Melissa

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  “Oh, Andrew!” cried Melissa, with more eagerness than she had ever displayed. She held out her hands to him and came to him quickly. She put her hands on his shoulders, and kissed his cheek almost hungrily. Andrew was startled. He did not remember ever having been kissed by Melissa before. He patted her shoulder awkwardly, held his pipe behind his back.

  “There, there, old girl,” he said, uneasily catching a note of hysteria in her voice. “How are you? I was going along this way and thought I ought to stop in to see you.” His shrewd eyes searched her face; he saw, with relief, that the gray shadows had left the hollows of her cheeks, and now, incredulously, but with pleasure, he detected a faint scent in her hair and on her flesh.

  Brother and sister smiled at each other in the sudden self-consciousness of shy and austere people who distrust emotion in themselves or in others. “Oh, sit down, Andrew, please,” said Melissa, somewhat breathlessly. “I am so glad to see you. Have you had breakfast?” Suddenly she glanced about her vaguely. “I suppose there’s breakfast,” she added doubtfully.

  “I’ve had my breakfast, but I’ll bet anything you haven’t,” said Andrew, cautiously lowering himself into a leather chair. He had removed his woolen mittens. His big-knuckled hands were red with cold. He held them to the fire.

  “No, I haven’t,” replied Melissa. “I suppose it’s too early for the others. I forgot all about breakfast.”

  How like Melissa that was! Andrew again felt sharp disappointment. He studied his sister searchingly. “What have you been doing, Melly? It seems you are up hours before anyone else.” (Where the hell was Dunham? It was odd that a man should be unaware that his bride had left his bed at crack of dawn, and it was even odder that a bride should be up this early.)

  “Yes, I have been up since half-past seven,” answered Melissa, without the slightest trace of embarrassment. Andrew was confounded, but his mouth fell open idiotically when Melissa went on: “I’ve been working on Papa’s books.” Andrew was speechless. The old fanatical light was in Melissa’s eyes again, he observed, with a sinking sensation. She was fishing hurriedly in the pocket of her skirt, and she brought out a crumpled piece of paper. She unfolded it with considerable crackling, while Andrew stared. She said: “I have just finished a translation from Horace, which I have decided to use as foreword in the book, because it seems to me so appropriate for Papa. I’ll read it to you.

  Then, while Andrew still stared at her in an unbelieving daze, Melissa read rapidly, in Latin:

  “Exegi monumentum aere perennius regalique situ pyramidum altius, quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens possit diruere, aut innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum. Non omnis moriar.”

  Her voice, sonorous and exultant, tender and strong, rang out in the silent library, which was suddenly flooded by the white winter sunlight. Andrew’s mouth was still agape. He could say nothing. Melissa smiled at him with almost passionate triumph. “Does that not seem perfect, Andrew, as a foreword, as an epitaph, for Papa?”

  Slowly, Andrew lifted his hand, rubbed his reddened forehead. He ran a finger around the neck of his woolen scarf, and breathed loudly. Melissa remained blissfully blind to these manifestations of intense discomfiture and perplexity. Melissa was still smiling at him. “I know your Latin was never very good, dear Andrew,” she said, with that blazing and exalted expression still bright on her face, “so I’ll translate it for you.” Incredibly, she believed Andrew’s silence one of embarrassment because he had been unable to follow her Latin. “Well, no matter, Andrew,” she continued, “Latin is a serious study in itself, I shall translate it as best I can. Naturally, one misses the more subtle meanings in translation.” She frowned at the piece of rumpled paper, then translated:

  “I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze,

  Loftier than the royal peak of pyramids;

  No biting storm can bring it down,

  No impotent north wind, nor the unnumbered series

  Of the years, nor the swift course of time.

  I shall not wholly die.”

  She looked at Andrew intensely, waiting for his comment. Now all his face was red, suffused with complete discomfiture.

  “I suppose it does very well,” he commented, in a stifled voice.

  “Oh, Andrew, it is perfect!” she cried.

  How often he had seen this look on her face, after a session with their father! He had hoped never to see it again, but there it was and he could not understand.

