Justina met Moses at the door the next night with a long and an excited face and said that Melissa was ill. “Indisposed perhaps would be a better word,” she said. She asked Moses to have a drink with her and D’Alba but he said that he would go up and see Melissa. “She’s not in your room,” Justina said. “She’s moved to one of the other bedrooms. I don’t know which one. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.” Moses looked first into their bedroom to make sure she was not there and then went down the hall, calling her name loudly, but there was no reply. He tried the door of the room next to theirs and looked into a room with a canopied bed but at some time in the past a large piece of the ceiling had fallen and fragments of plaster hung from this cavity. The curtains were drawn and the damps of the room were sepulchral—ghostly he would have said if he had not had such a great scorn for ghosts. The next door that he opened led into an unused bathroom—the tub was filled with newspapers tied into bundles—and the room was lighted luridly by a stained-glass window, and the next door that he opened led into a storeroom where brass bedsteads and rocking chairs, oak mantelpieces and sewing machines, mahogany chiffoniers with rueful lines and other pieces of respectable and by-passed furniture were stacked up to the ceiling, antedating, he guessed, Justina’s first glimpse of Italy. The room smelled of bats. The next door opened into an attic where there was a water tank as big as the plunge and there was an aeolian harp attached to the next door that he opened and asthmatic and airy as the music was it made his flesh rough when it began to ring as it would have been roughened by the hissing of an adder. This door led to the tower stairs and he climbed them up and up to a large raftered room with lancet windows and no furniture and over the mantelpiece this motto in gold: LOOK AWAY FROM THE BODY INTO TRUTH AND LIGHT. He ran down the tower stairs and had opened the door of a nursery—Melissa’s, he guessed—and another bedroom with a fallen ceiling before the foolish music of the aeolian harp had died away. Then with so much stale air in his nose and his lungs he opened a window and stuck his head out into the summer twilight where he could hear, way below him, the sounds of dinner. Then he opened a door into a room that was clean and light and where Melissa, when she saw him, buried her face in the pillows and cried when he touched her, “Leave me alone, leave me alone.”
Her invalidism, like her chasteness, seemed to be an imposture, and he reminded himself to be patient, but sitting at a window, watching the lawns darken, he felt very forlorn at having a wife who had promised so much and who now refused to discuss with him the weather, the banking business or the time of day. He waited there until dark and then went down the stairs. He had missed his dinner but a light was still burning in the kitchen, where a plump old Irishwoman, who was mopping the drainboards, cooked him some supper and set it on a table by the stove. “I guess you’re having trouble with your sweetheart,” she said kindly. “Well, I was married myself to poor Mr. Reilly for fourteen years and there’s nothing I don’t know about the ups and downs of love. He was a little man, Mr. Reilly was,” she said, “and when we was living out in Toledo everybody used to say he was runty. He never weighed over a hundred and twenty-five pounds and look at me.” She sat down in a chair opposite Moses. “Of course I wasn’t so heavy in those days but towards the end I would have made three of him. He was one of those men who always look like a little boy. I mean the way he carried his head and all. Even now, just looking out of the train window sometimes in a strange city I see one of these little men and it reminds me of Mr. Reilly. He was a menopause baby. His mother was past fifty when he was born. Why, after we was married sometimes we’d go into a bar for a beer and the barkeep wouldn’t serve him, thinking he was a boy. Of course as he got old his face got lined and towards the end he looked like a dried-up little boy, but he was very loving.
