Why Joan? Part 42

He told her what he could remember. It was not much except a voice--a soft English voice; and the feeling of arms that held him close; and quite clearly the sound of sobbing beside his pillow whenever he woke suddenly at night.

"Nothing was ever heard from her after she left you here?"

"Oh, yes. Money came once or twice to the landlady for my board--this was a boarding-house, then. But after a few months it stopped coming."

"And haven't you _any_ idea what became of her?"

"She died, of course," said Archie simply. "Or she'd have come back for me. There were people who thought--" he swallowed hard--"that she left me here on purpose, and never meant to come back. That isn't so. I don't know much about her, but I do know that she loved her child. You, can't fool a kid about that!... And there were people who thought she killed herself. But I don't somehow believe she was a quitter. What do _you_ think?"

He had taken a photograph out of his pocket, and handed it to Joan, who studied it closely. Despite the unbecoming "fringe" and jersey of an earlier day, it was a lovely face she saw, without a hint of folly or weakness or worse. The chin was firm as Archie's, the features strong as they were delicate. The face was still rounded and soft with youth, yet out of it looked a pair of haunted eyes.

"No, your mother was no coward," she said with conviction. "But she was a very unhappy woman. And Archie--she was a lady!" The look of race seemed to her unmistakable.

He drew a great breath. "I think so, too," he said gladly, "I've always thought so. That's how I dared--" Suddenly, pa.s.sionately, he drew her up into his arms. "Oh, my Joan, do you see why I wanted you here in my own home? It's all the home I've ever had. Anything that's happened to me has happened here. I've lain here at night trying to be a man when I was nothing more than a kid. I've sat here listening, listening--Oh, for years I used to think I heard my mother coming up the stairs to get me, long after I was old enough to know she never would! And sometimes I thought--Do you believe in ghosts?"

"Yes!" said Joan. "Ghosts of people that love us and want to help--"

"That's what I mean! And that's why I wanted to stay on in this room, where--she could find me. It's a horrible thing not to belong anywhere, nor to any one, like any little fyst dog in the streets. I've never said this before--"

"I know!" whispered Joan.

"And now that I do belong to some one, I wanted my room to know it. I wanted--in case there _were_ any ghosts--"

"I know," whispered Joan again, her lips against his.

There was a taste of salt on them, and she held him close and closer, this great, lonely child who should never be lonely again. If, as she had warned him, she was not capable of offering deep love, Joan could at least offer deep understanding, which perhaps is rarer....

And presently as she held him so in the quiet of his old room, with the house settling into drowsiness about them, and the sycamore tapping its friendly signal on the roof close above their heads, Joan's ident.i.ty seemed to be slipping, merging, into that of some one else. She ceased to be Joan the girl. She felt, in that strange moment of transition, partly the wife, and partly the mother; but most of all the woman, whose mission is to give.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

There is, among the wives and mothers of what the

Misses Darcy were wont to call the polite world, a general conspiracy of silence on the subject of honeymoons. The theory is allowed to go unchallenged that a honeymoon is invariably a period of bliss and romance unalloyed; the conspirators apparently subscribing to the ideas of the stoical parent who teaches his child to swim by throwing him unexpectedly into the water. If he manages to keep afloat, well and good; if he drowns, regrettable; if he comes out alive but with a shrinking cowardice with regard to water that never afterwards leaves him, perhaps it is no concern of his parent's. And again, perhaps it is.

Joan and Archibald Blair returned from their honeymoon not quite as close friends as when they embarked upon it. Joan's manner had gained a certain kindliness, a gentle consideration that was akin to sympathy; whereas Archie, with puzzled eyes and a smile that beamed rather uncertainly, almost evinced his desire to propitiate by rolling over at her feet and holding up four paws to heaven. (Which was no way to propitiate our heroine.)

Honeymoons, however, do not last indefinitely; and by the time Ellen Neal and her furniture and the results of Archie's "twigging" were moved into a certain modest house that simply cried aloud to be purchased (on the installment plan), Archie had grown almost accustomed to the sight of the One and Only seated at his breakfast table _en negligee_, pouring out his coffee, with a preoccupied word from him now and then as she glanced through the morning paper. (It was characteristic of that household that Joan was the one who read the morning paper.) He kissed her whenever he liked without asking leave; and in return she rumpled up his hair deliciously, and called him "Goose!", and reminded him to bring oranges from downtown because the neighboring grocery had such poor ones.

Joan entered upon the domestic role with her usual thoroughness.

At first she had been rather afraid of the expenditure the purchase of a house involved. It sounded to her too much like the large and not very practical ideas of her father. But when Archie pointed out to her that even day laborers managed to own their cottages, thanks to building-a.s.sociations, and that purchase on this plan was merely a way of saving money, she yielded without undue reluctance. After all, there was not only his salary to be relied upon, but his commissions, dependent upon his own energy, which seemed boundless. Like many poor girls, she was quite ignorant of the value of money. Beyond the purchasing power of a concrete sum, say one thousand dollars, money meant nothing to her at all. Ten thousand dollars, twenty thousand dollars--they seemed very much the same.

The house was its own best advocate; one of the charming English cottage types that are beginning to make home life not only comfortable but dignified for the small householder in our American cities. The neighborhood was excellent, one of the pretty green courts she had long ago coveted; and there was a small garden artfully arranged into vistas and quite an air of privacy by means of shrubbery, and overlooked by a secluded porch whose coolness seemed like paradise to Archie, hurrying to it out of the hot city.

