Why Joan? Part 61

The funeral did great credit to the Misses Darcys' experience in such affairs. A crowded, beflowered church bore witness to the fact that Darcy was still a name to be reckoned with in the community. Not only the best people were there in quite sufficient numbers, but many of those lesser folk whose duties bring them happily into touch with the best people; milliners, modistes, clerks in the better shops, and so forth.

As Mr. Florsheimer of the Gents' Furnishing remarked to Miss Murphy of the Silks: "Such a loss to trade, ain't she?"

Among these humbler friends not a few genuine tears were shed, however, for Effie May had scattered her kindness impartially.

Joan, in solitary state as chief mourner, with the Misses Darcy sadly rustling in the pew behind her, was conscious of many curious glances turned her way. Perhaps her husband was the only person there whose eyes never turned in her direction. She was glad of her heavy veil, through which she might study him un.o.bserved.

He sat just opposite among the other pall-bearers, grave and quiet, with the odd dignity still about him which had come at the time of his disgrace. She noted new lines in his face, an unexpected touch of gray in his boyish, curling hair. The ears, the freckles, the great, clumsy hands were still much in evidence; but somehow Archie had lost forever his slight touch of the ridiculous. Declining to run away from disgrace, facing his music, humbly but unafraid, it occurred to Joan that her husband was approaching rather nearly her own and her father's standard of gentlehood.

"Blessings brighten," she reminded herself, grimly, "as they take their flight!..."

She came presently under the soothing spell of the old cathedral, a shabby, not very beautiful edifice left stranded in a neighborhood no longer its own, but whose pews still bore the names of the town's first citizens, gentlemen who had been her father's boyhood playmates, and whose fathers had worshiped there with his father. Oddly enough, considering how little time she had spent within its walls, the echoing dimness of it gave Joan her first sense of home-coming. This old house of G.o.d, that had witnessed so many ends and so many beginnings of human endeavor, had gathered into itself the heart of a city.

A warm heart, it was, thought Joan; despite those speculative glances fixed upon her. She recalled people's kindness to Archie in his trouble, their quick response to any call upon their sympathy, their willingness to give every stranger his chance. She remembered their invincible hospitality, whether in wealth or poverty; the ardor with which they entered into the interest of the moment, be it work or play, their generous admiration for any fellow-citizen who made a success in the world. A warm heart, she thought, and a loyal one.

She understood in that moment why it was that the people of this little city rarely drifted too far away to come back again. Just as the human body claims in the end its six feet of earth for a resting-place, so must the human spirit claim its bit of the world for a resting-place, a Neighborhood. The tragedy of a wandering life such as Nikolai's was, she saw, in its detachment from common human interests, from a Neighborhood.

Better a tree, with its roots in friendly soil, as he had once said.

Cast her out though it might, Joan knew that her Neighborhood was here, here among her father's people....

A trolley-car clanged past, and the challenge of the peanutman came cheerfully in at the open door. "Pop-corn, Lady? Yere's your fine fraish roasted peanuts, right off the hopper!"

The little lads in the choir stirred restlessly to this voice of the summer outside. "Lead, Kindly Light," they warbled in a piercing young treble, with now and then the Bishop's robust tones added in a hospitable effort to make the thing go.

Joan's irrepressible fancy recalled the last occasion on which she had heard this n.o.ble anthem. It was at the Country Club, where some irreverent wag was playing it in rag-time; and Effie May had danced to it merrily, Lightfoot Ef with her indulgent Major. Joan wondered whether Lightfoot Ef might be remembering, too, and smiling perhaps in her coffin....

But out at the cemetery her queer sense of elation vanished. Here, in the shadow of her father's monolith, with Mary's modest headstone on one side, a yawning grave on the other, at her feet two mounds so small as hardly to be noticed, the aloneness of the human soul suddenly smote her with such force that she could not stand under it. Was she never to know again that human touch of hands and of lips? Was her only neighborhood after all to be this quiet city of the dead?

She went quite dizzy and might have fallen, but for the quick arm that supported her; whose in that bitter moment she neither knew nor cared.

But she was not surprised to find herself presently alone in a carriage with Archie.

"I guess I oughtn't to have done this," he apologized, when he saw that she could listen to him. "I just didn't think--out there. I'll go as soon as you feel better, dear. Where do you want the driver to take you!"

"Home," she said. It was no more than a whisper.

"You mean to Mrs. Darcy's house? Won't that be pretty gloomy for you just now? Better let him take you to your cousins'--or to Miss Emily's.

How would that be? I know she'd he mighty glad to have you."

