Joan was alone at last in such a bed as she had never occupied in her life, even in her most luxurious games of Pretend. To her inexperience the sheets felt as if made of softest silk—at its crest the Darcy establishment had never run to fine linen—and they were edged with lace which Joan longed frugally to transfer to a best petticoat; only that there seemed no need for her to trouble further about best petticoats, nor about anything else. Under the eager guidance of her "new mamma," drawer after drawer in the room she occupied had been opened to disclose piles of exquisite underthings, of the sort Joan had first encountered upon the Calloway clothes lines, except that these were white instead of pink.
"Pink'smycolor," explained the former Mrs. Calloway. "Besides, white lawngerie seems sort of better for a girl that's never been married, don't you think? Even if it isn't so becoming. 'Tain't as if there was anybody to see her in it," she added, with a conscious blush.
Joan found no suitable comment to make upon this treasure-trove. Her lips would not utter anything beyond a perfunctory "Thank you," even when further investigation discovered a closet hung with dresses of every sort, with peignoirs, with motor-coats and dainty wraps, with everything in the way of finery which every girl alive hopes at some time to possess, but which the daughter of Richard Darcy had learned to look upon from afar with an air of indifference.
"Are these all for me?" she asked dully.
"Of course they are! Just a few little models I had sent up on approval." (The ex-Mrs. Calloway invariably referred to her costumes in affectionate diminutives, as "little gowns," "little negligées," "little hats," etc., though the adjective could rarely be said to fit them.) "If these don't suit we'll get others—though anything ought to look good on your form, dearie." She added, clasping her hands, "It certainly is fun shoppin' for a daughter of your own!"—an outburst which might have struck some responsive chord in a heart less young than Joan's, less hard and tight and bitter with the tears that would not come.
Major Darcy had observed her apathy under this rain of largesse with some disapproval. It was not the first time he had secretly wished that his daughter might have inherited a trifle more of the Darcy manner. At length, as the girl stood looking about her new room silently, still with the strange lack of comment that seemed like indifference, he ventured a remonstrance.
"I don't think you quite realize how much time and thought and trouble your—er, your mother and I have expended on these little surprises for your home-coming, Dollykins. Or you would be more appreciative."
"My mother!" repeated Joan to herself with a sick gasp.
It was the bride who came to her rescue. "She's tired out, Major, that's all. And no wonder! She hardly ate a bite of dinner. You go right to bed and sleep, girlie," she advised comfortably. "In the morning you'll be better able to enjoy all your pretties."
So Joan was at last alone, wondering whether she would ever be able to enjoy anything again; alone in a strange room crowded with large blond bird's-eye maple furniture which reminded her oddly of her step-mother; with pale blue walls, a blue rug, blue silk covers on chairs and bed, blue stationery spread out on the desk, all to match. There was nothing, not a chair, nor book nor picture, to remind its forlorn inhabitant of home; until suddenly, lost amid the glitter of the silver on the dressing-table, she discovered a faded photograph of her mother which her father had for many years carried in his pocket. This she jerked out of the opulent silver frame that disguised it, and held hungrily to her cheek, going to bed with it finally under her pillow. It did not occur to her to wonder who had put it there. (But it was not Richard Darcy.)
Yet still the tears would not come. She lay staring into the dark with hot, dry, aching eyes, repeating agonizingly to herself the questions she had not found courage to ask her father—foolish, trivial questions that seemed almost irrelevant in the face of this overwhelming calamity.... What had he done with the furniture, their furniture, the dear, shabby tables and chairs and hangings which were part of the home Mary Darcy had given her life in making?... And where was Ellen? What had he done with Ellen? Was there to be nothing left?
Once she whispered aloud, "Howcouldhe?"—but resolutely turned her mind away from that. It did not bear thinking of. The luxury of the room seemed to crowd upon her, choking her.... The price of her father's shame!...
It seemed to her near morning when her door opened, softly. She began to shiver, thinking it must be her father come for the intimate explanatory talk which was inevitable between them. What could she say to him? How could she ever find anything to say to her father again?
But it was not Richard Darcy who tiptoed in. The lamp beside her bed clicked on, revealing a good deal of the former Mrs. Calloway in a marvellous nightgown, her golden head as carefully coiffed as for a ball.
"Major's off and going strong," she announced, "so I slipped away to see how you were gettin' on, dearie. I Had a kind of feelin' you wouldn't be asleep yet. I'm like that myself in a strange bed.... Look here," her voice changed as she saw the white and miserable face among the pillows—"you aren't holding it against your papa and me, girlie, because we sprung this on you as a surprise? ItoldMajor we ought to wait till you came home! But it was you who introduced us, you know; and I knew it would be all right as soon as we got to know each other better. And Major wouldn't hear to waiting, was bound and determined to have me just as soon as he could get me. Men,"—she laughed her plump, merry laugh—"are such babies when it comes to havin' what they want right away, ain't they?"
"Are they?" said Joan dully.
"You take it from me they are! A man that doesn't want you quick don't want you at all. And I must say your father needed marryin' more than any one Ieversaw! Spots all over his clothes, and that shiny in the back you could see your face in him. Your mother must have had a time keepin' that man neat! Besides, if we'd waited till you came, what would we have done with you on the honeymoon? Not," she added coyly, "that it's over yet, by any means! When he was on his death-bed Calloway said to me, says he, 'Effie May, our honeymoon never has been over, has it?' Some women are that way, just naturally affectionate and fond of makin' men feel at home. And both of us were real lonesome.... You don't blame me for marrying Major, do you?" she finished rather wistfully.
Joan said after a long pause, "No, I don't think I blame you, Mrs. Calloway."
The other gave an unexpected squeal of mirth. "Goodness' sakes, don't call methat! If you don't feel like callin' me 'mamma' yet"—(there was a hopeful pause, which Joan did not fill)—"then you might as well call me Effie May. I'm not so awfully much older than you, I guess—I was only sixteen when I eloped with my first. But there's one thing I wanted to tell you"—(her voice lost its confident note and became rather shy). "I married your father as much to get you as to get him, dearie. A man's easy enough to pick up anywhere, goodness knows! if you've got the looks. But a child—" she sighed. "That's something else again. I used to think I'd like to adopt one, only Calloway didn't want to be bothered—Say, it was more fun than anything I've ever done in my life, shopping for lawngerie and little models and all, and telling the girls in the stores they were for my little girl just coming home from boarding-school!..."
