Melissa Page 11

A bright spark touched Melissa’s urgent and pleading eyes. Amanda sat up very straight in her chair and stared at her younger daughter compellingly. But Phoebe would not look at her.

  “Certainly,” said Amanda, in a shaking voice, “I cannot force you to marry John Barrett, Phoebe, though you have given him your word. But I beg of you to consider, before you ruin your life with childish folly. We have no money. Unless we struggle very hard we shall not have even a home. Your poetry! What do you expect to do with it, child? Sell it? To whom?” Then the enormity of her daughter’s words struck her with horror. “What are you saying, Phoebe?” she cried. “That you are not going to marry John?”

  “Oh, I don’t know!” sobbed Phoebe. “Oh, can’t I be let alone?”

  Amanda said nothing. She sat in her chair in a sudden stony silence. Melissa sprang to her feet, ran to Phoebe, knelt beside the girl, and pulled the golden head to her shoulder as if in passionate protection. Phoebe allowed herself to collapse against her sister, and cried.

  Andrew had not spoken at all. He just sat there, looking slowly from his mother to his sisters, and his small, dark-blue eyes were very meditative. He wanted to smoke his old pipe; he longed with hunger for a smoke. His hand fumbled at his pocket. A sudden loud burst of sobs from Phoebe made him frown a little, impatiently. A man was out of place among a flock of women. He wished Phoebe would shut up, and he wished that Melissa would not be such a damn fool. He looked again at his mother and was about to speak, when Melissa exclaimed:

  “Phoebe, dearest, do go to your room and rest for a while. Lie down, and after a little while I’ll come to you and we can talk quietly.” She stood up and helped Phoebe to her feet, then led the girl to the door. Phoebe clung to her in the most pathetic way, and Andrew, watching them, felt that something was out of place, false, in the touching picture of the young girl leaning against her sister. He was not a very subtle young man, but he sensed that something was not quite right. He frowned again, and his brown forehead wrinkled.

  Amanda did not watch her daughters leave the room. She sat in her silence. She did not look up when, in a few moments, Melissa returned to her chair. She knew, without looking, that Melissa wore an air of proud vindication and determined conquest. But she felt no anger.

  Melissa leaned against the back of her chair like a judge disposing of urgent cases. “Andrew,” she said, “you haven’t spoken. You know what Papa wished for you. You know the money that has been spent on you. Have you nothing to say?” But Amanda answered for him: “There is no money. There is nothing for any of us but this land.”

  “We can sell the farm!” cried Melissa. “Papa always hated it, and so do I. We can sell it. We can move away from here, to Philadelphia, or to New York, while Andrew completes his studies and Phoebe writes her poems. I know she will sell them. I have absolute knowledge that she will. We can buy a little house in the city. I can myself, perhaps, obtain a situation as a teacher, or a governess. Papa has friends in Philadelphia who will help me obtain such a post. The money we can get for this farm will support all of us until Andrew has completed his law course and Phoebe has sold her book of poems to—to Mr. Dunham, and I have prepared Papa’s last manuscripts for publication.” Her voice began to shake with her emotion. “I can work on them at night, after my teaching duties are over. It is our only hope, to sell the farm—!”

  She trembled, gripped the edges of her chair with her hands. Deliverance. Deliverance from this dreadful farm, this empty land, deliverance for Phoebe and Andrew and herself. In the stress of her excitement she almost forgot her grief as she fought for her father’s wishes. Her face blazed, so that light seemed reflected from every strong delicate plane. A lock of her hair fell over on her forehead, and she brushed it aside with a gesture almost violent, as she stared at her mother, waiting for Amanda’s reply.

  Amanda said, coldly and clearly: “No. We shall stay on the farm. It is all we have. You must be mad, Melissa.”

  But Melissa went on, in her loud crying voice: “We can’t waste Andrew’s life! Papa had such a struggle to pay for this term, for Andrew. It—it is paid up to January. By that time the farm will be sold and we’ll have moneyl”

  Andrew thought: Yes, it is paid up to January. It would be a waste not to take advantage of that. I’ll go, until January.

