There were those, notably among the Jabberwocks, who felt that in availing herself of the age-old solution of handing her burdens over to a man to bear, Joan had rather hauled down her colors. Perhaps she felt so herself, after the first glow of relief was over.
But if she needed solace, she got it in the radiant, incredulous, blissful attitude of Archibald. He could not believe the marvelous thing that had happened to him. A dozen times a day he was obliged to glance at the ring he had given her (a solitaire inevitably, small but of good water) to make sure that he was not dreaming.
He began at once, following the example of the birds about him, to prepare for the coming event; "twigging" as Joan called it to herself, amusedly. He was as mysterious about it, and quite as obvious, as any robin darting about with a straw in its beak. He called her to the telephone frequently to ask such questions as how many drawers a "chiffoneer" ought to have; and when she asked him why he wanted to know, the reply was a joyous, "Never you mind!"
He listened with the stealth of a Sherlock Holmes for any expressions of preference on her part, putting them secretly down in a note-book; and Joan grew afraid to mention any object, no matter how unlikely, for fear it would become part of the procession of packages which Ellen reported as filing daily past her door to the room upstairs.
"A rocking-chair come this morning," Ellen would report. "Golden oak, all carved! Yesterday it was one them new-fangled electric-lamps with brass chain hanging down like fringe. Real tasty. The day before it was a statute."
"Heavens, Nellen—Not a statue!"
"Sure! A nigger woman brandishin' a spear. I poked a hole in the wrappin's to get a good look at it."
(Joan had once unguardedly envied the Carmichaels their rare old bronzes.)
She was touched but alarmed, and decided that she would better hasten the wedding if only to put a stop to this indiscriminate twigging.
Others were almost as pleased with the engagement as Archibald; her father, for one, who had not expected quite so early a release from parental responsibility. Joan, while a creditable child, had proven a rather difficult one, especially since his marriage.
"Not that it is quite such an—er—ambitious arrangement as I could have wished, Dollykins,"—(a ducal alliance would have been more in accord with Darcy inclinations). "But young Blair is an excellent fellow, an excellent fellow. And after all, in this world virtue is the thing that counts!" He appeared to indicate that in the next world things might be arranged more satisfactorily.
Ellen was as proud of this unexpecteddénouementas if it were an egg of her own hatching.
"I didn't believe you had the gumption!" she said unflatteringly. "I thought you was too highminded to know a real man when you seen him.—And now, praise the day! you'll be needin' your mamma's furniture back again."
"Oh, but, Nellen darling, what will you do without it?"
"Me?" The old woman's face fell. "Why, I kind o' thought you'd be takin' me along with the furniture. Unless I'm too stiff and plain to be makin' you a fancy servant like you're used to nowadays!"—she tossed her head angrily.
Joan hugged her. "I'd rather have you than all the fancy servants in the world, and you know it. But I thought you preferred being an independent modiste in lodgings. And then—you see, dear, I'm not quite sure whether Archie can afford a servant."
She had not so far been able to bring him down from the clouds long enough to discuss ways and means.
"Sho! He can affordmeall right. I'll save him money—And you don't suppose he's going to let you spoil them white hands of yourn with housework and cookin'? Not if I know Mr. Archie!..."
The Misses Darcy were almost tearful with gratification, and received Archie with the sort of romantic respect younger girls accord to heroes of the matinée.
"What did I prophesy?" cried Miss Virginia. "Only one season out, and already—! Such a beautiful name too,—'Mrs. Archibald Blair.' Not a Kentucky or Virginia one, of course. However, thereareother States, Maryland, or South Carolina, or even Massachusetts. Where did you say he was from, precious girl?"
"Louisville."
The sisters exchanged startled glances. "Louisville? But that's impossible. We do not know his people!"
"He hasn't any people."
It was Miss Euphemia who recovered herself first. "So much the better," she murmured. "I mean—Not that one would wish them to have died, of course! But really, you know, in-laws—"
"And so often I think a self-made man—" Miss Iphigenia took up the parable. "So many of our Southern families seem to run largely to girls nowadays. What I mean is, a little good red blood—"
"Sister!" murmured two shocked voices. Everybody blushed.
"I'm afraid Archie isn't even a self-made man, yet," smiled Joan, mentally struggling to fill in the gaps. "I shall have to help make him."
"Ah, yes! A woman's touch, as dear papa used to say—"
Joan reflected that the late Mr. Darcy must have known a good deal about the power of a woman's touch....
Her friend Emily's congratulations were something on the same order, though more frankly expressed. There was a wholesome attitude of frankness always between the two girls.
"I think it's dear of you, Joan," she exclaimed, "and so brave!"
"Just why 'brave'?"
