Читать книгу Why Joan? - Eleanor Mercein Kelly - Страница 7

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Friends of Mary Darcy, in the distant days before they forgot to discuss her surprising marriage with a promoter from who knows where, were wont to say, "At least he makes a devoted husband and father!"

Which was perfectly true. His little family had always been, as he often said, a passion with Richard Darcy. Perhaps his facility in saying things of the sort was what had appealed in the first place to the shy, undemonstrative Northernness of Mary. Though he was one of several who had professed their willingness to live for her, he was the only suitor who had offered to die for her—an attention she could not but appreciate.

It was entirely for his child's sake (and, indeed, at some personal risk to himself, had Mary but suspected it) that two years before Major Darcy had so arranged the mysterious affairs he called Business as to be able to return to the State and city of his illustrious birth; "where," he explained with proud humility, "we are not quite nobodies, my darling!"

(The "who knows where" on the part of Mary's friends had been sheer arrogant affectation; for nobody could have talked with Richard Darcy for five minutes without learning that he had been born and raised and hoped to die in the great Commonwealth of Kentucky.)

Joan had been quite as eager about the prospective move as her father, marveling at the apathy of her mother, who said, "I never mind being 'nobodies,' Richard, so long as we have each other."

Romantic visions danced through the girl's head of stately pillared mansions, of faithful negro servitors, of fascinating belles and gallants on horseback (her mental language became quite stilted and ante bellum to suit the picture), riding to hounds through meadows as blue as the skies above.

"Though I don't suppose there's much bluegrass right around Louisville, is there, Daddy?" she demanded, with the passion for truth that was in her.

"Plenty of it, Dollykins, plenty of it—though of course Louisville is not really in the bluegrass region, you remember. It belongs to the beargrass district." (Joan nodded. Thanks to her father's powers of reminiscence, she was well up on her Kentucky.) "Still, it isn't like one of these soulless Northern cities, which regard land as so much waste space on which to build monstrosities!" He glanced out truculently upon the streets of Chicago, which had managed in some way to incur the Major's displeasure. "No, no, there's plenty of bluegrass about the old town still, plenty of space, plenty of room to breathe. And how my old friends will take you to their hearts and love you! None of this blighting Northern indifference to everything except the chink of money. Money—bah!—It is God's country down there, my child—gentleman's country."

This was not anti-climax on the Major's part. He visualized God at His best as a superior sort of Christian gentleman, who, had America been discovered at the time, would doubtless have chosen the Southern portion of it for the scene of His nativity.

Of course the girl's anticipations of "God's country" were too glowing not to foredoom her to disappointment. The bluegrass itself was a flat failure; mere meadows of ordinary green, above which hung in seedtime a purplish tinge, like smoke from burning leaves. Louisville, too, did not quite meet the rosy expectations of a young person rather experienced in cities.

They were received at the station, not by a deputation of the old friends who were to take them to their hearts and love them, but merely by a cousin, one of three Misses Darcy who had paid lengthy southern visits to the various places Joan had hitherto called home. By this lady they were conducted volubly in street-cars (Joan had hoped for a long-tailed carriage-pair) to an ancestral mansion which had loomed large in the Major's reminiscences, but which, as he himself admitted, appeared to have shrunk strangely, after the way of houses one has known in early youth. It was one of a row of duplicate tall marble fronts, stained and yellowed, unpleasantly suggestive to Joan's too-vivid imagination of neglected front teeth.

From this shelter the Darcys soon departed. The cousins, while most cordial, were under the necessity of letting their spare chambers to paying guests, under which category their Cousin Richard could not with any certainty be classed.

Joan recalled vividly the family search for a house that suited both her father's taste and her mother's pocket-book. The streets had seemed to her gray, endless cañons, from whose pavements the heat arose and eddied in dizzying waves. From within dark doorways women in dressing-sacks, waving palm-leaf fans, gazed out at them languidly. Block after block they traversed of houses that seemed as afraid of differing from each other as men in evening dress; again they came to neighborhoods where each dwelling stood at a bias angle from the street, as if hoping to achieve an impossible privacy by turning a cold shoulder upon its neighbor. And everywhere they huddled together as close as possible, presenting a solid front of masonry to repel invasion. Where was the space her father had boasted, the room to breathe?

Joan had gazed longingly down certain vistas of tree-lined avenues, lined with pleasant mansions; or into compact green courts where there were smaller homes, with gardens. But these the elders passed without inquiry. They were as quick as house-agents at guessing rents.

At last an abode was found that seemed to the Major suitable upon all counts. Mrs. Darcy, gazing up at its tall, narrow brick front, said with a slight sigh, "Isn't there a good deal of it to keep clean, dear?"

It was the first time Joan had noticed her mother's new little air of weary indifference.

"Ah, but in the South one cannot be cramped for room," replied the Major largely. "There is hospitality to be considered! You must remember that our daughter's début into society will take place from this house, my love. Who knows?—perhaps her wedding!" He pinched Joan's cheek playfully. "How do you like it, Dollykins?"

