CHAPTER XIV
Many arduous and adventurous years in the Fourth Estate had sharpened Mark Mellenger’s native ability to think and act quickly in an emergency. He saw that Tamea’s bold onslaught for the love rights in his friend had disturbed Pritchard greatly; the latter’s face was rosy with an embarrassment that was all the more poignant because nothing that Dan could do or say would relieve the situation; Maisie had apparently exhausted her ammunition and would, unless supported promptly, retire from the field. Weeping, doubtless. Something had to be done, and in this emergency anything would be better than nothing.
Mellenger strolled up to Tamea and offered her his arm to take her in to dinner. But Tamea only smiled at him the tender, tolerant smile which, apparently, she had for all men, and said in a low voice: “Thank you, Monsieur Mellengair, but I will take the arm of Dan Pritchard.”
“Oh, but you must not do that!” Mellenger protested confidentially and addressing her in excellent French. “You are a member of this household, while Miss Morrison is a guest here tonight. If Mr. Pritchard were to permit her to go in to dinner on my arm, that would be equivalent to informing her that she was not welcome in his home. It would be a very great discourtesy—in this country,” he added parenthetically.
“Oh! I did not understand that. Nobody has told me these things. I would not care to embarrass anyone.”
“Thank you, Miss Larrieau. You are very kind and considerate.” He bowed to her with great courtesy, and she accepted his arm.
“I like you, Mellengair—no, I will call you Mel, like Dan who loves you.”
“That’s better.”
“And you shall call me Tamea.”
“Thank you. I think that is better, too.”
She came closer to him. “And you will tell me—things?”
“You mean the things you should know in order to avoid embarrassment to yourself—and others?”
“Oui, Mel.”
“There is not a great deal that you will have to be told, Tamea. Merely an outline of the principal customs of this country which differ so radically from yours. For instance, just now you made a very sad mistake—oh, very, very sad!”
“But no!” the girl protested.
“But yes! You were very discourteous to Miss Morrison.”
“About Dan?”
“Yes.”
“But that is the truth.”
“It is not always necessary to tell the truth. You have assumed that Miss Morrison is in love with Dan.”
“She is, Mel. I know.”
“But he does not know this, and she would not tell him for all the wealth of the world.”
“Such a stupid! Why not?”
“It is the custom of the land,” he assured her.
“Then I must not tell Dan Pritchard I love him?”
“Not unless he tells you first that he loves you.” She laughed softly but scornfully. “Has he told you that he loves you?”
“With his eyes—yes.”
“Eyes are not admissible as evidence. What you mistook for love may be admiration. Until he speaks with his tongue you must remain silent, else will you be dishonored.”
They had reached the dining room. Maisie and Dan were following, in frozen silence. Mellenger tucked her chair in under Tamea, and over her head he winked at Maisie and Dan. There was a terrifying silence until after Julia had served the soup. Then Tamea spoke.
“It appears,” she said very contritely, “that I have been stupid and of gross manners. I have offended you, Maisie, and to you, dear Dan, I am as a dishonored woman. I am truly sorry. Will you both forgive, please?”
“You poor, bewildered dear,” said Maisie, and laughed. To Mellenger’s amazement the laugh held real humor. She got up, walked around the table to Tamea’s side and kissed her. “Of course you are forgiven. You did not understand. How could you know, Tamea, that Dan and I are to be married? Nobody told you, I dare say. Dan, darling, did you tell Tamea of our engagement?”
“Of course, I didn’t,” he began. He was at once amazed, indignant and profoundly complimented. “Why, Maisie——”
“Shut up, fool!” Mellenger’s lips formed the words without speaking them. “Do you want to spill the beans?”
Maisie returned to her seat, flushed, bright-eyed, distinctly triumphant, and Mellenger realized that, between himself and Maisie, poor Tamea had been thoroughly crushed, humiliated beyond words. She contented herself with looking at Dan very curiously, as if she were seeing him for the first time.
