Flight to the Stars

by Pamela Kent

She danced again with Jake when that number concluded, and then Diane seemed impatient to pair off with Jake again.

  “You don’t mind, darling, do you?” she said to Rick. “I’m getting so much useful information out of Jake, and if I continue to pump him skillfully I’ll get lots more.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” Rick replied, with a brevity that could have been an indication that he minded very much indeed.

  He turned to Melanie and drew her up out of her seat.

  “Come on, honey,” he said, for the first time sounding drawling and American. “Let you and me dance, too, shall we? Maybe you can extract some information from me, or I’ll learn a little something from you!”

  And there was reproachful smile on Diane’s lips as she drifted away in Jake’s arms.

  Later Rick stood still suddenly in the very middle of the glistening floor, and said to Melanie: “We’ll go now, shall we? You seem to be flagging a bit, and I’ll take you home.”

  Melanie wasn’t actually flagging, but dancing with him both bemused and exhausted her emotionally, and perhaps the fact that the breeze had died away was responsible for the fact that she did look a little pale and wan. And she had danced so little in her life that this was an experience new to her.

  “But what of Miss Fairchild?” she asked. “Won’t she object?”

  His dark eyebrows were arrogantly raised. “Diane is being taken care of,” he said. “We’ll meet again later, I’ve no doubt.”

  She knew a swift conviction that either the evening had failed for him, or he was preoccupied with something that was disturbing him. She respected his mood of sudden aloofness and silence, and went with him quietly. The other two didn’t seem to notice their going, and Melanie felt uneasiness take hold of her. There could be little doubt now, she thought, having watched them at intervals throughout the evening, that the “Di” who had signed the letter was an English Di, and Jake was either infatuated or in love with her. When he was dancing with her on a rooftop garden, beneath white-hot American stars, he was unable to conceal the fact altogether.

  Surely Rick must have some sort of suspicion?

  But he said nothing—made not even the lightest effort at conversation—until they reached the hotel, and then when she was for continuing in the elevator up to her floor he invited:

  “Come in and have a drink, Melanie. It’s early yet.”

  But she hesitated, and might even have declined had the lift gates not swung open at that precise moment, and Rick taken her arm. He gave her no opportunity to refuse, and inside his suite he poured her a drink which she didn’t really want, and then came and sat beside her.

  “Melanie,” he stared at the dark fluid inside his own glass, which was whisky and a very little soda, “why do you suppose everyone imagines I’m no good at hotel-keeping? Not even interested in it?”

  “Well—are you?” she asked, with simple directness.

  He looked at her with a mocking slant to one of his eyebrows.

  “Even you, Melanie! You think I’m no good too?”

  “I meant are you interested?” she corrected the wrong impression she had conveyed.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I think I am.” He stared again at the amber liquid. “Perhaps my interest has been slow in developing—a little latent. But as I grow older,” with only very faint derision, “I realize that in order to be liveable life must have something more to it than passing interests. The things one imagines are all-absorbing in one’s callow youth become as empty as this glass will be in a few minutes at a later stage of existence. I must have left my youth far behind, because I’m beginning to realize that the old man is right about a lot of things.”

  “He wants you to marry and settle down,” Melanie heard herself say very quietly. “He thinks that once you are married, and have a family growing up around you, your interests will become centred in your job. And according to your father a man must have a job, however rich he is.”

  “He could be right, of course.” He flicked the ash from his cigarette into an ashtray. “He’s right about so many things! But it would be highly important that the wife who would, in time, produce the family, should be entirely the right type, wouldn’t it? Otherwise the plan might come unstuck!”

  “It might,” she agreed.

  “And I suppose nine people out of ten would agree with me that Diane would make any man an enchanting wife? A highly satisfying wife!”

  Melanie barely nodded her head this time.

  “A lovely helpmate with all the right connections, who would curb my restlessness and make my parents happy! And me, of course! I wonder whether I realize how lucky I am?”

