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 canons, 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 debut 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-cochere from a most imposing limousine, a person who was
indubitably the owner of the strayed garment; a plump, blonde, dimpled
lady who suggested pink _crepe 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 naively, "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.