The two rooms in which Ellen Neal had established herself were on the
second floor of a house that had gone some decades since into a state of
senile decrepitude. But such was the fashion of building in its day that
it showed no particular signs of its approaching end beyond a slight
tilt to leeward and the rather eczematic effect of its stuccoed brick
facade. A high-waisted door surmounted by a fine fan-light and supported
by slender columns which had once been white led into a square panelled
hall from which curved a staircase of exquisite proportions. These
things in a city of larger growth and greater sophistication would have
marked the house as the natural abode of artists and their ilk; but in
Louisville, where art is yet chiefly a thing to be taken in courses by
the elect, it let itself out in rooms for light housekeeping and other
humble purposes. The slender columns were defaced by such signs
as, "Feather Cleaning and Artificial Flowers,"--"Furniture
Upholstered,"--"Plain Dressmaking," etc.
The neighborhood, except for this one decrepit mansion standing well in
from the sidewalk with an ancient sycamore for company, had long since
forgotten its former claims to fashion; but it was still respectable.
Trust Ellen Neal for that! She had the same flair for respectability as
had the Misses Darcy for gentility. No doubtful character, whether in
house or individual, could fail to yield up its weakness to the
corrosive rectitude of Miss Neal's shrewd eye.
Joan liked to come to this house, not only because Ellen and the
familiar home furniture were there, but because it carried her romantic
fancy back into the Louisville her father sometimes talked about, the
old South with all its lost glamour of gallantry and derring-do. "_Les
belles dames du temps jadis_" was a phrase that invariably came to her
mind as she entered the graceful, defaced portal. Nearby stood a
street-pump where an actress who was one day to make the charm of
American women world-famous, used to come each morning to draw water, in
her shabby little slippers with a rope of hair over each shoulder--a
lovely young Rebekah at the well. Around the corner stood another old
mansion, now debased to commercial uses, in front of which the
townspeople used to gather daily at a certain hour to watch the languid
progress from door to carriage of a beauty so widely heralded that her
name and her many love-affairs have become history. Here and there in a
neglected fence-corner a ragged rose-bush, or a clump of larkspur
bravely in bloom, spoke to a few observers, such as Joan, of gardens
which had been the lovely setting of lovely ladies long since dead and
dust.
Twilight was the hour for that neighborhood. Joan liked to fancy Ellen's
house as the darkness fell, with candle-light streaming from the
wide-flung windows, and glimpses within of bells in crinoline and beaux
in tight wrinkled trousers, dancing a quadrille. Among them moved negro
servitors with trays of frosted silver cups, and syllabub (though she
had no slightest notion of what syllabub might be), and black cake, and
small, pricked, beaten biscuit with ham in their insides. And there
would be carriages stopping constantly at the door, to emit more belles
and gallants, girls hoop-skirted and beshawled, who ran lightly up the
curve of the long staircase, with apologies to the couples they
disturbed in passing....
Always the house brought such fancies to Joan, and so clearly that she
sometimes wondered whether they were less fancies than race-memories,
souvenirs of Darcys who might have lived and made merry there in the
halcyon days when the old gray river-town was at its zenith; truly, as
it boasted, the Gateway to the South, stopping-place for all travelers
on these floating palaces which no longer ply their leisurely journeys
down the Ohio and the Mississippi to the Gulf.
Once she had questioned her father about it. "No, that's not one of our
houses, I think," he replied interestedly. "Though it might have been.
Your ancestors were very fond of change, Dollykins--as I am myself. We
seem to have lived in half the houses in Louisville, at one time or
another. But that one has been shabby and tumbledown ever since I can
remember. In my boyhood it was a cheap boarding-house, for actors and
people of that sort, I believe. I knew no one who lived there."
Joan was disappointed. She would have liked to claim the old mansion as
a relative.
As she went wearily homeward from her disastrous interview with her
father, Joan suddenly bethought herself of this house, and of Ellen. She
was in no mood just then for the cheerful vulgarities of her
step-mother. On the impulse, she went into the nearest drug-store and
telephoned that she would not be home that night for dinner.
"Ellen shall cook me some pancakes, and I will help her," she decided,
comforted by the idea. It must be remembered that Joan was only
nineteen.
Inhabitants in suspenders and dressing-sacks, seeking air on the
doorstep, stared at the girl inquisitively as she entered; but once
within the dimness of the panelled hall she was able to forget these
anachronisms. The quaint elegance of an earlier day was proof against
even Expert Feather-curling, and Upholstery Done Here.