At this juncture, for some inexplicable reason—perhaps the warmth of a kindly human presence, perhaps sheer rage with the vulgar, impossible creature who, having purchased her father, expected also to purchase her—whatever brought them, Joan's tears suddenly arrived—a torrent, a deluge of them; in the midst of which her new mamma, with more tact than might have been expected of her, disappeared.
"Get up, Jo! Time you was gettin' up. Come, come—it's ten o'clock!"
A familiar, relentless voice penetrated Joan's consciousness at last, and she screwed her swollen eyelids down tighter and even managed a reproving snore, wondering whether the halcyon days would ever come when she might be allowed to sleep her sleep out in the morning. Probably not, so long as Ellen Neal was within calling distance. The woman had a horror of what she called shiftless ways. Once in a moment of special exasperation she had been heard to mutter, "That's the chief thing that's the matter with your pa—he's never ready to get up in the morning!"—a remark which had remained in Joan's memory.
Now the sheets were suddenly jerked off her, and the relentless voice continued, "No use pretendin' you're asleep when you ain't. Here's your breakfast they've sent up to you, child, just as if you was sick a-bed. Humph!"
Suddenly reality came back upon her with full force—horrible reality; and she jumped up in bed and flung her arms around the old servant's neck, clinging tight, as she had done many a time before when something frightened her.
"Oh, Nellen, Nellen!" she moaned. "It's you! I thought you had deserted me, too!"
The woman stood immobile in this embrace, making no effort to return it. But her eyes blinked a little.
"Sho! What would I want to do that for? Don't be silly—Look out! There now, if you haven't gone and upset the coffee all over them fancy sheets! Coffee's hard to get out, too. That's what comes of havin' your vittles in bedrooms, where they don't belong."
The tears, which had threatened to take possession of Joan again, turned into a burst of wild laughter, "No matter! Plenty more where they come from, Nellen. What is a lace-trimmed sheet to my new mamma? I expect the very dishcloths are hand-embroidered. Behold the abode of cash, Ellen, cash! Isn't it grand? Oh," she cried, her voice breaking, "whydidn't you come to me last night! Didn't you know how I'd need you?"
"I didn't know you was here, child, till I come this morning to see when him and her was expectin' you."
The girl's face fell. "Why, Ellen! Aren't you living here?"
"Me? In this house? I wouldn't so demean myself," said the other primly.
"Do you mean to say"—Joan's cheeks were hot—"that after all these years, and everything you've done for us, my father haslet you go?"
Ellen tossed her head. "'Twan't none of his lettin', child. I told him that all things considered I'd ruther sew for my livin'. And so I would. Your time's your own that way, and you see more of folks. I like folks. I must say," she added conscientiously, "that woman—your pa's wife—was real kind about offerin' to get me work with a dressmaker. But Ellen Neal don't have to be beholden to nobody, thank you!"
"And where do you live?"
A mysterious smile twinkled in the woman's eyes. "Some day when you're good and sick of all this fancy flubdubbery" (she indicated with a disparaging hand the elegancies of the blue chamber) "you come and see where I live, Jo, and come often. I've got me two as nice rooms as ever you seen. And—I got my own furniture for 'em, too, real grand furniture I bought up cheap at an auction room. There's some carved chairs, and a walnut desk with a bookcase on top, and some blue velvet porteers, and a mahogany bed with the tester sawed off—"
Comprehension dawned on Joan. "Ellen!Ourfurniture!" she cried.
Ellen nodded. "Some of it. As much as I could git. I'm keepin' it for you till you git a home of your own to put it in, Joie. I sort of thought your ma would want me to."
Joan was weeping again, not the devastating flood of the past night, but sweet and healing tears, as good for strained nerves as a summer rain is good for flowers.
"You old wretch!" she gulped. "Where did you get the money?"
The other grinned. "Any time Ellen Neal gets caught without plenty in her stockin'-fut, you may be sure the Scots blood is failin' her! I'm a whole lot richer than I'm willin' to let some folks know. Why, I could set idle, if I'd a mind to, the rest of my life—only I don't hold with settin' idle just because you got a right." (Long afterwards it occurred to Joan that Ellen, who was not given to discoursing on her own affairs, must have had some reason for thus bragging of her unsuspected riches.) "There's nothing," she added rather irrelevantly, "that makes a person contented with the place she's in like knowin' she can go somewhere else if she's a mind to."
What barrier there had been between servant and mistress—a fluctuating barrier at best, dependent upon Joan's varying conceptions of her own dignity—had gone down forever under that rain of grateful tears, and Joan felt free to ask some of the questions of which her heart was full—how, for instance, the affair between her father and Mrs. Calloway had begun.
"How?" repeated Ellen grimly. "Well, when a lone female and a lone he-male ain't got nothin' to keep 'em apart but an alley-fence, and her with paint on her face till she looks like a fat sixteen, and food on her table every day as good as a two-dollar table d'hôte, what can you expect? I wa'n't surprised myself. Nor," she added quietly, "I don't believe your ma would be, Joan."
"Oh, but how it must have hurt her!"
Both spoke in low tones, as if the spirit of Mary Darcy might be lingering near enough to overhear.
"I ain't so sure about that," mused Ellen. "I ain't so sure! Your ma always set great store on havin' the Major comfortable—'Ellen,' she said to me that last day, when we knew what was comin'—'Ellen, be sure to keep himcomfortablehere at home, so he won't be lookin' for it somewheres else.' There's worse things can happen to a widow-man than gettin' married again."
"Oh, but if I'd been here to look after him myself!" wailed Joan. "If you had only told me what was happening! I might have come back and stopped it!"
"About as much chance as stopping a fire-hydrant that's blown the top off. You're a smart child, Joan, always was; but you don't stand a show against that woman your pa's married—nor I wouldn't want you to," she added cryptically. "You wasn't raised that way.—Anyhow it wasn't none of my business. And just remember this, child, it's none of yours. It's none of yours!"
After she had gone, a sense of something heartening and bracing remained with Joan; and as she brushed out her straight, heavy hair with new silver-backed brushes which bore her own initials, a typical Ellenism recurred to her: "There's nothing that makes a person contented with the place she's in like knowing she can go somewheres else if she's a mind to."
"At least," she thought suddenly, "I'm independent of father. Mother left her property to me—I can get it whenever I ask for it.... And now I understand why!"
