Chapter VII

“Yonder see the morning blink,
The sun is up and so must I....”

Melissa’s matins!

The little song she used to say to herself, arising at grayish seven, to be dressed by a still grayish eight, breakfasting at a cheerless eight-fifteen, office-bound at the stroke of nine....

She said it again on the first morning of her awakening within the air-castle ... began to say it, rather, and broke off with a smile and a sigh of sybaritic ecstasy, curling the tips of her cool white fingers against the linen sheets, digging her doubting toes yet deeper beneath a drift of fleecy blanket.

A flood of sunlight came in at three eastern windows--clear thin gold, a riotous wash of it.

Sunlight--in a bedroom--in the city!

Windows--looking across a park!

Sky--all one wanted of it--to be had, merely by turning on one’s side, opening one’s drowsy eyes, and staring--across a room.

Melissa hardly believed in the thing which had happened to her.

“You’d like to move in to-morrow, my dear?” the Marchesa had asked. And upon that to-morrow, Melissa had moved in. It was simple as that. Although in the matter of whys and wherefores it wasn’t simple at all.

Melissa didn’t yet know, was (she sometimes felt) never to know, just what the Marchesa was getting out of the whole affair. Of course money was--as the phrase goes--no object to the Marchesa. She might, if she’d cared for that especial sort of exercise, have rolled in it. Her wealth had outlasted her opportunities of enjoying it ... but even so ... rich old ladies didn’t commonly select worthy young women ... Melissa was beyond doubt a worthy young woman ... to help them dissipate their unearned increment. Much more often, rich old ladies selected more--or less--worthy young men. Married them, even. The Sunday papers gave frequent space, colorfully embellished to just such May-and-December unions. Withered hands snatching at youth. Futilely snatching.

Not that the Marchesa was given to futilities of any sort. And, except for the frequently-mentioned and not always flatteringly-referred-to nephew--not that the Marchesa was given to young men.

Much too clever, the Marchesa, to tolerate fortune-hunters. On the other hand--much too scornful of women, the Marchesa, to be doing a thing like this out of sweet-lavenderish altruism.

Whatever Melissa was receiving would some way, sooner or later, have to be given back.

As a pound of flesh ... or a gill of heart’s blood ... or what-not.

“Who cares!” thought Melissa, stretched white arms above her head, linked smooth hands at the back of her neck and stared at the ceiling rapturously. She was living in the moment--nothing more ... trusting not even her own senses.

She rather expected to have those wide clear windows shrink, as one looked at them, into the dim-paned, narrow-silled apertures of the room on Sixty-third Street. To have the beautiful simple mahogany bed in which she lay, resolve itself suddenly into the white-painted thin-mattressed couch that had cradled her insurgent dreams this last half-dozen years.

If there had come a knock at the door and Mrs. Robinson’s voice had said plaintively--“I left your bill in the box, Miss Wayne ...” Melissa would have gotten up quite unsurprised and fetched her pocketbook. However no knock came, and from moment to moment, it appeared more incredibly plausible that the thing was real.

Utterly real, the walls of that quiet, delightful bedroom. Cream walls, and cream silk at the windows, beneath a valance and side-curtains of some velvety, wine-colored fabric. Mahogany dressing-table and chest of drawers. One or two prints about the room, neutral and pleasant. Landscapes--but without nymphs. Nothing more human than a sheep or so.

All at once, Melissa knew the reason of that ordered simplicity, the reason of those fine open spaces ... it was undeniably a masculine apartment--sub-let by the Marchesa’s efficient and intuitive agent!

Through Melissa’s blood, a tiny ripple widened at thought of the man in whose room she lay, thus innocently. At whose pictures she gazed thus appreciatively. Had he kept his ties in the topmost drawer of that highboy? Or were ties kept in any drawer at all? Melissa didn’t know. She had never had a brother. Her father had died when she was still a little girl. Men were to Melissa, at once, the romance and the commonplace of existence.

The romance--because she knew nothing about them.

The commonplace--because for a number of years, from nine of a morning to six of an evening, she had known all too much.

At that, her experience wasn’t unique.

Too little and too much is all that most women know of men.

Anyhow--if he hadn’t kept his ties in that top drawer, he had kept something else there. Some other article of masculine apparel. Which rendered subtly more interesting in the course of Melissa’s lazy musings, the fact that her own stockings and handkerchiefs now resided--as it were--at the same address.

“Absurd!” she felt. But the fact remained. Facts do.

She couldn’t rid herself of a certain misty consciousness of broad shoulders against the light; of a strong hand drawing those Burgundian curtains; of keen eyes scowling at the traditional run-away stud. But when it came to the lift of a shadowy chin before the bathroom mirror, a foamy shaving-brush following the line of a clean-cut lower lip ... Melissa’s sense of humor lifted a derisive head.

“He’s most likely some smug old thing in spats,” she decided coldly, “who goes south for the winter, and that’s why....”