From above came a sudden tuneless whistling, and then a thump on a door
and a man's voice calling, "Say, Mrs. Neal! Here's a bushel of fine
assorted socks for you, and if you can get enough out of the lot to keep
my feet off the cauld, cauld ground till pay-day, I'll be yours truly."
She heard Ellen's voice replying in more muffled tones, "All right, sir,
just dump 'em in the door, will you? My hands are in the dough."
Joan was amused to hear Ellen Neal called "Mrs."--she who was so
unmistakably and truculently a spinster; also she was surprised at the
politeness of her "sir" in response, for Ellen was not given to the
small amenities of social intercourse. The Major himself was rarely
"sir" to Ellen.
The whistling resumed itself, coming rapidly nearer; and around the
curve of the stairs, which he took two at a time, bounded a young man,
who brought himself and his whistling to a full stop just in time to
avoid carrying Joan with him in his downward course.
"Whew!--just missed you!" he exclaimed aghast. "You startled me. For a
minute I thought you were a ghost!"
"Perhaps I am," murmured Joan, and demurely passed on up the stairs.
He turned and stared after the white ascending figure. She was aware of
his eyes following her. Suddenly he chuckled, "I knew I'd find you
again. And I found the quotation, too! 'Richard the Second,' by William
Shakespeare."
Joan glanced over her shoulder. "I do not know what you are talking
about," she said frigidly, "and I do not know you from Adam!" She had
brought the impertinence upon herself, but she felt quite able to handle
it--particularly with Ellen Neal just a few steps away.
Even as she spoke, however, she was aware that she did know this young
man. Something in his voice, in his awkward, deferential manner, brought
back to her memory the too-sympathetic drummer on the train. She lifted
her eyes from his necktie to his face, remembering past regrets. His
ears stuck out.
"Like the Yellow Kid's!" she thought disgustedly.
There is nothing in the least romantic about a man whose ears stick out.
He might as well be fat....
"'Sad stories of the death of kings,'" he was explaining eagerly. "I
looked it up myself. Sort of sounded like Shakespeare."
"Oh! I thought it was 'Alice in Wonderland'!" Joan was surprised into
speech.
"That's a new one on me--'Alice in Wonderland,'"--commented the young
man. "Is it good stuff?"
"You've never read 'Alice in Wonderland'? What a queer childhood you
must have had!"
"Didn't have any," he replied, smiling up at her. Then he removed the
smile, made a respectful little bow, and went on out the door.
Joan found that she was blushing, hotly; and no wonder. She was shocked
by herself. She, one of Sister Mary Agnes's best exemplars of decorum,
had deliberately started and continued a conversation with a strange
young man met by chance on the dark stairway of a house where assuredly
gentlemen did not live. ("Unless very poor gentlemen," she amended; for,
ears or not, he seemed somehow to belong in the category of gentlehood.)
Nor had she even terminated the conversation. It was he who had done
that. He had shown more sense of the fitness of things than had she,
Joan Darcy!
It was all the effect of the hospitable old hall, Joan decided. The
house, like the roof of a friend, had introduced them. But what was he
doing in such a house? It was not the sort of abode that would appeal,
she fancied, to necktie drummers.
She opened Ellen's door without knocking. "Hello, there! Who's that I
met on the stairs, and why does he call you 'Mrs.,' you giddy old
fraud?"
A spoon dropped to the floor with a clatter as Ellen turned, beaming.
"Land sakes! You might as well kill a person as scare her to death," she
complained, far too pleased to admit it. "What you doin' down town this
time o' day, all dressed up like lady-come-to-see? What do you want,
eh?"
"Pancakes," explained Joan, ripping off her long gloves. "I'm going to
stay to supper, Nellen, so get me an apron and let's begin."
Ellen's smile widened. "Pancakes! On a hot night like this?"
Joan nodded. "Um-humm! And lemonade," she said, "and anything else you
can think of that's indigestible. Got any pickles?"
"What would a lone woman be doin' keepin' house without pickles?"
replied Ellen scornfully, producing them. "And there's a batch of
cinnamon rolls in the oven this minute, just as if I was expectin' you."