Mary Darcy had been a very far-sighted woman.
It was long before Joan recovered from the dazed sensation her father's little surprise had produced in her mind. Perhaps she never did quite recover from it. Something died within her; a naïf belief in the wisdom of her elders, the ultimate rightness of existing things, which once gone never returns again. If it is true that we live in experience rather than in years, Joan came to her majority over night.
It was her father's attitude which amazed her most. Had he seemed in the least apologetic, in the least ashamed or embarrassed by the quality of the woman he had put into her mother's place, she would have been ready to pity and console and help him make the best of a grave mistake. But the Major's attitude was that of the cat which has not only eaten the canary, but digested it and found it extremely beneficial to the system. Far from seeming apologetic, he appeared rather proud of his performance. There was something almost pathetic in his content with his new prosperity, with the ease and luxury of the establishment of which he found himself head.
Joan sometimes thought, with a scornful sort of pity, "How Dad must havehatedto be poor!"
Certainly he took to wealth, to which he had always professed himself indifferent, with an alacrity which surprised his daughter.
She had opportunity to notice, too, for the first time in action, Richard Darcy's chief and perhaps sole equipment for the unequal battle of life; his talent for making friends. Not for keeping them—that is a separate art, calling for certain efforts, certain reticences, above all certain abstentions of which Richard Darcy was temperamentally incapable. But in the art of creating admiring and useful acquaintances out of raw material he had few equals, even among his own profession.
Mary Darcy had kept herself and her child for the most part aloof from these easily acquired friends of her husband, though they were invariably quite presentable—(as has been hinted, the Major had no use whatever for what he called "the canile"). Possibly this was owing to some odd Puritan scruples on Mary's part about combining business with pleasure....
But now that business had no longer to be combined with pleasure, Richard Darcy was free to exercise to the full his gift for being agreeable, without afterthought. It was perhaps fortunate that his new wife had made few friends of her own, a fact which left him unhampered in the matter of what he called quite seriously "resuming his position."
Joan found that he was no longer forgotten in the city of his youth. The older residents had already been made aware by means of engraved and crested announcements that Richard Throckmorton Darcy had returned to their midst for the purpose of wedding one Effie May Smith Calloway, and that the bridal pair would be at home after a certain date at a very good address on Elmtree Street. Whither quite a respectable number of them hastened, if only out of curiosity, to leave cards.
What they found was an extremely affable, leisurely, and prosperous-looking host, an establishment which appeared able and willing to maintain those traditions of Southern hospitality which have latterly fallen somewhat into disuse, and a rather silent young girl whose manner atoned for the perhaps excessive cordiality of her step-mother. Some of the callers did not come again, even under pressure; but on the whole Joan realized that the old friends in whom she had almost ceased to believe were about to take the Darcy family belatedly to their bosoms, indifferent to the substitution of a Mrs. Calloway for her mother.
It was the girl's first experience of the omnipotence of money; an experience which if it comes young enough will make a cynic out of a congenital optimist, which Joan was not.
To do the new Mrs. Darcy justice, she was an adaptable and, in her way, a tactful creature who had already in her admiration of the Major and his daughter, learned to modify her speech and behavior rather touchingly. And her frank delight with what she called "breaking into society," may have been rather disarming to society; or to such portion of it as found its way to the imposing house on Elmtree Street. She was extremely cordial to her guests, urging them to come often, to have more iced tea and cake, to take candy home to the children, to try the Major's cigars and whisky, for which he had an undoubted palate. If the women looked at her a little askance, the men were loud in her praises, and obeyed her urgings to come often.
Effie May, encouraged, began shortly to seek new worlds to conquer.
"Well, what next?" she demanded one night at dinner, after an afternoon of callers, stifling a wide pink yawn with the palm of a much beringed hand. "Your old families are all very well, Dickie boy, refined and classy and all that—but, my God, they ain't exciting! Now are they? Isn't there anybody in Louisville born since the Civil War?"
"If there is, I'm afraid I don't know it," admitted the Major, smiling indulgently. "You see the people who were young when I left are young no longer."
"So we've noticed," murmured his bride, making a companionable grimace at Joan. "But we don't want to spend the rest of our lives in the baldhead row, do we, girlie? You've got to find us something under sixty to pal around with, Hubby mine, that's all there is to it. See?"
One of her step-mother's most unbearable traits, to Joan, was her habit of calling the Major absurd comic-supplement pet names. But his dignity seemed not to suffer from it. In fact he expanded visibly under the treatment, like a dog whose ears are being tickled.
"Your commands are law, my angel," he said. "Just how would you suggest that I go about it?"
Effie May ruminated, while the two Darcys watched her—with, however, somewhat varying expressions. The Major appeared to be admiring, indeed gloating over, the appearance she made at the head of her bountifully appointed table, in a dress not niggardly in its display of her bountifully appointed charms. His eye followed appreciatively the curve of her plump arm as it disappeared into enveloping laces.
Joan, on the other hand, watched her step-mother warily. There was something about the woman she could not fathom, for all her surface simplicity. She felt, beneath the other's careless, easy good-nature, a certain force, a driving power, in the grip of which she and her father were mere helpless puppets. Effie May would use them always for her own ends—whatever those ends might be. Why had she chosen to saddle herself, free and rich and independent as she was, with an impoverished gentleman and his grown-up daughter? Certainly at that age, thought Joan (Effie May was in the neighborhood of forty), people could not possibly fall in love! No, there was something mysterious about her step-mother....
"I have it," said the lady suddenly. "The Country Club! I see in the society column that everything nowadays is going on at the Country Club. We'll have to join that."
"I believe," interposed Joan, flushing, "that people have to be invited to join a club, don't they, Father?"
"All right—We'llbeinvited. Won't we, Dickums?" said the bride, with a ravishing smile in the Major's direction.
He rose to the occasion. "Certainly, my love," he replied.
And they were invited. At any rate, a week or two later found the Darcy family dining alone at the Country Club, among various other little table groups, all of whom seemed to know each other intimately.
To be in and not of this friendly assemblage filled Joan with that most miserable of all sensations, crowd-loneliness. Even the Major wore a rather fixed and nervous smile, and mentioned to his wife and daughter at intervals that Louisville society had changed very much since he used to frequent it. Only Effie May seemed quite unperturbed, gazing about her smilingly, and tapping her slippered foot, and nodding her head in time to the music; meeting the curious glances which strayed in their direction with a frank interest of her own which might have seemed bold if it were not so like a pleased child's.
