by Pamela Kent
“If your sick-visiting manner can’t rise to anything better than that I think we’d better leave you off the list in future,” he observed quietly. “And I’ve made it perfectly plain to young Ransome what my personal opinion is of his handling of a boat.”
“Yes, I know darling,” a trifle rebukingly, “and you were definitely harsh. Quite unnecessarily harsh, considering he’s a guest.”
“Melanie’s a guest, too.”
Diane’s feathery gold eyebrows lifted.
“I understood she was employed in a secretarial capacity, and that you’d handed her over to your father because you could do without her yourself!”
Rick’s lips seemed to become very tightly compressed together.
“One doesn’t hand over a secretary in the same manner that one might hand over a bale of wool, Diane,” he said softly.
She didn’t quite like the softness, so she pouted. “Well, in any case, does it matter?” she asked, and took his arm and led him away along the length of the terrace.
Melanie watched them go, and she wished she had remained in her own room. So Rick had handed her over to his father! ... The story about his father needing her wasn’t quite true! Perhaps he had sensed danger—real danger—if she remained in close daily proximity to him, not because he was in love with her, but because she had some sort of physical attraction for him which could menace his future with Diane!
It would never do, when he had made up his mind to marry Diane, to become involved with someone like herself ... Someone who tempted him so strongly occasionally that he had to kiss her! Just as he had kissed her in New York, and in her own room last night.
But the touch of his lips last night could have been a brotherly attention, because he had been upset by the sight of her lying there, and he had also been upset because she had nearly drowned.
She wished she could remember what, exactly, she had said to him the night before ... What she had begun to say to him.
CHAPTER TEN
For the next few days Melanie was not quite her normal self, and Mr. Vandraaton wouldn’t hear of her doing any work for him. Rick, too—although there was a certain amount of reserve in his manner whenever they were temporarily isolated from the rest of the house guests, and found themselves alone together—was almost brusque in his insistence that she must rest and take things easy.
He was assiduous in looking after her even when other people looked on, and piled cushions behind her head, and ordered her to keep her feet up at moments when she would far rather have been allowed to sink into the background, and be ignored. She was certain that Mrs. Vandraaton thought he fussed unnecessarily, and there was no doubt about it, Diane Fairchild actively resented the fussing. She must have felt quite secure in her own hold on Rick, but according to the way she looked at things a secretary was a secretary, and a pretty one was always a potential nuisance. Men being what they were!
But Melanie didn’t feel at all pretty with the bump going down slowly under her hair, and her head so tender that the hundred brush strokes she normally gave it nightly had to be temporarily suspended. She was afraid that her hair lacked gloss, and those pale mauve smudges under her eyes made the eyes themselves look slightly mournful. Aunt Octavia noticed the mournfulness one morning when Melanie was standing alone at the end of the terrace, looking forlornly out across the grounds to the sea. Everyone else appeared to have disappeared into thin air, and Aunt Octavia’s ebony cane as it tap-tapped smartly on the smooth floor of the terrace aroused startling echoes in the morning silence.
The sun was shining goldenly as usual, there was the lightest of morning breezes, but Melanie’s quiet, brooding expression suggested that none of it was balm to her soul. On the contrary, a wet morning in London at the end of summer could not have seen her looking more dispirited, or less as if she was a guest in a millionaire’s residence, with every luxury laid on.
And that was all she was at the moment—a guest whom nobody had invited formally. An unwanted guest.
Aunt Octavia stopped beside her, and observed that it was unusually peaceful.
“I must really be getting old,” she said, sinking into one of the terrace chairs, “but I find I can’t stand too much noise and excitement nowadays. These noisy week-end parties always get me down, but this one has gone on rather longer than most. It looks like degenerating into a summer vacation for some of the folks who’ve come here.”
Melanie glanced at her rather doubtfully, but Miss Vandraaton smiled.