With a sigh of content, the girl reached down a yellow crockery bowl out
of the cupboard--she was on quite intimate terms with Ellen's
cupboard--and tying a gingham apron about her neck, proceeded to stir
batter. It was the same crockery bowl, and perhaps the same gingham
apron, in which she had stirred batter so long ago that she had been
obliged to stand on a footstool in order to reach the kitchen-table.
There was something substantial and fixed and unchangeable about Ellen
Neal and her possessions, something that spelled home, though it was
only home for other people.
"But you haven't distracted my mind," said Joan judicially, "from the
fact that a young man of your acquaintance calls you 'Mrs.' without
correction. You haven't eloped or anything lately?"
Ellen Neal bridled. "How you do go on, Joan! It makes it look better for
a lone woman to be livin' by herself if she's called 'Mrs.' Men ain't so
apt to get fresh with her."
"No?" murmured Joan. She gazed at Ellen's gaunt unloveliness with
twinkling eyes. "Don't tell me men have been getting fresh with you,
Nellen!"
The other's jaw snapped. "They have not, and they better not try it."
"Don't you think it's rather a risk darning their socks, then?" murmured
the girl wickedly. "It might give them false ideas."
"I only do it for one of 'em, and he pays me good. Anything's proper so
long as you get paid for it."
Joan laughed aloud. "Why, Mrs. Neal, Mrs. Neal, you shock me! What a
perilous idea!"
"You're awful smart, guyin' me, but I'd be ashamed to think the kind of
thoughts you're thinkin' now," said Ellen Neal, unsmiling. "And you a
spinster yourself! Thoughts are as bad as deeds, any day--worse, 'cause
they come easier. That's one thing I've noticed about you lately, Joan.
You seem to know about things that ain't ladylike, somehow. Something's
happened to you, child. You ain't the nice little girl you used to be."
"No," admitted Joan, "I'm not. And the world's not the nice little world
it used to be, either." She went over and laid her head on her friend's
bony shoulder. "Don't scold me to-day, dear. You're right, but--Oh,
Nellen, father's lost our money! And there's nothing in the world I can
call my own. Just absolutely nothing!"
A silence fell. "So," said the old woman. "You've found out, at last,
have you? I've wondered how long it would take. And now what you goin'
to do about it?" she demanded suddenly. "Are you goin' to law?"
Joan shook her head. "You know what Mother would say to that."
Ellen sighed. "I suppose she wouldn't hear to it." It was a curious fact
that when these two spoke of Mary Darcy, they always spoke as if she
were still alive, and near them. "Anyway, you can't squeeze blood out of
a turnip--though I must say I'd like to see _somethin'_ squeezed out of
them kind of turnips, if it's only insides!" she added quite
blood-thirstily. "Oh deary me, deary me! How often I've begged your ma
to sneak what there was left out of his reach and put it away where I
keep mine."
"Where's that, Nellen?"
"In an old stockin'-fut under my bedtick, where you can bet no man on
earth ever laid eyes on it, or ever will!"
The smell of scorching bread suddenly filled the room. "Land sakes, my
cinnamon-rolls! And I'd promised that boy to save him some for
breakfast."
"Breakfast?" exclaimed Joan, glad enough of a diversion from discussing
her undiscussable father. "You mean to tell me you're not only keeping
your young man darned, but breakfasted? Nellen, I'm positively jealous!"
"You wouldn't be if you could see him eat," said the other seriously.
"Acts like he ain't had enough food to fill him sence he was born. He
was gettin' all his meals out to a restaurant before I come, a place he
calls 'The Sign of the Dirty Spoon.' Jokin', I suppose--he's a great one
for jokes. But he looked so skinny, and was always takin' something for
dyspepsy, so I told him I'd give him a good breakfast anyway, just to
start the day on. Say, Joan, you ought to see him put it away! He says
once, 'I 'spose this is what you call home-cookin', ain't it?' 'Land,
sakes,' says I, 'don't you know home-cookin' when you see it?' 'I ain't
never seen it before!' he says, laughing."
While she talked Ellen was bustling capably about, laying a cloth,
getting out dishes, dropping Joan's batter into a sizzling saucepan,
from whence arose dense, pleasing vapors.
"Here, Joan, mix some cinnamon in that sugar, 'less you'd ruther have
molasses on 'em. You ought to see the room he's got. Nothin' but books,
all over the tables, piled up on the floor, even on the window-sills--"
"Books?" said Joan, pricking up an ear. She had not imagined the
wide-eared young man in his dapper clothes a student.