Joan, intercepting one or two of these glances, looked her step-mother over critically, and to her relief found her less flamboyant than usual. She was dressed in white—"Handsome white, not girly-girly muslin like yours. I'm too stout for that," she had said wisely to Joan—The girl reflected that it is difficult to look vulgar in white. Mrs. Darcy was not appreciably different in appearance from many another rather overdressed matron there, even in the matter of rouge and touched-up hair.
As for her father—Richard Darcy would have been a distinguished figure in any assemblage he chose to enter, with his six feet of gallantly carried avoirdupois, his finely modeled head, his gray mustache and imperial concealing a mouth that might otherwise have left something to be desired. He wore that night—and wore well—clothes of the palest gray flannel, with socks and buckskin shoes to match, and a gray stripe in his white tie, and a gray monogram embroidered upon the exquisite cambric of his handkerchief. This was the parent who a few weeks ago she had associated irrevocably in her mind with spots and frayed collars! She found herself wishing that her mother could see him now—she would be so proud of him!...
To her own appearance Joan gave little consideration. She had discovered that the great advantage of good clothes is that you no longer have to think about them. She was quite unaware of the value in contrasts she afforded—her small, dark, smoothly combed head lifted proudly on its long neck, the awkward grace of her thin young body, the pale oval of her face lit by surprisingly vivid eyes, of the sort that are dreamy and shadowed until excitement turns them into soft blue fire. She was excited that night, a little frightened. She did not smile at all, but there was that about her lips—sensitive, wistful, faintly drooping—that made more than one person who glanced at the Darcy table wonder what the smile would be like if it came.
When the dancing began, Effie May's exuberance could no longer contain itself.
"This is something like!" she cried. "This is what I call life! Come on, Dick—'Waltz me around again, Willie, around, around, around!'"
"But," protested the Major, "it is some time since I have waltzed, my love—"
"Never mind, you'll waltz with me! Anybody can dance with me. The boys used to call me Lightfoot Ef—Oh, but you'll have to get a partner for Joan, first, of course; I forgot we had a family along."
The girl flushed, aghast at the thought of her father whirling in the midst of that whirling throng. "No, no, Effie May, please—!" she urged. "Let's just sit here quietly and look on."
The other laughed aloud. "Naturally! That's what we've come to a dance for, to sit against the wall and look on—Nonsense! Go and find your child a partner, Dick, and hurry back. My feet just won't keep still." She was humming gaily in time with the orchestra.
The Major, gazing a little blankly at the crowd of strangers before him, obediently went forth to do her bidding, and Effie May seized the occasion to give a little womanly advice.
"Don't you fret, Joan—remember there's as many young fellows in the world crazy to know girls as there are girls crazy to know them. And dearie"—her voice sank to a friendly whisper—"warm up to 'em a little, can't you? Jolly 'em along. Hot air, you know, talk! No matter what you say, just keep talking. That don't-touch-me, butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth air may be all right with the nuns and the old families but it won't go down with the men. Believe me, dearie! I know."
It was a well-meant effort, which had the effect of congealing the already subdued Joan into something resembling a marble effigy.
The Major shortly returned, bearing urbanely in his wake a blond young man who seemed not too unwilling.
"I want you to meet my wife, sir," he was saying. "I want to have the pleasure of presenting you to my daughter. Fancy the coincidence, my dears—this gentleman turns out to be the son of an old schoolmate!"
Effie May welcomed them with enthusiasm. "Good for you! I had my money on you, Dickums! Five minutes, and the son of a schoolmate! It's a record!—Ta-ta, young people! Enjoy yourselves," was her valedictory as she whirled the Major away, waving her hand over his shoulder.
Joan stared aghast at the blond young man, who said, "She is an awfully jolly sort, your mother, isn't she?"
"Very jolly," agreed Joan faintly. "But she's not my mother."
"Oh!"
A silence fell. He seemed to be waiting for her to break it. She gulped, and said in a firm voice, "Did you come to ask me to dance?"
The young man indicated politely that such was his intention.
"You couldn't very well help yourself, could you?" she remarked, and suddenly burst out laughing—rather hysterical laughter in which the young man joined embarrassedly.
"Of course if you'd rather talk—" he murmured.
Joan jumped to her feet. "Oh, but I wouldn't! I'd rather doanythingthan talk—no matter what I say, just talk, warm up to 'em, hot air—I mean," she explained desperately, "I'm much too shy to talk!"
"You don't sound very shy."
"I know—they're the worst sort, the ones who hide it."
They commenced silently to dance. Presently he confessed, "I'm rather—shy, myself."
"Goody!" she exclaimed with relief. "Then we needn't bother to talk at all."
They parted quite reluctantly when a whistle blew for the "circle"—a useful innovation for breaking up relations, by whose aid Joan found herself exchanging partners at intervals throughout the evening without finding herself too long on the hands of any. She blessed the inventor of the circle. Youth and a pair of winged feet came to her rescue, and she forgot her strangeness in sheer joy of motion. The people she danced with that night were not men; they were as trees walking, for all the personal memory she kept of them.
But when the music finally thumped itself out, and Effie May, a trifle blown and moist about the brow, again resumed charge of her scattered family, saying, "Well, dearie, you've had a pretty good time, haven't you?"—Joan was able to answer with some surprise that she had.
"Dancing," commented the Major, puffing, "is a very healthful exercise; indeed, an esthetic exercise. The Greeks practised it, as I recall, extensively, even in their riper years. My love, with a little experience I think I shall easily master that step you call the fox trot."
"Sure you will," encouraged she who had been called Lightfoot Ef, patting his cheek maternally.
The Darcys' social career appeared to be well launched. Each Saturday night found them at the Country Club, and no longer dining in loneliness. Effie May speedily collected about her a group of congenial spirits, for the most part young people, among whom she was extremely popular—far more so than was Joan, who sometimes felt as if she were the only elder present. Theirs was usually the most hilarious table in the room. Corks popped freely, and there was much horse-play, and throwing about of bread, and at a certain stage of the evening rather frank persiflage in which, to Joan's relief, her step-mother took no part. She laughed her cheery, plump laugh, and made no comment; but more than once with a glance at her step-daughter, she managed quite deftly to steer the conversation into other channels. Joan came to the gratifying conclusion that her father's wife was afraid of her.
