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 portieres 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."