  He had known very little wrath before in his life, very little anger. But as he looked at his mother, and then at Melissa, straining so wildly on her chair, he was filled with disgust and indignation. Damn women, anyway. They always made such an uproar. They decided everything, pushed themselves into the affairs of men with their clamoring tongues and their insistence. It was enough to make a man vomit.

  He stood up, looming high into the dimness of the room like a prodigious presence. He said, and the sound of his own voice, strong and deep, startled even Melissa, and made her turn to him: “Suppose you, Mama, and you, Melissa, let me do a little thinking for myself? Suppose you let me decide what to do? I won’t tell you my decision yet. But I can say this: I shall return to Harvard tomorrow, until January, at least”

  “Oh Andrew!” cried Melissa, and tears of joy wet her eyes. “Andrew—”

  “Andrew,” said Amanda.

  But Andrew made a gesture of complete weariness and aversion, and went out of the room slowly and heavily. They heard the door close after him. They did not see him shrug, in the hall outside, nor rub his hands together as if to remove something sticky and clinging. They did not see him put on his shabby heavy coat, and his broad-brimmed hat, and go out towards the stables in the rear.

  Now there was only a long silence in the parlor. I have won, thought Melissa. I have fought, and won, for you, Papa. It shall all be as you wished. All.

  Amanda had been sitting so quietly for so many minutes that it appeared that she dozed. Her dry and haggard face had fallen into lines of complete abstraction. Melissa watched her. It is all over, she said to herself. I have only to go now.

  Amanda began to speak just as Melissa began to rise, and the girl sat down again, clenching her hands together.

  “Melissa,” said Amanda, without agitation or emotion, “you are quite mad. You think you have won. I can only tell you this: We shall not sell the farm. It is mine. Andrew cannot continue his studies. There will be no money. Whether Phoebe marries John Barrett or not is her own affair. She will come to her senses, I believe, when she discovers that there is no other escape for her from poverty and penury. Andrew will return to the farm. He can do nothing else. He will provide for us here. In any event, we are staying.”

  Melissa’s clenched hands opened. She looked at her mother, and the wildest hatred and despair flashed into her eyes. “It is impossible, Mama! You can see how impossible it is. Have you no regard for Papa’s wishes, no remembrance of his work and what he strove to do?”

  Amanda moved her head ponderously in Melissa’s direction. Her expression became somber and very still. “Yes, Melissa, I know now what he strove to do. I have learned all about it, before it is too late. I only pray to God it is not too late.” Stupefied, Melissa could only blink. She hardly heard her mother’s words. She could only say to herself: There must be some way. I must find a way. An almost intolerable pain shot through her head.

  “As for yourself, Melissa,” Amanda continued heavily, “I can only say this: You are twenty-five years old. You are a woman past her first youth. You speak of obtaining a teaching position in Philadelphia. You are inexperienced. How much do you think anyone will pay you? What do you know of the world? Consider a moment. Do you believe that you can earn enough to support Phoebe and yourself and to let Andrew continue his studies, in the event that they go with you? I am beginning to understand Phoebe. I do not believe she takes her—poems”—and Amanda’s lip twisted—“seriously. I do not believe she will go with you. Nor do I think that of Andrew, either. If you go, you go alone, probably to starvation and homelessness. You will go in your utter madness, and learn what you will inevitably learn.”

  A ha
rd stone seemed to have settled crushingly on Melissa’s chest. She could hardly breathe. She crouched in her chair. She looked at her mother with eyes hot with despairing hate. Oh, the obdurate, scheming woman, who had killed her husband with her implacability, who was now determined to destroy Phoebe and to deprive Andrew of his very life! There must be something, something, anything, to rescue her brother and her sister from the hands of this woman.

  Then, for the first time, Melissa implored her mother: “Are you not going to think of Papa, not even for a moment?” She wrung her hands together.

  Amanda’s face changed as she heard the break in her daughter’s voice and saw the hopeless gesture of importunity. She said steadily: “Yes, I am thinking of him. I am thinking of him a great deal, Melissa.”

  “Then why do you not remember what he wished for us?” cried the girl.

  “I am remembering,” said Amanda, and she looked away, and at the fire, and her expression became stern and resolute.