Emily answered, despite embarrassment, "Why, to marry a man without antecedents, without position, and without money, seems to me very brave. I know I should never have the courage to do it, even if I cared for him. In fact, I should be mighty careful not to care for him!—But then I've never had your spirit of independence."
"Perhaps because you've more to lose," said Joan quietly. "If either of us is brave, I think it's poor Archie."
She often thought of her lover so; tenderly, even lovingly, but as "Poor Archie!..."
Effie May was the only one of Joan's immediate environment who seemed to look with any doubts upon a situation she herself had largely brought to pass.
"Look here, girlie," she said once abruptly. "You don't love that boy. At least you ain't in love with him—and there's a difference. Why do you do it, anyhow?"
Joan, taken by surprise, was not immediately ready with her reply.
"Is it because you want to get away from me?" asked the other.
Still Joan was not ready to answer, and Effie May sighed. "You needn't have gone so far as that," she said, "I'd have fixed it for you somehow—I'm not going to forget what you've done for me, Joan. Not telling, treating me just as if—it was all right. You're a bigger woman than you know you are," she added, gravely. "I'll make it up to you some day, see if I don't."
Joan gave her a quick, straight look. "If you mean money, Effie May, and I think you do, we'd better come to an understanding at once. I'm keeping my counsel about—about your affairs; I'm helping you commit a fraud, you know—entirely on my father's account. For myself—that's another matter. I appreciate your kindness, I know you have meant to do your best, but—"
"But you're done with me?" finished the other.
"Yes. I shall only see so much of you hereafter as is necessary to keep Father from suspecting anything. As for your money,"—the girl's voice shook—"neither I nor my husband will ever touch a cent of it under any circumstances. Do you understand? We do not forget how it was—earned."
The other sighed again. "Well, dearie, don't forget that itwasearned, good and plenty!—And I've done you one good turn already," she remarkedsotto voce, as the girl turned away to greet her fiancé.
Joan and Archibald were married two weeks later, very quietly, before only her family, resisting all the Major's importunities to make an occasion of it. Nor would the girl accept a trousseau.
"If I need any more clothes than I've got already, Archie will buy them for me. Won't you, old boy?" she said, slipping her hand into his.
Archie, with the happy consciousness of a rapidly growing business and several years' savings in a Building Association replied proudly that he would.
One comment she had missed on her engagement; Stefan Nikolai's. She had written to him at once (her first letter since his post-card advising a preliminary course in matrimony), saying in effect, "Now I hope you're satisfied!" But as no reply came, she reached the correct conclusion that he was on the wing again, with her letter following him from address to address, unread.
Ten minutes after the little ceremony that left her no longer Joan Darcy, a cablegram was brought to her from London.
"Wait. Coming. Nikolai."
To which she replied with reckless extravagance:
"Too late. Sorry. Come anyway...."
Alone at last with her husband in a carriage (to which the negro yard-boy, feeling with the Major that something was lacking to the occasion, had generously attached one of his own shoes), Joan asked rather listlessly where he meant to take her. She had a conviction that it would be to Atlantic City, or to Niagara Falls.
For Archie was everything that was most correct in the way of bridegrooms. His bulldog toes, his padded blue serge, his near-Panama hat, his very socks, were so palpably bought for the occasion that Joan felt that to match him she ought to be wearing dove-gray and a shrinking manner.
But she did not feel particularly shrinking; merely relieved that the die was cast, and tired enough to be glad of the arm that stole tentatively around her.
"What train are we catching, dear?" she asked.
"No train at all.—Oh, Joan," he said tremulously, "I hope you won't mind! It's just for to-night—just a foolish idea of mine."
"What is?"
"Wait and see!"
She waited rather apprehensively. She was a little nervous about surprises, since her father's recent effort in that line.
But the carriage was traversing a street she knew well, and it presently stopped in front of the house where Ellen lived. There was still a tinge of afterglow reflected in its many-paned windows, and among the young feathery leafage of the old sycamore sparrows were preparing to go to bed. Two or three of the denizens of the lower floors were taking a breath of air on the doorstep. They stared at the carriage with interest.
"None of 'em know about us yet," reassured Archie in a whisper. "Just bluff it out." Aloud he said to one of them (it was the lady who expertly curled feathers): "Do you know whether Mrs. Neal is in, Mrs. Higgs? We've come to see her."
"I don't know as she is, Mr. Archie," replied the other, her eyes taking avid note of Joan's smart tailor-made dress and traveling hat. "But I know she's expectin' company all right, 'cause I been smellin' comp'ny cookin' all day! Go right up and make yourselves to hum," she urged, with the never-failing hospitality of her class.
