Why Joan? Part 43

Her father took a satisfaction in Joan's house and husband and general condition of modest prosperity which surprised and rather touched the girl. It was as if he found in her well-being a justification of something that needed justifying. "I may have my weaknesses," his manner seemed to say, "but observe how well I have provided for my child!"

He dropped in almost daily for his afternoon julep on the shaded porch that overlooked her garden. Effie May had the tact rarely to accompany him, and Joan found herself seeing more of her father than she ever had under his own roof.

"I don't know just what it is, my dear," he once said, musingly.

"Possibly the familiar furniture, or the presence of Ellen Neal (quite a fair cook, Dollykins, though her manner leaves something to be desired).

But somehow in this little establishment of yours I always feel as if--well, as if Mary were about somewhere." He sighed sentimentally. "I feel as if she might at any moment sit down beside us and take out a bit of sewing. She was rarely without sewing, you remember?"

"I remember." Joan patted his hand, a demonstration rare with her. "I am glad you feel that way, Father. Mother always does seem very close to me--especially just now." An odd feeling of sorriness for her step-mother came over Joan. "You are sure," she asked on an impulse, "that Effie May does not object to your coming here so much without her?"

"Object? To my visiting my daughter under her own vine and figtree? It would hardly be within her province to object," he commented regally.

"But, as it happens, she is the one who frequently suggests my visits.

She quite understands that under the--er, the happy circ.u.mstances--you cannot come much to us, not caring naturally to appear any more often than is necessary in public." The Major adhered rigorously to every tenet of the old school.

He had recently presented his daughter with a low, comfortable phaeton of the sort which, as he explained, the gentlewomen of his day were accustomed to drive; and Pegasus was learning to adapt herself demurely to the role of a family horse. Joan found this phaeton a great convenience for shopping and marketing and her rare visiting (she saw very little of her friends that summer); and in the evening she and Archie went for long drives about the parks, covering less ground than they had covered in the ill-fated Lizzie, but making up for this by a more intimate knowledge of what they pa.s.sed.

"It's good to go slowly enough now and then to see the wayside flowers, and smell the fern, and hear the bird-calls, isn't it?" she said once as they jogged along.

"Sure it is! Now and then," replied Archie guardedly. A rising young business man of the present time could hardly be expected to find phaetoning an exhilarating means of locomotion. But "anything goes just now," as he said to himself, happily.

He was not able to take as many of these drives with her as he should have liked. The cares of business were beginning to sit upon him with increasing heaviness. "A man's business has got to grow with his family," he was fond of saying, importantly; and Joan was left alone sometimes, even on Sat.u.r.day afternoons and after supper in the evenings--those periods sacred in these our States to the uses of domesticity.

But she did not complain. She was even, secretly, a little glad, for she had always enjoyed being alone. There were so many books to be read, letters to be written, thoughts to be thought in which Archie, for all his loyal efforts, could not quite share; and there was her music. One of her step-mother's several wedding presents had been a small grand piano, as companionable to Joan in this "pasture-time" as a dog is to some women.

Archibald, too, loved music. He frequently urged her to play and sing, and was as proud of her rather indifferent performances as a _maestro_ of a star-pupil. But he had an innocent, disconcerting habit of patting time with his foot, or bursting into the air at unexpected moments in a large, booming tenor that never by any accident quite found the key.

Music was one of the things Joan found herself unable to share with her husband.

She objected sometimes to his growing preoccupation with business, on his own account. He began to look a little thin and fine-drawn; the typical American husband, she told him reprovingly.

"You're neglecting your exercise, Archie dear! You never go to the Y. M.

C. A., or play around with the boys any more."

"Got something better to do," he beamed at her.

"Goose! But it isn't good for a man never to have any fun at all. 'All work and no play'--"

He took her in his arms. "Fun! What do I want with fun?" he exclaimed quite fiercely, lifting her face to his. But before their lips met, he let her go.

"No rough stuff," she heard him admonish himself under his breath.

He kissed her hand instead....

The Darcys too, were spending rather a quiet summer. Now that they had no debutante daughter in prospect, their names figured leas prominently in the social column. With his growing avoirdupois, the Major appeared to be abandoning the one-step in favor of the easy-chair, which was to be found in greater perfection at home than at the Country Club. If his bride regretted this lapse into settledness, she showed no signs of it.

Her avoirdupois, also, was getting rather out of hand, despite constant attention to ma.s.sage and sporadic attempts at dieting.

"It ain't how _much_ I eat, seems like--it's _what_ I eat," she said once plaintively to Joan. "Everything tasty turns to flesh on me; and G.o.d knows, I hate a poor table!"

But Joan realized that it was not entirely physical inhibitions which were retiring the Darcys from the social arena. Her step-mother had delicacy enough to understand that her place was not among Joan's acquaintance, now that the girl had discovered her history. Joan liked her the better for it. She was punctiliously careful to invite Effie May to her house at frequent intervals, and always accepted such invitations as the other offered in return. The Major, never observant, was quite unaware that the relations between his wife and daughter had suffered any change. As he once remarked impersonally, "You and my wife would naturally find very little in common, excellent creature though she is.

