Melissa Read online

  But what if it were Melissa Upjohn? At this, Arabella uttered an involuntary cry and covered her face with her hands. Not Melissa, dear Godl Oh, certainly not Melissa, that horrible creature, that gargoyle, that hoyden and frump! Not Melissa Upjohn in Mama’s pretty room, or coming down that noble stairway, or sitting at the foot of the dining-room table! It was not to be endured. She, Arabella, could not remain in this house if Melissa came here. But where would she go? What would she do?

  Life could not be that cruel. Arabella rubbed her aching forehead. Feverishly, she recalled Geoffrey’s words. She must guard herself, she thought. She must stop putting foolish ideas into his head. He was just at the dangerous age. Men committed such follies. She must keep quiet, and pretend he had not teased her. That was her only safety. Forcing a gay smile, she went downstairs.

  CHAPTER 19

  Though the weather remained bitterly cold, it rained in the night, so that gutter and eave rippled and gurgled with water. But at dawn the rain stopped, and everything became curiously still, struck into immobility.

  For the last night or two, relieved of her duties, Melissa slept the instant she went to bed, falling asleep as if struck down. She awoke this morning in her cold and fireless room, and went to her windows. The strangest sight lay below her.

  Every tree was incandescent in the sunshine, each thin branch and twig plated with bright clear glass, glittering with a thousand prismatic colors under a brilliant sun. The dwindled snow had lost its soft undulations; it had become rigid white fire, straight and stark, like a carpet of stiff tinsel. Now a slight wind stirred, and the glassy branches and twigs of the trees moved, and rattled, and threw off thin waves of tinted light. The sky had taken on an unearthly pale blue, translucent and far. So clear was the air that distance had lost perspective, and Melissa could see the sharp brown hills and the small houses upon them, and even the whitish-brown blur which was Midfield, in the long valley below.

  For the first time since her father’s death she felt the warmth of an objective pleasure in the bright and crystalline scene. She thought, suddenly: I wish I believed in God!

  She was taken aback, and amazed, at her thought. Her father had obliterated God from her universe, as he had obliterated other “sentimentalities” and “errors.” The mind of man, he had told her, can take its final step out of the primal ooze only when it understands that it alone is reality, that it alone has power to confer reality. Emotion is man’s dark and primitive past; it is an anachronism, and should be discarded as man has discarded his tail, his prehensile toes, his fur. As incomplete man carries in his body vestigial remains of organs no longer necessary for his functions, so he carries in his mind vestigial superstitions and passions no longer necessary for his life. God was not essential to existence. The forest and the jungle had been left behind in man’s progress and, with them, the animal fear and terror of the unknown which were marks of the beast. “Animal man is obsolete,” Charles had said. “The man of the future is the man of mind.”

  “There are some who say,” he had continued, “that the banishment of ‘God’ necessarily means the banishment of music and poetry. These people declare that music and poetry are essentially emotions. That is arrant nonsense. They are abstractions, and have a mathematical basis. Only when man’s mind is pure intellect, controlled solely by reason, can music and poetry reach their perfection.”

  But Melissa looked down at the prismatic scene below her windows and felt a deep and aching nostalgia for something mysterious which she had lost, or perhaps had never known. Another thought came to her: I wish I knew how to pray! It was very foolish, she knew, yet only prayer could express beauty. Her thoughts went on confusedly, and with a kind of pain: Perhaps we can experience knowledge only when we interpret the beautiful in the lexicon of God. If God was only a superstition or an emotion, it was still a magnificent one, and human vocabulary was bereft of much of its meaning when it could no longer speak the name of God.

  She drew away from the window, strangely oppressed and desolate. And then she felt the flooding sickness of disloyalty. What was the matter with her? Twice before, she had doubted her father and his wisdom and nobility, had thrown a darkness over his remembered face. She felt a silent reproach in the air about her, a sadness, a bewilderment and regret. If she continued to allow herself to be swayed and confused like this, thrown into perplexity, she would be committing a sin against her father and all his work for her would come to nothing. She resolutely turned her back on the cold and brilliant loveliness below. “Nothing exists beyond the mind of man; nothing has reality,” he had said. Therefore the beauty of the world was meaningless, without purpose or design. Her father had said this, and he had known.