But what smug old thing would have known just how to lay that mellow rug before the fireplace--that day-dream couch beyond the rug--that long, book-hungry table behind the couch--those fairy lamps at either end?

“Any clever decorator might have done it,” argued Melissa, while subtly knowing no decorator had.

The room bore the imprint of somebody’s fingers.

Some one had set that scene for love--not pay.

Upon Melissa’s consciousness took shape like shadows falling across a wall the picture of another room, a cluttered, scented, dimly-lighted one ... with by-gone adorers in tarnished silver frames standing faithfully about ... watching lace cushions turn yellow, and rose-leaves fall, a fire, lit at dusk, sink to ashes....

The Marchesa, of course, was clever enough for anything. Between delicious hazardings and wonderings, Melissa experienced a small, cold tremor of distrust.

Hadn’t the Marchesa happened upon this perfect place a little too quickly for absolute chance? Hadn’t she--although the thought disturbed and vaguely alarmed one--hadn’t she perhaps had it in mind from the first? Even while convincingly observing that if this didn’t serve there were one or two others just across the Park ... hadn’t she all the time been holding in her delicate ivory claw the key to that silk-hung door?

What--in plain words--was the Marchesa’s object?

But if it came to that--what was Melissa’s own?

“Not much to choose between us!” thought Melissa, wryly smiling, and slipped out of bed and turned on a hissing hot bath.

She breakfasted at the small table before the sitting-room windows; in a welter of autumn sunlight; on coffee and rolls set forth in the most satisfying fashion by a black-browed French boy from the restaurant downstairs. And she wore, for that breakfasting, alone though she was, a charmingly impractical rag of bluish lilac chiffon, with a dragging hem of silver lace, with a twisted string of silver about the slender hips....

Like a creature out of a poem, Melissa looked that morning--with no one there to see.

“And it wants--some one to see!” she murmured, smiling faintly--then had the grace to blush.

The grace and good luck. For no art is more quickly forgotten nor more impossible of recapture than the simple and effective sending of blood to the female face.

While she blushed, therefore, distinctly enjoying the sensation, the telephone, which stood on a little table near the door, rang crisply, and she answered it at her leisure in a cool slow voice ... a little cooler and a little slower, no doubt, than it might have been, a day or so before.

“Yes?”

Across the wire, reply sputtered briskly, just touched with an indefinable suggestion of subservience: “Miss Wayne--may I speak to Miss Wayne?”

“This,” said Melissa, “is Miss Wayne.”

“Oh--Miss Wayne, this is Anna speaking....”

“Yes--” quite kindly, “Anna?”

“The Marchesa di Ricci wishes to know if you will be at home this afternoon?”

“I think so.”

“The Marchesa would like to come in, about tea-time.”

“Say I shall be very happy to see her.”

“Thank you,” said Anna.

“At tea-time,” said Melissa and stood frowning for a long indeterminate moment after she had broken the connection.

So the hand of steel was at once to inhabit the velvet glove! And the air-castle to be open without delay, to the step and the stare of a landlady.

“What did you expect, my dear?” muttered Melissa, shrugging, “she’s bought you--for a year. She’s within her rights ... after all, what difference does it make? When you had freedom--you had nothing else.”

Like lightning scribbling a quiet sky, a wild thought crossed her: “If only I had some one--a man--to tea with me--at the very start ... what a shock for the lady! If he were here--before her ... some one very cool and charming. I can’t bear that cracked little laugh of hers--those wise, cruel eyes--as if she watched me wriggling on a pin!... If there were some one--at once ... I could do a bit of laughing, myself....”

Some one--all very well--but who?

Young men to be had to tea didn’t grow on bushes. Unless one had previously cultivated just such quaint shrubbery.

Melissa thought of the junior partner. Too fat, too pale, too blond, too dull ... besides, having left her position abruptly, without explanation of any sort other than that she was leaving, her ex-employer would scarcely care to share a cup that cheered with his ex-employee.

Remained the gent’s-furnisher, Mr. Arthur Curtis of southern Iowa and West Sixty-third Street. On every count, impossible.

What Melissa needed was some one very perfectly accoutered, very casually impeccable, as to look and manner and garment--heart no object, mind no object--just a hand accustomed to juggle a plate and cup, a foot accustomed to cross from rug to rug without skidding.

“It isn’t much to ask!” sighed Melissa.

Came (as the more colorful stylists have it) a knock at the door.

More fairy-tale stuff! If Prince Charming had entered in person, glass slipper and all ... the moment might almost have been termed psychological.

It was, however, merely the maid. A fresh-faced, brown-haired, blue-eyed Irish woman, in a starchy white apron over a blue cotton frock--with a smile, to disarm Medusa.

“Good mornin’,” offered this pleasant creature, in the softest Celtic croon, “--if I’m not early to do the rooms....”

“No--no ... come in!” said Melissa.

She stood at the window, looking out across the Park while in bathroom and bedroom like a new Sinfonia Domestica, the gentle swishing clatter of mop and broom began.