She had to smile. Trust Stephen to set an unmistakably light tone for the conduct of their relationship. How she hated and loved him!
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MELANIE RESTED cross-legged on the nursery floor. At every movement the layers of newspapers upon which she sat crackled and whispered, but she was too absorbed to notice the sounds. She had never seen toys so delicately fashioned as the furniture in the old French dollhouse, and the mending and painting were a labor of pure joy. Denise would not thoroughly appreciate the wooden mansion, its rooms and furnishings, for several years to come, but Lucille was as happy about the renovations as Melanie herself.
They were splendid rooms with bay windows and tiny copies of Louise Quinze furniture. The whole thing had been made for Lucille more than thirty years ago by an old islander of French extraction. And now, of course, she wanted it slicked up for Denise; Henry had several times been on the point of starting the repairs but she had put him off because she felt that a woman would conceive a neater finish to doll-sized furniture.
At the moment Denise was down on the beach with her Indian nurse, and Henry was tobacco planting. Lucille was at the back of the house, spasmodically singing; she had an indistinct, croony voice that made pleasant listening.
Everything about the house was pleasant. It was light and cool, and full of quiet laughter. Dabbing glue upon the leaning leg of a dainty chair, Melanie reflected that some houses were almost too expressive of the people who lived in them. There had been Elfrida’s apartment; vivid, vicious in its sophistication; the Perez villa, gracious, slightly florid, with an unexpected austerity in the scholarly study. Stephen’s present abode had imbibed an uneasy blend of patchouli and Western culture.
Three days under the same roof with Henry and Lucille had shown Melanie that love, in its widest and tenderest application, is the greatest influence in the world. Love and faith were indispensable to a complete and happy life.
Melanie thought back to her arrival last Sunday. Henry’s almost hilarious reception of her disclosure that she had done with Elfrida; Lucille’s immediate, “Stay with us, Melanie. Only yesterday I was saying to Henry how good it would be to have you in John’s room.”
It had not been so much a welcome as a glad acceptance of any circumstances that brought her here as a guest. Later, when Stephen had gone, Melanie had talked over her financial position with them; the facts had slipped so easily into place, and for the first time in her adult life she had known the blessed sensation of belonging.
Melanie sat back upon her heels and regarded with some satisfaction the numerous minute articles of furniture that were whole again and standing upon a tiny tray to dry. Her fingertips were sticky with glue and varnish, a honey-gold lock persisted in obscuring one eye and her cheeks were pink with crouching and pleasure in her task.
Lucille looked down at her as she came in, looked and smiled. “You were so quiet I thought you’d gone to sleep,” she said.
“I can always be located because I love to croak a song.”
“Humming to entertain oneself was discouraged at the school, and Elfrida can’t bear to have anyone singing around her.” Melanie laughed. “When we first came to Mindoa I used to sing to myself as I explored the streets.”
“But lately you haven’t found so much to be merry about? Did she make you unhappy?”
“A little, but it’s past now.”
Lucille dropped into a wicker chair, leaned forward to take a miniature table between her fingers. “Whenever the name of Elfrida Paget is mentioned I begin to get angry. At one time it was for John’s sake and more recently it’s been for yours.”
“If it hadn’t been for Elfrida I’d never have met you and Henry.”
“Or your Stephen—and he’s much more important to you than we Jamesons! I’ve always believed that certain people cross one’s path for a purpose and thereafter go their ways. Elfrida widened your horizon and unintentionally put you in touch with your future husband. Such blessings help you to forgive the rest.”
Her head bent, Melanie answered, “I haven’t the least grudge against Elfrida. I shall always be glad I’ve known Stephen.”
“What a funny thing to say! Of course you’re glad. Stephen’s an unusual man—he has it in his power to make you ecstatically happy.”
“Or frightfully miserable,” Melanie said soberly. “I don’t suppose I understand him yet.”
