Why Joan? Part 10

"I think," said Joan quietly, "we'd better not say 'fastidiousness.'"

She was struggling, struggling so hard that her hands were clenched, to do justice to her father. Had she misjudged him? Was his marriage after all not the horrid thing she had thought it, but an honest effort to atone to the child he had beggared? Something within her cried "No!" Her father had sacrificed nothing in the marriage. He had simply yielded, without a struggle, to the lure of the flesh-pots. Worse than this, the girl recalled honeymooning incidents that often made her shudder with mental nausea; certain billing and cooing which she had not always been able to avoid. It was not only the flesh-pots that had lured him....

"Cad!" she cried to herself fiercely. "Cad and liar!" And the terrible thing was that he did not seem to know he was being a cad and a liar.

Aloud she said, "And what did Mrs. Calloway get out of the bargain?"

The Major stared at her, astounded. It was a question so absurd that he literally could not answer it. Quite unconsciously his eyes strayed beyond her after a moment to a mirror, as if for rea.s.surance.

Joan burst out laughing. The laughter was so palpably close to tears that her father forgave it, and held out his arms to her. "There, there, my poor child! You're overwrought," he murmured. "Come to Daddy!"

She had lost all desire to weep on his shoulder now, however, and Richard Darcy shrank from the look she gave him, as a more innocent man than he might have shrunk; so level it was, so keen and without mercy.

She saw her father in that moment not only as cad and liar, but as something very close to a thief. As surely as if she had been told in words, she knew why her mother, after fighting for years to keep her bit of property safe for her child, had at the last left it to the guardianship of her husband. It was to show him she trusted him, to put him on honor, as it were; to bolster up his waning self-respect by this final supreme act of faith in him. And he had betrayed her.

Joan shrugged, and turned to go. Her head hung in shame, and Richard Darcy knew that the shame was not for herself. What pa.s.sed through her brain then was for the moment clear to him, as it is sometimes with people of one blood.

"I dare say," he said very low with a sort of dreadful questioning, "that the law might--might hold me responsible as guardian of your property, my daughter. If you cared to--if you wished to--make an issue of it?"

"What good would that do" she replied brutally. "The money's gone, isn't it?"

Then, glancing back, she surprised in his face that look she had almost forgotten--the frightened, baffled, anxious expression which she a.s.sociated with the days when, as Ellen Neal put it, "the Indians were after him."

Instantly the reaction came. It was she he feared now, not "Indians"--she, his own little girl, Joan!

She ran and put her arms around him tightly, protectingly. "Nonsense!"

she cried, her voice beautiful with the instinct of all the mothers who had made her. "The law'll never know a thing about it. What has the old law got to do with you and me? You've done the best you could, Daddy, I'm sure."

Richard Darcy answered humbly, like a repentant child, "I have, daughter, truly I have. I'm sorry...."

Later, as she walked wearily homeward through streets that no longer exhilarated her, no bachelor-maid now with a latch-key, nor yet an independent young traveler in foreign lands, but merely a poor relation dependent on the bounty of a step-mother, Joan made for herself a new beat.i.tude:

"Blessed are the weak," she thought stoically, "for they have got to be taken care of."

CHAPTER XI

The two rooms in which Ellen Neal had established herself were on the second floor of a house that had gone some decades since into a state of senile decrepitude. But such was the fashion of building in its day that it showed no particular signs of its approaching end beyond a slight tilt to leeward and the rather eczematic effect of its stuccoed brick facade. A high-waisted door surmounted by a fine fan-light and supported by slender columns which had once been white led into a square panelled hall from which curved a staircase of exquisite proportions. These things in a city of larger growth and greater sophistication would have marked the house as the natural abode of artists and their ilk; but in Louisville, where art is yet chiefly a thing to be taken in courses by the elect, it let itself out in rooms for light housekeeping and other humble purposes. The slender columns were defaced by such signs as, "Feather Cleaning and Artificial Flowers,"--"Furniture Upholstered,"--"Plain Dressmaking," etc.

The neighborhood, except for this one decrepit mansion standing well in from the sidewalk with an ancient sycamore for company, had long since forgotten its former claims to fashion; but it was still respectable.

Trust Ellen Neal for that! She had the same flair for respectability as had the Misses Darcy for gentility. No doubtful character, whether in house or individual, could fail to yield up its weakness to the corrosive rect.i.tude of Miss Neal's shrewd eye.

Joan liked to come to this house, not only because Ellen and the familiar home furniture were there, but because it carried her romantic fancy back into the Louisville her father sometimes talked about, the old South with all its lost glamour of gallantry and derring-do. "_Les belles dames du temps jadis_" was a phrase that invariably came to her mind as she entered the graceful, defaced portal. Nearby stood a street-pump where an actress who was one day to make the charm of American women world-famous, used to come each morning to draw water, in her shabby little slippers with a rope of hair over each shoulder--a lovely young Rebekah at the well. Around the corner stood another old mansion, now debased to commercial uses, in front of which the townspeople used to gather daily at a certain hour to watch the languid progress from door to carriage of a beauty so widely heralded that her name and her many love-affairs have become history. Here and there in a neglected fence-corner a ragged rose-bush, or a clump of larkspur bravely in bloom, spoke to a few observers, such as Joan, of gardens which had been the lovely setting of lovely ladies long since dead and dust.