Archibald led his wife up the dim, curved stairway that had doubtless known the reluctant feet of many another bride before her, and opened Ellen's door with a key.
"Yonarehonored," murmured Joan. "I didn't dream that Ellen had got to the point of trusting gentlemen with her latch-key!"
"Look!" said Archie proudly.
The room was gay with flowers, truly a bridal bower; and in its center stood the old round walnut table she had known all her life, much battered by the kicking of her own youthful toes, set for two, and laden with delicacies. There was a small but magnificent wedding-cake, there was chicken-salad, crisp pink tongue, pickles, chocolates of Joan's favorite brand, and resting in a pail of ice-water, its neck swathed in a napkin, a bottle of champagne.
"Cinnamon-rolls keeping hot in the warmer, butter in the ice-box right-hand side, and I'm only to light the jet under the coffee-pot, and leave it to bubble ten minutes—" murmured Archie, as one reciting a well-conned lesson.
Joan's listlessness suddenly disappeared. She hugged him.
"What a perfectlybeautifulwedding-supper!" she cried. "Was it your idea, or Ellen's?"
"A sort of combination, I guess. She thought you might feel more homelike here with your mother's things, and I—well, it's my home too, you see!—So you don't mind?"
"Mind!" she winked hard to keep the tears back. "Archie, let's have pancakes, too!" she cried.
They had pancakes. They also had eggs, in the scrambling of which Archibald was quite expert. Afterwards they washed the pans and dishes together, with two of Ellen's aprons tied around their necks, amid much merriment.
"I had no idea married life was so pleasant!" she sighed. "Archie, let's always do our work like this, together!"
"Work?" he picked up one of her hands and examined it reverently. Joan had rather beautiful hands, sensitive and lithe, delicately white, with rosy palms and finger-tips. "I'll let you play at work now and then," he said soberly. "But work is for us men, my Joan, not for our women!"
"It's fortunate the cooks and housemaids of the land don't agree with you," she teased; "or perhaps they do, and hence the servant problem!"
Later, they locked Ellen's door and put the key under the mat, and went up a flight higher. Joan entered Archie's room with some curiosity. To her, people's environment spoke a clear language; and sometimes she realized, with a little shock, that she knew nothing at all of the man she had married.
It was a long, low attic chamber, whose ceiling sloped cosily down over casement windows with wide sills. There was a fine fireplace, marred, however, by a small stove showing evidences of occasional culinary efforts.
The results of Archie's twigging were very apparent; notably the golden-oak rocking-chair, the "chiffoneer" surmounted by the bronze lady with a spear. But she was more interested in the things which had belonged to him.
As Ellen had told her, the place was littered with books, shelves, tables, and even window-sills. Joan examined these eagerly. There was a very shabby Shakespeare in a good edition, an old pocket Emerson, a new Rubaiyat, a brand-new "Alice in Wonderland" (which made her smile); but it was no scholar's library. Archie's tastes were not what he would have called "high-brow." The works of Marie Corelli and Conan Doyle predominated, with several school geographies and histories, and various treatises on the psychology of salesmanship. She found something rather touching in this collection of books, remembering that he had referred to it as his college career.
She looked next for his pictures, those other sure indications of the inner man. But there were none, except the small photograph of herself in its elaborate frame, with a little vase attached holding fresh flowers.
"Archie!" she protested, laughing, "I look like a Madonna in a shrine!"
"One of those namby-pamby parties with a dinner-plate behind her head? Never saw one of them that could touch you!" he pronounced candidly.
"I fear your correspondence-course has been neglecting Art," she murmured. "There was a fellow named Botticelli who did some very neat little things in that line. But come now, surely you've got some other pictures hidden away somewhere? No naughty ballet-girls kicking up their limb-legs? No bareback ladies? Or Parisiennes exhibiting wicked garters? Honest Injun?"
He grinned sheepishly. "I did have," he admitted. "But I sort of lost my taste for 'em when you gave me that picture of you."
She kissed him.
"That's a prettier compliment than the little vase of flowers before my picture, dear!..."
Archie had been standing at the door, watching her progress around his room with eyes that were almost incredulous. His room!—and she in it!... He felt that if he opened a window she might flutter out again, back into the world from which she came. Once, when he was very small, he had found a belated autumn butterfly in the street, and brought it home, and put it on a geranium-plant he had in the window, hoping it might like to spend the winter there. But in the morning it lay dead against the pane. Archie remembered that butterfly now, and shivered. She saw him.
She ensconced herself in the largest and shabbiest of his three chairs and patted the arm of it invitingly. "Come over here, and let's really talk!" she commanded.
He obeyed. "What shall we talk about?"
"Tell me about your mother," said Joan.