“Full understanding doesn’t come till after marriage, and even then it takes time. Stephen’s the sort who has to be trusted to the hilt and allowed to handle both you and himself. Don’t get despondent if you have doubts. They’re a common recurring symptom of the engagement period. I do wish you two were getting married on the island.”
Melanie’s heart twisted. With Lucille she had continually to remind herself that the engagement was farcical and temporary, that in a few weeks’ time Stephen would put her aboard a vessel bound for England and wave her an airy goodbye. The pretense would be over; she and Stephen would have parted forever.
At night, in the room that had been John’s, Melanie was too spent to thrust away the roseate dream in which Stephen found her necessary to his existence and wouldn’t let her go. By morning’s searching light, however, she had no illusions; he would carry out his plan suavely and ruthlessly, and plunge back into his work at El Geza, scarcely remembering the diversion she had created for him during has break at Mindoa. It would have been more easily endurable if he had allowed her to be honest with Henry and Lucille, but not knowing them and none too confident about the soundness of Melanie’s judgment, he had insisted that there should be no exceptions; in any case, he had pointed out, it would be better for Melanie if the Jamesons thought her engaged; otherwise, through some mistaken sense of loyalty to her dead cousin, they might consider themselves in a degree responsible for her. They were that type.
“I’m selfish enough,” said Lucille, “to wish that Stephen had planned for you to remain with us for a long time. Selfish,” she tacked on explanatorily, “because you’re just the person to make a fine job of those terrible manuscripts.”
Melanie looked up, amazed. “I? How can you know? What has to be done to them?”
Lucille’s fingering of the small table had slanted one of the legs. Apologetically, she replaced it on the tray.
“It came to me when you showed us the letter to your lawyer on Monday. You have small, clear handwriting, so very different from my scribble or John’s heavy scrawl. He’s not too good at French, anyway,” she ended with seeming inconsequence.
Melanie smiled, “You’re very mysterious.”
“I’m awful at asking favors—always take the longest road. It’s like this. Those manuscripts—there are about two thousand pages—were left to me by my father. They were actually started in the dim ages when the very first consignment of ink reached Mindoa, and it must have been pretty poor stuff, because all the older pages are nearly illegible. My father and grandfather wrote their part in English, but the others have used French.”
“I hope you’re not going to ask me to translate archaic French into present-day English!”
“No translations at all, but the writing must be done by someone who knows French rather well or there might be bad errors. You see?”
Melanie nodded. “And what is the work?”
“The manuscripts are dated. They have to be put in chronological order and copied by hand. The originals should then be sent to the British Museum, and the copy should be bound in leather and placed in the government offices here. Those were my father’s stipulations.”
“Wouldn’t it be simpler to send them away to be typed?”
“Much simpler, but papa was something of an aesthete, and he had an exaggerated idea of Mindoa’s importance. Apart from that, there’s the risk of their being lost or damaged. I more or less gave him my word that they wouldn’t go out of my hands till the whole task was complete.” A pause. “I’m really begging you to stay with us, Melanie. I know you
can’t accept without consulting Stephen, but you did admit that you’d be at a loose end in England, and if you and Stephen aren’t marrying till he’s finished at El Geza...”
Sharply, Melanie sprang to her feet. “I’d love to do it for you, Lucille. I can promise to remain here at least until I hear from the lawyer.”
“I’d be everlastingly grateful. Those papers have been reproaching me for nearly five years. I haven’t explained quite everything.” She smiled again. “My father knew me very well. He was sure I’d get someone else to do the writing, so he set aside two hundred pounds to cover the cost.”
Melanie drew in her lip, caught herself staring at Lucille and started to pick up the glue and varnish, the spread newspapers. “I wouldn’t need payment. Living here would be enough for me.”
“If you finished the job you’d have to take the cheque—it would belong to you. But that’s only a trifle. The big thing is that you haven’t turned me down. Stephen will be here on Saturday. Talk it over with him, but it might be wise not to mention the fact that the work is to be paid for. I imagine he could get really nasty if he thought you were laboring here for a salary, and I wouldn’t want to be the cause of that.”