“Now,” Mellenger remarked dryly, “I think we’ll all feel equal to imbibing a modicum of soup. Maisie—pardon my effrontery in calling you by your first name on such brief acquaintance, but then those who love Dan always inspire me with a desire to know them better and act as if I had known them always—how long have you and Dan been engaged?”
Dan glared at him. Maisie, scenting the deviltry behind his query, liked him for it. “I really do not remember, Mark—pardon my effrontery in addressing you by your first name on such brief acquaintance, but it seems I’ve known you always. Dan, when did you first propose to me?”
“Maisie, you’re an imp.”
“A benevolent imp, at any rate,” Mellenger adjured him. “She goes out of her way to make everybody around her comfortable.”
“Did Dan tell you he desired you, Maisie?” Tamea was speaking now.
“What makes you ask that, Tamea?”
“I inquire to know. This is important.”
“Well, Tamea, I don’t suppose Dan ever told me in so many words——”
“Ah! With his eyes, then?”
Maisie shrugged. “I suppose so.”
Tamea favored Mellenger with a sidelong glance of disillusionment and contempt. She spoke in French. “It appears that the rules of deportment are broken as readily by those who dwell in this country as by those who are ignorant of those rules. Now I shall proceed to be happy again. What an excellent soup!”
She saw by the look in Maisie’s eyes that Maisie had not understood her. And this was true, for while Maisie was presumed to have learned French in high school, it was high-school French, and Tamea’s rapid-fire utterance was far beyond her understanding.
“I hope you will be very happy,” she said in English to Maisie, who thanked her with a demure smile. To Mellenger she said in a swift aside: “I know very well she will not! What a curious dinner party! This woman is thinking of schemes to take from me the man whom I desire. Alas! She is no match for me, for look you, Mel, she has not the courage to take that which she desires.”
“Unfortunately, she has not, Tamea. Nevertheless, she may develop a form of courage that may amaze you. Just now she gave you a bad minute or two.”
Tamea shrugged. “I have no fear. That which I desire I take, and that which I take I think, perhaps—I—can—keep.”
“Well, suppose we discuss something else,” Mellenger suggested in his surprisingly good French. “And if you do not feel equal to the task of keeping pace with the discussion, try being silent awhile.”
Tamea included Dan and Maisie in her retort to this fundamentally solid bit of advice. “This large friend of yours does not like me, no?”
“Why, of course he likes you. Nobody could help liking you!” This from Maisie, who was bound to be cheerful and complimentary at any cost.
“You are wrong, Maisie. Mel thinks very quickly, and he talks as quickly as he thinks. He thinks clearly, too. . . . Well, I should like him for my good friend. One does not care for stupeed men. Mel is very honest. He will make a good fight, yes? I think so. Yes, you bet. And I will make a good fight, also.”
“Something tells me you will. Are you the offspring of a nation of warriors?” Mellenger queried.
“My mother was the daughter of a chief—a king, bred from a thousand kings. And in Riva he who would be king must be a warrior and a leader of warriors.”
“Is polyandry practiced in Riva?” Dan had emerged from the trance into which the startling events of the past few minutes had thrown him.
“I do not know what that is, dear Dan Pritchard,” declared Tamea.
“I mean, do the women have more than one husband, and do the women choose their husbands? In this country,” he hastened to add, “the men do the choosing.”
“Indeed?” Tamea seemed to find this humorous. “Men are weaklings everywhere, I think, and in this country, as in Riva, it appears the women sometimes do the choosing of their husbands. What else may one do? You men are so stupeed!”
“Let us discuss the League of Nations, Dan,” Mellenger suggested. “That is a subject upon which you and I may hazard an opinion. Tamea, are you an advocate of the right of self-determination for the lesser nations—Ireland, for instance?”
“You make the josh, Mel.”