  She dressed and washed, but she could not shake off her oppressed and somber thoughts. They came to her involuntarily, like an alien and insistent voice. Her father had often spoken, sonorously, of the “heroic human mind.” But it was heroism in a vacuum, if there was no God. It had no meaning, no point, no compass, no beginning and no end. It had dignity only when it stood in the shadow of God, and it had purpose only when it guided its course by that fixed and spiritual star. Alone in the everlasting darkness, it was only an empty shout without words, and the things which it dreamed had no significance.

  “Oh, God may be a lie, but I wish I believed in Himl” she said, aloud.

  The sound of her own voice frightened her, and the words revolted her, implying, as they did, her relapse into atavistic folly. She wound up her hair with tremulous hands, and ran out of the room.

  But some of the eerie joy of the morning remained with her, false and foolish though she believed it to be. It was a morning to gather red berries to be strung on the Christmas tree in the parlor. It was a morning to think of fruit cake and the turkey waiting in the barn-yard. Andrew would be returning home this evening. There was a bottle of good brandy in the cellar, and cider, and red apples. She would bring them all up today, in readiness for Christmas. Though Papa was dead, he would want his family to forget for a day, and be happy. He had thought Christmas silly, and had spoken indulgently of the Roman Saturnalia, which he had considered much more sensible. Saturn was a less oppressive god than Jesus, and much wiser. But let the people call him Saturn or Jesus: it did not matter. Only the holiday was pertinent. “Thank God for the ‘pagan’ Romans,” he had said. “They have mitigated a little for us, with their appropriated feasts and happy rituals, the horror of Christianity.”

  Melissa stopped at Phoebe’s door. It was nonsense for the girl to hide in her room and cry all the time. This was Christmas! Melissa knocked with peremptory firmness on the door, and called: “Phoebe! Tomorrow is Christmas, and I do want you to help me today.”

  She put her hand on the door handle, turned it, and entered the room. Phoebe was sitting up in bed, brushing her shining curls. Idleness had plumped out her rosy cheeks, but when she saw Melissa she pulled her mouth down in a doleful expression.

  “How can you speak of Christmas, when Papa is dead hardly more than a month and Mama is dying?” she asked, in a quivering voice. “Haven’t you brought my tray, Melissa? I think I could eat a little bacon this morning.”

  Melissa was touched, but exasperated. “I know it is very distressing to you, dear Phoebe, and that you have a delicate temperament. But Andrew will be home tonight, and we ought to make things a little more pleasant for him. It is such a beautiful morning. Do get up, and come out and gather red berries with me. Perhaps we can find some mistletoe. I know where there is some ivy, and it is still green, and we can decorate the parlor with it. And there are popcorn balls to make and dip in molasses for the tree, and red ribbon to twist. It is very sad for all of us, but we need not make it sadder. There is work to do.”

  Phoebe flung herself forward on her pillows and sobbed alarmingly. “You’ve always said that odious thing: “There is work to do’!” she cried betwen her gulps. “I hate that expression! It is so dull and dreary and heartless!”

  Helpless as
always before uncontrolled emotion, Melissa stood by the bed and said feebly: “But, my darling, aren’t you interested in living again? There are your poems to complete. I thought that if you saw how beautiful it is outside you would be inspired to write another poem—”

  “Send me my tray!” cried Phoebe, clenching the pillows around her face. “And go away, do, please, Melissa. I—I’ll get up tonight, if I can, when Andrew comes.”

  Melissa felt a surge of some emotion of her own. She wanted to seize Phoebe in a healthy rage and shake the girl out of bed, fling her through the door. She had never felt this before with regard to Phoebe, and she was shocked. Whatever was the matter with her? She was constantly being assailed by the most alien passions; it was dreadful. Ugly thoughts about Papa, and now this hunger to lay hands on her miserable little sister: there was something wrong with her.