Perhaps Lucille was aware of her wisdom in thus phrasing her final comment. Certainly it made an appeal to Melanie, who had mostly worked hard but never yet earned a salary. Already she was calculating; two thousand pages at an average of twenty pages a day would take between three and four months. At first the writing would be arduous and she might not be able to work fast, but practice would give speed, and by the end of four months she would have earned comparative independence.
“The advantages of having it done in the house,” observed Lucille, “are that I shall be on the spot for calculations when you come across anything difficult to decipher, and we can check each manuscript together as you go along. By the way—” her head went to one side as she heard heavy footsteps in the veranda “—Henry will call you all sorts of a fool for taking it on, but secretly he’ll be as pleased as a hound with a long tail. Believe it or not, the old darling is a complete snob about being married to the last of the de Vauxs. He even had the baby christened Denise de Vaux Jameson!”
She muted her laughter, got up and looked out of the window and along toward the front of the house. Melanie lifted the tray of doll’s furniture to the top of the dressing table and pushed the stool holding the dollhouse back against the wall.
“Supposing,” she said evenly, “I got partway through the manuscripts and had to leave them?”
“It would be that much done, wouldn’t it?” Lucille said practically. “But I won’t have you decide finally till you’ve had a discussion with Stephen.”
Melanie, of course, had already made her decision. This work—paid, too, though she would not take the whole two hundred pounds for it—was just what she needed. She would live with the Jamesons without getting in their way, do a worthwhile job that would so sweeten the rest of her time on Mindoa that the memory of the first disastrous months must fade. And Stephen ... well, he would be free to take the very next boat if he desired.
During the last days of that week Melanie read parts of those mellow, closely written papers and practiced elaborate capitals, with a flourish. Henry procured several reams of smooth, tough paper and an expensive fountain pen. He polished up John’s writing table and fixed a well-sprung cushion into the seat of the chair. The view through the window above the table could not, in Melanie’s opinion, be improved.
On Saturday morning Melanie went down for a swim. The house was two hundred feet above the sea, and one descended by way of a zigzag path through banana, palmetto and tall, reedy grasses. The beach was coral and brown rocks, and here the reef was close enough to form a clear blue lagoon.
She swam a little in the languorous, buoyant water and then pulled on her bathrobe, stuffed her bathing cap into the pocket, and climbed to a ridge that was shallowed by a lone tree. From here she could see a smaller lagoon to the right where coolies bathed. Most of them wore loincloths, but the little boys and girls were naked. No women were in evidence. Melanie had never seen an Indian woman without her yards of sari; most of them were slim and probably shapely, but no one except their husbands glimpsed anything but their facial beauty. And their faces, though lovely and intelligent, seemed to Melanie to be stamped with the tragedy of continuous subservience to antediluvian customs.
Melanie lay back against the tree and closed her eyes. Sometime today she would see Stephen; nothing else had significance. Because of him her blood ran faster and her heart, which was his, seemed melting and unruly. Impossible to picture a world in which there would be no Stephen. She would have to face it, but not now, not today. At last her life was taking shape and substance. Ahead lay months of valuable work; her copy of the de Vaux chronicles would lie in a safe at the government offices. Ink was indelible these days, and it was not improbable that her writing would still be read a hundred or more years from now. She thought of the volumes in the old senor’s possession and was sorry he could not be told about the historical data concerning Mindoa. He’d have been interested and reverent.
Uneasy at the trend her conjectures had taken, Melanie sat up and looked at the sea. A head bobbed there now; a man’s head with close-cropped hair and ruddy skin. Upon the beach not far from the water’s edge lay a towel and some articles of clothing. Idly, she speculated upon the man’s identity. Henry’s plantation stretched both ways for many acres, and there were no white men in his employ.