The Major at his end of the table devoted himself assiduously to his duties as host, seeing that glasses were filled, distributing gallant remarks among the ladies, constantly signing tickets. He was in his element; expanding, positively glowing, with hospitality.
"Another cigar, my boy? Try this brand! Take several! Fill your pockets with them. I can recommend them personally!"
There came to be several brands which he could recommend personally, several vintages as well. The waiters hovered about him like cherubim about the throne of grace, and he knew them all by name, and took an interest in their families.
This lavish generosity, Joan reflected, was the spirit which gave the old South its glamour, its traditions—to say nothing of its consequent poverty. There was something rather fine and large about the Major's apparent obliviousness of the fact that the money he spent so royally did not belong to him.
"If Effie May does not worry, why should I?" argued his daughter with herself. Her father's affairs were no longer her concern; if indeed they had ever been. But she could not help taking a certain uneasy interest in them.
"How do you happen to know enough people to invite to all these parties of yours?" she asked Effie May, aware that the Darcy family was doing rather more than its share of entertaining.
"Oh, you don't have to know people well to ask 'em to parties," explained the other innocently. "And once they eat with you, they're your friends."
"That depends upon what you give them to eat!" interjected the Major, chuckling.
It seemed a primitive conception of social relationships, but not on the whole a false one. Joan thought of the Arab and his salt....
"Food," she wrote to Stefan Nikolai, "appears to be the Tie that Binds."
"What about drink?" he inquired on a post-card. (They did a good deal of this staccato correspondence, Joan liking to exchange deep thoughts with him, as she expressed it, "while they were hot.")
"Drink," she replied on another, "is the Tie that Loosens!..."
Stefan Nikolai was the only one of her friends with whom she had found courage to discuss her father's marriage. Writing things out to him was almost like writing them out to herself. It served somehow to clear her mind. It is probable that Mr. Nikolai, a student of various phases of the human problem, got a good deal of valuable vicarious experience out of young Joan's letters. Certainly he encouraged them.
It was to him that she confided her discovery that social life is far more pleasing after dinner than before. She was learning to count, as surely as does many an experienced hostess, upon the help of the Tie that Loosens. While she herself had not as yet developed her father's palate for cocktails and fine vintages she appreciated their effect upon her partners—for to her men so far were merely partners.
It was after dinner that Joan's part of the evening began. Then, thanks to the Tie that Loosens, there was no longer need to make banal conversation nor to listen to it, no need to pretend friendly interest in young men to whom she was incurably a stranger, no need of anything but to yield herself to the music and the first pair of arms that offered, and float away into Dreamland.
There was something curiously sensuous to Joan about dancing. It acted like a drug upon her fancy, stimulating, soothing. She was hardly aware of whom she danced with, if he could dance. If he could not, she stopped. This odd impersonality of hers was rather piquant to her partners. Many a youth who was afraid to talk to "that quiet Darcy girl—you never know what she's thinking about!"—was not afraid to dance with her, whenever he got the chance.
At such times Joan had her rare moments of beauty. With flushed face, loosened hair, and wide, dreaming eyes, she was as graceful as one of the three circling maidens in the Primavera—the one who looks wistfully over her shoulder at the oblivious youth. Unfortunately her lot was cast among people who did not think in terms of Botticelli. Her step-mother wondered sometimes whether curling-tongs and perhaps a little rouge would make her look more like other girls....
Sometimes people came to the club who attracted Joan's attention—quieter people than Effie May's friends, more simply dressed, who never seemed to join in the accentuated hilarity after dinner. Once in such a group she recognized the girl who had eyed her aloofly on the train coming home from boarding school. Joan suddenly yearned to do some aloof eyeing on her own account, now that she was no longer shabby but wore a frock as smart as any in the room.
She watched her opportunity, and followed the stranger into the dressing-room with some such truculent idea in view; but was disarmed by the courtesy with which the other made room for her at a mirror, where they powdered their noses side by side in amity. As she was leaving the room, however, she heard the aloof one murmur to a friend: "What a lot of strange people one sees at this club nowadays! I wonder where they all come from? It's getting very mixed."
Joan went white with anger. She struggled with the temptation to explain proudly that she was not a strange person, that her name entitled her to any society she chose to enter, that it was her step-mother who was "mixed," not she....
And then she remembered that it was only thanks to her step-mother that she happened to be there at all.
For the moment this encounter with the enemy took away Joan's heart for dancing. Crowd-loneliness got her by the throat. Was there always to be just one of her, and so many of everybody else?
She slipped out on to a terrace that overlooked a valley with the great river gleaming far off, still holding some faint glow of the sunset's aftermath. There was a bench at the far end, lost in shadow, and she was about to seat herself there when she saw that it was already occupied.
"Oh," she said, drawing back. "I didn't notice you!"
"Women rarely do," remarked a plaintive voice with a smile in it. "I'm used to that. And yet I notice them, dreadfully!"
Joan laughed a little, and retreated. "I won't disturb you," she murmured; but the voice held her.
"Oh, please! Please do. I want to be disturbed. I simply came here to see my moonrise." A shadowy arm pointed out a dim glow over the trees to eastward.
"Whyyourmoonrise, especially?"
"By right of discovery. I seem to be the only person aware of it.... May I share it with you?"
"You are sure you wouldn't rather see it alone?"
"Goodness gracious!" cried the voice quite querulously, "what human being ever wanted to watch a moonrise alone?"
Joan chuckled, and sat down to the first conversation she had enjoyed since her last one with Stefan Nikolai—one of the few real conversations, she thought afterwards, in her life.
Yet it was difficult to remember the many things they talked about. Smoke, for one. He pointed out the dim loveliness of the city below, towers and battlements and the airy span of a bridge against the gray-gold sky.
"'Many-storied Camelot town,'" he said, musing. "Without the shrouding smoke, what would it be? Factory chimneys, iron smoke-stacks, a filtration plant—Ugliness, ugliness! Yet there are people in that town who want to rid themselves of those billowing mists of rose and violet and silver."
"I suppose," said Joan, "the beauty of smoke depends upon whether you're down in it, getting smuts on your nose, or looking on from a hilltop."
"A question of perspective, you think? Hmnn—yes. Well, then" he said reasonably, "by all meansgetyour perspective. Stick to the hilltop—especially at sunset."