The garden was his part of the establishment; and there he might be observed any morning shortly after sunrise, digging, pruning, whistling tunelessly between his teeth, with one eye on a window whence would presently issue the drowsy voice of Joan, calling, "Good-morning out there, Adam!" Then with a rush Adam would disappear from his garden, leaving spade or hose where he happened to drop them, lest Eve need a.s.sistance with b.u.t.toning a blouse or tying a shoe.

It was a glorious time for Archie. He was almost painfully happy.

The Jabberwocks and others took a good deal of critical interest in Joan's house. She had always been suspected of being a little odd, and her house proved it indubitably. At a period when Louisville was graduating out of the green-wall-and-mission-furniture period, through Coloniality, into a more catholic appreciation of possessions which express the personality of the possessor, Joan's house was still rather a shock to all preconceived notions of decoration. There was none of the white woodwork and panelled severity which sounded the correct and most recent note. Joan's woodwork and walls were alike a soft, practical gray--"Soot-color," she explained placidly--and the plaster had been left rough-cast. Against it, instead of the accepted pictures of the day, hung two or three rare prints, a cast of the Parthenon frieze, and a fine strip of Persian embroidery. On the floor were black skin rugs. A green vine, growing out of an ancient yellowed marble jar, wandered at will across one wall and up the brick of the chimney-place.

"You got that idea in Italy," commented one visitor.

But the undoubted charm of Joan's house was that she had taken no ideas from anywhere. She simply had about her the sort of things she liked.

There were ferns growing in the window-sills, and no curtains whatever except two lengths of heavy pumpkin-colored silk which might be drawn across the panes at will, but rarely were.

"People will be able to see in when the lamps are lighted," protested her step-mother.

"What of it? They won't see much over those ferns," said Joan, "and I always love to peep in at lighted windows myself, don't you? Haven't you ever noticed how much nicer the houses in this part of the world look when they're undressed for the summer? Personally, my taste has never run to lingerie in household decoration."

Effie May, who was nothing if not receptive, went home and meekly took down her point-lace curtains.

What troubled Louisville most about the Blair house was its lack of a dining-room. There was no chamber held sacred to the rites of nourishment, with chairs sitting primly against the wall and a center table with a centerpiece upon it, bearing a fernery or--what was more recently affected by the really up-to-date--a dish containing imitation fruit. ("So much smarter than the real kind," explained her neighbor, Mrs. Webster, who had quite a taste for the correct in art.) There was no sideboard for the display of wedding-silver, no china-cabinet containing the best gla.s.sware in glittering serried rows. What was the use of having nice things, thought many a troubled housewife, if they were to blush unseen in pantries?

But Joan did not understand, and frankly said so, why in a small house one room should be set aside for use only three times a day. She needed the extra wall s.p.a.ce for her books. Besides if there was a dining-room people seemed to feel obliged always to eat in it, instead of in the garden or the porch, or on a table drawn close to the window, where one might look out into the world while one ate, as in a pleasant restaurant.

"I'm like the Irishman," she remarked, "who said that he was glad he didn't like strawberries, because if he did he'd have to eat them, and he hated the d.a.m.n things.--Try having your meals served about in different places, and see if you haven't a better appet.i.te for them!"

Even the admiring Jabberwocks felt that this was carrying oddity to the extreme. They always took strangers, however, to see Joan's little house, and incidentally Joan herself. Mr. Nikolai had sent her recently several Mandarin costumes, unique in the history of Louisville for domestic wear, in which she appeared comfortable, piquante, and quite exotically feminine.

"Fancy! Trousers on a bride! And at such a time, too," murmured the ladies of the neighborhood among themselves.

But as Effie May pointed out to the Major, himself a trifle shocked by this eccentricity of costume in a lady of his family, "She's slim enough to wear 'em, d.i.c.kie, and those full silk pants are certainly becoming to the feet. Wish I had some myself--Don't you worry," she added, chuckling over the Major's expression, "I haven't! Pantaloons weren't meant for the pincushion style of figger."

Archibald, of course, found the Mandarin costume adorable. He would have found any costume of Joan's adorable, even a Mother Hubbard, or its lineal descendant, the bungalow-ap.r.o.n.

Altogether, Joan had a rather happy aftermath to her honeymoon. "The pasture-time," she called it, during which she was as placid and content as a cow in a clover-field. For the first and possibly the last time in her life she was quite free from worry. That was one of the things Archie took completely out of her hands. He would have liked to take everything out of her hands that might be irksome to her--her thinking, her very sleeping and eating, had it been possible. But worry at least was something he could take upon his own broad shoulders.

Her personal allowance and the allowance he made her for household expenses were paid regularly into her account--an arrangement Joan had insisted upon, despite his protest.

"Why should you be bothered with the paying of bills, darlingest?"

"But I _love_ to pay bills, Archie," she had replied, rather piteously to one who had known anything of the earlier Darcy _menage_. "It's a real pleasure to get them all out of the way before the tenth of the month!" And it was a pleasure she attended to religiously, even after she began to grow a little lax and indifferent about other household matters. There were to be no "Indians" in the annals of the Blair family.

Joan had never been so sluggish mentally as in these first months of married life; yet she felt almost abnormally normal, close to the great heart of existence, at one with the physical world about her, content with the content of a cog which fits well into the wheel where it belongs.

Long afterwards some would-be cynic asked her whether she believed that marriage _per se_ was an experiment which paid.

"Yes!" she answered without hesitation. "If only for the moment when you tell your husband that he is to have a child."

CHAPTER XL