Читать книгу Why Joan? - Eleanor Mercein Kelly - Страница 6

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Later, as she lay propped up in her snug little berth (far the pleasantest part of the journey to Joan), with her shade up for fear of missing anything of the mysterious night that passed outside—strange, silent cities, isolated farms asleep in the starlight, the glow of smelting fires as they flashed by, like a startling glimpse into the infernal regions—it suddenly occurred to Joan that her father had been unprecedentedly lavish in his provision for her journey home.

"Money for good-by presents to all the girls; money for ticket, and sleeper, and tips, and ten dollars besides—goodness! Dad must have struck something!" she mused, deciding that it was really business that kept him from coming to see her graduate, and not, to put it delicately, the lack of business.

In the Darcy family things were always put delicately. The mention of cost was deprecated. One never said crudely that a thing could not be afforded. One "preferred not to bother about it just then," or one "liked last year's hat so much better than any in the shops," or one "enjoyed the freedom of being without servants for a while—it was a relief."

Occasionally Joan's mother, before she overcame the blunter speech of the North, had offended the family taste with plain statements about prices and possibilities. Joan, observant from her cradle, drew her own conclusions from the expression of wincing deprecation these faux pas produced upon her father's face, or upon that of the cousin or aunt or what-not in the way of Darcy relation that was usually visiting them.

"Mamma," she had asked once in the murmured intimacy that preceded sleepy time, "isn't money a very nice fing?"

"A very nice thing indeed, babykins," answered the lady with a faint sigh.

"Then why mustn't us never speak about it?"

It was not the only one of her daughter's questions that the harassed woman had been obliged to parry with what skill lay at her command. Honesty always came more easily to Mary Darcy than subterfuge.

Joan grew up into the family habit of euphonious speech; but, thanks to a certain inheritance from her mother, facts had a way of presenting themselves to her inner vision with a clarity, a brutal frankness of outline, quite unprecedented in the mind of a Darcy.

Her facility in the valuable game of Pretend came from the paternal strain. Richard Darcy was one of those fortunate spirits who move through life to the sound of an invisible drum corps—a procession of one, affably ready for whatever honors Fate chose to thrust upon him. Joan, too, was quite prepared for the best the world had to offer. Nevertheless, unlike her father, she was never unaware of the difference between pretense and reality, nor of the fixed line dividing them. When she lied, it was deliberately, with her eyes wide open.

Just now she chose to step over the dividing line firmly into reality. Perhaps her dinner may have had something to do with it; a diet of chocolates and ham sandwiches not being conducive to glamour of thought, even at eighteen.

Joan wished, soberly, that she were happier at the idea of going home. She wished that she were not haunted by a vague dread of it. …

The Convent—with its daily round of prescribed duties and pleasures, its fixed intimates and enemies, its atmosphere of simple piety, its guardian nuns, striving conscientiously for that "detachment from place" which is enjoined upon them, but lavishing all the pent-up mother-passion of their hearts upon the young creatures in their care—Joan, young as she was, visualized the place she had left as a sunny haven, a little quiet eddy in the whirlpool; sheltered, secluded, safe.

She frowned at the adjective. Surely her own home was "safe," too! Surely the vague dread she felt had nothing to do with her father, for instance—her own dear, splendid Dad, so handsome despite his frayed and spotted clothes, with the courtly manner that had won both nuns and girls to awestruck admiration, and that gave him far more distinction than the fathers of other girls who did not wear frayed and spotted clothes. No, it could not be her father she dreaded!

And it was certainly not Ellen Neal, the elderly woman who had followed the Darcy fortunes in their waxing and waning for many a year—part servant, part mentor, always friend; declining to be shaken off even in those crises when Mrs. Darcy "enjoyed doing without servants"; supporting herself during such financial depressions by means of a skilful needle—supporting, Joan sometimes suspected, others than herself. The girl recalled one significant incident of her early childhood; her mother, pale and anxious, arguing at the door with a rude man who declined to leave without something she seemed unable to give him, until Ellen appeared, half running up the street, opening her shopping-bag as she came. And when she had thrust something into the rude man's hands and slammed the door in his face, Mrs. Darcy had turned silently to the servant and kissed her.

Joan's feeling for Ellen was one of the few she had never tried to analyze. It was simply there, like her breath, her eyesight. She could not be said to love her—there was nothing attractive about Ellen Neal; yet her only quarrel with her father (if anything so one-sided could be called a quarrel) was on the subject of Ellen. Once during Joan's previous summer vacation, the Major, who disliked familiarity in servants, had taken occasion to remind Ellen most kindly that his daughter was almost a young lady now and should be spoken to as Miss Joan, no longer as "Joie" or as "Baby." Joan had thoroughly concurred in this opinion; until, happening to glance at Ellen as she left the room, she saw that the servant's compressed lips were trembling. She had cried out unaccountably: "No such thing, Nellen! You're to call me anything you like, always!"—and then she had turned upon her father, scolding, stammering out astonishing reminders, raising her voice, altogether behaving in a manner most unbecoming a gentlewoman and a Darcy—as her father quite obviously forebore to suggest to her. The quarrel had been altogether a most unsatisfactory one. During her tirade the Major had sat with poised carving-knife, regarding his daughter under mildly raised eyebrows. When she had stormed herself out, he remarked quietly, in quotation marks:

"Her voice was ever soft and low,

An excellent thing in woman."