"Whatever people want all them books around for I can't see," said
Ellen. "Dust collectors, I call 'em; but he says they're his college
career. Always will have his joke! And the dirt--! He had a colored
woman in to do for him before I come, and guess what she used to do with
her dust?" She paused dramatically, arms akimbo.
Joan admitted her imagination unequal to the task.
"Swept it under the bed and left it there! Land!" said Ellen Neal, "how
I do hate a nigger! You can bet I got that place to rights in a jiffy."
"I can indeed," murmured Joan, "and I can also bet he couldn't find a
thing belonging to him for a week afterwards."
Ellen grinned. "You've the truth of it. There wasn't a morning for about
a week but what he'd thump on the floor and yell down the chimney, 'Mrs.
Neal, _oh_, Mrs. Neal! For heaven's sake where is my blue necktie?' or,
'In the name of Jehoshaphat, what have you done with my other pair of
pants?' It kind of reminded me of your pa," she said, sighing. "I been
lookin' after him ever sence. There now, ain't you goin' to eat your
pancakes now you've got 'em?"
Joan drew up her chair to the oil-cloth covered table, and, despite the
heat and her troubles, made such a meal as she had not eaten for weeks
at her step-mother's elaborate board. Ellen sat opposite her, with no
servant-and-mistress nonsense to complicate the pleasure of hospitality.
Sometimes the old woman waited on Joan, and sometimes Joan waited on
Ellen, all in a friendly democracy that would have caused Major Darcy's
hair to rise on end. It had been his conscientious effort for years to
keep Ellen Neal "in her place." The difficulty was in the ups and downs
of the Darcy menage to know just what might be considered Ellen's place.
Not troubling themselves with any such niceties of status, the two ate
their pancakes and drank their lemonade and otherwise courted
indigestion contentedly, meanwhile chatting about the young man from
upstairs, who for some reason began to appeal to Joan's imagination. His
name, it appeared, was Archibald Blair.
"Archibald Blair! Nellen, how romantic! Like an English novel. Young
Lord Toodledeboots ruined at Monte Carlo, hiding his poverty and a
broken heart in lodgings. I suppose these might be called lodgings? If
only his ears had been made to fit him!"
She no longer thought of him as a necktie drummer. The books made a
difference. It seemed unlikely that necktie drummers would be on terms
of first-name intimacy with Shakespeare. Moreover, his awkward yet
somehow easy and unassuming air, like that of a friendly young dog who
takes for granted that the world will be glad to see him, marked him as
one not belonging to what her father called "the canile." No, he was a
student and a gentleman, stranded by some freak of fortune in this
near-slum, a youthful Beloved Vagabond. (It was the year when Locke's
great book cast a glamour over all strange men in shabby clothing.)
Although Archibald Blair was by no means shabby; on the contrary, rather
appallingly dapper.
"I wonder how he happens to be living in a house like this?" she
ruminated aloud.
"And why wouldn't he be living here?" demanded Ellen tartly. "It's cheap
and decent, and there's some folks that don't like to go forever hoppin'
from one place to another, like fleas on a dog's back. He's lived in
that same room upstairs ever since he can remember."
"Oh, has he?" Joan's eye kindled. It occurred to her that the young
man's history might have some connection with the history of the house
itself. "Ellen, I have it! It's the old family mansion, belonged to his
father and grandfather and great-grandfather, and _of course_ he wants
to go on living in it. I would myself!"
Ellen grinned. "If there's a romantical notion to be found, trust you
for finding it. But if you really want to know, folks do say--" She
hesitated, under the hallucination (which many virtuous women share)
that she disliked to repeat gossip.
"Yes, yes? Do go on, Nellen!"
"Well, they do say that if he's got a father at all it's more than he
knows, let alone a grandfather, and great-grandfather. I had it from a
woman downstairs (her that curls feathers, and she got it straight from
somebody who used to live in the neighborhood when this was a actors'
boardin'-house), that he got left here when he was a little boy, by his
mother, in hock for her board-bill. And she never come back for him."
Joan gave a gasp. "Oh," she cried. "Oh! poor woman!"
Ellen eyed her curiously. "Poor _woman_? I should think you'd say 'poor
child'!"
"Poor both of them! But can't you see how much greater the tragedy must
have been for the woman, who knew--who was to blame? Imagine how she
must have dreamed of that pitiful little boy with his nose pressed
against the window-pane watching for her--and she not able to come for
him! Ellen--That's what he's doing here now! Waiting for his mother to
come back!"