"We haven't all got wings to reach a hilltop with, you see. Nor yet automobiles."
"I haven't, myself," he said. "I use trolley-cars.... Did it ever occur to you what a marvel the trolley-car is? For a nickel—or at most a dime—all Nature is yours to command; beechwoods in their autumn field of the cloth of gold; little whispering streams breaking their winter silence, fireflies dancing—to the tune of the 'Merry Widow' waltz," (as that melody of the moment made itself audible from the house beyond). "What a twilight! Fireflies, an afterglow, and the moonrise set to music, all at once," he said under his breath. "And some one to share them with!"
Joan was silent, flattered by the knowledge that this whimsical gentleman was letting her into his thoughts.
"The beauty of such a moment is that one never loses it," he mused. "One puts it away as people press flowers in books, to be looked at when—when pleasant things need remembering. I thank God for a mind well stocked with beautiful occasions!"
"Wild Evenings I Have Known," murmured Joan, frivolously, because for some reason she was rather touched.
He nodded, "With wild people in them. Like you."
"Me! Wild?"
"Oh, I know on the surface you're a demure, well-behaved young miss, but underneath—good gracious! You'd shock these people to death!"—he indicated certain hilarious couples who had waltzed onto the terrace near them. "Yes, you're quite untamed, my dear. Wild as a—chipmunk."
Joan leaned toward him, "How did you guess?"
"I've watched you dance. And then—well, I've never quite got used to the cage myself, perhaps." He began to hum under his breath a tuneless little ditty:
"It is a very dreadful thingTo be so fat a child,To have to sit around all dayAnd yet to feel so wild."
"It is a very dreadful thingTo be so fat a child,To have to sit around all dayAnd yet to feel so wild."
"At least," laughed Joan, "I'm not fat!"
"No!" he said soberly, "never get fat. It is the beginning of the end.... By fat I mean old. And cautious. Ugh!"
How the conversation came about to apple-trees, Joan never was sure; but he told her about one he had discovered somewhere in the deep woods, all in bloom, a little old gnarled affair hidden among giant first growth sycamores and elms and beeches.
"An apple-tree lost in the woods! How do you suppose it got away from civilization?" wondered the girl.
"Some bird, perhaps; or Johnny Appleseed."
"Who was he?"
"Fancy living in Kentucky without knowing about the first and greatest of our pioneers! He was a daft old creature—an innocent, as the kind phrase goes—who used to wander away from the settlement where he lived into the wilderness, scattering apple seeds. All over this Ohio Valley he journeyed, sowing his orchards for the benefit of those who were to follow. The Indians let him pass, the wild animals did not harm him; only his friends locked him up whenever they could catch him, because it seemed such a silly thing to do. Friends are that way ... Years later, when the pioneers fought their way at last over the mountains to stay, they found here and there apple-trees blossoming and fruiting in the great, lonely wilderness; and wherever that happened their wives made them build cabins and settle down, for of all things that grow an apple-tree most suggests home. So mad old Johnny Appleseed was the founder of many cities."
"And yet there is no monument to him!"
"Except the cities...."
Here a young man appeared to claim Joan for the next dance—the blond young man with whom she had commenced her dancing career, and who had formed quite a habit of looking for her whenever the music played.
She rose with reluctance. "I wishyou'dcome in and dance with me," she said to her new friend. "I'm sure you could!"
"I'm sure I could, too," he replied, "if I hadn't my body with me. As it is, I'll just sit out here and make believe I'm dancing with you—In a starlit glade. With the other young nymphs and dryads..." the whimsical voice followed her.
The blond young man stared. "Of all the assorted nuts!" he remarked, when they were out of earshot.
"Yes—but who is he?" demanded Joan eagerly.
"Something on the stock exchange. I see him there every day."
"The stock exchange!"
"Yes. Oh, he writes poems and things for the papers, too, I think. Quite a literary guy." He mentioned the name.
It is a name known and remembered wherever there are moonrises and fireflies, smoke against the sunset, apple-trees in bloom—all the everyday lovely things people forget to see unless there are poets to remind them...
It gave Joan quite a new zest in living to realize that at any moment, even at Country Clubs, it is possible to run across a poet.
Richard Darcy was accepting the change that had come into his life much as he had accepted others of a less fortunate trend. He had become at last what Nature had always intended him to be, one of the world's chosen, a rich man—or, what was even better because less troublesome, the husband of a rich woman. He was also once more an honored citizen of his native commonwealth—where he had not always been entirely an honored citizen, owing to one of the unfortunate mistakes to which youth is liable. There had been some disagreement with an early employer about the right of employees to divert the firm's funds, temporarily of course, to private uses. Only family influence had prevented this misunderstanding from resulting in truly disastrous consequences, which he shuddered to this day to contemplate. But it had prevented; and the early employer was dead (as Richard Darcy had taken pains to ascertain before returning to Louisville), and the few who knew of this painful episode at the time appeared to have forgotten it.
Very good! He was quite willing to forget it himself. It was Richard Darcy's creed that a gentleman takes whatever comes in his stride, without too many backward glances; and his stride was just now adapting itself gracefully to the one-step.
Joan, watching her father sometimes with a faint recrudescence of pride in his sheer good looks, decided that he was the only stomached person she had seen who could perform the one-step without loss of dignity. He footed the measure indulgently, as a bishop or a cardinal might have footed it, with an air of spiritual detachment, as it were, while yet seeming to receive and to bestow a priceless privilege. Even lively young girls liked to dance with the Major. It made them feel uplifted. If he pressed the hand or the waist of his prettier partners more closely than necessary, the pressure seemed almost impersonal, a mere tribute to a sex which he could not but regard with tenderness, being himself a husband and a father.
In addition to this valuable social acquirement, the Major further fortified his popularity by inventing and promoting (uncommercially, of course) a beverage which shortly bade fair to make him famous, and which was christened by grateful habitués of the Country Club the "Dick Fizz." Its ingredients were—but that is a secret not at the author's disposal. Suffice it to say that the "Dick Fizz" achieved results that were all and more than could be expected of it. (Among others, the Major's election to a certain gentlemen's club which had hitherto remained annoyingly unaware of him. So much for the power of the Tie that Loosens!)
It was thanks to the "Dick Fizz," too, that there presently came about between Richard Darcy and his daughter that heart-to-heart interview which had been postponing itself from week to week, with the tacit consent of both parties; an interview dreaded by Joan perhaps even less than by her father.
