CHAPTER XIX
That ended the conversation for that night. Tamea retired shortly after dinner, leaving Maisie and Mellenger in possession of the field. The next morning Dan and Mellenger breakfasted early and left for the golf links at Pebble Beach. Maisie, her aunt and Tamea joined them there for luncheon, and in the afternoon Maisie, Dan and Mellenger made up a threesome and played nine holes, with Tamea following, playing the part of the gallery and bored to the point of tears. At a point on the course where one drives along the cliff, Mellenger sliced badly and drove a new ball into the Pacific Ocean. Tamea was frankly delighted. In the evening there was dancing and again Tamea was out of it. She could neither fox-trot nor waltz; she could only gaze wistfully after Dan and Maisie.
Mellenger sat with her. “Do you dance, Stoneface?” she queried.
“Oh, yes!”
“Perhaps you will teach me?”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Oh, but a beginner——”
“You do not wish me to dance with Dan Pritchard?”
“I do not.”
She nodded. “I have listened to this music and I have watched these others dance. I think I can dance the fox-trot, too. You shall dance with me, Stoneface. I would learn.”
“I’ll not make a spectacle of myself, Tamea.”
“Then I shall. You shall dance with me or I shall dance alone, and when I dance alone others cease dancing to watch me. I will do what you call bust up the show. I will do the hula!”
“You win,” he declared, and they stood up. Tamea made a false step or two, caught the rhythm and moved away rather easily. As she gathered confidence she improved and they circled the hall without colliding with anybody. “You’re an apt pupil,” said Mellenger.
“I grow more apt,” she retorted—and commenced to dance. In all his days Mark Mellenger had never held in his arms a more wonderful partner. She handled him easily, steering him cleverly among the dancers, moving with a swiftness, a lightness and an abandon both new and thrilling.
“You have danced before?” he charged. “You’re marvelous.”
“In Tahiti,” she admitted. “I had a humor to force you to meet my will. Now I am very weary—so weary that I shall not dance with Dan Pritchard if he asks me—and he will.”
Dan did—and Tamea begged off. Mellenger was immensely amused. “Playing me off against old Dan,” he thought. “Well, I think I shall fall in with that mood and play the game. This is getting interesting.”
They drove around the seventeen mile drive the following forenoon and had a Spanish luncheon in Monterey; in the afternoon Mark and Dan played eighteen holes of golf while Tamea and Maisie went down to the beach swimming. After dinner Tamea fell into step beside Mellenger as they walked down the long hall and clasped her hand in his, after a childish fashion she had.
“You have been very nice to me today, Stoneface,” she admitted. “I think, perhaps, I may learn soon to forget that I dislike you. Do you insist upon going back to the city tomorrow morning?”
“Yes, I’m going back with Dan.”
“Please do not go,” she whispered, and squeezed his hand a little.
“Why? Why do you ask me to remain, child?”
“Because I shall be lonely here—and if you remain perhaps we may have a nice fight, no? I wish to talk to you—to understand some things. Please?”
She halted him, came close to him and looked up at him in a manner that could not be resisted. Mellenger felt a wild thrill in his heart and it must have registered in his eyes, for Tamea’s great orbs answered thrill for thrill.
“I’ll not stay,” he almost growled.
“Then walk with me a few minutes in the grounds,” she begged. “I must have some conversation with you—alone.”
They strolled out and down a graveled path through the trees to a bench Tamea had observed under one of them that day. They sat down. Tamea was first to speak.
“Stoneface, I have done much thinking because of what I heard you tell Dan the other night at his house. I know now how the friends of Dan Pritchard will regard me if he takes me to wife. They will not say, ‘Ah, there is that nice wife of his.’ No, they will say, ‘There is Dan Pritchard and his Kanaka wife.’ I shall always be one apart. You have made me very unhappy, Stoneface, but perhaps I should thank you for telling me first. Now I shall not go too far until I know how far I should go.”
“I’m so sorry,” he murmured humbly. “I didn’t mean it for your ears. I wouldn’t have said it—then—if I had known you were eavesdropping. You’re much too fine, Tamea, to have this happen to you, but I know Dan Pritchard. You are not the woman for him. Maisie Morrison is.”