The swimmer made long, measured strokes. If swimming was a reliable indication, this man had few complexities of character. Backward and forward he went in the same thirty yards of ocean, and when he had had enough he plodded up to the beach and dried his face and shoulders. Obviously believing he had this part of the shore to himself, he pulled on a sports shirt, threw shorts and towel over his arm and made for the path.
He was about a dozen feet from Melanie when he raised his head and saw her. He stopped dead and stared from under shaggy Jameson brows with the blue eyes of Henry,
“I beg your pardon,” he said, though he did not explain for what.
He was a good bit younger than Henry; Melanie put his age at thirty, or even less. He was ruggedly agreeable to look at and of average height. No outstanding features, but nice, ordinary men rarely have arrogant noses or contemptuous mouths. She liked the way his wet hair stood up in short tufts.
She swung her legs from the ledge and jumped down. “I expect we’ve heard about each other. You’re Henry’s brother, aren’t you?”
He nodded. “And you’re Melanie. I didn’t think you’d be so young.”
“Why not?”
He gave a self-deprecatory grin. “I knew your cousin John, and somehow thought of you as nearer his age. Have you swum or are you about to?”
“I’m just going back to the house.”
“We’ll go together, then.”
Colin Jameson was exactly as Henry must have been about fifteen years ago. Dogged, unassuming, a son of the soil, he was even managing the very estate that his brother had supervised for so long. He had no desire to leave Mindoa, and his ambitions ran to pattern; one day he would have his own plantation.
“And a wife,” interposed Lucille, for the subject had arisen over the luncheon table. “Don’t put that off till you’re forty, as Henry did.”
“There’s not another Lucille to wait for,” said her husband. “He’ll have to pick one of the belles of Carimari. Played any tennis with the Acheson girl lately, Colin?”
“She wouldn’t suit Colin,” said Lucille witheringly. “She’s too hearty. He needs someone sweet but spirited.”
Colin laughed good-temperedly. “So does every man. I suggest that my fate be permitted to work itself out without help. I’m perfectly happy as I am.”
“You won’t be as soon as you meet the right girl, I can tell you,” Henry warned him. “Being in love before you’re married is a perpetual state of el
ation and depression in equal parts. Isn’t it, Melanie?”
She blushed, but answered flippantly, “I believe it is.”
Colin gazed at her for a moment in some surprise, but the topic died there when Denise staggered into the room, bypassed her parents and flopped adoringly at his feet. He bent and lifted her to his knee, instinctively held her well away from the table and spoke to her in a gentle drawl. Presently he excused himself; it was his habit to take Denise for a walk in the garden.
The other three moved to the veranda for a cigarette. It was a somnolent afternoon. Crickets chirped and bright green parrots squawked as they perched in the trees. The sound of the sea merged with that of the wind, forming a drowsy background to conversation.
They saw the dustcloud from the track before the car itself was visible. With careful precision Melanie disposed of her cigarette, pushed back hair that was neatly curled. As she watched the bend where the large gray car was likely, within seconds, to make its appearance, her nerves tightened as though she were preparing for battle.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
STEPHEN CAME UP into the veranda, sardonically inclined his head.
“You’re agreeably early,” exclaimed Lucille. “I hope you’re here for the rest of the day!”
“Thank you. I’d thought of inviting you all to the Miramar for dinner, but please yourselves.”
“Colin’s here for the weekend. We’ll go some other time. Sit down and have a cigarette.”
Stephen took the wicker chair between the two women, accepted a cigarette and, through a curtain of smoke, gave Melanie a smile tinged with mockery.
“Everything smooth?” he queried casually.
“Quite,” she responded. “I’ve had a restful week.”
“So restful,” inserted Lucille, “that all my needlework is now up to date and there isn’t a minor repair left to do in the house.” She bent forward and peered anxiously down the garden. “I wonder where Colin has taken Denise. She didn’t have her sunbonnet.”
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