The Chinaberry Tree

  Even in her fear she laughed at him, repeating his question, mimicking his nice pronunciation of his “ing-s.” “It sounds so funny for you to talk slang and yet be so precise about it.”

  He smiled briefly. “Yes, I know—sort of takes the curse off it, doesn’t it? What is the matter with her? Why on earth wouldn’t she let me come to see you?”

  “I don’t think it was just you, Malory,” she murmured, fending off the evil moment. “I don’t believe she even knows who you are.”

  “Well, anyway, what’s she doing refusing to let you meet any boys, as long as they’re O.K.?”

  “Well, you see Malory, it’s like this,” she cast about, seeking for words sufficiently delicate,—“Laurentine’s, well, Laurentine, you see, is a child of sin.”

  He stared at her incredulously, his jaw sagging, “What are you talking about?” His tone was almost rough, “What do you mean a child of sin?”

  His roughness steadied, even though it frightened her. “I mean just that, a child of sin. You see—er—her father and her mother—my aunt—weren’t married.”

  He didn’t like it, she could see that. “Does she know who her father is? Does he live around here?” She could imagine his mind asking itself, “What colored man in this town could have been the father of that beautiful creature?” He actually thought of Brown and Ismay, but of course they were scarcely old enough—and neither one of them had any looks anyway.

  “No, he doesn’t,—he used to, that is. But he’s dead now. He—he was a white man, he was Colonel Halloway whose father built the factory.”

  He was aghast. “You don’t mean, why Melissa, you don’t mean to say she’s one of those Stranges?”

  She couldn’t pretend not to know what he meant. “She’s a Strange—I don’t know what you mean by ‘those Stranges,’ but anyway they’re the only family of that name here.”

  “But, Melissa, they’re, they’re,—why, they’re notorious, why, they’re known all over. Why, I can remember as a little fellow—I was only four when I left here—they used to talk about your aunt—er—her mother. Why, I used to be afraid to come down this way—See here, did they always live down here? I remember my mother used to say to my sisters ‘I never want to hear the name Strange mentioned under this roof.’ She was so queer about it, her voice was—it frightened me. . . . I hadn’t thought of that for years.”

  Melissa was paler than the silvery light warranted. “I’m sure I don’t see why anyone, any colored person should have anything to say about it. She hadn’t done anything to any of them.” To her own amazement she heard herself taking up for Aunt Sal, excusing her, exonerating her, using and believing in Asshur’s arguments.

  “After all, she was only a very young girl, Malory, living in a time when—when a colored woman might be very much dazzled at receiving such marked attention from such an important man.”

  “She should have known better,” he interrupted stubbornly.

  “And after all, he must have loved her, he must have respected her. Goodness knows he was faithful enough to her in the face of everything. I imagine he’d have married her, no matter how poor or ignorant she was if only she hadn’t been colored. It’s only in this poor old dumb country anyway that people carry on so about color. . . .” For the first time in her life she was able to see how purely artificial, how man-made such a barrier was.

  “You see he thought a lot of her . . . he left her this house and grounds, and the money to keep it up.”

  Moodily he gazed about him, evidently beholding the beautiful place with an altered vision.

  “Naturally,” he said slowly, “you’d have to take up for them. . . . Just what relation are you to the famous Laurentine?”

  “She isn’t famous,” she said resentfully and as steadily as one may with a chin that would quiver. “She isn’t famous a bit, she’s a very fine lady. Not anybody,” said Melissa, confused in her grammar, “is any better than my cousin Laurentine, not if she had all the sons and daughters of the American Revolution back of her—and you know Malory Forten, no colored person has that. . . . And I’d take up for Laurentine, relation or no relation. Yes, and for Aunt Sal too. Her being my mother’s sister’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “Your mother live here too, Melissa?”

  “No, she didn’t, she just paid one little visit here when she was a very young girl. It had all happened then—Laurentine, I’ve heard her say, was eight or nine. No, my mother lived in Philadelphia and so did my father and I was born there.” She was suddenly sick unto death of his inquisition. . . . “I don’t think you’ve been very nice, Malory.”

