Why Joan? Part 37

"Humm! Well, we'll see what your new husband thinks about it, eh?"

"No, you don't!" It was a sort of gasp; but instantly the voice steadied again. "You'll never lay eyes on my husband, Joe. He doesn't live here.

I--I just happened to come over for the races."

The man grinned. "That's easy enough! I seen you drivin' in with your swell friends, and sittin' in a box and all. Recognized you right away, too, for all that thick veil. You ain't the sort a man forgets easy, Ef," he leered. "Not when he's knowed you like I have! I'll get your name before you leave this stand, and then--Better come across, kiddo!"

"I--let me go now, Joe! I'll think it over."

The man chuckled. "Afraid somebody'll see you talking to me, eh? You can bet your sweet life you'll think it over, and d.a.m.n quick, too! See?"

His grip tightened on her arm. Effie May glanced this way and that, nervously. Joan stepped out from behind her pillar. After all, the woman was her father's wife! She must be protected....

Just then she saw Archie coming, and hurried to him.

"It was an old lady with a bonnet tied under her chin," he told her soberly. "She's dead."

But Joan had no ears for the earlier tragedy.

"There's a man frightening Mrs. Darcy," she said breathlessly, "he seems to be somebody she knows. He's--threatening her! Oh, Archie, what shall we do?"

The meaning of it, the incredible sordid horror of the thing she had half learned, began to come home to her. Her father's wife!

"Threatening!" Archie's jaw set. "Here, that won't do!"

He strode forward, Joan following. They both heard the man say with leering distinctness, "It ought to be worth a _little_ cash to a loving husband to learn the sort of woman he's married up with, Ef, old girl!"

Then Archie's hand fell on his shoulder.

Joan never forgot the face her step-mother turned upon them--She made a desperate attempt to rally.

"Why--why, dearie! is that you? A--an old friend of mine's been giving me a tip."

"Get out," said Archie to the man. "Get out, quick!"

"Hold on there, kid--So, you been robbing the cradle this time, Ef?" He grinned at her evilly. "Wait a minute, mister, there's a few things I might be able to tell you about this party--"

"Nothing I don't know already," muttered Archie, his grip tightening.

"You've got five minutes to get off the grounds before I tell the police. Blackmail's a penitentiary offense in this State."

The man hesitated, looked at Archie's grim jaw, and went....

Joan and her step-mother gazed at each other. The woman's face had a curious gray look under its perennial bloom, and she moistened her lips with a dry tongue.

"You--you heard?" she said at last.

Joan nodded. She could not speak.

It was Archie who remarked quietly: "You'll want to be going home, I guess. I'll get a taxicab."

Then sheer pity overcame the horror in the girl's mind. "Yes, Mother.

Come home with me!" she murmured.

For the first and last time in her life she had called her father's wife "Mother."

CHAPTER x.x.xV

"I guess you've got to have the whole story now, though it ain't a very pretty story to tell a girl," said Effie May wearily. "I don't know as your papa would much want you to hear it, Joan...."

To the girl the whole episode seemed unreal, part of that strange day, with the holiday crowds, the brief, hectic excitement of the races, followed by the pistol-shot that meant the death of a ruined old woman.

She could not believe that she, Joan Darcy, convent-bred, the daughter of reserved and fastidious people, could be actually partic.i.p.ating in this impossible melodrama.

"What my father would wish hardly matters now, I think," she said, more frigidly than she realized. "Please say what you have to say."

All the way home her step-mother had wept, steadily and hopelessly, with ugly snuffling noises that took away what dignity there might have been in her grief. Joan, always helpless in the face of uncontrolled emotion, made no effort to comfort her. Her impulse of pity had already died into disgust. She could not look at that swollen, grayish face, of whose careful complexion tears made strange havoc.

The woman sighed. "If only you weren't so young!--I suppose you think I'm a bad lot--bad as they make 'em. But I'm not. I never was. Oh, I know I've done things ladies don't do!--but then ladies ain't often asked to do 'em, dearie. You got to remember that."

Joan shrugged, and resigned herself to hear what she was to hear.

"I guess you know I wasn't born a lady, nor raised like one, though I've tried.... Well, never mind that!--Pa had a little cash-and-carry grocer store over to Indianapolis, and we lived upstairs, all of us in two rooms.... It was the dirt I couldn't stand, and the crowding. It ain't _right_ for a whole lot of children to live like that, all mixed in so!

The others didn't seem to mind, but I was always sort of nice in my ways. Maybe because I was born before Mom took to the c.o.ke."

"The what?"

"c.o.ke--dope, you know. It was the only thing that seemed to keep her going, poor Mom! and I'm glad she had it."

"Was your mother an invalid?" asked Joan, a little startled by this breadth of tolerance.

"Oh, no. But kids come along once a year regular, and she wasn't ever, so to speak, well. I made up my mind when I wasn't more than ten never to get myself in the fix Ma was in!... My two older sisters felt that way, too, I guess. They always had fellows, but not the sort that'd do to marry. Men like Pa, you know. No 'count--One of the girls worked at a dressmaker's, and sewed till her eyes were red all the time, and her shoulders stooped and she coughed. The other--well, the other didn't keep straight, dearie. Awful few of the girls I knew did keep straight.

But Mame went into one of those houses--you know?--and had a lot of swell clothes, and jewelry and all. I remember all us younger ones used to envy her. But she didn't last long at it, and she died--horrible."

Effie May's eyes were fixed on strange places, and the tragedy of the world was in them.

"She used to be a pretty thing, Mame; and sweet, too.... Well, it seemed to me there ought to be _something_ better for a girl than marrying a man like Pa and slaving, or getting a good job like Jule's and slaving, or going wrong like Mame and slaving worst of all! Once when I was out delivering dresses for the dressmaker where Jule worked, I saw what I was looking for. Society women. Ladies.

"That's what I'm going to be," I says to myself, "a Society woman! (I was about twelve then.) You don't have to work, you live in a fine house and wear swell clothes, and you can keep as straight as you like.

"The others used to laugh at me, but Mom never did. She was real ambitious for her children, Mom was. 'You keep on thinkin' so and you'll get there,' she used to say. 'You're smart and pretty enough for anything!' And so I was, then!" Effie May gave a sigh.

"A fellow come along presently that looked pretty good to me. I met him over to Casey's dance-hall, I remember, and from the first it was all up with him. He was better than the fellows I'd been running with; a good dresser, always flas.h.i.+ng his roll--you know race-horse people used to make good money before the Pari-Mutuels--And when he wanted me to come over here to Louisville with him--well, it looked to be my chance--Imagine starting out to be a lady, in company with Joe Markheim!" said Effie May grimly.

Joan exclaimed, "Not that dreadful-looking creature you were talking with to-day?"

The other nodded. "Only he wasn't dreadful-looking then. He was real handsome--or he looked that way to me. You see I was only sixteen," she sighed. "Almost anything in pants that'd take me away from home would have looked good to me then, I guess!--But I talked to Mom about it, and she thought I'd better take a chance, too. So I went."