  He could not help himself; the words came involuntarily: “Where is Dunham—your husband?”

  Melissa looked blank. “Geoffrey? I suppose he is still sleeping. I haven’t seen him,” she said.

  Andrew stood up abruptly. “You haven’t seen him?” he exclaimed.

  “No.” She was puzzled. “Is there something wrong, Andrew?”

  Something wrong! Why, God damn it, everything is wrong, and that poor simple creature just sits there and stares at me like an imbecile! Andrew’s mouth opened, then closed, opened, then closed again, and now he was crimson. This was the old Melissa, unaware of anything except the thought she was thinking, single-minded as always, obsessed as he had hoped never to see her obsessed again. Andrew felt sick. He began to have a glimmering, and again anger stirred in him.

  “He must have been tired,” Melissa was incredibly going on. “So, naturally, he would still be asleep. They all go to bed late and sleep late,” she added, disdainfully. Then she paused. Andrew watched her in silence. All at once, a sharp wave of color ran over her face, seemed to fill her very eyes. Her hands lifted, dropped. The color ebbed, left her very pale. Now she looked at the fire.

  Andrew came closer to her. “Melly,” he said with quiet urgency, “tell me: Is anything wrong? Things don’t sound right to me—”

  “I assure you everything is all right, Andrew,” said Melissa, with an effort, and almost inaudibly.

  Andrew made a helpless gesture. “I—I don’t understand, Melly. I thought Dunham would take care of you—help you—” He stopped, unable to go on, in the inarticulate manner of people who speak rarely and only when they have something to say, and who find it almost impossible to express their emotions.

  Melissa was silent. She lifted a fold of her brown frock, let it fall. She murmured: “He is very good to me. I—I think I am beginning to trust him. Of course,” she added, in a louder tone, “there were some things he said last night, before his guests, with which I disagreed very strongly, just as Papa would have disagreed. But I hope to change his opinion in the future.” Again she stopped, then repeated: “He is very good to me. I had a pretty gown last night, Andrew. It was blue. I’d like you to see it.”

  Not a nightgown, evidently, thought Andrew with bitterness. He sat down heavily, and regarded his sister with grim concentration.

  “Melly,” he said quietly, “I came here this morning to find out if you were quite—well, and happier.”

  She lifted her eyes and gave him a quick, surprised look, reluctantly moved. “Thank you, dear Andrew,” she said. “That was very kind of you. I—I am well. Naturally, I cannot be very happy, under the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances?” asked Andrew, quickly, hoping for a clue.

  Melissa sighed. The miserable gray shadows were under her strong cheekbones again. “You, Andrew, and Phoebe. I try not to think too much about it, but I cannot forget that you have sacrificed yourselves. Because we had no money, and you were both too proud to accept any from Mr. Dunham.”

  So, that is how she has rationalized it! Andrew did not know what to say. While he was trying to find words, he lit his pipe again, which had gone out. Clouds of smoke obscured his face. He waved them away with his hand. He leaned towards her, and she saw his eyes, a hard, bitter blue.

  “Listen to me, Melly. You must listen, for I think your life depends upon it, and all your future, and any happiness you can have. It is very important, Melly I want you to understand,” he said, in a slow, weighted voice, “that you are dece
iving yourself. I am not too ‘proud’ to accept money, if I need it, and want it. But I neither need it nor want it, from anybody. I did not ‘sacrifice’ myself. I tell you again, as I told you yesterday, that I only want the land. I have wanted it all my life. For the first time since I can remember, I am happy, because I am a farmer now.”

  But Melissa did not believe it. She only gazed at him somberly, and slightly shook her head.

  “For God’s sake, Melissa,” he pleaded. “Try to understand. You’ve built up a completely false premise in that narrow mind of yours. You think you are always right. You are almost always entirely wrong. You are one of the most intolerant and pig-headed people I have ever known.”