Why should you, indeed? Your antecedents, your early environment, have been entirely different. And as one grows older, those are the things that really matter," he added, with a complacency that sat rather oddly upon him in the circ.u.mstances--On the whole, Joan began to feel distinctly sorry for her step-mother.

The older people came sometimes to take her for long automobile drives into the State; expeditions which Joan enjoyed thoroughly. Her father's imperturbable good manners and Effie May's amiability made them excellent traveling-companions, proof against all hazards of the road; tire trouble, bad going, even delayed and poor meals. And they both treated Joan with a new consideration, oddly wistful on the woman's part, to which she responded gratefully.

It shamed her somehow to see how kind the world was to her nowadays; as if, in following the line of least resistance, she had done something very commendable indeed.

CHAPTER XLI

These long automobile rides familiarized her as nothing else could not only with the State but with her father. She came to understand and share his peculiar, proprietary interest in the lovely Kentucky countryside. He pointed out to her its beauties of wood and hill and pasture like the owner of some vast estate exhibiting it to visitors, with a frank and pardonable pride. It is a habit of mind not unusual to the native of certain localities--notably Virginia and Maryland and Kentucky; but in her wandering, unimportant old father it seemed to Joan a little piteous, as if he had sunk his small ident.i.ty into that of his great State, content to make its history his history, its glory his.

"Here," he would say reverently, "is the spot where we made our final victorious stand against the Indians. Sacred ground, my daughter!"

Or--"This is the place where our women went down to the spring for water, risking their lives, bless their hearts! because the men could not be spared from the defense of the stockade. You should thank G.o.d that you are a Kentucky woman!" He sometimes forgot in his enthusiasm that she had not been, so to speak, born to the purple--though that fact, as he once explained to her, was merely an accident, due to a certain miscalculation of dates.

Joan came to realize in this new intimacy with her father that his futility was owing in large part to circ.u.mstances over which he had no control: notably the times in which he lived. He had been born a little too late or perhaps a little too early. There is no need for men of his type in the piping times of peace; but had his prime chanced to occur during some convulsed period of the world's history, it is conceivable that Richard Darcy might have rendered a great account of himself. He was a born leader of men, with unfortunately little opportunity to exercise his talent. During the only war that came within his range of vision (our late unpleasantness with Spain), he had chanced to be involved with certain trusting friends in a financial situation so acute that the affairs of the nation had been obliged to stand aside until he extricated himself; by which time, to his lasting regret, the war was over.

He had, of course, no right to his t.i.tle. It had simply accrued to him as t.i.tles often do accrue to men of his type, particularly in the South; partly by inheritance, growing as he grew, beginning with a modest lieutenancy in the State Guards, which had been his one and only taste of the career for which he had been created. He never spoke of himself as "Major"; but from the habit of years he had perhaps come to think of himself so, accepting the unsought honor gracefully as he accepted whatever else came his way, whether of good or evil.

It is a pity that he could not have fallen asleep, say, at twenty, in his clean, brave youth; and awakened in the month of August 1914, ready for the day's work....

The Darcys and Joan were running home after a long trip in the Bluegra.s.s one evening, slipping along without lights in the glow of an October aftermath, when at the turn of an unfrequented lane they came suddenly upon a crowd of people collected about a bridge. The chauffeur brought the car to an abrupt stop. It was at once surrounded by several men with handkerchiefs tied over the lower parts of their faces.

"What the devil--" cried Major Darcy.

"Highwaymen!" gasped Joan.

A man with a pistol in his hand said laconically, "No, we ain't highwaymen, lady. We wasn't expectin' comp'ny, but sence you've come, you'll hev to stay. Set right where you are and don't look. We'll be through this job in a minute."

"Nonsense! Let us pa.s.s at once," said the Major indignantly. "Drive on over the bridge, James!"

"Better not, James," drawled the laconic one. "We're usin' that bridge ourselves just now."

The chauffeur hesitated, walling his eyes in fright. Joan, who was seated beside him, reached for the ignition switch to start the engine, but turned on instead the lighting-switch. The sudden glare of the headlights revealed some twenty or thirty roughly dressed men of the farmer cla.s.s, and in their midst, bound hand and foot with rope, a cowering negro.

"My G.o.d! It's a lynching," quavered Effie May.

The Major had by this time collected his startled wits.

With a sudden oath he jerked open the door and got out.

"What are you up to here, men? Don't touch me, sir!"--this to one who had laid a hand on his sleeve.

There was a quality in her father's voice that sent a thrill through Joan. She had never heard it before. The man removed his hand.

"We're just stringin' up a n.i.g.g.e.r for the best of reasons," he explained. "'Tain't no business of yourn, stranger."

"I'll make it my business," said Richard Darcy sternly. "You're not going to disgrace this State while _I_ am here!"