He told her what he could remember. It was not much except a voice—a soft English voice; and the feeling of arms that held him close; and quite clearly the sound of sobbing beside his pillow whenever he woke suddenly at night.
"Nothing was ever heard from her after she left you here?"
"Oh, yes. Money came once or twice to the landlady for my board—this was a boarding-house, then. But after a few months it stopped coming."
"And haven't youanyidea what became of her?"
"She died, of course," said Archie simply. "Or she'd have come back for me. There were people who thought—" he swallowed hard—"that she left me here on purpose, and never meant to come back. That isn't so. I don't know much about her, but I do know that she loved her child. You, can't fool a kid about that!... And there were people who thought she killed herself. But I don't somehow believe she was a quitter. What doyouthink?"
He had taken a photograph out of his pocket, and handed it to Joan, who studied it closely. Despite the unbecoming "fringe" and jersey of an earlier day, it was a lovely face she saw, without a hint of folly or weakness or worse. The chin was firm as Archie's, the features strong as they were delicate. The face was still rounded and soft with youth, yet out of it looked a pair of haunted eyes.
"No, your mother was no coward," she said with conviction. "But she was a very unhappy woman. And Archie—she was a lady!" The look of race seemed to her unmistakable.
He drew a great breath. "I think so, too," he said gladly, "I've always thought so. That's how I dared—" Suddenly, passionately, he drew her up into his arms. "Oh, my Joan, do you see why I wanted you here in my own home? It's all the home I've ever had. Anything that's happened to me has happened here. I've lain here at night trying to be a man when I was nothing more than a kid. I've sat here listening, listening—Oh, for years I used to think I heard my mother coming up the stairs to get me, long after I was old enough to know she never would! And sometimes I thought—Do you believe in ghosts?"
"Yes!" said Joan. "Ghosts of people that love us and want to help—"
"That's what I mean! And that's why I wanted to stay on in this room, where—she could find me. It's a horrible thing not to belong anywhere, nor to any one, like any little fyst dog in the streets. I've never said this before—"
"I know!" whispered Joan.
"And now that I do belong to some one, I wanted my room to know it. I wanted—in case therewereany ghosts—"
"I know," whispered Joan again, her lips against his.
There was a taste of salt on them, and she held him close and closer, this great, lonely child who should never be lonely again. If, as she had warned him, she was not capable of offering deep love, Joan could at least offer deep understanding, which perhaps is rarer....
And presently as she held him so in the quiet of his old room, with the house settling into drowsiness about them, and the sycamore tapping its friendly signal on the roof close above their heads, Joan's identity seemed to be slipping, merging, into that of some one else. She ceased to be Joan the girl. She felt, in that strange moment of transition, partly the wife, and partly the mother; but most of all the woman, whose mission is to give.
There is, among the wives and mothers of what the
Misses Darcy were wont to call the polite world, a general conspiracy of silence on the subject of honeymoons. The theory is allowed to go unchallenged that a honeymoon is invariably a period of bliss and romance unalloyed; the conspirators apparently subscribing to the ideas of the stoical parent who teaches his child to swim by throwing him unexpectedly into the water. If he manages to keep afloat, well and good; if he drowns, regrettable; if he comes out alive but with a shrinking cowardice with regard to water that never afterwards leaves him, perhaps it is no concern of his parent's. And again, perhaps it is.
Joan and Archibald Blair returned from their honeymoon not quite as close friends as when they embarked upon it. Joan's manner had gained a certain kindliness, a gentle consideration that was akin to sympathy; whereas Archie, with puzzled eyes and a smile that beamed rather uncertainly, almost evinced his desire to propitiate by rolling over at her feet and holding up four paws to heaven. (Which was no way to propitiate our heroine.)
Honeymoons, however, do not last indefinitely; and by the time Ellen Neal and her furniture and the results of Archie's "twigging" were moved into a certain modest house that simply cried aloud to be purchased (on the installment plan), Archie had grown almost accustomed to the sight of the One and Only seated at his breakfast tableen negligée, pouring out his coffee, with a preoccupied word from him now and then as she glanced through the morning paper. (It was characteristic of that household that Joan was the one who read the morning paper.) He kissed her whenever he liked without asking leave; and in return she rumpled up his hair deliciously, and called him "Goose!", and reminded him to bring oranges from downtown because the neighboring grocery had such poor ones.
Joan entered upon the domestic rôle with her usual thoroughness.