  Melanie stared at a standard lamp that was glowing softly, and shedding a lovely warm light all about them. She felt as if her eyes were heavy, and at the back of them something pricked, and there was something hard in her throat that was not easy to swallow. Rick glanced at her sideways, and then he put out a hand and drew her face round to his.

  “Why, Melanie,” he said softly, “you are tired! Or is it that you’re not particularly happy?” He ran a finger along the edge of her lashes and collected a bright drop. “Tears?” he said. “After dinner with Jake, and an evening on the rooftops?” He murmured something caressing, and then drew her into his arms, and she felt his mouth close over hers. Convulsively she clung to him, and the eagerness with which she yielded her lips must have convinced him that it was not merely tiredness she was suffering from.

  She heard him catch his breath as he drew a little away from her, and he looked down at her wonderingly. Then a queer flickering flame seemed to leap up in his eyes, and he caught her back against him possessively. Her heart thundered so that the sound of it was like a roaring Niagara in her ears, and a wordless ecstasy possessed her. She knew beyond all shadow of doubt that she loved this strange, hard, complex, unpredictable man with all the strength of her being, and it didn’t matter that he was merely whiling away an idle moment by kissing her in this fashion. Nothing mattered, apart from the fact that the moment would arrive when he would let her go. But he was in no hurry to let her go.

  “Melanie,” he said softly, thrillingly, as he continued to hold her fast, “you’re so lovely and unusual! What is it that’s so unusual about you?” He tilted her chin and looked at her, and her grey eyes were utterly revealing. “Oh, darling!” he exclaimed, abruptly, and then he was holding her as if he never would let her go, and their mouths clung together with wildness and abandon.

  It was Melanie who jerked herself out of his arms at last, and stood up.

  “I must go!” she said. “I ought not to have come in here ...” Her face was white as wax, and her small breasts were heaving.

  Rick stood up also, and his eyes had the hot look of smouldering coals in his dark, hawk face; and underneath the darkness a tinge of pallor was spreading about his lips.

  “No,” he said, gazing at her as if he had not yet properly taken in an amazing discovery. “No, I don’t think you ought. As a matter of fact—”

  “I ought not to have come out here to America!”

  She put a hand over her lips to hide their trembling.

  “Perhaps I ought to send you home—”

  The door burst inwards, and Diane and Jake stood there, both gazing in a certain amount of astonishment. Diane put her astonishment into words.

  “Why, Rick! Have you developed a secretary complex? Surely you’re not working at this time of night?—or rather, morning!” Her eyes swept disdainfully to Melanie. “Tell her she can go now, Rick! Whatever you were discussing can wait until business hours!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  But Melanie was not to have her stay in America cut short, and be returned to England for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of her work. In fact, the quality of her work was one reason why she suddenly found that her stay might be prolonged.

  The week-end following her evening outing with Jake she accepted an invitation to the Vandraaton’s Long Island hom
e, not because she wanted to do so, but because Lucas Vandraaton sent along a special message to the effect that he once more wished to see her amongst his guests. Rick made no comment on his father’s flattering condescension, and he did nothing at all to help her to make up her mind to accept the invitation. From his manner she might have deduced that it was a matter of the most complete indifference to him whether she did or not.

  She had no doubts that Diane would be amongst the guests—indeed, the star turn. And when she arrived at the Long Island home for the second time—driven this time by Jake—it was to find that Diane and Rick had arrived the previous evening. To the acute disappointment of Mrs. Vandraaton, Diane’s mother, Lady Fairchild, had flown north to visit a sister who had married and settled in Canada.

  Mr. Vandraaton, Melanie thought, was looking as if the long hot summer, and spells of intensive work in his huge New York office, were getting him down. And she for one was not greatly amazed when, following a particularly energetic game of golf on Saturday morning, he suffered a fairly severe heart attack.