  “Then why? Why, Mama?”

  Amanda was silent. Melissa stood up. Amanda gave her a swift glance. “I cannot tell you why just now, Melissa. You would not understand. It would be too terrible for you. I can only reiterate: We are staying here, Phoebe, Andrew and I. If you go, you go alone. There is nothing you can do.”

  Melissa pressed her fingers hard against her eyes. When she dropped them, slowly, her face had become wizened with anguish. She looked exhausted and broken.

  And now Amanda could not look at her daughter because of the pain she felt for her. “I hope you will not go, Melissa. I hope you will remain. I think you will, when you have had time to think.” She paused: “I even think you will consider what I must tell you. An offer has been made for you.”

  There must be a way, thought Melissa. There must be some way I can rescue them. Then her mother’s words penetrated to her stupefied brain, and she started back, with a look of horror.

  “What are you saying?” she exclaimed, with incredulity. “An offer? What are you saying? An offer of marriage?”

  She could not believe it. She could not believe this final enormity.

  Amanda gazed at her steadfastly. “Yes, Melissa, an offer of marriage. I could not believe it myself, when it came to me yesterday. I can hardly believe it even now. But there it is.”

  Sick with outrage and shock, with overpowering mortification, Melissa flushed scarlet. She stammered: “It—it is not possible. There is no one who would dare. Who had the effrontery?”

  “Effrontery?” Amanda turned in her chair and regarded her daughter with wrath. “You consider an honorable offer effrontery? But then, I ought to have known. Sit down, Melissa. You are trembling so violently that I am afraid you will fall. You are stupid, my girl, and I think the man who offered himself must be stupid, too. It is Geoffrey Dunham.”

  The silence that fell in the room was like the silence that follows a gigantic explosion. Slowly Melissa sank into the chair she had left. She sat there then, and could only look at her mother. She had become very white.

  “Geoffrey Dunham,” she whispered harshly. “Geoffrey Dunham!”

  Amanda nodded grimly. “Unbelievable, isn’t it? I agree with you. What could he want with you, Melissa? What is there about you that he could want? I asked him that myself, and he only smiled a little. Look at yourself, Melissa; think of yourself. What would he want with a woman like you, a foolish, blinded, deluded woman?” She said in herself: My child! My child! “A penniless woman, who knows nothing about anything?”

  “He had the audacity,” whispered Melissa. She closed her eyes as if to shut away her humiliation.

  “He had the imbecility,” said Amanda, forcing down her pain, “to want to marry you, to take you to his beautiful home, to surround you with every luxury, to give you whatever you desire, to dress you as you have never dreamed of being dressed, to put jewels about your neck and on your hands, to make you mistress of his house, to offer you all the world. He wanted to give you this in return for nothing. For nothing at all, Melissa. I do not understand it. It does not seem possible. He could not actually want a woman of twenty-five, with the inexperience of a child, totally lacking in grace, deliberately spurning any charm she might have, a woman who had never seen anything or known anything. A completely ignorant and silly woman. He, Geoffrey Dunham!”

  “He dared insult me like that!” said Melissa, in a strained and choking voice.

  Amanda stood up, flinging out her hands hopelessly. “You are quite mad, Melissa,” she said. “I am afraid I can endure your company no longer.”

  She went out of the room, moving with her stiff stateliness, quietly closing the door behind her. She left Melissa sitting there before the meager fire, as still as if she had died.

  Amanda climbed very slowly up to her room. Once there, she lay down on her bed, flaccid and overpowered with sick exhaustion and agony. After a while, she felt as though an iron knife, red with fire, had been plunged into her heart. I have lost, I have lost everything, she thought, before she fell into complete darkness.

  CHAPTER 11

  Melissa forced herself to move sluggishly to the kitchen. Phoebe had gone to bed with her tears, and begged to be left alone. Melissa had heard her mother’s door close while she had crouched in the parlor. She had remained there an hour, shivering, stunned by calamity. But it was nearly noon now. Someone must help Sally.