"Not at all," she replied, too discouraged to be euphonious just then. "It's hideous, and there's a grocer-shop opposite, and Mother'll never sleep with these horrid cars jangling by. Why can't we have a house in one of those pretty green courts, Daddy?"

The Major looked pained. Mary came to the rescue. A few years ago she would have explained bluntly that they could not afford one of the pretty green courts. Now she said with a rallying smile, "What! Not a banal, stupid, uninteresting new bungalow such as one might have in Pittsburgh, or Oshkosh, or Kalamazoo, Michigan! Where's your sense of local color, child? The atmosphere wouldn't be right at all!"

Joan thought that the atmosphere of this neighborhood seemed to be largely compounded of soot and sewer-gas; but she did not say so.

Richard Darcy, brightening, pointed out that while the house indeed faced a grocery-shop (so convenient for Ellen!), its rear was separated only by an alley from the rear of a house which faced upon a very fine avenue indeed; a backyard in which at the moment lingerie of a faint flesh-pink disported lacy ruffles and kicked airy silken limbs upon a clothes line. (Of this lingerie more anon.)

"Evidently," pronounced the Major with an unconscious eye upon it, "a desirable neighborhood in every way."

So the lease was signed, and Ellen Neal and the furniture sent for, and the first month's rent paid in advance; and these feats having been accomplished, Mary Darcy took to her familiar bed and died there, promptly and unobtrusively as was her way, without leaving any inconsiderate doctors' and nurses' bills behind her.

That first summer in Kentucky was a strange time to Joan. It was filled with dim memories of the books she read aloud to her father day after day, in the futile effort to be a companion to him; of long walks she took with him in the cool of the evenings, through streets and parks and suburbs that were as strange to the man who had come back to them, Joan suspected, as to herself; and far more desolate. For the ghost of a boy haunted them; a mischievous, headstrong, innocent lad who had meant no harm to the world, nor to himself, in those days.

Sometimes in the older streets he pointed out to her houses which came near to fulfilling her best hopes of pillared Southern mansions.

"Tim Throckmorton used to live there," he would say, forlornly; or "Many's the time I've courted pretty Sally Field in that parlor!"

Now there were "Furnished Room" signs in the windows, or shops in the lower floors, or, worst degeneracy of all, signs of negro habitation. For many a day the two hunted for a certain dearly remembered pond where a boy named Dick and his friends had been wont to repair for fishing and swimming and many a feat of derring-do. But they never found it; only houses already old, and even office-buildings, in the place where it might have been.

And in those long and lonely walks they met no friends. It was as if for Richard Darcy the streets of Louisville were peopled by the dead.

Joan had suffered for her father even more than for herself. Somehow she felt that she was better able to bear things than her father. And in her inner consciousness, lonely as she was for her mother, and must always be, she knew that the misery in her heart was a thing that would pass. She was too young to be so sad for long.

Old Ellen wisely kept her busy with her preparations for boarding-school, her father having announced his intention of complying scrupulously with his dead wife's wishes, no matter at what cost to himself. Joan thought this very generous of him, although the cost was figurative rather than literal, as Mrs. Darcy's little property was willed to her child, with himself as guardian. Sometimes she had been a little ashamed of herself for the willingness with which she prepared to leave him, the eagerness with which she longed for the merry companionships and irresponsibilities of school again. But perhaps it was natural enough, considering that throughout that dreary summer her sole companions had been her grief-stricken father, the servant Ellen, and the sympathetic maiden cousins, who would have felt it indelicate to so much as smile in the presence of such deep mourning.

Toward the end of the summer she made one other acquaintance, thanks to the above-mentioned lingerie. One of the sudden summer wind-storms which occur sometimes in the Ohio Valley landed in their yard one Monday morning a garment that had strayed unmistakably from the clothes line across the alley; a trifle of palest silk and lace and blue ribbons which Ellen Neal eyed with dark suspicion, but which Joan privately determined to copy for herself so soon as finances permitted.

Monday being the day when Ellen's temper was at its most difficult, Joan decided to abate her dignity to the point of returning the article herself; and so she made her way, looking very young and touching in her homemade black frock, to the front entrance of the house across the alley. And there by good luck she met, just alighting in her porte-cochère from a most imposing limousine, a person who was indubitably the owner of the strayed garment; a plump, blonde, dimpled lady who suggested pink crêpe de Chine and blue satin bows all over her. She greeted Joan with an effulgence that seemed out of all proportion to its cause, until in the course of conversation it transpired that she, like the Darcys, was a newcomer in Louisville, and rather lonely. Her name was Mrs. Calloway, and she came, as she vaguely explained, from "across the river."

"It isn't as easy to get acquainted here as I thought it would be," she admitted naïvely, "Still," she added with her dimpling smile, "I expect folks will be friendly enough, once they get to know me, don't you think?"

"Of course they will!" murmured Joan quite sincerely; for despite the woman's patent vulgarity, there was something attractive about her. One felt above all things that she was kind; and just then kindness meant a good deal to the lonely girl.