  He was pretty unyielding, “Why didn’t you tell me all this before, Melissa?”

  “Well, at first I didn’t think it was necessary. After all, it’s Laurentine’s affair, isn’t it? It isn’t mine. My father and mother were honestly married,” she added with that little rush of pride which the contrast of her own estate with Laurentine’s always seemed to release in her.

  “Well, why did you tell me now?”

  She was a little evasive. “To explain to you why Laurentine won’t let me have company. She’s always been very strict about her own behaviour—naturally she’d be strict about mine.”

  He considered a moment. This was clearly a new and not distasteful point of view. He said more humanly, “I’m glad you told me about this yourself, Melissa. I can’t tell you how it would have hurt me to hear it from anybody else.”

  She thought: “You don’t know how the way you’ve taken it has hurt me.” But she only said, “I’m awfully tired, Malory. I’m going in. . . . I feel as though I could sleep forever. Guess you’d better not come any more this week.”

  He said tardily, “Perhaps I did seem a little—tight. But I was so shocked, Melissa. I’ll call you up to-morrow.”

  “No, don’t do that. Good-night, Malory.”

  “Good-night—little Princess.” Belatedly gallant, he caught her hand and kissed it.

  She was tired, but for all that she lay sleepless for hours locked in a perfect fury of reflections. She thought, “The darn snob! Well, I’ll get all that nonsense out of him before we’ve been married long. . . . My heavens, what difference does it all make? After all, it’s over. Aunt Sal and Lauren-tine’s conduct can’t affect me. But don’t say I’m not sick and tired of this whole Halloway-Strange business. Well, Mr. John Paul,” she apostrophized the father whom she never remembered seeing, “I’m mighty glad you took it into your head to marry my mother. . . . Poor Laurentine!”

  • • • • •

  “Come to think of it,” Malory said a few evenings later, “I’m just as glad we did get this all threshed out the other night, about your cousin. It explains why Mrs. Epps spoke as she did that day. I must say, Melissa, that up until you told me about Laurentine, she had me quite upset.”

  “How does that explain anything?” Melissa asked a little stonily. Malory was very handsome to-night. He had been very gentle and tender and had brought her a little nosegay. She liked his handsomeness and she liked his little present but she was still secretly resentful of his attitude of the other night. “It makes me—why it makes it seem as though he were doing me a favor to marry me,” she told herself in childish dismay, “and I certainly don’t like that.”

  “Well, you see,” Malory said a trifle hesitantly, sensing something changed in her manner, “I figure it’s like this. You know what busy bodies these people are here in Red Brook. Mrs. Epps I suppose knew all about your—er—cousin’s—er—misfortune. But she knew that I’d been away from home so long and that I’d left so young that probably I didn’t know about it.”

  “Yes,” said Melissa expectantly.

  “Well, then she could just about imagine that someone would tell me about it some day and while she doesn’t know of course that we’re engaged still she may have thought that we were interested in each other and that perhaps—perhaps I—well maybe it might be different if I knew about it all. She didn’
t want you to be hurt, and so she advised you to think about Lane.”

  She said to him steadily enough though her eyes were very wan: “Is it any different?”

  “No,” he told her immediately, and his voice was very sincere. “At first, Melissa, I thought it was. I thought it would have to be. I was really shocked out of my senses. Of course I know as well as you that these things at least theoretically are of no importance, but actually, Melissa, every fellow does want his wife to be on a pedestal ; he’d like to think of her as a little inviolate shrine that isn’t ever touched by the things in the world that are ugly and sordid.”

  But she had done a lot of thinking within the last few days and although she had never heard Dr. Denleigh express his views on matrimony, she had come in her childish way to certain conclusions very much like his because they were equally fundamental.