  She went out of the room, and down the back stairs to the kitchen. Sally immediately attacked her with vigorous threats and denunciations. Christmas! Well, there’d be no Christmas unless Melissa made all the preparations! It was high time, too. She, Sally, would leave at once unless she had help, and no mistake this time, Missl What with that hoity-toity nurse, and all the sickness, and the trays, and the other unnatural things, it was too much, that it was, for a lone woman. Sighing impatiently, Melissa took the slops out to the hogs, and brought in the filled milk pails which Hiram had left in the barn to catch chaff or any random manure. Melissa had been relieved of the milking job during her mother’s illness, but now it was hers again. With a sudden rush of relief she remembered that Andrew liked to milk. During his time at home, then, he could do this abominable work.

  She hurried through the endless chores, for she was determined to gather the red berries and find the green ivy. She watched for her opportunity, and when Sally went lumbering out of the kitchen for a few minutes, Melissa caught up her ragged gray shawl, flung it over her head and shoulders, and rushed out. She circled around the house to the gate in the picket fence, and was just about to open it when she saw a string of three carriages driving up the road towards the Dunham house.

  They were filled with ladies and gentlemen and their sleek bags and luggage. As the air was so pure and still, windows had been opened, and gay faces peered out. A black-and-gray blot in all that whiteness and clarity, Melissa stood by the gate, too proud to bolt ignominously, though the carriages came nearer. She became at once the target of every eye, and as she saw the curious glances she felt suddenly old and bedraggled and ugly.

  “Do look at that strange, Gothic creature!” a high sweét voice floated towards Melissa as impertinently as though she had no ears and no understanding. “A farmer’s wife, doubtless.”

  Melissa flushed darkly. She flung up her head and her eyes silently and contemptuously challenged the silly creatures in the carriage, all bedecked in their furs and velvets and foolish little bonnets. The gentlemen were less insolent. They smiled at her. One said, quite clearly: “By Jove, a handsome piece, for all that! Look at that hair, like the old gilt on an ormolu clock. Wouldn’t you like to paint her against the background of that lean gray house, Holland?”

  The ladies laughed. The carriages went on. The breath of the black Dunham horses flowed back like plumes of vapor in the bright air.

  Rage choked Melissa, and furious desolation. A farmer’s wifel They had looked at her and had commented upon her as though she were some doltish creature without hearing or sensibility, some dumb brute who could not understand the spoken language. She, the daughter of the distinguished Charles Upjhon whose scholarly works were renowned among men of letters! Melissa gripped the gate in shaking hands, and, full of hate, watched the carriages climb the long and winding hill to the Dunham house. They were going up there for holiday merriment, these empty animals. They would dance and coquette, sing and laugh and drink and eat, and trail their lustrous silks and satins through all those great rooms. She suddenly saw Geoffrey, smiling, bending over the shoulder of one of these worthless and twittering women and peering around her fan. He would flirt and dance with her, and with her sisters. The music would pour out into the snowy Christmas night, and every window would be lit with golden radiance, every fireplace would be roaring. There would be no sadness there, no desperate anxiety about money, no grief for one who had died, no sparse pantry, no small Christmas tree strung with wood berries, popcorn balls and cheap red paper. Melissa remembered Phoebe’s ecstatic descriptions of the ballroom and the Louis Fifteenth Room. A mighty tree had stood in the corner, covered with tinsel and colorful glass balls, and had glittered with candles set in silver and gold candlesticks. The ladies had been pictures out of Godey’s Lady’s Book, and Harper’s Bazaar, and the Parisian La Mode. And such music, such gayety, such dancing and singing!

  It is because he is rich, thought Melissa, with increasing hatred and pain. It is because they are all rich and idle, and we are poor.

  Because envy was alien to her, she did not know that it was this she felt. She knew only a sense of abandonment, forlorn loneliness and yearning, and she could not understand even these. She pictured vividly to herself the house on the hillside. But through every room, in every firelit corner, she saw Geoffrey, Geoffrey who had laughed at her and insulted her with impunity.