This kindness began at once to manifest itself. Elaborate desserts and salads, in very ornate dishes, made their way across the alley to the Darcy table; obligations scrupulously returned by Ellen with pickles and preserves of her own making. There were other generosities, more difficult to return in kind; candy, automobile drives, hothouse flowers, the latter evidently meant for the grave where Mary Darcy lay among strangers.

Over these attentions Ellen Neal grumbled frequently. "Your pa certainly ain't noticin' much these days, or he'd never let you get so thick with a strange woman we don't know nothin' about, Joan."

"A strange lady, Ellen," corrected Joan with dignity.

"Humph! Lady is as lady does. Look at her face, all painted up like a sign-board!"

"Southern ladies quite frequently rouge," said Joan out of her recent observations; but she did not pursue the subject, for she herself had doubts as to her father's approval of this new acquaintance. Richard Darcy was no democrat. He had been heard frequently to state, as one rather proud of the confession, that he had no use whatever for the canaille (which he pronounced "canile.")

Hence she was a little embarrassed and uneasy when, one Sunday morning as she and her father were starting on their weekly visit to the one bit of his native soil owned so far by Richard Darcy—his wife's grave—a limousine drew up at their door, out of which beamed the face of Mrs. Calloway, beneath a broad pink hat.

"I suspected you'd be off to the cemetery this fine morning," she called out cheerily, "and I thought I'd come and take you, you and your father. Hop right in, both of you. No, it won't be a bit of trouble. I've nothing else to do, and I always did love a cemetery anyway—it's the first place I go to whenever I strike a new town."

Joan glanced nervously at her father, wondering how he would take this initial encounter with Mrs. Calloway. But after a moment's pause of sheer astonishment, the Major's native gallantry came to the rescue, and he advanced for the introduction with all the manner of one about to be presented at court.

They found themselves bowling along at a smart clip among the churchgoers and the more lively joy-riders, out for a Sunday's pleasure, which thronged the avenue that sultry August morning.

"Now isn't this better than a poky old street-car?" demanded Mrs. Calloway archly.

The Major responded in kind. "Undoubtedly! Particularly in the matter of company."

Joan's liking for her kind-hearted neighbor had suffered a sudden eclipse. Ellen was right about her—"Lady is as lady does." It was worse than vulgar to force herself upon them at such a time—it was unfeeling, indecent. She envied her father's poise. She had never seen him appear to such advantage as upon this trying occasion, in his new, cheap black suit which had not as yet had time to acquire spots and wrinkles, his fine features showing the ravages of sorrow, his handsome gray head bent courteously toward this voluble companion as though her every word were priceless. Manners, she reflected, cannot be assumed on occasion like garments, but are a part of the very texture of a personality. She could not imagine her father anything but suavely courteous, even under the most untoward circumstance.

Nevertheless, beneath her pride in him lingered an odd fear lest, now that he had an audience, he might be moved to oratory over her mother's grave. With Richard Darcy emotion and the expression of it were usually simultaneous. Joan's unresponsiveness (a trait which she hated in herself, but could not help) had hitherto kept her father somewhat in check; but in the presence of a kindly warmth of sympathy like Mrs. Calloway's there was no telling what might happen.

The Major, however, contented himself with murmuring, as he approached the grave, "She was very, very dear to me!" in so touching a voice that Mrs. Calloway openly wiped her eyes, exclaiming, "You poor man! Don't you think I understand—I, who've laid away two of them?"

Joan moved hastily out of earshot, leaving the pair to reminiscence. Talk of things that hurt was to the girl like pouring acid upon an open wound; but if it helped her poor father, by all means let it help him. She had never made the mistake of thinking that because his grief was facile it was any the less strong and real. His utter helplessness, his stunned amaze that the wife he so sorely needed could have gone away and left him to bear the vicissitudes of life without her, were as piteous to his daughter as the wailing grief of a child. If she could have comforted him in any way other than by speech she would have done so. In the presence of great emotion she was dumb—though she sometimes thought she might be able to write him what she felt. Often at night she lay awake for hours, wondering how she could drive out of his eyes that baffled, frightened look which always came when things went wrong with him, and which only her mother had been able to banish. …

It haunted her all through the months which followed, that look of her father's; and sometimes in the midst of school-girl gaieties she would fall suddenly silent, thinking that she had no right to enjoy herself because he was there alone in the city of his childhood which seemed to have forgotten him. Joan was not yet quite the hard young egotist she intended to become.

And so when toward the end of her journey the train slid into a pleasant country, mellow with the evening sun, long reaches of rolling pasture and hill and fertile bottom-land that meant Kentucky, something welled up in the girl's heart deeper than glamour of place, stronger than regret for her sheltered little past, than fear and hope for her unguessed future; perhaps the deepest and strongest feeling life plants in the human soul—the blood-tie. Weak or brave, fraud or fool or honorable gentleman—perhaps a little of all these things—it was her father who waited there for a woman to come and make him a home again; and Joan was ready.