Why Joan? Part 9

Her father grinned a little sheepishly. "Why--why yes, I keep it here as an office coat, to save the others, you see. I'm sort of used to it," he added explanatorily. "It seems to fit into my curves. The new ones don't. One is supposed to fit into theirs!"

Joan patted the sleeve of the second-best affectionately. Her eyes were moist. She felt nearer to her father than she had for weeks. He had kept the old chair out of their home equipment; he had kept the old coat. Was he after all not so obliviously content as he seemed in his fine new surroundings? Did he remember, too, and was he homesick as herself for the shabby days when he and she and her mother had made a little world of their own, happy in spite of everything?

She said with a smile, "You'd better not let Effie May catch you wearing such a garment!"

"Heaven forbid!" he exclaimed. "I may confess that it was with some difficulty I rescued this coat from the ashman, to whom your mother had given it."

But his use of the phrase, "your mother," hardened Joan out of her momentary tenderness. Invariably he spoke of Effie May to her as "your mother," and of her real mother only as "Mary." The girl was too young to realize that this may have been because the name meant things to him which the phrase never would. Mary was something more to Richard Darcy than Joan's mother....

"I have come to talk to you," said Joan, "about business, Father."

"Business?" The Major's eyebrows lifted. Business meant money, and the ladies of his family never cared to talk about money! remarked those eyebrows. Though, to be sure, they sometimes found themselves under the necessity of asking for it--His hand went instinctively to his pocket.

"I suppose you are out of pin-money?" he interpreted. "Stupid of me not to have realized it, Dollykin, though I sent you rather a good deal to the convent, you remember?" He brought his hand out, filled with silver.

"There! Spend it 'not wisely but too well'--not that one need give any girl advice on that subject! Dear, dear, how women can make the money fly!" humorously sighed the Major (whose debts had probably been paid by women ever since he had been old enough to make them).

"I should like a chance," said Joan soberly, "to make the money fly, Father. My money, you know."

He stared at her, really bewildered.

She refreshed his memory, flushing. "The money Mother left, with you as guardian--that I was to have whenever I asked--"

"Not that she ever expected such a contingency to arrive!" commented the Major with a sudden accession of stiffness. "You are not of age yet, my child."

"Was there any provision in her will about my being of age?"

"No," he admitted. "Owing to what was of course purely a technical error, I think there was not. My poor Mary was quite unaccustomed to the terminology of wills, naturally, and as she and a servant drew it up between them, you may imagine--" he shrugged indulgently.

Joan moistened her lips. She was finding the interview even more difficult than she had imagined. Her father's manner managed to put her somehow in the wrong. But she held to her purpose.

"I do not think it was an error, Father. Mother wasn't the sort who says things she doesn't mean. I believe she foresaw that--that something might occur which would make me wish to be independent, even if I was not of age. She could trust my judgment a little. She knew that I'd never dream of asking for her property unless I had a good reason--I have a good reason now, Father--I want to be independent." Her voice trailed off miserably. What she really wanted was to put her arms about his neck and have a good cry.

Unconsciously the Major discouraged the impulse. "What is this nonsense about independence?" he demanded. "My dear Joan, you sound like a New Woman!" On his lips the phrase was a scathing denunciation.

Joan explained faintly that she wanted to go away somewhere, to live....

The Major was honestly aghast. "Leave your father's roof?" he cried incredulously. "My child! What is this folly? Never with Richard Darcy's consent shall a daughter of his leave her father's roof except for the roof of her lawful husband." (In moments of emotion, the Major was always liable to these attacks of circ.u.mlocution.)

Joan pointed out to him, still faintly but determinedly, that it was not her _father's_ roof she wished to leave....

Even under his armor of complacency this shot told. He winced. "Have you been made to feel that? Has my wife ever caused you to believe that you were an unwelcome member of our household?" he demanded sharply, in a voice that boded ill for the present Mrs. Darcy if such were the case.

"No, Father! I shall never give her the chance to make me feel unwelcome. That is why I want my mother's money."

The Major toyed with a pen, and seemed to be thinking. "I am not at all sure," he said presently, "that the will Mary left was legal, my dear; whether it would stand in the courts--"

"What does that matter?" interrupted Joan, "when you and I know what Mother meant?" Something impelled her to add, "And when Ellen Neal knows, too?"

The Major looked quickly at her, and looked away. "Perhaps you are not aware that regardless of any will whatsoever the law ent.i.tles me to one-third of my wife's estate?"

Joan flushed with an embarra.s.sment that was more for him than for herself. "You're welcome to it, Daddy; you're perfectly welcome to it, of course! It isn't that I want to take anything away from _you_.

It's--oh, won't you _please_ understand, and not be hurt with me?" she implored. "I only want to know how much there is, how much money I can count on getting every month to live on. Just income, you know. I wouldn't think of touching the--princ.i.p.al, don't you call it?"

Richard Darcy rose abruptly and went to the window. It was a fine view that spread before him--a soothing, mellifluous landscape of golden river and hazy blue Indiana hills. Indiana, as he sometimes remarked, was delightful as a background though undesirable as a dwelling-place.

He said so now. He had taken this office entirely for its view, he informed his daughter. The Major patronized Nature extensively, and believed that all gentlemen should do so; especially Kentucky gentlemen, to whom Nature has been so particularly lavish.