They were returning one night from one of their most successful evenings; Joan as usual on the front seat beside the chauffeur, where she might enjoy the rush of the cool night air upon her face, and hear as little as possible of the billing and cooing of the honeymooners in the tonneau behind. There seemed more of this than usual, little giggling exclamations and audible embraces which made the girl wince and the chauffeur grin surreptitiously.
"Really, Father!" protested Joan over her shoulder. There was something physically nauseating to her in those amorous echoes from the tonneau. No wonder servants laughed! It made of love a travesty and a mocking.
She was glad when they reached home. The Major stepped out gallantly to assist the ladies, but miscalculated his impetus, and after a series of complicated maneuvers brought up seated upon the curbstone. The chauffeur burst into an uncontrollable guffaw, in which his mistress heartily joined.
"Oh, you Dick Fizz!" she laughed, wiping her eyes. "I knew it would get you yet.Lookat your funny papa, dearie! Lit up like a Christmas-tree!"
The Major murmured something reprovingly about the duties of hospitality, which he found some difficulty in pronouncing; but once upon his feet, he gave an arm to each of them and managed the steps without further mishap.
In the hall Joan, who had not laughed, said to her step-mother in a low voice, "Is he—drunk?"
"Oh, not enough to hurt," replied the lady, still laughing. It occurred to Joan that she herself was a little flushed and expansive. "I can handle him, all right. Don't you worry! I always know a gentleman by the way he carries his liquor."
"Do you?" said Joan.
"Sure thing! And Major's a perfect gentleman always. Don't you fret."
Joan mounted quietly to her room, and undressed in the dark. She did not want to see her face in the mirror, afraid of the disgust, the loathing, that must be reflected there—Her father—drunk! The man to whom her mother had given her love and her life, tipsily furnishing amusement for a woman who judged gentlemen by the way they carried their liquor!...
She recalled one other time when she had seen her father in his present condition. She remembered her mother's stricken, tragic face as she hurried him out of sight, explaining tremulously, "Daddy's ill, darling. No games with Daddy to-night—he's ill."
"But he wants to play! Look, mamma, hewantsto play!" the small Joan had insisted, to no avail.
And when this strangely interesting Daddy was safe in bed, with Ellen Neal mounting guard, Joan had been hurried out to the nearest church (which happened to be a Catholic one, for Mary's was a casual sort of religion that boasted neither creed nor prejudice); and there, before a statue where little lamps burned, the child had prayed hard, as she was bid, that her father might never be ill in just that way again.
"God may listen to you, even if He's tired of listening to me!" the mother had whispered, desperately.
It was because God had listened that Joan was sent later to a Catholic convent. Mary Darcy's was not the nature to forget favors; and it occurred to her that there might be worse protectors for a girl who must one day be motherless than Our Lady of Sorrows. Not every faith is strong enough to go through life without some creed to cling to. Mary had offered her child what she could.
Lying there in the darkness, Joan understood. She wished that she might have been able to take what her mother offered. She yearned for the anodyne of simple, unquestioning prayer, for the mesmeric comfort that comes to the believing from the slipping of rosary beads between the fingers; above all, for the right to kneel unrecognized in a quiet confessional and learn from some priest wiser than she in the ways of men where her duty lay and how she was to follow it. The confessional is perhaps the secret of the hold the oldest of Christian churches keeps upon a world which would seem to have outgrown it. That is a self-reliant nature indeed which does not sometimes feel the need of guidance at once human and detached.
But Joan's creed and confessional alike were contained in her troubled young head; and where a happier woman would have wept and said her prayers, she set herself sternly to the task of thinking. It seemed to her that throughout the past weeks she had been shirking an issue, deliberately drugging her wits with anything that came to hand. Now she faced conditions squarely. There must be no more drifting.
She focused an unsparing vision upon her father. Already there were changes apparent in him, signs of deterioration not entirely physical. His features seemed slightly blurred from their fine chiseling, there was a relaxed look about the lips and chin, about the very poise of his figure. He had lost a little of that indefinable something which gave him distinction, even in the days when the women of his family tried in vain to keep him pressed and unspotted. Prosperity was not going to be good for Richard Darcy.
Joan pronounced ruthless judgment upon her father:
"He's done for!"
And, as Ellen had warned her, it was none of her business.... What then was her business? Clearly, to keep from being "done for" herself.
She saw quite clearly that she had been in danger of this. There was something curiously enervating about the atmosphere of her step-mother's house, alaissez-fairethat was almost—the girl sought for the word and decided upon "lascivious." Luxury, ease, pleasure—these were the ends for which her step-mother strove—or rather accomplished without undue striving, an ability to which the girl gave full due. She knew that it must take more than mere money to keep so elaborate a household running without apparent effort. The servants were efficient and unobtrusive, the accounts scrupulously kept, every nook and cranny clean and in order. Even Ellen Neal, who knew whereof she spoke, admitted that the ex-Mrs. Calloway was a housekeeper of parts. But...
Joan tried conscientiously to fathom the meaning of her "but." She decided that the house was too like its mistress—over-bathed, over-perfumed and dressed and manicured—to be quite nice. The windows were too fluffy with lace, the drawing-room too pretty and satiny, the library too red. ("Why is it," she had written to Stefan Nikolai, "that people who never open a book invariably have a red library?")
A fantastic thought came to her. She wondered whether those strange houses which are sometimes whispered of even among convent girls, those palaces of horror where women's bodies are bought and sold, might not perhaps resemble this home to which her father had brought her ...
Then she smiled at herself. Vulgar, her step-mother might be; hopelessly underbred; doubtless in some previous manifestations a shop-girl, a dressmaker; possibly one of those anomalous beings known in race-towns as "race-horse women." But she was unmistakably respectable. There was not a picture on her walls, nor a novel on the shelves of the red library, which was not, as she herself once remarked to Joan complacently, "perfectly refined." The girl recalled her evident uneasiness when sometimes at the dinner-table the talk had waxed a little too free. She did her step-mother the justice to believe her a quite decent woman.
Perhaps the curious sense of enervation was due only to the heat of midsummer in a Southern city. Now and then the elder Darcys spoke vaguely of going away, only to decide that it was too much trouble. It was easier to stay where they were. In a Kentucky July, one follows the line of least resistance.
