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 habitues 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 negligee over her
nightgown. (Her father had become quite reconciled to negligees, 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.