  “I’m only eighteen, Malory,” she told him slowly because she was struggling with a big thought, “and I haven’t had such a lot of experience, but it seems to me, Malory, that while all this about shrines and pedestals and things like that are awfully pretty, really beautiful, that life doesn’t permit you to keep things like that in your head.”

  A trifle amazed and very much amused at this evidence of original thinking, he regarded her however with profound attention.

  “I’m thinking that after all, Malory, if our plans do turn out all right and we do get married, even with your grandfather’s and your Aunt Viny’s money we’ll still be pretty poor. And I just imagine that then you’d rather I’d be able to cook and sew and mend and copy notes and all that—than to be an inviolate shrine which sounds to me mighty darn useless. . . . It might be better for me then that I had seen something of real life even if I hadn’t been particularly touched by it.”

  She was thinking not at all of Aunt Sal nor of her cousin but of her own mother. Judy had seen Melissa, when she was beginning to grow, frown with distaste at some of the rough badinage exchanged between herself and her noisy admirers. “Let me tell you something, girl; they’s many a time we’d starve, you and me, if these fellers didn’t like me and my fun enough to make them bring their steaks and potatoes here for me to fix.”

  Melissa privately determining that her own life would be different, got the point no less. Out of her pondering on these private matters she spoke:

  “You’ve always complained about the sadness of your home life, Malory. It was partly because you thought I could relieve that sadness that you began to like me. You don’t think the fact that I’m related to Aunt Sal—and mind you I don’t think there’s anything the matter with her either, only that she’s had a bad break—is going to make me less cheerful and—and well enlivening as a wife, do you, Malory?”

  He put his arms around her, dragged her up from the seat and held her close. “You blessed little logician! Listen, honey, I’m just a miserable snob. I don’t even know where I get it from, Melissa. Part of your job as my wife will have to be to get it out of me. Hope you’ll like that Melissa.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes very sweet and trustful, “I’ll adore it, Malory.”

  “Good! Now kiss me good-night. You’re sleepy, darling. . . .” Laurentine gently raising her window so as to let in more air glanced down at the Chinaberry Tree and saw to her amazement, two figures standing in a broad white shaft of moonlight. She could not recognize the boy whose dark head was bent down over the girl’s smooth, tawny one, but the girl she knew was Melissa.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  EASTER. “The time of the singing of birds is come and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land,” Malory quoted again to Melissa. He liked the Bible, having read a great deal of it in company with Aunt Viny who took it quite literally. Since she insisted on reading every bit of it even down to all the “begats,” the lad had in self-defence been forced to look for something in it aside from its religious value. Quite without any prompting he had discovered its literary and poetical beauty. It gave him a curious sense of satisfaction to have found this out unaided; he quoted it frequently as an evidence to himself of his own innate good taste; the adoption of it by others served him unconsciously as a sort of intellectual shibboleth, very much as once the frequent quoting of the Rubaiyat marked a person as possessing a certain amount of literary perspicuity.

  Melissa, being almost entirely without the aforesaid perspicuity, wondered often at the choice and meaning of his selections. Such things appealed to her only if their meaning was immediately apparent or apposite. In this case, for instance, she could see no connection with spring and turtles; she had never heard of turtles possessing a voice. But she was by this time aware of the fact that Malory was endowed with many tastes which to her were incomprehensible. On the whole she rather liked her ability to be cognizant of the fact that he was different without showing resentment or jealousy. It made her feel that she would be a fine, forbearing wife whose motto might be “Live and let live.” Malory was aware of this slight deficiency on her part; it both amused him and appealed to his vanity. Neither one of them was old enough or sufficiently experienced to envisage the very, real joy that might be in store for two people who found In each other an exact and even sympathy along the line of common tendencies.

  With Easter came the Spring Vacation, meaning many varied things to many varied people. To Laurentine it meant an extra onslaught of work plus the promise of a brief holiday. Her customers were getting ready for their exodus to seashore, city, foreign parts,—any of the places which the nomadic rich visit in order to get away from their own home no matter how charming its situation. Laurentine must turn out sports clothes, street costumes, filmy evening dresses, wisps of negligées, accessories of scarf and tie and throw such as only she could contrive.

