, would be his reaction were he to learn the fate of his little gift of amber? She hadn’t wanted it, hadn’t even thanked him for it, but to pass it on to Elfrida as if she herself had bought the thing had been cowardly, however strong the impulse to keep peace at any price. But there was nothing she could do about it now.
Resolutely, she put the objectionable Stephen from her thoughts, stepped out on deck and descended the companionway to the tourist-class nursery. There, for two hours, she was happy among the Indian and doll-like Chinese children.
The boat sailed at five, glided away from the bare, sunbaked city into a sea that was choppy, with a heavenly coolness blowing over it. That night was the most sparkling and fresh since they had entered Suez. The stars scintillated just out of reach, the sky was a dark royal blue and a thin arc of moon showed for a short while in the west.
Now that Elfrida was
back to three meals a day and promenade strolling, the time passed quickly. At Bombay they marveled at the Oriental architecture of the Gateway of India, and were taken by bus from the Flora Fountain to Malabar Hill. They saw masses of people in the streets, more masses in the bazaar quarter, leprous beggars, women in silk saris bearing heavy loads on their heads, girls in cotton Punjabi pajamas and men and boys in white dhotis and black turbans.
Their guide, of course, was Stephen. He knew some people who lived in one of the palatial dwellings on Malabar Hill. They were Parsees, moneyed and westernized, hospitable and obviously glad to renew contact with the “honorable Stephen Brent.” Though it was four in the afternoon, barefoot servants brought many dishes of delectable food, trays of tea, whiskey and wines.
To Melanie, the whole day was a page torn from the Arabian Nights. Back on the Tjisande she reeled with the intoxication of it, went drowsy with the effort of recalling the scents of Indian flowers and joss sticks. Stephen gave her a derisive little grin and sent her to bed, while he and Elfrida went along to the lounge for a nightcap.
Around midnight the ship left Bombay. When Melanie took her first glimpse of morning light through the porthole, they were in a blue, white-capped, unbounded sea. Elfrida was still sleeping, lying squarely back on her pillow with a faint smile on her lips. For that smile, as well as for her cousin’s recent pleasant disposition, Melanie knew that she had to thank Stephen Brent. Elfrida was thirty-one, though she looked younger. In their travels across France she had not captured the attentions of anyone under fifty, and too often the men who invited her to dine with them had left a wife at home. Alone in her hotel bedroom Melanie had felt sorry for those wives; she couldn’t believe Elfrida’s assertion that Frenchwomen did not demand fidelity from their husbands. She had grown all fierce inside about it, had even been glad when Elfrida’s nerves had snapped under the strain of repeated disappointments and she had defensively taken to her bed. What a glorious relief it had been to arrive in Marseilles, to roam the streets and view the Mediterranean from the hotel windows, to know that soon they would board the liner with an exotic name that lay in the harbor loading up with supplies for the voyage and mail for the Far East.
This morning, Melanie knew herself a different person from the shy young girl who had gazed with awe upon Elfrida’s gilt cocktail set and the daring pictures on the walls of the London apartment. Not that Paris and Nice had taught her much; she had passed the greater part of those weeks inside hotels, copying model dresses and suits for Elfrida. But once the Tjisande had steamed out of Marseilles her whole horizon had widened to embrace Africa, Asia and the hot, turbulent seas of the south.
Although she had necessarily spent much time in the cabin, massaging Elfrida’s temples and doling out ice water, medicines and sympathy, she had constantly been aware of the magnetism of the East. It was as though some new element had entered her mind and body, something vital and almost too powerful for her awakening perceptions to grasp. Once past Suez, she felt, anything could happen. Terrible and wonderful things. They were happening already; the dark, scorching rocks of Aden, the color, the dreadful poverty and vast wealth of the teeming city of Bombay.
Soon they would view the green shores and mountains of Madagascar, and in due course they would come to the scattered groups of islands of which Mindoa was the largest.
Presently Elfrida stirred and opened her eyes. Her smile did not fade but it acquired a sharpness.
“Don’t you get tired of staring out at the sea every morning? The view never changes.”
Elfrida was wrong there; the milky light of early morning developing into the full glare of day played all kinds of tricks with the crests and hollows. But Melanie laughed, as if at her own foolishness.
“The air is like silk. Come and feel if, Elfrida.”
“Not I. It would be just a sticky tropical wind to me. I hope it won’t be too hot at Mindoa.”
Melanie ventured a question that had never yet been discussed between them. “What are we going to do on the island?”
Elfrida raised both arms and crossed them under her head. “I can’t say till we get there and weigh up the condition of the estate. We shall have to spend carefully. There’ll be no new clothes for either of us for sometime to come.”
Seeing that Elfrida’s wardrobe was plentifully stocked and Melanie’s pocket money and clothing were met from the tiny sum left by her mother, this remark was superfluous. Melanie pulled on a dressing gown to cover her pajamas.