At first she had been rather afraid of the expenditure the purchase of a house involved. It sounded to her too much like the large and not very practical ideas of her father. But when Archie pointed out to her that even day laborers managed to own their cottages, thanks to building-associations, and that purchase on this plan was merely a way of saving money, she yielded without undue reluctance. After all, there was not only his salary to be relied upon, but his commissions, dependent upon his own energy, which seemed boundless. Like many poor girls, she was quite ignorant of the value of money. Beyond the purchasing power of a concrete sum, say one thousand dollars, money meant nothing to her at all. Ten thousand dollars, twenty thousand dollars—they seemed very much the same.
The house was its own best advocate; one of the charming English cottage types that are beginning to make home life not only comfortable but dignified for the small householder in our American cities. The neighborhood was excellent, one of the pretty green courts she had long ago coveted; and there was a small garden artfully arranged into vistas and quite an air of privacy by means of shrubbery, and overlooked by a secluded porch whose coolness seemed like paradise to Archie, hurrying to it out of the hot city.
The garden was his part of the establishment; and there he might be observed any morning shortly after sunrise, digging, pruning, whistling tunelessly between his teeth, with one eye on a window whence would presently issue the drowsy voice of Joan, calling, "Good-morning out there, Adam!" Then with a rush Adam would disappear from his garden, leaving spade or hose where he happened to drop them, lest Eve need assistance with buttoning a blouse or tying a shoe.
It was a glorious time for Archie. He was almost painfully happy.
The Jabberwocks and others took a good deal of critical interest in Joan's house. She had always been suspected of being a little odd, and her house proved it indubitably. At a period when Louisville was graduating out of the green-wall-and-mission-furniture period, through Coloniality, into a more catholic appreciation of possessions which express the personality of the possessor, Joan's house was still rather a shock to all preconceived notions of decoration. There was none of the white woodwork and panelled severity which sounded the correct and most recent note. Joan's woodwork and walls were alike a soft, practical gray—"Soot-color," she explained placidly—and the plaster had been left rough-cast. Against it, instead of the accepted pictures of the day, hung two or three rare prints, a cast of the Parthenon frieze, and a fine strip of Persian embroidery. On the floor were black skin rugs. A green vine, growing out of an ancient yellowed marble jar, wandered at will across one wall and up the brick of the chimney-place.
"You got that idea in Italy," commented one visitor.
But the undoubted charm of Joan's house was that she had taken no ideas from anywhere. She simply had about her the sort of things she liked. There were ferns growing in the window-sills, and no curtains whatever except two lengths of heavy pumpkin-colored silk which might be drawn across the panes at will, but rarely were.
"People will be able to see in when the lamps are lighted," protested her step-mother.
"What of it? They won't see much over those ferns," said Joan, "and I always love to peep in at lighted windows myself, don't you? Haven't you ever noticed how much nicer the houses in this part of the world look when they're undressed for the summer? Personally, my taste has never run to lingerie in household decoration."
Effie May, who was nothing if not receptive, went home and meekly took down her point-lace curtains.
What troubled Louisville most about the Blair house was its lack of a dining-room. There was no chamber held sacred to the rites of nourishment, with chairs sitting primly against the wall and a center table with a centerpiece upon it, bearing a fernery or—what was more recently affected by the really up-to-date—a dish containing imitation fruit. ("So much smarter than the real kind," explained her neighbor, Mrs. Webster, who had quite a taste for the correct in art.) There was no sideboard for the display of wedding-silver, no china-cabinet containing the best glassware in glittering serried rows. What was the use of having nice things, thought many a troubled housewife, if they were to blush unseen in pantries?
But Joan did not understand, and frankly said so, why in a small house one room should be set aside for use only three times a day. She needed the extra wall space for her books. Besides if there was a dining-room people seemed to feel obliged always to eat in it, instead of in the garden or the porch, or on a table drawn close to the window, where one might look out into the world while one ate, as in a pleasant restaurant.
"I'm like the Irishman," she remarked, "who said that he was glad he didn't like strawberries, because if he did he'd have to eat them, and he hated the damn things.—Try having your meals served about in different places, and see if you haven't a better appetite for them!"
Even the admiring Jabberwocks felt that this was carrying oddity to the extreme. They always took strangers, however, to see Joan's little house, and incidentally Joan herself. Mr. Nikolai had sent her recently several Mandarin costumes, unique in the history of Louisville for domestic wear, in which she appeared comfortable, piquante, and quite exotically feminine.
"Fancy! Trousers on a bride! And at such a time, too," murmured the ladies of the neighborhood among themselves.
But as Effie May pointed out to the Major, himself a trifle shocked by this eccentricity of costume in a lady of his family, "She's slim enough to wear 'em, Dickie, and those full silk pants are certainly becoming to the feet. Wish I had some myself—Don't you worry," she added, chuckling over the Major's expression, "I haven't! Pantaloons weren't meant for the pincushion style of figger."