“Sit down, child.” She indicated another chair near to her. “You’re not looking very robust yet, and I blame my nephew for letting you get that crack on the head. After all, presumably he made himself responsible for you when he brought you out from England. A nice shock it would have been for your mother if she’d received a cable announcing that you were somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean!”
Aunt Octavia spoke with a certain amount of relish, as if it might have had a salutary effect on her nephew also, and she was inclined to the view that such a shock would do him no harm at that particular period of his existence.
But Melanie smiled with sudden amusement. “I don’t honestly think I would have been left to lie at the bottom of the ocean,” she remarked. “Someone would have done something about fishing me out.”
“Rick, I expect,” the faded spinster observed. “And he would have worn sackcloth and ashes for weeks—probably months, or maybe even years!—because he’d been unable to prevent your untimely end!” She looked at the girl rather curiously. “Rick isn’t like other young men of his generation, you know,” she remarked. “He has the most extraordinary potentialities, and it would be most unwise to predict what he might, or might not do in a given set of circumstances. For instance, although we all know he plays hard—or has played hard, in the years since he’s been running his own life, and parental opposition hasn’t counted for much—if he suddenly became sufficiently revolted by everything and everyone he wouldn’t hesitate to become a monk, or something of the sort! I can even imagine him taking a vow of silence while he looked back in retrospect—contemplation, is it?—on the failures in his past life!”
Melanie heard herself give a slightly unnatural burst of laughter.
“I’m afraid I can’t, Miss Vandraaton!”
“Ah, but you don’t really know him, do you?” Miss Vandraaton pointed her cane at her shrewdly. “You only think you know him, and what you think you know about him occasionally depresses you, doesn’t it?” She didn’t give Melanie time to reply—even if she had been capable of framing a reply—but went on, still emphasizing with her cane: “You only recognize the restless, unpredictable side of Rick—you don’t realize that there are deeps below the shallows which are ten times deeper than any normal person’s deeps! When he was a little boy I think I understood him more than most people because he came to me with his troubles, and if he wasn’t so certain I can’t be fooled he’d come to me with them now.” She sighed. “But those days are over. Rick keeps his troubles to himself, and often they don’t improve his temper. And my brother’s sledgehammer methods of trying to find out what, if anything, lies beneath the crust of his only son gets him nowhere. Why should it?” she demanded.
Melanie felt forced to defend Mr. Vandraaton and his methods, because she had become very fond of him.
“An only son of an exceedingly rich man must be a great anxiety,” she observed.
“To whom?” Aunt Octavia caught her up swiftly. “To himself, or his father—or the girl he eventually falls in love with? For all men fall in love at least once in their lives, you know! With Rick it will be only once!”
Melanie could feel her heart begin to labor rather painfully, and she was aware that Miss Vandraaton was subjecting her to immensely shrewd glances.
“I’ll tell you something!” Miss Vandraaton said suddenly. “If Rick marries the wrong girl it will be all up with him. He’ll never recover from the mistake, and his parents will live to rue the da
y they forced someone like that stiff-necked, prim-voiced British girl down his throat! Goddaughter of a duke!” She made a sound between a snort of disgust and a strong expression of doubt, which appeared to be strangled in her throat. “You’re a British girl yourself, and you’ll understand I’m not trying to underrate your countrywomen, or anything like that. But I’ve had rather more than I can stomach of that patrician young woman lately. My sister-in-law never lets up on her, and never stops extolling all her virtues—which to my mind are doubtful!”
There was nothing Melanie could say to this, so she waited for Miss Vandraaton to get anything else off her chest she wanted to get off it while the opportunity was hers. And Miss Vandraaton did so.
“I’ll tell you something else, my dear child, if you’re in a mood to listen. My brother says you’re a first-class listener, but I shouldn’t think you always act upon advice that’s given you! Now I’m going to give you a piece of advice. You can act upon it if you like, but I don’t suppose you will!”
Melanie stared at her, and Aunt Octavia prodded her cane right at her.