"If he is, I hope it's with a club in his hand," muttered the other
angrily. "Why wasn't she 'able to come,' I'd like to know?"
"Perhaps she died. Or, she couldn't get enough money, or oh--oh, Ellen,
don't you _see_? She didn't dare to come for him! He was getting too
big, noticing things. For his own sake she had to give him up!" There
were tears in Joan's eyes, ready to spill over.
Ellen paused and stared at her. "Well!" she said at last. "If I had your
imagination, Joan Darcy, I'd go to a hospital and get it cut out. It
ain't safe! Here you are blubbering over the troubles of a woman who
maybe never lived, and probably was a bad lot if she did--and a'most
making me blubber over her myself!"
Joan laughed and jumped up. "Here, let me help with the dishes. You wash
and I'll wipe. But what a funny, pitiful little boy he must have been
with those stick-out ears and those big, innocent-looking front teeth of
his! I wonder why it is that big front teeth always do make a person
look so innocent, Ellen?"
"Seems to me you noticed a lot to have seen Mr. Blair only once."
Joan did not think it necessary to mention that she had seen him more
than once.
"I always notice things--I can't help it. Anyway, I'm glad you keep the
poor thing darned and comfy! It's only charity."
"Charity nothing. He pays me good, and prompter than I ever got paid
before in all _my_ life," disclaimed the other rather tactlessly.
While she washed and put away her dishes, the girl made a tour of
inspection about the rooms that were so full of associations to her. She
smiled and nodded at the two familiar Landseer dogs on the wall, which
had been a familiar part of every dining-room she remembered. She patted
the worn chairs affectionately, and went in to pay her respects to the
shorn four-post bed, which looked more at ease in its present
surroundings than in others where she had seen it. The panelled walls,
as nearly white as scrubbing could make them, the wide-silled windows
with arched casements, the tall mantel-shelf, the finely molded ceiling
which years of coal soot and cobwebs and general neglect had not
sufficed to rob of dignity, all made a more suitable setting than Ellen
guessed for her mistress's household goods; and to Joan these two
bare and shabby rooms had become a haven of refuge. Tenement though it
was, there was more of genuine beauty in the place where Ellen did plain
dressmaking for very humble customers than in all the elaborate
establishment with which Richard Darcy had managed to provide his
daughter. Joan was very dependent upon beauty.
Later, Ellen walked out with her through the languorous summer evening
to the house which she never called home. Nothing more had been said
between them of the loss of her independence; but the girl felt soothed
and comforted, strengthened as the heart is always strengthened in the
presence of a deep though inarticulate devotion. She slipped her hand
into the other's thin arm, and so linked they walked along without much
talk between them, listening as they passed to pleasant sounds from many
a shadowed porch and garden, guitar music, singing, the inevitable
hushed murmur of boy and girl voices commingled, which is as natural to
a summer gloaming as the twitter of birds in spring.
There came again to Joan, for the first time in weeks, something of the
glamour, the sense of promise, which had touched her in the summer past
when she walked at night with her father through the strange city where
he had once been young. It was as if Romance brushed her in passing with
shadowy skirts, and Joan felt that she must catch at them, cling to
them, before it was too late. Youth is so short, so short!...
Ellen, too, felt the witchery of the soft night; but to the Ellens,
Romance comes only vicariously.
"Joie," she said after a long silence, "ain't it time you was having
some steady company yourself, child?"
The girl did not smile at the phrase. It voiced too well her own secret
thoughts. There had been something strangely unreal, unnatural, about
the past weeks. She had brought nothing out of her experience with life
so far, not even a friend--for Stefan Nikolai was merely an inheritance.
"You're right," she said soberly "I suppose I ought to have a 'steady
company' at least by this time. That ought to be simple
enough!--Marriage is about the only thing left for a girl in my
position, isn't it?"
"Who's talking about marriage? You don't have to marry every fellow you
walk out with, I should hope," said Ellen surprisingly. "I've walked out
with quite a few myself!... But as to gettin' married, Jo--it's about
the only thing for a girl in any position, I guess, even if she finds
out afterwards that she's picked a lemon. Lemons are better than
nothing."
"Why, Mrs. Neal!" laughed Joan. "What sentiments from a confirmed
spinster-person!"
To which Ellen replied quietly, "It's the spinsters who know."