Archibald, of course, found the Mandarin costume adorable. He would have found any costume of Joan's adorable, even a Mother Hubbard, or its lineal descendant, the bungalow-apron.
Altogether, Joan had a rather happy aftermath to her honeymoon. "The pasture-time," she called it, during which she was as placid and content as a cow in a clover-field. For the first and possibly the last time in her life she was quite free from worry. That was one of the things Archie took completely out of her hands. He would have liked to take everything out of her hands that might be irksome to her—her thinking, her very sleeping and eating, had it been possible. But worry at least was something he could take upon his own broad shoulders.
Her personal allowance and the allowance he made her for household expenses were paid regularly into her account—an arrangement Joan had insisted upon, despite his protest.
"Why should you be bothered with the paying of bills, darlingest?"
"But Iloveto pay bills, Archie," she had replied, rather piteously to one who had known anything of the earlier Darcyménage. "It's a real pleasure to get them all out of the way before the tenth of the month!" And it was a pleasure she attended to religiously, even after she began to grow a little lax and indifferent about other household matters. There were to be no "Indians" in the annals of the Blair family.
Joan had never been so sluggish mentally as in these first months of married life; yet she felt almost abnormally normal, close to the great heart of existence, at one with the physical world about her, content with the content of a cog which fits well into the wheel where it belongs.
Long afterwards some would-be cynic asked her whether she believed that marriageper sewas an experiment which paid.
"Yes!" she answered without hesitation. "If only for the moment when you tell your husband that he is to have a child."
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 circumstances—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 rôle 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 passed.
"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 Saturday 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 amaestroof 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 débutante 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 massage and sporadic attempts at dieting.
"It ain't howmuchI eat, seems like—it'swhatI eat," she said once plaintively to Joan. "Everything tasty turns to flesh on me; and God 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 circumstances—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.
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 identity 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 God 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 circumstances 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 title. It had simply accrued to him as titles 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 Bluegrass 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 pass 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 class, and in their midst, bound hand and foot with rope, a cowering negro.
"My God! 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 nigger 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 whileIam here!"
The effect was histrionic; and yet Joan realized that her father was not blustering. He meant it.
There came a wail from beyond that made her shiver, the cry of a man in mortal terror. "I ain't never done it, 'fore Gawd I ain't never tetched that woman. Oh, Boss! O-o-oh, Boss!" It was like the cry of a damned soul to God. "Don'you let 'em git me!"
There was an agony of hope in the appeal, as of one who sees at hand unexpected deliverance.
The Major responded to it, speaking in quiet reassurance as she had sometimes heard him speak, years ago, when she had wakened out of some nightmare in the little bed beside her parents'.
"All right, boy. They shan't get you,"
He strode through the crowd, putting men out of his way right and left. In sheer surprise they let him pass till he reached the negro, who cringed to him, catching at his hand.
Then a voice cried out, "Here, we're wastin' time. Muzzle the old boy!"
The Major turned and stared magnificently in the direction of his voice, nettled by the term "old boy."
"Evidently," he remarked, "the gentleman does not know who I am!"
Joan was seized with an hysterical desire to laugh. At such a moment the bombast of it was too much. Suppose they should inquire minstrel-fashion, "Well, then, Mr. Johnsing, whoareyou?"
But the crowd was not as used to her father as she was. They hesitated, impressed by his hauteur, his fine clothes, the waiting limousine. They stirred uneasily. A voice near her murmured, "Mebbe it's the Governor!"
Richard Darcy took instant advantage of the impression he had created, and began to speak. It was not the first time she had heard him make a speech, for he was frequently called upon to aid some friend in turning the tide of political battle. The Major, indeed, had rather a reputation for assisting his friends into office—It was typical of Joan that she listened critically despite her thumping heart; that she watched what she could see of the faces about her, picked out by the lights of the car; that she missed no expression on the gray, working features of the negro, darting wild glances about him like a newly caged wolf she had seen once at the Zoo, frantically eying the people who stood to stare at it.
Her father's voice poured out in a golden flood, running the gamut from anger to gentle suasion. It was the voice of the natural orator, which depends very little for its effect upon words. Once, passing a negro church, Joan had heard just such a voice rising and falling within, and though not a word of the sermon reached her, after a few moments she had been almost ready to sway and moan with the congregation as it muttered, "Yas, good Lawd!" "Be mussiful to us po' sinners" "Come, Jesus, come down and take me home!"