Meanwhile Joan waited. He recalled that her mother used to have the same habit of silent waiting. Some minds seem incapable of pleasant digression.

He sighed, and resumed the subject under discussion. His manner had changed somewhat, however. He spoke in the persuasive, frank, "he's-a-good-fellow-and-'twill-all-be-well" tones which he reserved for directors' boards, stockholders' meetings, and like courts of last resort, when things unpleasant had to be told and he was the one to tell them. It should be said in all justice that he rarely side-stepped these meetings, as he might have done, and allowed the unpleasantnesses to disclose themselves through others. n.o.body could say that Richard Darcy was a coward.

"Well, about this little business affair of ours, Dollykins--Of course the property was never large, though properly invested it might have brought us in a decent income instead of the trifle Mary was content with. The merest pittance I a.s.sure you, the merest pittance!"

Joan nodded. She had heard before about the mereness of the pittance.

"Often during my wife's lifetime I took occasion to point this out to her. The question of securities and investments being one to which I have devoted the greater part of my business career, I think I may say without undue vanity that I am qualified to give advice on such matters!

But Mary had a certain sentimental reluctance about changing investments which her father had made for her, and sentiment is a thing which I am always able to respect."

("Good for mother!" said Joan to herself.)

"However, after her death--" he paused to pay his Mary the tribute of a sincere though dramatic sigh--"I began at once to look about for a means of providing my little girl with more affluence than had hitherto been at my disposal. The best," he smiled, patting her hand, "is none too good for my Dollykins! And an opportunity shortly presented itself, a quite exceptional opportunity, not only of increasing our income materially, but of a.s.sisting to develop the resources of my native commonwealth." He expanded suddenly with public spirit. "What a State!

Fortunes have been made here, but nothing compared with the fortunes which shall be made. People have dared to call us a 'pauper State'--'pauper,' if you please!--with wealth at our command, untouched, unguessed resources lying just beneath the surface of this beautiful soil, which would make Aladdin's cave look like--like--"

"Thirty cents," supplied Joan, in an anxious effort to get to the point.

"I know, Father!--but what did you buy with the money?"

"Oil-fields!" he said largely. "Oil-fields! Or, to be exact, stock in a company formed for the purpose of purchasing oil-fields, in which by good chance I happened to be let in on the ground floor (as we say in commercial parlance, Dollykins. It is not an expression I should care to hear you use.) You are the part possessor of something like one thousand acres of virgin Kentucky soil!" He leaned back in his chair and beamed on her.

"Am I?" said Joan dubiously. "It sounds promising."

Something of her father's elation disappeared in a sigh. "Promising, yes!--but so far only promising. Oil has been struck all about us, but none as yet on our holdings. I have by no means given up hope, of course." (Richard Darcy had never given up hope in any of his lost causes.) "But I must confess that I have been disappointed. Worse than disappointed. For a while I was--well, really, desperate!" He smiled deprecatingly.

The smile did not for the moment touch Joan's heart; but it told her the truth she had dreaded. "Father! You mean you have _lost_ the money?--There's no income left?"

"Income? Alas, no. And even the princ.i.p.al--Still, the land is there, one thousand acres of it, and that cannot escape!" he added, brightening.

"There were times when I thought of going to live on the land. Though my experience of agriculture has been practically nil, many of our ancestors were planters and stock-breeders, and, as you know, I am a firm believer in the power of heredity. However, I was credibly informed that the property would not lend itself to agriculture. I was at my wit's end. Fancy the position!" (The Major was beginning rather to enjoy his woe in the retrospect.) "Here was I not as yet firmly established on my feet (as we say in business parlance); deprived alike of helpmate and companion, with my child at an expensive boarding-school where I had promised my dead wife she should remain until the completion of her education--and I without a dollar I could call my own! Frightful! There were certain obligations to tradespeople as well.... I am sure I do not know how for a while Ellen Neal managed to provide us with necessities!"

(Joan thought grimly that she knew how.) "It became necessary to--ah!--realize on my possessions. First the silver went--I daresay you have wondered what has become of our family silver, my child? It was sacrificed to keep a roof over your head. Then the more valuable pieces of furniture--"

"Oh, don't!" groaned the girl in a sort of angry pity, "Why didn't you tell me? Oh, _poor_ father!"

"You may well say, 'poor father.' It was for you I suffered most, for you I was afraid. A man alone can always manage to subsist in some fashion, but a man with a helpless female dependent on him--! Thank heaven," he said earnestly, "you can never know what it is to be a father! I thought constantly, 'What a home to bring a young lady into!

What a situation for my child!' I may confess that I prayed--no gentleman need be ashamed to pray when he is in distress. And then like light in darkness the answer came to me. At whatever cost to myself, whatever sacrifice, I must provide comfort for Joan, a home suitable for the reception of a young gentlewoman. There was nothing left to offer except--myself. Therefore--"

His face shone with a n.o.ble sadness, and he waited for the generosity of his sacrifice to sink in.

"You mean," said Joan slowly, "that it was for my sake you married Mrs.

Calloway!"

He bowed a.s.sent. "Why else? She is an excellent woman, a kind and excellent and devoted woman. But under happier circ.u.mstances, a man of my position, my traditions, my--shall I say fastidiousness?--" He shrugged, and allowed the ungallant suggestion to complete itself without words.