Not only the older girls, but more than one of the nuns, made some
excuse to come into Joan's little room when she was dressing that
Saturday evening. The rumor had gone forth that their charge was
beginning to take interest in worldly affairs again, and the good ladies
congratulated each other. While they themselves had forsworn the
pleasures of the world, they were quite aware that for some these had
their uses, if only as an anodyne. They took, too, a quite feminine
pleasure in Joan's frock, a simple black chiffon with transparent
sleeves, which she had cut out a little at the neck to make it suitable
for the evening.
"I suppose," said the Reverend Mother, making her turn round and round
for inspection, "that this is what they call in the world a decollete
basque, is it not? And very becoming, too! Only"--she added with the
frank conventual innocence that occasionally startled Joan, "does not
such a display of the person tend to encourage lust of the eye, my
child?"
Joan laughed a little. "Let us hope so, Mother!" she murmured. "We
strive to please"--a remark which the old lady trusted that she had
misunderstood.
Her striving on that occasion was by no means in vain. There seems
something peculiarly alluring to the masculine taste (as women of the
oldest profession in the world are quite aware) about black. Joan, with
nothing to relieve her somberness except a cluster of white gardenias at
her breast, would have held the gaze of any man who saw her as surely as
she held that of Eduard and of Betty's father, who had hitherto not
known his daughter's friend and openly regretted his missed opportunity.
She was one of the women whom motherhood, even denied and thwarted
motherhood, gives a momentary poignant beauty, of the sort that Leonardo
loved to paint. Betty's father was indeed so regretful of his missed
opportunity that it was with some difficulty Eduard secured the
tete-a-tete upon which he had counted.
"At last!" he sighed when he had finally manoeuvered her into the
conservatory to admire orchids. "I began to think this was going to be
another wasted hour, like my ghastly experience of the monastic
life.--Do you realize, my dear, that I am entitled to a little praise
and comforting on your part?"
"Just why?"
"Why? Why, because of the discretion, the magnanimity, in fact the utter
damn-fool quixotism of my late conduct! At Longmeadow, you know. Leaving
you--when I might have stayed!"
Joan was rather startled. She had not expected him to carry the war into
the enemy's country to such an extent as this.
"That makes twice," he murmured, leaning over her, "that I've let you go
unscathed, my dear. When you left school--and when you came back to me.
But--Fate is too strong for us. You're not expecting me, I hope, to let
you go a third time?"
"In just about five minutes," she smiled, glancing at her wristwatch.
"I've ordered my taxi for ten o'clock."
He gave a little exclamation, and caught her hand. "Don't pretend to be
so cool and indifferent, you witch! I know you better than that.
You--cool and indifferent! Have I forgotten that night under the
beech-tree? Have you?"
Joan suddenly blazed out at him, white with anger. "No! I've not
forgotten that. Nor afterwards."
"Afterwards?"
"Will you be good enough to tell me in plain language what was your idea
in running away?"
He eyed her appreciatively. He liked a touch of temper in a woman. It
gave them a zest your amiable creatures lack.
"Why, Beautiful, what else as a man of honor could I do? A thing like
that doesn't stand still, you know! The flare dies out--or it goes
further. Our flare would not have died out."
Her lip curled. "And as 'a man of honor' it never occurred to you that
we might preserve our flare, as it were, in marriage?"
He sighed ruefully. "Oh, yes, it did! That temptation, too, I had to
fight. For you see, my dear, I don't believe in marriage. I've seen too
much of it (vicariously). Believe me, it preserves no flares! It
quenches them. The thing's as fatal as death--though not, thank God, as
inevitable! I will not put a relation I value to a test it will not
bear," he explained, evidently in earnest. "What!--tie a creature of
spirit and fire like yourself to the duty of forever loving one man,
obeying one man, giving yourself into his hands to break at his leisure?
Can you think of any surer way of killing love than to make a duty of
it? 'Duty'--the most hideous, cold, Puritanical word in our hideous,
cold, Puritanical language! The French put it better. _Devoir_ suggests
something that is by no means cold. Therefore, dearest girl"--he kissed
her hands--"let me pay you my _devoirs_ always, and be sure that I shall
never trouble you with anything so unpleasant as a 'duty.'--Why, suppose
I had taken you then, bound you hand and foot to me by law--think how
bored we should be with each other already! It would be from me you
would be taking a vacation, instead of from the unfortunate Blair."
(Joan winced.) "As it is--"
"Well?" she prompted, veiling her eyes. "As it is--Eduard?"
He drew her toward him with little inarticulate murmurs. She took a
fleeting glance at the face approaching hers. It was flushed, the eyes a
trifle glazed as if he had been drinking. He breathed hard.
"How unbecoming it is to them!" she thought, but without resisting. (The
reader who happens to like Joan would do well to skip this paragraph. It
is not our heroine at her best.)
"As it is," said Eduard rather hoarsely, "we have each other for all
time, my Beautiful! Nothing to bind us, nothing to hold us, except our
sacred--er--"
"Flare?" prompted Joan, helpfully.
But he was not paying his usual attention to words just then. He lifted
her face to his, and closed his eyes the better to savor what was
coming....
An unexpected sound caused him to open them again. It was laughter,
issuing from the very lips he was about to enjoy; not hysterical,
nervous laughter such as might have been pardoned under the
circumstances, but cool and sweet, and unimpassioned as the tinkling of
ice in a pitcher.
"You're not really trying to warm it up and serve it over again?"
protested Joan, as she extricated herself from his embrace. "How absurd!
I thought you were too much of an artist for that. And at your age,
too!"
She sauntered back to the others, still laughing over her shoulder. He
did not follow.
Which may be said to have been the end of Eduard Desmond, so far as this
chronicle is concerned....
But it was also the end of what Joan had disloyally spoken of to him as
her vacation. The word stuck in her memory, and she was ashamed of it.
Her heart yearned toward Archie.
The nuns bade her a delighted farewell; and all the way home she made
amends for her long neglect of him by thinking of her husband
constantly. By contrast with Eduard's smooth hair, his slim hands, and
well-modulated, expressive voice, Archie appeared to her the very
epitome of manliness. She idealized his defects into beauties, big ears,
clumsiness, and all. She remembered with a thrill how easily he carried
her upstairs when she was tired, how he went tiptoeing squeakily about
the house in the morning for fear of waking her, whispering in tones
that would have roused the dead--Blessed, funny old Archie! She could
hardly wait for the sight of him.
Yet when she did see him, through the car-window, watching the platform
for her appearance as tensely as a terrier watches a rathole, Joan
shrank back with a faint gasp. He was looking quite appallingly dapper,
with shiny new shoes and a Derby hat--an article of wear not designed
for people with badly adjusted ears; and his mouth hung slightly open in
his eagerness, showing the infantile front teeth, through which issued
(she could almost hear it) a sort of a tuneful hissing, as was his way
in moments of emotion, just to show that he was not nervous or excited
in the least.
Joan shrank back, the last person to leave the train. And as she passed
a mirror, catching a glimpse of her pale face within it she whispered
piteously, "Oh, Joan Darcy, what have you done?"