Читать книгу Why Joan? - Eleanor Mercein Kelly - Страница 13

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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. Look at 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, he wants to 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, a laissez-faire that 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 am I?"

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 in chic black 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.