He chuckled, gave his attention to Maisie and displayed an amazing facility at small talk and the gossip of her set. Thereafter he addressed but an occasional word to Tamea, who, however, appeared to relish this neglect, since it gave her ample opportunity to favor the uncomfortable Dan with languishing looks. With the advent of the salad Mellenger deftly piloted the conversation into the realm of trade and finance, appealed very frequently to Dan for confirmation of some theory or an expression of opinion. He contrived to leave Tamea quite out of it, and when at last Maisie rose from the table and the others followed her into the drawing room, Tamea was sensible of a feeling of neglect, of paternalism. She resented this with all the fierce resentment of her hot blood.
But Mellenger was tact and graciousness personified; and when, as the evening wore on, it began to dawn on Tamea that his action was not predicated so much on antagonism to her as on a desire to save Maisie from humiliation, her resentment began to fade. She observed that Dan had little to say, that the conversation was dominated by Mellenger and Maisie; in listening to their words, in watching the play of emotions on their faces, an hour slipped by. Then Mellenger sat at the piano and played while Maisie sang; and later Maisie played while Mellenger sang. Tamea enjoyed their songs immensely and urged them on until ten o’clock, when Dan suggested that perhaps she was tired and would like to retire.
“You wish it?” Tamea queried softly.
He nodded, so Tamea kissed him good night and then followed her caress with one each for Mellenger and Maisie.
When she had gone Mellenger swung round on the piano stool and grinned at Dan Pritchard.
“This has been a trying evening, old horse,” he declared, “but, by and large and thanks to two people who appear to possess the faculty of keeping their heads when all about them are losing theirs, what threatened to become a riot has ended in a love feast. Dan, that girl is nobody’s fool. Her head is quite filled with brains.”
“I think, when she has become a little more civilized, she will be adorable,” Maisie added.
“She is adorable now,” Dan reminded them. Subconsciously he desired to defend any weakness he might have exhibited during the evening. Also, he had an impulse to castigate Maisie for her inexplicable conduct in declaring, in the presence of his other guests, that an engagement existed between them.
“That’s no excuse for your losing your head over her, old son.”
“Quite so,” Maisie echoed. “Because I sensed your helpless state, following Tamea’s frank declaration of a proprietary interest in you, I invented our engagement as a sort of funk-hole for you to crawl into, Dan.”
“You were very courageous, Maisie.”
“It was a forlorn hope and it failed. I might as well inform you, my friends, that Tamea was unimpressed.” Mellenger was very serious now. “What are you going to do about this girl, Dan? You’ve got to get her out of your house.”
Dan shrugged helplessly.
“If you send her to a boarding school now,” Maisie suggested, “she would matriculate in the middle of a semester. You refer to her as a child, Dan, but she is a fully developed woman, and I fear that her education, in English at least, has been so neglected that she would have to start in the same class with girls of ten or twelve. This would prove embarrassing to her. She should have a year of private tutoring.”
“Where, Maisie?”
“I do not know, Dan.”
“But you telephoned to me this evening that you had a plan to discuss.”
“My plan is not fully developed, Dan, but it contemplated the engagement of a governess and companion for Tamea, and sending them both to a warmer climate—say Los Angeles—until Tamea becomes acclimated. You seemed worried about her in the cooler climate of San Francisco.”
“That’s a splendid plan,” Mellenger hastened to interrupt. “The success of it depends upon the acquisition of the right sort of governess, of course. She should be firm, indomitable, tactful, able and possess the physical attributes of the champion heavyweight pugilist of the world.”
“I fear you are absolutely right,” Dan sighed.
“Well, then, I’m at my wits’ end, Dan’l,” Maisie confessed.
“I am not,” Mellenger replied coolly. “I beg of you, Maisie, to dismiss the matter. I shall go into executive session with myself and evolve a plan that will be puncture-proof. I fear me neither you nor Dan is able to think clearly in this emergency.”
Maisie flashed him a swift glance of deepest gratitude. “In that event I think I shall go home,” she said, and rang for Julia to fetch her wrap. Dan escorted her out to her car, and as she gave him her hand at parting he bent and kissed it humbly, turned and left her without the formality of saying good night.
Fortunately, Maisie thought she could understand the failure of his conversational powers.