Some such effect began to be visible on the Major's audience. There were stirrings and murmurings that suggested applause. He rose to them. The eloquence that lies so close under the skin of Southern-born men—certainly of all Southern-born men of Irish stock—came to the surface and flowered. He showed this handful of rough farmers what it should mean to them to be natives of so great and glorious a commonwealth ("'Commonwealth'—what a splendid word, my friends!"); wearing in her bosom all the riches of the earth, nourishing at that bosom a race of supermen ("And superwomen, my friends! superwomen!"); carrying in her womb the greatness of the country's future.
"Statesmen we give to the world—law-makers, not lawbreakers! Soldiers we give, not midnight marauders and assassins!" (If he borrowed freely from a certain greater Kentucky orator who speaks only with his pen, the Major was unaware of plagiarism.) "Show me the fools who say Kentuckians are lawless? We make our laws as we need them, gentlemen—and we obey them! Perhaps the greatest of our laws is this: 'Never kick a dog when it is down.'" His voice sank to a warm and personal friendliness. "I ask you, gentlemen—is there any dog more down than the negro? It is not his fault that he is here where he is no longer wanted. It is not his fault that he brought with him when he came the ways and the intelligence of the jungle. It is ours, perhaps, that he has kept them. We shall never tame the negro by proving ourselves savages!—My friends, you and I here in Kentucky pride ourselves on breaking our horses and our dogs by means of kindness. Shall we do less for our unfortunate black brother?"
A voice in the crowd remarked, "Youcan claim kin with him ef you want to, Jedge—Iain't!"
A ripple of laughter greeted this sally, and Joan's tension relaxed. She felt intuitively that a crowd which laughs does not kill.
While he spoke, her father had more than once caught her eye over the heads of the others, urgently, meaningly. Now he nodded to her. Joan suddenly caught the message he was trying to convey.
"He wants us to go to him. Quick, James! Start your engine. Quietly!"
In his nervousness, however, the chauffeur started the car with a jerk, and many faces moved in their direction. The Major turned on the full tide of his voice, and rose to his climax.
"My friends," he asked solemnly, "have you thought to take into your hands the privilege of the Most High, who saith, 'Vengeance is mine'? Perhaps you have called vengeance 'justice'? Even so there is a finer thing than justice. There is mercy. And there is something we may give even greater than mercy—something to which each of us poor souls has a human right. I refer, gentlemen, to the benefit of the doubt.
"Some day every one of us here present—who knows how soon?—must stand before the Judgment Seat, cowering as this wretch is cowering now. And what we dare to ask then will be perhaps not justice, nor even mercy—but simply the benefit of the doubt."
Tears came into Joan's eyes. It seemed to her that for a moment her father had forgotten his purpose there, and was speaking not for another but for himself....
His mind, however, had not left the business in hand. After a slight and telling pause, he said in his ordinary conversational voice, "Now I am going to take this negro with me, gentlemen, if you don't mind. I have at hand a safe conveyance, as you see. I pledge you my word to deliver him in person to the sheriff of this county."
He beckoned to Joan.
The spell was broken, and pandemonium reigned. "Look out—he's makin' a get-away!"
"Aw, what's the use? Leave him go!"
"By God, it wasmy sister—"
"Let me at him"—
"The gen'leman's right, I tell you!"—
And penetrating all a laconic drawl, "Stranger, leggo that nigger, and leggo quick."
Joan, on tiptoe, saw her father's head and beckoning hand above the crowd.
"Go on, James!" she said tensely. "Never mind if you run them down—"
"Stop!" gasped Effie May. "Don't you see those pistols? They mean to shoot!"
The terrified James did not know which to obey.
"Here, give me the wheel," ordered Joan. "Be quiet, Effie May!" Into her mind came scornfully one of her father's sayings, "The canaille are invariably timid."
Effie May suddenly screamed again. "They're going toshoot!"
And as if at a signal for which they had been waiting, two shots barked out.
The Major, still finely erect, thrust the negro behind him, and at the same moment Joan sprang out of the car to go to his defense; two instinctive acts which proved them father and child, and also proved indubitably the Darcy right to pride of race.
His steady voice reached her again as she struggled through the milling crowd; "You poor fools, look to what your folly has already led you! You've shot the wrong man. You've shotme!"
There was a second of appalled silence. Then a man muttered "Golly!" and turned and fled. His panic was contagious. One after another, by twos and threes, the lynchers melted hastily away. When Joan reached her father he was seated on the ground, leaning for support against the bridge railing, alone except for the shackled negro.
He still had command of the situation. "Take my penknife, Dollykins, and set this boy free so that he can run," he ordered.
Joan cut the ropes, sick with relief. He was so calm that she thought he must have been bluffing the crowd.
"Dad! Dad! You're not really hurt, then?"
He smiled up at her. "Not hurt, my child. Killed," he said, dramatic to the last....