  Mrs. Vandraaton collapsed when the doctor pronounced her husband out of danger, and spent the rest of the week-end in bed herself. Rick was so shocked by the sight of his father’s ashy face and utterly exhausted eyes that it seemed to have a curiously sobering effect on him and he spent most of the time sitting quietly with the older man.

  “You’ll have to have a rest, Father,” he said. “You can’t go on as you have been doing. You’ll have to take things easy.”

  “Rubbish!” the elder Vandraaton declared testily. “If you want to kill me altogether tell me to do nothing at all and take things easily! I’ll rest for a couple of weeks—but no longer! And you can leave that young woman of yours behind to help me out when I feel like getting down to it. She’s not one of those disturbing young women with bright fingernails and too many languorous glances, even for an old man. And I like her!”

  “You mean Miss Blake?” Rick said, after a moment of silence. “But I brought her out to work with me!”

  “You can find someone else. There are dozens of girls who’ll suit you in my outer offices, and that red haired little English girl’s soothing—in spite of her hair! Leave her to me,” he said, and looked rather hard at his son as he sat beside his bed.

  “Very well, Father.”

  Rick rose and walked to the window.

  The elder Vandraaton lay watching him, and the outline his black head made against the deep cobalt blue of the sky.

  “Did you know her mother runs a poultry farm?” he said suddenly, once more referring to Melanie. “And she’s got a couple of kid sisters she’s very fond of? Nice family,” he remarked, watching a white cloud float happily across the blue. “The sort of family one can admire—especially the mother!”

  Rick said nothing, and presently he excused himself and went out to meet Diane coming off the tennis-courts. She waved her racquet at him, but pouted a little.

  “You’ve done enough sick-visiting for today,” she declared, slipping her hand into his arm. “Remember, I am here, darling!”

  So Melanie watched Rick depart for New York without her, and before he went he gave her rather a curious smile, and recommended that she enjoy a short holiday.

  “I don’t suppose my father will work you very hard,” he said. “I’ve worked you very hard since you arrived in America, and you’ve lost a little of your English schoolgirl color. Get it back while you’ve got the chance.”

  Melanie surveyed him coolly. Never again, she had decided, would she permit him to treat her as anything other than an employee, and he could sense the slight change in her attitude—the new reserve and dignity.

  “I shall work whenever Mr. Vandraaton wants me to work,” she answered. “And when he feels that he can dispense with my services I shall, with your permission, go home to England.”

  He cocked one of his eyebrows half-humorously. “And if I withhold my permission?”

  “I shall refer the matter to Mr. Vandraaton.”

  “I see,” he said, and turned and walked towards an impatient Diane.

  Before the end of the week he was back again, accompanied this time by Diane’s mother as well as Diane. Mrs. Vandraaton was delighted, and recovered most of her spirits, and Lucas Vandraaton said to Melanie that this was where they went into retreat.

  “I get tired of people milling about me,” he said, “and you and I can cut ourselves off from the rest of them. I like talking to you, even when I don’t feel like working, and so long as you don’t feel you’ll be missing anything we’ll have a quiet time.”

  Melanie assured him that she wouldn’t be, missing anything, and already she had grown used to sharing his quiet study with him, and reading to him from the New York Times, and financial newspapers. He was keenly interested in everything that went on in New York during his absence, and in world affairs, and they discussed them without fear of interruption. They also discussed the London hotel, and because he obviously valued her opinion Melanie almost felt that she had shares in the hotel.

  “I don’t mind admitting to you that I’m worried about Rick,” he said once. “Really worried! Jake has been keeping a close eye on him for months now, and we all know he has Rick’s interests at heart. But even he is inclined to advise me to let Rick have a shot at something else very different from hotel-keeping.”

  “And who would take Rick’s place in the Nonpareil?” Melanie asked.

  “Well, Jake is the obvious man. I value him even more than I value the chap who is manager at present, and it would be a reward for loyal services to promote Jake. But Jake himself doesn’t want to feel that he has thrust Rick out.”