“Make up your mind what you want from life, and go after it! Don’t let anyone else beat you to the post! ... Remember, years are long when you’ve nothing to do but look back and remember—and regret! The fact that you preserved your pride intact, and no one ever suspected the way you were feeling, is cold comfort when the only thing you’ve got left to comfort you is your pride! I know what I’m talking about, because years ago I wanted something—no; someone!—and my pride wouldn’t let me go after him. A girl with a face like a plate and a pocket full of money got him, but he never again knew happiness until the day he died. And then it was just release ... And look at me! An old maid with a stick—just somebody’s Aunt Octavia!...”
Rick came along the terrace, having just parked his car on the drive, and he was mopping his dark brow with a blue-and-white silk handkerchief. It wasn’t a violently spotted handkerchief, like his father’s, but it emphasized the deep bronze of his skin and the amazing blackness of his hair.
“You look warm, darling,” Aunt Octavia said to him brightly, as he sank a little heavily into a chair. “Where is that delightful young woman of yours? Have you reduced her to a grease spot on the golf course, or have you merely been sauntering on the shore, like the happy pair of lovers we all believe you to be? I’ve just been telling Melanie here—” lying for some purpose outrageously—“that the thing we are all looking forward to is your wedding in the autumn. Your mother has it all planned—down, I should say, to the smallest detail!—and I’m simply dying to meet the duke...”
Rick had a heavy scowl on his face—quite an unusual scowl—and it wasn’t lightened by this spate of words. He looked very hard at his Aunt Octavia.
“Are you?” he said, in a pronounced American drawl. “Then you’re also looking forward to the wedding?”
Aunt Octavia flickered her eyes at him, and they were overbright, uncannily shrewd eyes. She clasped her veined hands over the silver-mounted head of her ebony cane.
“I am looking forward to a wedding—one day!” she said. “If it’s the right sort of wedding I shall discard this,” patting the top of the stick, “and dance at it!”
Rick smiled very faintly—a smile without any humor in it—and lit a cigarette. He sent an oblique glance at Melanie.
“And how’s the unfortunate victim today?” he asked, his thick eyelashes concealing the fact that he was very carefully studying her.
“A little tired of being referred to as a victim,” Aunt Octavia answered for her rather briskly. “In fact, she’s tired of having nothing to do all day while other people buzz, round her like a swarm of bees. Concentrating entirely, of course, on their own affairs! ... And what I want to do is find a nice young man for her who’ll lift her out of the doldrums! Not one like that stupid young idiot who very nearly drowned her—although I daresay he could be trusted to take her dancing, and I will say he was very properly upset after the accident. Would you like to go dancing with Terry Ransome, my dear?” she asked Melanie. “He’s the only one I can think of whose age and everything else is really suited to you—” flickering her eyes again at her nephew—“and if you like him enough I’ll get Rick here to fix up a little party for tonight at one of the local night spots. There’s a place called the Pink Satin Cow, or the Pink Satin Elephant—”
“I imagine you’re thinking of the Pink Satin Slipper,” Rick corrected her, with extreme dryness. “And it’s hardly the sort of place I’d recommend for Melanie at the moment.”
“But why on earth not?” His aunt sounded astonished. “Not with nice young Terry Ransome to take care of her?”
“He failed dismally to take care of her before,” Rick returned, as if he was speaking through his teeth. “And why have you suddenly decided that he’s so nice?”
“Because I was looking at him very carefully the other day, and I decided that he’s very nice. If Candy hadn’t fallen for that austere doctor type everyone’s so much against—and of course I’m referring to your revered parents, who have a habit of opposing everything their children want to do!—I would have liked to see him married to her. Or her married to him, which is a better way of putting it. He’s got a wholesome look, and he’s not over-experienced. I can’t think of anything worse for a young girl without experience than to find herself being escorted by a man who thinks he knows all the answers. For one thing, that kind are never serious!”
“And the Terry Ransomes are?”