The negro did not run. In return for his defender's heroism, he performed a small act of heroism himself—not so small either, perhaps, considering that his life depended upon what use he made of the next few hours.
"I'll tote him to de car, lady," he offered, pantingly; and delayed further to give the paralyzed chauffeur instructions as to where to find the nearest doctor.
Joan sat on the floor of the limousine with her father's head in her lap, only half aware of his labored, fluttering breath, of the blood upon her dress, of her step-mother's wild pleadings with him just to look at her, just to say one word to his Effie May, who loved him—
She was strangely exalted. Her mind seemed to have slipped into a region of consciousness where things were made suddenly clear to her, troubling questions answered, doubts set forever aside.
"A gentleman," she kept repeating to herself. "A gentleman!"
It seemed to her in that moment a great thing to have been born a gentleman, even if one became nothing more; to know that whatever the fortunes of life, one would be able to meet them gallantly and unafraid, because of a something within stronger than personal will or habit: the sum of the wills and habits of many ancestors. She was sorry for thecanaille, the Effie Mays, who had no such inner power to rely upon....
As they carried him into a doctor's office, Richard Darcy's eyes opened. They passed the face of his frantic wife unseeing, and came to rest upon Joan in some anxiety.
"You all right, Dollykins? Must not allow—mere trifle like this—upset—"
"Nothing shall upset me, Father," she said, smiling at him.
"Children so necessary—family traditions—"
She bent close to him. "My son is going to be proud to carry on the family traditions, dear."
His face cleared. "Good girl!" There was a little bubbling breath. "I promised Mary—"
But Joan never learned what promise it was that he had made, and doubtless broken, to his Mary.
Joan herself, like other self-reliant people, sometimes made promises which she was unable to keep. She had made such a one to her father. Despite her best efforts, the fact and manner of his death did manage to upset her, disastrously.
The day came not long afterwards when for hours, years, they seemed to her, Joan was aware of nothing but pain, and of the fact that miserable, terrified Archie must somehow be got out of the way before she lost control of herself. She thought that when she could get enough breath to do it, she would ask him to go down town and bring her some ice-cream or something; but when she did open her lips they emitted, entirely without permission, a queer sound that was somewhere between a yelp and a croak.
"Goodness! This is no way for a gentleman to behave," she said to herself oddly; and must have spoken aloud, for the voice of Ellen Neal responded.
"There, there, my lamb! Yell all you want. You ain't no gentleman, thank goodness! but just a poor little girl who's got a right to holler all she likes. That'soneright the men-folks ain't going to deny us and get away with it—not them!"
Ellen as she spoke glared truculently at the doctor. It was not the first accouchement at which she had assisted, and at such moments she became feministic almost to the point of violence. Even Archie found it safer to remain out of reach of her accusing eye.
But long, very long afterwards, Ellen herself admitted him once more to the Presence, for the sake of the burden he carried—a subdued, queerly gentle Ellen, with all the acerbity gone from voice and manner, and in its place something rather beautiful. It was motherhood that glowed in her, had any one cared to notice; motherhood come by vicariously, as Ellen Neal came by all the loveliness in life.
"See, my lamb," she murmured, bending over the bed. "Open them pretty eyes and look who's here! Come close, Mr. Archie, and show her the present you've brought her. Quiet, now!—she ain't up to much. It's a surprise, Joie. Open your eyes and look!"
It was a surprise, indeed. Joan, by great effort, managed to focus her gaze on Archie's burden. She shut her eyes quickly, and opened them again. They were still there; not one, but two little wrinkled, fuzzy heads.
"Can you beat it?" demanded Archie, shakily, "Some little present, eh?" He held them out to her.
Joan's lips moved, twitching. "From a Friend," was what she said; and Archie, recognizing a jest on sight, let out such a roar of joy that the twins awoke with pin-prick wails, and a nurse came running, and he was thrust once more into outer darkness.
There a message was brought to him. "Your wife says why don't you telegraph President Roosevelt about it?"
And literal Archie did so....
But this was the last laughter heard in the house of Blair for many a weary week. Twins require more strength for their bearing and rearing than Joan, taken so unawares, was able to provide. The Major's final act of gallantry cost a good deal in the way of human life, which may, or may not, have been of more value than the life he saved.
Afterwards, when she was able to think again, Joan sometimes wondered whether his death was not perhaps an even more futile thing than his life had been; yet she would not have had it otherwise.
His widow had caused to be erected to his memory the finest granite monolith obtainable for money, bearing the inscription, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends"; and Joan, after her first startled distaste for the grandiloquence passed, was able to appreciate how deeply the memorial must gratify the proud spirit of a Darcy, if it lingered near enough to know.