  “It would be a grave mistake to thrust Rick out,” Melanie heard herself say with surprising emphasis. “What would he do if you let that happen?” She looked at Mr. Vandraaton almost accusingly. “He’s tried his hand at quite a few things already, and to fail with the Nonpareil would give him a sense of futility. I believe that if you’re patient, and if—if he marries Miss Fairchild, in time you’ll see a great change in him.”

  Lucas looked at her very closely.

  “And you honestly think the Fairchild girl isn’t after his money; and that she’d make him a good wife?”

  Melanie wanted to cast caution to the winds, and cry: “No, no! I don’t think anything of the kind! I think Diane wants to marry Jake—means to marry Jake!—and Jake means to get control of the Nonpareil! If you rob Rick of the woman he’s in love with, and the hotel, you’ll probably ruin his whole future. You can’t do it, you mustn’t do it!”

  But to say all that was impossible, even to Lucas, whom nowadays she not only respected but felt very close to. And yet, with the evidence inside her handkerchief-box, she could perhaps convince him.

  But only as a last resort, and in Rick’s best interests, would she bring that fragment of letter to light.

  “You know something, Melanie,” Lucas said, with sudden, intense seriousness. “I wish my son had fallen in love with a girl like you, and then I’d have some hopes for his future. Yes, by George, I would! Even if my wife does fancy a snippet of English aristocracy for a daughter-in-law, and all the fal-lal of a big wedding. A big wedding!” He snorted. “She and I were married in a small-town church, and it was good enough for us. But,” gazing with melancholy eyes out into the garden, “it won’t be good enough for Rick! Rick is what we’ve made him!”

  Melanie felt tears of pleasure and hopelessness prick behind her eyes as she made her way out into the cool of the evening, and she hardly noticed Rick until he was right on top of her. The paths were shut in by clipped hedges and formed a kind of shrubbery, and he was within a bare foot or so of her before she realized that she hadn’t got the shrubbery to herself.

  Out of those strange, black, fathomless eyes of his he looked down at her.

  “You’re almost a stranger nowadays,” he said. “My father keeps you very close.”

  “That’s exactly as I prefer it,” sh
e answered, with the coldness that instantly came upon her whenever her eyes even lighted upon him since t that night in New York.

  “But it isn’t good for a young woman of your age to be shut up with an old man.”

  “Your father isn’t all that old, and in any case I like him.”

  “And you don’t like me?” came swiftly.

  She looked up at him, and in the still green twilight of the shrubbery, with the first stars pricking above them, was able to answer truthfully:

  “No—I don’t like you!”

  “You love me a little, perhaps?” ,he suggested smoothly.

  She continued to gaze upwards at him.

  “Shall I tell you something?” she asked. “When I first knew you I thought you strongly resembled a North American Indian. I still think you do, not merely because of your looks, but because you like to hang scalps at your belt! Only the scalps you collect are feminine scalps, and mine will never hang amongst them. Is that a convincing enough answer?” and she left him and walked firmly in the direction of the river that ran happily through the grounds.

  He did not follow her—at least, not until she reached the river bank, and then he came striding after her.

  “Melanie, you’re a little fool! I don’t want your scalp, but I do want you to have a better time than you seem to have had since you came out here with me.” She looked so small and shadowy in the gloom that his eyes were actually anxious. “Come out with us tomorrow, Melanie! We’re going sailing, and it’ll put some color in your cheeks.”

  “You should know that redheads don’t go in for color,” she returned dryly, for he had more than once called her a redhead.

  “Maybe not. But there is such a thing as a healthy glow, and you’ve lacked it for the past week and more.”

  “I’m not accustomed to intense heat,” she said.

  “Then come sailing with us, and you’ll enjoy a good breeze. Half a dozen of us are going to race, and you can help Diane crew for me.”