But the matter of "Miss Joan" was, by tacit consent, never resumed between them.

No, it was decidedly not Ellen Neal who was responsible for her vague dread of home-coming. The girl, who had an odd dislike of anything vague in her mental processes, pursued the fugitive sensation to its lair with relentless precision.

Was it the poverty of home she feared, then? Surely not, for poverty was a condition quite as much with her elsewhere—rather more with her elsewhere, for among strangers it was impossible to practice those useful little economies of ragged underwear and worn-out shoes which in the privacy of home-life made an occasional extravagance possible. Joan rather looked forward to the time when she no longer need be on dress-parade, so to speak, at every hour of the day.

"If I wear cheap nightgowns, I can buy myself a good hat," was her thought—a thought which may be said to sum up the philosophy of the Darcy family.

And although it seems customary among novelists to gage the refinement of their heroines by the daintiness of their taste in underlinen—no matter if her outer wear be sackcloth and ashes, the lingerie of a true fiction lady is invariably above reproach—one would like to submit that an almost equal refinement may be indicated by the present heroine's determination to make as brave a showing as possible before her world with as little strain as possible upon her father's income. …

Was it her mother's absence she feared then—still? Forewarned, Joan resolutely kept back the nervous tears that threatened to rise again at the thought of her mother; and she faced the possibility calmly.

During the summer before, alone with her father and Ellen, Joan had been given plenty of time to get used to her mother's absence. Indeed, it seemed to her suddenly that during the several years previous she had been given time to get used to her mother's absence. It was as if Mary Darcy, knowing that the hand of death was upon her, had deliberately, gradually, withdrawn herself from the child she loved, in order to make the final separation easier.

"That would have been like Mother," said Joan, nodding.

She understood, in that moment of clear vision, why she had been sent away to boarding-school, despite her father's amazed protests—it was unprecedented that Mrs. Darcy should remain so firm in the matter of incurring unnecessary expense. She understood, too, why the narrow, bleak house in Louisville, which was the latest of their many homes, had taken on none of the look of her mother—that intimate, friendly, stay-awhile air which Mary Darcy, with the aid of long practice, managed to produce among the most unlikely surroundings within a few hours of occupancy. True, the old furniture made its faithful reappearance there, part of Joan's earliest recollections—the parlor suite of rosewood with blue velour, the little cottage piano, the great bed in which she, and her mother, and her mother's mother had been born, shorn long ago of its tester to accommodate altered circumstances—all looking a trifle shabbier, a trifle more battered after each adventure with fortune, but still dignified and "good," with the unmistakable mien of gentlefolk in reduced circumstances. For once, however, Mary Darcy had not been able to accomplish her usual miracle with this furniture. Chairs, sofa, tables, stood stiffly wherever the moving-men had chosen to place them, making no attempts to hide the spots on the wall-paper; the thread-bare velvet portières which had separated parlor from hall in every home that Joan remembered had never been altered to fit this one; stranger still, there were no green growing things in the window-sills, nor even in the can-strewn, sooty backyard. Joan could not recall any other home she had lived in without some attempt at a garden, were it only a few geraniums in the window-box.

"Mamma must have been very tired," she thought, soberly; and realized that, far from dreading her mother's absence in that dingy, dreary house, she was almost glad of it. When one is as tired as Mrs. Darcy, rest is the great boon—rest from hopeless hoping, rest from making homes out of patience and courage and a few old sticks of furniture, rest from the anxious sorrow of loving.

Joan was young to understand such things; but at her birth the fairies had given her the cruel gift of seeing out of the eyes of others. …

She came to the conclusion at last the thing she had been dreading was simply responsibility. Her play-time was over. No stretch of imagination could make her a little girl again—not with her hair well up on her head and a love-letter crackling deliciously under her pillow! Hereafter it was hers to create the home her mother had relinquished; hers to make ends meet somehow, if only in the accepted Irish way of "cutting a piece off one end and tying it onto the other"; hers to keep out of her father's eyes a certain baffled, hunted look which Joan associated with men who came to collect bills, referred to grimly by Ellen as "the Indians." No family of pioneers on the long-ago western frontier ever lived in greater fear of Indians than did Richard and Mary Darcy and their child Joan.

The girl sighed, bracing her slight shoulders. But still thinking of her mother, she rehearsed sleepily one tenet of the little creed she had made long since to fit her necessities:

"It does not pay to be too unselfish."