  Old gray Sally looked up, and when she saw Melissa she grunted in a disagreeable fashion and muttered under her breath as she slammed an iron pot on the great brick range. She was extremely obese and untidy and insolent, and only the fact that she would accept very poor wages for the privilege of having her son, Hiram, on the premises, had kept her in the Upjohns’ employ. She received eight dollars a month and her lodging, the latter consisting of two tiny slanting rooms under the eaves, which she occupied with her son. Sally was not reconciled to life, for all she was ignorant and gross and had never gone a step beyond Midfield. She had a chronic resentment against all humanity, against the farmhand husband who had deserted her some twenty-five years ago when she had been thirty, against the farming gentry in the carriages who glided by on the roads, against her broad, flat, whitish and bristled face, her uncouthness, her poverty, her homelessness, and most of all, against the Upjohns, who, she felt, had taken advantage of her impotent state. Didn’t poor Hiram do all the farming now being done on this farm and receive nothing for it? Was it his fault that he wasn’t “too bright”? Didn’t she herself work and slave from sunrise to sunset for a pittance?

  She hated all the Upjohns, with the growling and malignant hatred of the ignorant and the brutish for their betters. She had hated Charles, with his “fancy” and dainty ways, his air of a grand gentleman for all his shabby and wrinkled clothing; she detested Phoebe because the girl was lovely, Andrew because she believed him no brighter than her own son, “and he goin’ off to that collidge,” Melissa because of her bemused hauteur and domineering voice, and Amanda because she knew all about Sally and would stand no nonsense. To Amanda, she was obsequious and toadying, though she hated her more than she hated all the others. But she bullied Phoebe, showed her open contempt for Melissa, and had let Charles know, without reservations, that she thought him a pretentious fool and an exploiter of honest women. When Andrew had been reported missing during the war, she had gloated and chuckled deliciously to herself under the eaves. When Phoebe’s engagement to John Barrett had been announced, Sally had been beside herself with rage and had spat upon the food she served in the long bleak dining-room. When Charles had died, she had rejoiced secretly, grinning furtively while the family had attended the funeral, rubbing her huge aproned belly with delight. It was “good for ’em,” with their high and mighty ways and their hoity-toity voices. Sally had not been unaware of the family’s poverty and insecurity, and she knew their desperate straits now. While alone in the kitchen, she had hummed exultantly. With their needin’ Hiram for the farm, no fear that she, herself, would be discharged, in spite of
their havin’ no money. Maybe that grand lady of a Melissa would have to milk the cows now, and help with the garden, and churn butter. She, Sally, would have a talk with the mistress, complaining of her “rheumatism” and her increasing age and suggesting that, now that Phoebe would be marrying in the spring, she would be needing extra help with the chores. “I’ll soon be a-milkin’ my last cow,” Sally had whispered hoarsely to herself, shaking her fist at the door of the parlor where Amanda was discussing the family affairs with her children. “I’ll soon be a-doin’ my last ironin’ and my last emptyin’ of their slops.” Under Sally’s threat of leaving, Amanda would have to accede. Sally knew her value to the Upjohns.

  To Sally, as to others of her kind, the only difference between herself and others was the possession of money. Now that the Upjohns had nothing, they were no better than she, and she’d soon put ’em in their places and show that she was “as good as them, maybe better.” Their breeding, their education, their books, the old piano which Poebe played with such grace in the dark little “music room” off the parlor, their family traditions, meant nothing to Sally. They were all pretendings. She had observed Charles’ published books and his manuscripts with scorn. “Him, makin’ out like he’s somebody, when he ain’t got a cent,” she had muttered to herself. “Puttin’ on airs, all of ’em. I’ll show ’em, or my name’s not Sally Brown.”

  She looked up when she saw Melissa entering the kitchen with a slow and heavy step, and her tiny pig’s eyes narrowed with hate and triumph. She waddled to the table and began to pound dough viciously.

  “’Bout time, Miss Melissa,” she growled. “Your Ma’s gone to her bed, and Miss Phoebe ain’t comin’ down to lend a hand, and the butter needin’ churnin’ over there, and the slops not emptied, and the sittin’-room not reddied up, and the lamp chimneys not washed yit.”

  “I came to help you, Sally,” replied Melissa, in a faint and exhausted voice.