Elfrida yawned and brought down scarlet fingertips to tap her mouth. “I’ve a feeling that everything is going to work itself out. It’ll take time and we shall be able to sell the land, at present values, to Stephen’s development corporation.” For a minute she was silent and thoughtful. Then she said, “It was amazing luck, our being on the same ship with Stephen Brent. He’s the sort who naturally fits in with the rich and distinguished. His company has bought for him a sort of mansion just above Port Fernando, and he’s already acquainted with some of the people there—he knew them in Madagascar or somewhere. When I’m with Stephen I can’t help reflecting with horror what an imbecile I was to marry John Paget.”
Elfrida was adept at the jarring phrase. To Melanie’s recollection cousin John had been jolly and very sincere; not handsome and aloof like Stephen, but much more warmly human, and capable of deep and lasting emotions. One couldn’t imagine Stephen permitting a woman to wreck his life, as Elfrida had undoubtedly wrecked John’s. But Elfrida was several years older now, and distinctly more clever in her dealings with men.
To escape the distasteful subject, Melanie went to the cabin door. “I’ll tell the stewardess you’re ready for your tea and have a word with the bathroom steward.”
“See that she brings lemon with the tea, won’t you? Oh—and give me a couple of the pink tablets the doctor brought. Heaven only knows what they contain but they certainly make one feel good.”
At length Melanie was out of the cabin. She spoke to the small, swarthy stewardess, ordered a bath and, while waiting for it, found another porthole through which she could stare and dream, unmolested.
CHAPTER THREE
THE CITY SLOPED BACK from a coral beach, rose gently in spangled white-and-green tiers and rambled halfway around the rim of a sapphire bay. Seated there serenely in an amphitheater of low mountains, Port Fernando presented a lazily smiling face, and a promise.
At least, to Melanie it presented a promise; Standing at the rail as the ship anchored offshore, she was pale yet radiant; her green eyes had small flames in them and her sinews had tensed to withstand the beauty and strangeness.
She remembered what Stephen had told them of the island’s history. Discovered by the Portuguese on the way to India five hundred years ago, colonized and abandoned by the Dutch, then used by the French as a rendezvous for their privateers who preyed upon the shipping routes around the Cape to the East. France had eventually ceded the island to Britain. A good many French families, originally from Bourbonnais, still lived in the several villages on the island, but the workers were chiefly Mindoan Indians.
With such a background Mindoa could not help but possess a deep and mysterious soul. So thought Melanie, on that brilliant morning, at the journey’s end.
She ran back to the cabin, again counted the trunks and cases. She was in charge of them till they were collected.
At last came the porter—her first sight of a Mindoan coolie. He had coffee-pale skin, heavy-lidded eyes with yellow whites, and was wearing a faded red turban, a ragged bluejacket and a loincloth. He counted the cases as Melanie had done, indicated that the same number would arrive at the customs office, and went off with the largest trunk on his back.
Elfrida appeared in the corridor. “Come along, Melanie! There’s a launch below and important-looking people coming aboard. For goodness’ sake wake up! How do I look?”
“Beautiful. You’re always at your best in white.”
“Good,” murmured Elfrida. Magnanimou
sly, she added, “You’re quite attractive yourself this morning. Now don’t forget that first impressions are lasting.”
“I won’t.”
They went up on deck, passed the curious sightseers who had been their companions, and approached a group of four white-clad, handshaking men. From the midst of them came Stephen, smiling in that urbane manner of his.
“Mrs. Paget, may I introduce some friends of mine who have paid me the honor of meeting me. Colonel Davidson ... Senor Perez ... and his son, Senor Ramon Perez.”
Elfrida greeted them coolly, graciously. Melanie smiled up at the white-haired colonel and decided he was rather a dear, gravely acknowledged the introduction to an elderly Spaniard of aristocratic features, and turned to meet the black, leaping gaze of Ramon Perez.
He was young, no more than twenty-six; he had dark, wavy hair and smooth, olive-complexioned good looks. He held out a hand as if frankly disbelieving in this small, pale-skinned girl with the bright eyes and soft, honey-gold hair blowing under the narrow brim of her white hat. His glance was bold and frankly admiring; so bold that pink came into Melanie’s cheeks, and so admiring that she could not quell a tiny smile.
“This is a great pleasure, senorita, a splendid surprise! We thought to greet only the esteemed Mr. Brent, and now we hear that both you and the senora—” he bowed with perfect grace to Elfrida “—are to be residents at Port Fernando. And only yesterday I was urging my father that we leave Mindoa and continue our travels!”
Gaily, imperceptibly, he drew her away from the others. In tones that were made fascinating by a slightly foreign inflection he explained that his father had traveled much, that he himself had actually spent three years at Cambridge and was now doing a world trip with the old senor before settling in Cadiz.
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