  Melissa’s pale lips tightened with that old granite expression he remembered, and the young man was dismayed. How could one reach such a closed brain, impervious to anything it did not want to believe? If Melissa were a stupid woman, it would be easier to understand. But she was a woman of intellect—Andrew inhaled slowly. I might be wrong. It is very possible she is stupid, as only the learned can be stupid.

  Andrew took his pipe from his mouth and regarded it grimly. “Melissa, do you remember how you and my father tried to make me take an interest in poetry? I resisted it always, if you remember. But there was a poem of Pope’s, which expresses what I’ve always felt’ about the land. I don’t remember the name, but it goes like this:

  “Happy the man, whose wish and care

  A few paternal acres bound,

  Content to breathe his native air

  In his own ground.”

  The young man looked at his sister, and waited. But her expression was dark and obdurate. And now he saw that she was suffering. He went on resolutely:

  “Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,

  Whose flocks supply him with attire;

  Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

  In winter, fire.

  “Blest, who can unconcernedly find

  Hours, days, and years slide soft away

  In health of body, peace of mind,

  Quiet by day;

  “Sound sleep by night; study and ease

  Together mixed, sweet recreation,

  And innocence, which most does please,

  With meditation.

  “Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

  Thus unlamented let me die;

  Steal from the world, and not a stone

  Tell where I lie.”

  His voice, unconsciously rising in passion in the measures of the poem, filled the sunlit library, and his eyes burned with an emotion alien to Melissa. After he had finished, she put her hand for a moment to her own eyes, and let it drop.

  “Yes, Andrew,” she said, as if in anguish. “‘—Live, unseen, unknown.’ ‘Unlamented.’ ‘—Not a stone tell where I lie.’ That is what I wished to save you from. That is what I could have saved you from, had it not been for your pride.” She drew a deep breath. “You cannot make me believe that any human creature of intelligence prefers to ‘steal from the world’ like a pauper, a beggar, a faceless being, unmarked and unhonored. You are your father’s son. It is impossible for me to conceive that the son of such a man prefers obscurity, the lightless soil, ugly labor, and namelessness.”

  Andrew stood up, hopelessly, but heavily angered. “You can’t ‘conceive’ of anything, can you, Melissa, but your own conceptions? They are fixed, immutable. They only are the truth. That is what you believe. But you are wrong. I never thought you stupid. But I am afraid you are. You are so damned intolerant, and that is because you are the worst sort of egotist. I don’t remember who it was, but it was some old Frenchman who said: ‘We ought not to be so vain and imagine that others are anxious to have a look at us, and to esteem us.’ My God, Melissa, you are so infernally conceited! Do you actually think the world waits, breathless, for your words of wisdom, or that it gives a damn for Father’s books, or for anyone else’s?”

  In the extremity of his desire to make his sister understand, he had made the most eloquent and the longest speech of his life. He was of a tenacious character. He had insulted her vehemently, for her own sake, in order to awaken her. But she sat there dumbly, in a real agony, and without the slightest sign of anger. It is no use, he thought, desperately.

  Melissa wrung her hands together. “Oh, don’t, Andrew,” she whispered. “I do understand. You want me to be happy, and so you are pretending that all is well with you, and with Phoebe, so that I may have no regrets.”

  Andrew pressed his big, carved lips together, and breathed heavily through his nose. He spoke with the calmness of impotent rage: “Melissa, I plead with you not to be an infernal fool. Listen to me: I am going to marry Judge Farrell’s granddaughter, Miriam McDowell, the girl who was widowed in the war. You have seen her often, I know—the child who used to sit on the log fence and watch you and Father walking in the fields.”

  Wretched as she was, Melissa had a sudden memory of a little girl perched on a log fence one early summer twilight, when the last bird sang in the sky and a melancholy tide of lavender and pale rose swept over the earth. The trees of the woods stood in blurred violet shadow beyond the sloping meadows; the hills had turned a dark purple against a sky of somber fire. Melissa had seen the child on the fence, and the wide curiosity in the big black eyes, before Charles had become aware of her. He was regarding the silent sky dreamily; the last bird had fallen from it in a descending arc of faint song. Charles had said: “How much more poignant is the death of day, than its birth! How much more meaningful, though the meaning is the delusion of our emotions, really, and twilight has no more significance than dawn. It is our imagination which colors a colorless universe, and gives to life a pattern.” He sighed, smiled his sweet and whimsical smile, as if he chided himself tenderly for his own exquisite emotions, as one chides a lovable child. “But Melissa, my love,” he had added in a wounded voice, “you are not listening to me.”