“They could be. I rather gathered when Terry was telling me how upset he was about being the author of that bump under Melanie’s curls that he could very easily be serious about her! And he hasn’t a father to interfere in his affairs, and his mother would love a daughter-in-law. Almost any daughter-in-law!”
“Which can’t make Melanie feel very flattered!” Rick stood up, as if his chair was suddenly too small and restricting for him, and his expression was grim. “You’re nothing but a revolting matchmaker, Aunt Octavia!” he told her. “I suppose it’s because you’ve got nothing much else to do?”
“Nothing but look on at the foibles of other people,” his aunt murmured.
Rick squared his shoulders.
“If anyone’s going to take Melanie dancing I’ll do so myself. You can tell young Ransome to take lessons in handling a boat.”
“That would be rather cruel,” Miss Vandraaton offered it as her opinion. “And as for you taking Melanie out this evening, what would Miss Fairchild have to say to that? You mustn’t forget, dear boy, that your particular friendships incur obligations, and Melanie just isn’t one of them! But you can make the arrangements at the Purple Slipper, or whatever it’s called.”
Rick went off scowling so blackly that his aunt, instead of appearing intimidated, laughed.
“Men,” she remarked to Melanie, “like to have their cake and eat it, too. At the moment too much cake—or perhaps I ought to say the wrong sort of cake—is giving Rick indigestion!”
But Rick had quite plainly recovered from his indigestion when they all set off for the Pink Satin Slipper that night. He was affable and urbane, smooth and bland. He had a white gardenia in his buttonhole, and diamonds blazed in his shirt cuffs. Diane, in a very short evening dress that made her look like an extraordinary lovely child with a mature look in her eyes, clung to his arm all evening, but he appeared perfectly content to be chained to her side.
If there was anyone else amongst the party with whom he would have liked to dance it was not given away by his expression; and as for Melanie—apart from an occasional twisted smile at her that acknowledged her presence when she crossed his path, or they found themselves near to one another at the big round table in the centre of the room (the table that rattled with champagne glasses every time someone sat down at it) she might not have existed at all so far as he was concerned. Terry Ransome looked after her devotedly, and declined to permit her to dance too frequently in the airless room, but in spite of th
at she grew hot and tired long before the evening was over. Perspiration pricked on her pale brow, under her bright curls, and two spots of exhausted color burned in her cheeks.
She couldn’t think why Miss Vandraaton had put in a plea for her going dancing at all, for she certainly wasn’t in the mood for it—or perhaps she wasn’t quite fit for it yet—and Terry’s determination to look after her was carried a little too far. He held her too closely, and every time she flagged visibly his concern made her feel ten times worse. Even walking in, the garden, which was high above the sea, was not too pleasant, when he tried to inveigle her into every shady arbour, or on to every discreetly placed garden seat.
He told her he had never been so upset in his life as he was on the night after her accident due to his carelessness, and he hadn’t slept a wink for several nights after that. It wasn’t merely that she was on his conscience, but the danger that had come so close to her had made him realize how unbearable life would have been if it had been unescapably close. He would never forget the sight of her lovely red hair floating on the water, and her pale upturned face.
The remembrance upset him so much that he tried several times to kiss her, but Melanie avoided the kisses, and hoped her reluctance to be made love to by him didn’t hurt him as much as his expression suggested. He wasn’t a Jake Crompton, and she found it easy to share Aunt Octavia’s opinion that he was very nice, but on top of the bump on her head, the emptiness of the past few days, and the ease with which Rick had forgotten his own anxiety concerning her, and put the memory of a brief, quiet period beside her bed away from him, everything seemed either too much or completely unsatisfactory.
The night-club seemed too highly colored, and in her jaundiced opinion vulgar. Aunt Octavia (who had insisted on accompanying them) looked ridiculous in purple lace, flirting with a man of her own generation, and the fact that she was enjoying herself quite passed Melanie by. Diane Fairchild, lowering her childish cheek to Rick’s shoulder, and drifting dreamily in his arms, while the band played something seductive, finally made her want to escape from the lot of them at all costs.