  For a few weeks, for a last few days the rush would be hectic, nerve-wracking. Hitherto the girl had, at the conclusion of such a period, merely stayed in bed of mornings for two or three hours later, “taking it easy” for a few days. Now this year she was to have a treat. She would go to New York. Denleigh was to drive her over; they were to go sight-seeing, to the theatres, they were to visit the tops of sky-scrapers; she would meet some of Denleigh’s class-mates. Mrs. Ismay, who was accompanying her and with whom she was to stay in New York, had arranged for a tea at the house of one of her friends. It was to be perfect. Lauren-tine went about smiling, singing, dreaming.

  “You’re like a young girl,” Mrs. Ismay told her laughing, “you have the gift of enjoyment. People will like that. They like to do things for folks who are not afraid or ashamed to show their appreciation of the thing that is new or different.” She teased Stephen, “Better look out, Stephen, she’ll find a handsomer man than you yet, and go off with him.”

  Denleigh smiled complacently. “‘I fear no foe,’” he sang, quoting a song that his oldest sister used to warble years ago at church concerts to the accompaniment of a reed organ.

  • • • • •

  Melissa grumbled a little about the exigencies caused by the overflow of work into her cousin’s establishment.

  “I was thinking,” she told Malory standing almost at midnight under the Chinaberry Tree, her arms clasped loosely about his neck, “that we’d be having some time out to talk about our affairs. I thought, why I even thought we’d be able to go off for a whole day’s hike,—I had planned the best lunch! But as it is she needs me to help too, with the finishing-off and things like that. Of course I’m glad to do it,—Laurentine and her mother have been awfully good to me.” She rarely said “Aunt Sal” any more to Malory. She knew he did not like to hear the relationship emphasized. Her failure to do so, however, always left her with a curious sense of shame. She continued hastily.

  “Of course she’s going to pay me. Laurentine’s awfully decent that way. The chances are that if I were independent of her she wouldn’t offer me a penny. But being that things are as they are she pays me because she doesn’t want me to feel that she thinks I ought to do it.”

  Malory’s face ha
rdened ever so slightly. He assuredly did not want to hear anything about Laurentine for all her beauty, of Aunt Sal for all her kindness. “You’ll be quite a millionaire,” he teased her. “What are you going to do with your wealth?”

  She hugged him with her ridiculously childish strength that afforded him so much pleasure. “Silly as though you didn’t know! I’m going to buy house-keeping things with it. I’m going to buy curtains, window-shades you know. They’re having the most marvelous sales right now at Barton’s. And, Malory, I’m not going to buy the kind people usually buy,—horrid black or blue or brown things. Everything in our house is going to be beautiful, full of color, ‘sweetness and light.’ . . . See, I can quote too when it makes some sense. They had the divinest colors. I never saw anything like it before. . . . I’m going to get some very, very deep old-rose ones, almost red. I saw some once in a house in Philadelphia where my mother used to go to sew. . . . They made the light so beautiful—oh Malory you never saw anything else just like it. I’d rather have them than extra fine things to eat. And I like to cook too,” she ended, a trifle prosaically.

  He looked down at her, amused and touched. The moonlight sifting through the Tree gave her piquant face a delicate, fragile beauty. “Darling, I hate to tell you,—after all, we don’t know the size of the windows yet. All the shades might be the wrong width. We oughtn’t to throw money away.”

  “As though I didn’t know that.” She revealed the unexpectedly practical quality of the woman who is getting down to the only job in the world that seems to her really worth while,—that of building her home. “I’m allowing for that. I’m buying the largest possible sizes and then when we go into our home I take a yard stick and measure the width of the window, and you take a saw and if you’ve any manhood in you at all, Mr. Forten, you saw off the end of the rod to fit the space at the top of the window and you nail up one or two of those funny little gadgets that hold the rod in place. Then I take a pair of scissors and trim off the shade,—and there you are!”