Joan, like the others, slept late into the mornings, and had her coffee in bed, or went down to the dining-room for it with a negligée over her nightgown. (Her father had become quite reconciled to negligées, which at first startled him, accustomed as he was to the neat morning ginghams of his Mary.) Sometimes she found him departing reluctantly for the mysterious place he called the Office. Later, people would arrive connected with the rites of the toilet—the hair-dresser, the manicure, the masseuse—a chatty person who performed on Effie May what she called her "facial"; and other things. Cleopatra herself could have devoted no more time to the care of her body than did the ex-Mrs. Calloway.
"You've got it to do if you're risin' forty and like to eat," she explained once to Joan, simply.
After luncheon, which was brought on a tray—a large tray—to wherever it happened to be convenient, the ladies once more resumed nightgowns, if indeed they had ever discarded them, and napped and read until the sun was low in the sky; when the house like the city woke into animation, and they prepared to fare forth like fireflies to the evening revel. Then there were automobile drives to little beer-gardens, where they ate and drank and sat about among whitewashed tree-trunks, feeling Bohemian; pleasant moonlight excursions up the Ohio in launches, with a picnic provided which consisted largely of thermos-bottles; and the Country Club, always the Country Club. Joan wondered what people had managed to do with themselves in summer before the days of Country Clubs.
It was a life that somehow suggested the Orient, women of the harem coming forth at sunset to bask on the roofs of the houses; a placid existence; aimless, perhaps, but pleasant enough. Joan was puzzled to find the harm in it. Yet that harm was there, she knew. The touch of Puritanism in the girl told her that to live from day to day with no duty but pleasure made of pleasure something akin to vice.... And often in the midst of this harem life she remembered almost with passion that out beyond her shuttered windows, beyond the clangor of trolley-cars and the hum and clatter of the dirty streets, was summer—summer, the loveliest of the year's phases; leaf-shadows on wimpling water, lush meadows sparkling with the sunrise dew, green-gold glades of the wood delicious with the smell of warm pine-needles; all the world at fullest bloom, open like the heart of a rose, waiting.
It was a sort of nostalgia that took her then for the country she had never known, not Country Club country, nor the conscious, well-kept wildness of the parks which give the old river town its only claim to beauty—but simple wood and meadow and field, where homely folk live close to the soil they till, concerned with crops and the breeding season. It was this country her father had meant when he bragged about Kentucky. It is this country which, deep down under the surface things, means home to all people of Saxon blood, no matter how far astray they wander....
And as she lay there, as if her wistful thoughts had conjured it into being, came a whisper of song from the leaves of the magnolia tree just outside her window; a murmur that died away, and began again, and rose and soared, melody on wings, above the clang of a trolley-car and the honk of passing motors. It was a mocking-bird, that voice of the Southern summer, singing in the glare of the arc-lamps, mistaking it perhaps for moonlight.
Joan tiptoed to the window and listened, an aching lump in her throat. It was her first mocking-bird; she had not known they sang at night.
"You lovely thing!" she whispered to it. "What are you doing in this place?... And what amI?"
Then and there she made her plans to get away.
The thought frightened her a little. She had, despite the ups and downs of her father's fortunes, led hitherto a very sheltered life. Fortunately there was her mother's money, hers whenever she chose to ask for it. She would not be quite penniless. But where to go?
She thought first of the Misses Darcy, her father's cousins, who had been most affectionate and kind, particularly since her father's remarriage. Sometimes she wondered whether this was because they sympathized with her, or (with a touch of her new cynicism) because they did not. Effie May had been very generous to the Misses Darcy, remarking once that she knew what it was to be poor herself. They came frequently to dine at her lavish table; they appeared occasionally inchicblack costumes, as good as new, which Joan recognized as having served to mourn the late Mr. Calloway; the limousine was often at their disposal; and a limousine with a liveried chauffeur was a touch of distinction hitherto lacking to the Darcy fortunes, even at their palmiest.
Joan suddenly doubted whether her father's cousins would welcome her under their roof at the risk of alienating that limousine. She did not blame them—poor, anxious ladies to whom life had not been very kind. She simply realized that they were of her father's blood, not her mother's.
Her mother's people she did not know. Mary Darcy had managed somehow in her wanderings to loosen all the ties that bound her to her youth. It was as if she had deliberately lost herself, hidden herself away with husband and child from the loving eyes that are too quick to see.... It was the sort of pride Richard Darcy was quite incapable of understanding, though pride was a word often upon his lips. But Mary's daughter understood. Never through her should the quiet tragedy of her mother's life be revealed to those from whom her mother had chosen to hide it.
She wished that Stefan Nikolai were not a man; or that, being a man, he had a home to which she might have invited herself. But he was a confirmed wanderer, and Joan felt that a young lady companion, desirable though she might be as a solace for his declining years, would undoubtedly hamper his movements.
It left only Ellen Neal to rely upon. Perhaps there would be enough money to take a little flat somewhere, with Ellen Neal for servant and chaperone. A bachelor maid, with a latch-key!—the prospect was rather alluring. But not in Louisville. She could not leave her father's home and set up an establishment of her own in the same town without creating "talk," and, to Joan's training, "talk" was the one thing impossible.
They would have to go away somewhere, she and Ellen. And study something, she decided vaguely. Music, art, social service—whatever it was people did study. Her eye began to kindle. She was the true child of Richard Darcy, rolling stone by nature and profession; and to such, "the grass is always greener down the road." New York, Boston, swam before her dreamy vision; even London, Paris, Rome....
She brought herself back to the ungrateful consideration of ways and means. She feared the money would not run to much in the way of travel. "A mere pittance," her father had once scornfully called it. But she knew, or guessed, that all three of them had managed to live on the income from this pittance during many a period when the Major's star was not in the ascendant, and she thought that what had provided, however scantily, for three might be made to provide well for herself and Ellen. She wished that she had asked questions at the time her mother's will was read to her. It had seemed so unimportant then. What was hers belonged surely just as much to her father, guardian for the little property until such time as she chose to ask him for it.
Now that the time had come, Joan faced it with some dread. How could they talk about money, she and he—about her mother's money? It seemed indelicate, unfeeling, a desecration of sacred things. Nevertheless she faced it. She solemnly promised herself that not another day should pass without a complete understanding between herself and her father.
Possibly she was the only one of Richard Darcy's creditors who ever managed to put this promise into execution.