“Perhaps those are true words, Stoneface. I do not know men of your race too well. Yet it is certain that some day a man will seek me and I will be glad of the seeking. Many have sought me already, but you must understand, Stoneface, they were not gentlemen. Ah, but you do not understand. . . you do not know how much I wish to be all white. . . how my heart hurts because here, where I am alone, I must be alone always because I—am—different.”
He was overwhelmed with sympathy and possessed himself of her hand and patted it, but without speaking.
“You like me, do you not, Stoneface?” she pleaded.
“You are wonderful—transcendently beautiful—you have a mind and a heart and a soul.”
“And you like me—a very little?”
His grip on her hand tightened. “God help me,” he murmured huskily. “I love you. I am like a man smitten with a plague.”
“Yes, you love me. I was quite certain of that, only you told me the eyes were not admissible as evidence. You did not think I could stir a heart of stone and see love and longing in Stoneface, no? But I saw it, and I have not wished it, for I have not liked you. And now will I make you humble. You shall seek the love of the woman you would not wish your friend to take to wife—no, no, I dishonor you, Stoneface.
“Forgive, please. You would not seek it, but you shall yearn for it with a great yearning that shall cause you to forget that in my veins flows an ancient and alien blood. Stoneface, know you that if half of my blood is dark it is not the blood of the unbeautiful or the base. It is the blood of the kings and patriarchs of a lost race that is dying because, in its innocence, it touched hands with the vilest of living things, the white man civilized. No, I am not ashamed of my blood. I am proud of it and I rejoice that it has given me a weapon to humble you.”
She grasped his hands and drew him toward her. “Look at me, Stoneface,” she commanded. But he turned away his heavy, impassive face. “Ah, look at me,” she pleaded now, “and let me see again in those strange, stern eyes the look that was there when you betrayed yourself into my power. For I have power—over men. I know it. It is not to brag, to show a large conceit, when I admit it—to you. . . . Come, look at me, Stoneface.”
He looked at her, turning his head slowly, as if it hurt him to move it. There, in the moonlight, in that scented park, her power, her tremendous magnetism, the intoxicating glory of her strange, baffling, childlike but commanding personality made his heart pound and set up in his huge frame a weak trembling. Had he possessed the power to think, this spell she had cast upon him, all within the space of seventy-two hours, would not have been possible of analysis. Perhaps the best explanation was the one he had already given—that he was as a man suddenly smitten with a plague.
“You tremble, Stoneface.”
“That is because I am weak, Tamea, and I am ashamed of my weakness. I, who came to scoff, remain to pray.”
“That is my desire. I would have you, of all men, suffer as you have made me suffer. I shall make of you a great stone idol, with stony face turned sadly to the sea, like those colossal figures on the coast of Easter Island. Yes, Stoneface. Now you may gaze long for that which never comes. I am avenged.”
She dropped his hands and with her own clasped tight against her tumultuous breast she looked at him with eyes that blazed with emotion. Mellenger sighed deeply and then his heavy, almost dull face lighted with a smile so tender the plain face was glorified.
“And when the gods rain blows upon me, O Tamea, I, too, shall take them standing and smiling. You have called me Stoneface. Very well. I withdraw my opposition. I would have you happy, even at the price of my old friend’s unhappiness, even at the sacrifice of my own. But I shall not gaze out to sea for that which never comes. For it shall come. And when I see you bent and broken and taking the blows with your flower face in the dust——”
Her glorious face softened. “Then what, Stoneface? Then what?”
“Then,” he murmured huskily, “I shall weep. But I shall also lift you up and hold you to my heart and love you, and my love shall endure in the days when you are old, and perhaps fat, when your beauty shall be but a memory. Yes, Tamea, when you too are a Stoneface gazing sadly out to sea for that which came—and went—and shall never, never come again, I shall love you and love you the more because your child’s heart will have been broken. You will, perhaps, remember this when you need a friend.”
He left her there and went away, with hands outstretched a little before him, like one who walks in darkness and is afraid.