Joan gathered herself together for an effort. It seemed to her, faint as she was, that much depended upon this moment. But for once her eloquence failed her. She could only repeat that she wanted to go home.

Archie understood her trembling better than her speech, perhaps. He, too, began to tremble.

"I--I haven't got any home now, Joan. Only the old attic-room in Poplar Street--"

She cried out, painfully, "Archie! don't you _want_ me any more?..."

In his arms at last, her face pressed roughly against the familiar roughness of his coat, words returned to her. She quoted her husband's sole adventure into poetry:

"A book of verses underneath the roof, A cup of coffee and an egg, in troof, And Mrs Neal to cook it up for us-- Ah, attic life were Paradise enoof."

Archibald did his faithful best to laugh; but the effort was not successful.

So it happened that they were received from a funeral as they had once been from a wedding, into the portal of an ancient, friendly mansion whose stairway still creaks to the tread of ghosts and broken people, with now and then a happy footstep to remind it of its youth. And there Ellen Neal, mounting stiffly and wearily with the aid of the curving bannister, was hailed by a loud whisper from the floor above.

"Hsst! Come on up and look who's here."

A radiant Archie led her to his door, and exhibited the One and Only, clad in his bathrobe, curled up asleep upon his bed.

"Humph!" gulped Ellen through her tears. "I _knew_ that woman'd manage to fix things somehow!" Which was a final reluctant tribute to the force of kindness that had been Effie May.

TWO YEARS LATER

A distinguished, foreign-looking gentleman with pointed gray beard got off an interurban car in the vicinity of Louisville, and stood gazing about him uncertainly. It was not the suburban neighborhood he had expected to find, but a distinctly rural one. Here and there smoke was visible above the tree-tops, but the only house within sight was a small farm-cottage of red brick, which had doubtless stood there among its gnarled fruit-trees at a time when the turnpike that pa.s.sed it was a postroad leading from the metropolis of Middletown (now half a hundred houses strung along the pike) to the little port of Louisville on the Ohio.

There was a big chimney at either end, in the picturesque but impractical early fashion, and a bricked-up terrace across the front overflowing with simple flowers: petunias, snapdragon, larkspur. Upon the lawn grazed a rather stiff-kneed thoroughbred, apparently under convoy of a pair of infants. One of these, the smaller, got about on all fours with astonishing rapidity, and seemed imbued with the spirit of investigation. The other, slightly larger, was extremely black as to color and extremely capable as to manner.

"Tek keer, you Steffum!" Mr. Nikolai heard this one admonish. "Don't you go so near his mouf, you heah me? Dat hawss could snap you up jes' as easy as nippin' off a dandelium!"

The visitor leaned over the fence in sudden interest, "Can you tell me, young person, whether Mrs. Blair lives here?"

At sound of his voice the investigatory infant, in an excess of hospitality, rose to its legs and teetered eagerly toward him, only to come to earth at Mr. Nikolai's feet. Nothing daunted, however, it gazed up at him from this lowly position with a mixture of Archie's grin and the droll, blue, wistful twinkle of Joan.

"Dar you goes, Steffum!" cried the guardian, in hot pursuit. "Dirtyin'

up anodder clean dress so's Miss Ellen gwinter whup me good--He's always a-fallin' over on his face dataway," she complained, while maternally repairing damages with the skirt of what appeared to be an only garment.

"I b'lieve he goes and does it a-purpose!"

"To gain experience, perhaps?" suggested the visitor.

"I reck'n," a.s.sented the other, doubtfully. "Ya.s.suh, Mis' Blair she _libs_ heah, but she's playin' on de type-writer dis mawnin'. Will I run an' tell her comp'ny is came?"

"Heaven forbid!" exclaimed the gentleman. "Not if she is playing on a typewriter."

"Mr. Archie, _he_ libs heah, too, when he ain't a trabelin' on de railroad train," volunteered the black one, "He's out behine, makin' him a little house to put a hawg in. Heah him?"

Mr. Nikolai nodded. There was a good deal of intermittent hammering and whistling going on in the background.

"You need not announce me, thank you. Perhaps my namesake will lead me to him?"

He held out a forefinger to the younger Stefan, who examined it, found it good, and clasped a trusting fist about it. So linked, the two moved off at a pace suitable to experimental footsteps.

In this slow progress they presently came upon a somewhat nondescript figure at work in a potato-patch. It wore blue jeans overall trousers, surmounted by what had once been a leghorn picture-hat, from which straggled a lock or two of spa.r.s.e gray hair.