Twilight was the hour for that neighborhood. Joan liked to fancy Ellen's house as the darkness fell, with candle-light streaming from the wide-flung windows, and glimpses within of bells in crinoline and beaux in tight wrinkled trousers, dancing a quadrille. Among them moved negro servitors with trays of frosted silver cups, and syllabub (though she had no slightest notion of what syllabub might be), and black cake, and small, p.r.i.c.ked, beaten biscuit with ham in their insides. And there would be carriages stopping constantly at the door, to emit more belles and gallants, girls hoop-skirted and beshawled, who ran lightly up the curve of the long staircase, with apologies to the couples they disturbed in pa.s.sing....

Always the house brought such fancies to Joan, and so clearly that she sometimes wondered whether they were less fancies than race-memories, souvenirs of Darcys who might have lived and made merry there in the halcyon days when the old gray river-town was at its zenith; truly, as it boasted, the Gateway to the South, stopping-place for all travelers on these floating palaces which no longer ply their leisurely journeys down the Ohio and the Mississippi to the Gulf.

Once she had questioned her father about it. "No, that's not one of our houses, I think," he replied interestedly. "Though it might have been.

Your ancestors were very fond of change, Dollykins--as I am myself. We seem to have lived in half the houses in Louisville, at one time or another. But that one has been shabby and tumbledown ever since I can remember. In my boyhood it was a cheap boarding-house, for actors and people of that sort, I believe. I knew no one who lived there."

Joan was disappointed. She would have liked to claim the old mansion as a relative.

As she went wearily homeward from her disastrous interview with her father, Joan suddenly bethought herself of this house, and of Ellen. She was in no mood just then for the cheerful vulgarities of her step-mother. On the impulse, she went into the nearest drug-store and telephoned that she would not be home that night for dinner.

"Ellen shall cook me some pancakes, and I will help her," she decided, comforted by the idea. It must be remembered that Joan was only nineteen.

Inhabitants in suspenders and dressing-sacks, seeking air on the doorstep, stared at the girl inquisitively as she entered; but once within the dimness of the panelled hall she was able to forget these anachronisms. The quaint elegance of an earlier day was proof against even Expert Feather-curling, and Upholstery Done Here.

From above came a sudden tuneless whistling, and then a thump on a door and a man's voice calling, "Say, Mrs. Neal! Here's a bushel of fine a.s.sorted socks for you, and if you can get enough out of the lot to keep my feet off the cauld, cauld ground till pay-day, I'll be yours truly."

She heard Ellen's voice replying in more m.u.f.fled tones, "All right, sir, just dump 'em in the door, will you? My hands are in the dough."

Joan was amused to hear Ellen Neal called "Mrs."--she who was so unmistakably and truculently a spinster; also she was surprised at the politeness of her "sir" in response, for Ellen was not given to the small amenities of social intercourse. The Major himself was rarely "sir" to Ellen.

The whistling resumed itself, coming rapidly nearer; and around the curve of the stairs, which he took two at a time, bounded a young man, who brought himself and his whistling to a full stop just in time to avoid carrying Joan with him in his downward course.

"Whew!--just missed you!" he exclaimed aghast. "You startled me. For a minute I thought you were a ghost!"

"Perhaps I am," murmured Joan, and demurely pa.s.sed on up the stairs.

He turned and stared after the white ascending figure. She was aware of his eyes following her. Suddenly he chuckled, "I knew I'd find you again. And I found the quotation, too! 'Richard the Second,' by William Shakespeare."

Joan glanced over her shoulder. "I do not know what you are talking about," she said frigidly, "and I do not know you from Adam!" She had brought the impertinence upon herself, but she felt quite able to handle it--particularly with Ellen Neal just a few steps away.

Even as she spoke, however, she was aware that she did know this young man. Something in his voice, in his awkward, deferential manner, brought back to her memory the too-sympathetic drummer on the train. She lifted her eyes from his necktie to his face, remembering past regrets. His ears stuck out.

"Like the Yellow Kid's!" she thought disgustedly.

There is nothing in the least romantic about a man whose ears stick out.

He might as well be fat....

"'Sad stories of the death of kings,'" he was explaining eagerly. "I looked it up myself. Sort of sounded like Shakespeare."

"Oh! I thought it was 'Alice in Wonderland'!" Joan was surprised into speech.

"That's a new one on me--'Alice in Wonderland,'"--commented the young man. "Is it good stuff?"

"You've never read 'Alice in Wonderland'? What a queer childhood you must have had!"

"Didn't have any," he replied, smiling up at her. Then he removed the smile, made a respectful little bow, and went on out the door.

Joan found that she was blushing, hotly; and no wonder. She was shocked by herself. She, one of Sister Mary Agnes's best exemplars of decorum, had deliberately started and continued a conversation with a strange young man met by chance on the dark stairway of a house where a.s.suredly gentlemen did not live. ("Unless very poor gentlemen," she amended; for, ears or not, he seemed somehow to belong in the category of gentlehood.) Nor had she even terminated the conversation. It was he who had done that. He had shown more sense of the fitness of things than had she, Joan Darcy!

It was all the effect of the hospitable old hall, Joan decided. The house, like the roof of a friend, had introduced them. But what was he doing in such a house? It was not the sort of abode that would appeal, she fancied, to necktie drummers.