  “I’m looking at that horrid child sitting over there, Papa, staring at us like an impertinent crow,” replied Melissa, in her loud and hectoring voice. She imperiously fluttered her hand at little Miriam. “Run along, girl. This is our property.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Charles, annoyed. “Old Farrell’s grand-daughter. What a quite unprepossessing little creature. What long—er—limbs, and thin body. A veritable young scarecrow. What are those black ropes hanging over her shoulders? Ah, yes, her hair. I was never fond of dark hair; it does not look delicate on a female. It is obvious the little one is not marked by brains, which are necessary in a female devoid of beauty.”

  “You are trespassing, child,” said Melissa, angry because the girl continued to sit on the fence, dangling her long legs in their soiled pantalettes and swinging her feet. The clarity of the heliotrope twilight made her small face very white, expressionless and still. “How can you be so odious?” Melissa demanded, when the girl did not move but only stared at Charles and herself as if they were strange and fantastic creatures from another world. All at once Melissa became aware of her patched gingham frock, her worn hands, her bedraggled hair, her muddy boots, and of her father in his cloak, his gray head bare to the skies, and of the cane he flourished delicately in his hand. An obscure fury rushed upon Melissa, and she took a menacing step towards Miriam. Miriam only swung her legs thoughtfully, and Melissa stopped a few feet away.

  “I’m not trespassing,” said Miriam with a note of contempt in her child’s voice. “This is Grandpa’s fence, anyway. I was just looking at you. Folks say you and your papa are crazy, and I wanted to see.” She regarded Melissa reflectively. “I guess you are, too,” she added, with satisfaction.

  Then, with a hoot of raucous laughter, she had swung her legs over the fence, and run off over the darkening fields, her laughter a long, unendurable streamer flying behind her.

  That had been eight years ago. And now Andrew was going to marry that frightful little creature with the long black ropes over her thin shoulders. Melissa said, in anguish: “
Oh, Andrew. Oh, no, Andrew!”

  “Yes, Melissa,” he replied firmly. “I am. I’ve loved Miriam for years, even before she married poor Jim McDowell, but I didn’t have the sense to speak for her. But I did, yesterday afternoon. We are going to be married just as soon as possible, and the two farms, the Judge’s and mine, are going to be merged, for Miriam is the Judge’s only heir, and he approves of the match. So, you see, Melissa, I am not ‘averse’ to money, and am very glad that Miriam has a good, healthy dowry, and if I had wanted to borrow money from Dunham I should have done so, without ‘pride.’ I have returned to the farm, and am marrying Miriam, because I wish to, and only because I wish to. And there’s Phoebe: she is doing what she always wanted to do, and not because of some transcendental idea you think she is cherishing.”

  Melissa stood up, sick with her pain. It was now as strong as it had been yesterday, and sharper. She gazed at her brother with such misery that he was both freshly angered and newly compassionate.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Melissa!” he exclaimed. “Why the hell don’t you sleep with Dunham, and wake up?”

  Melissa put her hands to her throat. Andrew furiously snatched at his woolen cap and mittens, pulled on his rough woolen jacket, wound his knitted scarf about his throat. His small blue eyes sparkled irately. Then, without another word, he swung about and lumbered rapidly towards the door. Geoffrey Dunham stood there, leaning against the wall in an attitude which suggested that he had been standing so, and listening, for a considerable time.

  Andrew stopped abruptly, falling back on his heels. Color surged into his large rugged face. He seemed to choke. “Why you—you—popinjay!” he spluttered, helpless for a word which would express his full embarrassment, rage, disappointment and fear for his sister, and his disgust for this man. “ What did you marry her for?”