  They will speak of me tonight up there, she thought, with a burning ache in her heart. And he will answer them and make game of me, and that horrible Arabella will gurgle and chitter, and everything will be fine and high merriment. Oh, how I hate himl

  Her hands pressed harder on the gate, until her flesh protested. She went off into the woods and gathered the few berries the birds had left. But she was no longer eager. She saw herself, tall, black and gaunt, trailing her disheveled ^ skirts through the crusty snow, her hair straight and badly arranged. Suddenly she flung the shawl off her head and smoothed her hair, feeling its roughness. She looked at her hands, red and coarsened and chapped. Big, ugly hands!

  Started and shocked at her thought, she dropped her hands to her sides and stared emptily before her. What in heaven’s name was the matter with her? Who cared if she had no beauty, and her hair was an unkempt mass, and her hands showed neglect and hard work? She was useful; she had a purpose in life. She was no idle and frivolous fool. A woman’s appearance was of no consequence. Her father had told her that, and he had spoken with strong admiration of the sensible Spartans, who had loved work and accomplishment. Empty beauty was the goal of fools. It had no significance, no meaning.

  She was having so many grotesque thoughts these days, thoughts which would have appalled her poor father. She could not understand herself. She was treacherous and shallow: that was very evident. Without Papa, she could not control her stupid reflections and keep her eye on the strong and resolute future. She pulled the shawl over her head again, filled her little basket with the berries, and tore the ivy from the trunks of the trees. The shining glass silence stood all around her, and her eyes began to smart from the brilliance. Her feet crackled on the tinsel crust of the snow.

  The woods were in the general direction of the Dunham house. Now, as she emerged from them, she could see the house, solid gray-white against the blue sky, its red roof bright and vivid. The chimneys smoked. The sun glittered back from the windows of the conservatory in the rear. Now, very distinctly, Melissa could hear the clear, bell-like barking of dogs and the delicate fairy jingle of bells. Behind those doors and those silk-shrouded windows there would be a quick and rustling movement, the high laughter of women, the deep voices of men. And he would be among them all, moving around on his big strong legs and turning his head to answer a quip or some gay remark.

  It was only the brilliance of the air and the sun, of course, which forced tears to Melissa’s eyes. It was only the stinging cold which numbed her and slowed her blood. She gripped the basket, and turned away, like an exhausted exile.

  She had come farther than she had known. She walked slowly, her skirts dragging, the basket heavy in her hand. She was haunted by lonelines
s, and something strangely like grief and sick anguish and bitter longing. She moved against all that light like a black figure of sorrow and despondency. She was almost at the gate of her home when she became aware that someone was urgently calling her name and waving an arm at her from the doorway. She looked up, bemused, her wet eyes splintering the sunshine like prisms, and saw that it was Sally.

  “Hurry up!” shouted the fat old woman. “Your Ma’s a-wantin’ you, quick!”

  Melissa sped into the house, dropping the basket on the hall table. On legs that bent like tallow, she raced down the upper hall to her mother’s room. The door was open. Matilda, the nurse, was bending over the bed. Melissa’s eyes, dazzled by the sun outside, could not see at first. She groped into the dim and shuttered room and, panting a little, waited, trying to see her mother.

  The bright mist lessened. Amanda lay gasping heavily on her pillows, her eyes closed. A change had come over her face. It was intent, drawn together in a kind of austere intensity, and its color was dark. All her being, her life, was focussed on resisting the pull of death. Even before the nurse did, she became aware of Melissa, and opened her eyes. They seemed to peer at the girl as from the end of a long tunnel or from some great distance.

  “Melissa,” whispered the dying woman, and one of her hands moved.

  “Hush,” said the nurse, gently. “Be quiet, Mrs. Upjohn. We’ve sent the boy for the doctor, and he’ll be here soon.”

  But Amanda looked only at her daughter. Melissa, shaking with cold and dread, came closer. She tried to speak, but her lips had turned thick and chill.