Why Joan? Part 4

Calloway."

The other gave an unexpected squeal of mirth. "Goodness' sakes, don't call me _that_! If you don't feel like callin' me 'mamma' yet"--(there was a hopeful pause, which Joan did not fill)--"then you might as well call me Effie May. I'm not so awfully much older than you, I guess--I was only sixteen when I eloped with my first. But there's one thing I wanted to tell you"--(her voice lost its confident note and became rather shy). "I married your father as much to get you as to get him, dearie. A man's easy enough to pick up anywhere, goodness knows! if you've got the looks. But a child--" she sighed. "That's something else again. I used to think I'd like to adopt one, only Calloway didn't want to be bothered--Say, it was more fun than anything I've ever done in my life, shopping for lawngerie and little models and all, and telling the girls in the stores they were for my little girl just coming home from boarding-school!..."

At this juncture, for some inexplicable reason--perhaps the warmth of a kindly human presence, perhaps sheer rage with the vulgar, impossible creature who, having purchased her father, expected also to purchase her--whatever brought them, Joan's tears suddenly arrived--a torrent, a deluge of them; in the midst of which her new mamma, with more tact than might have been expected of her, disappeared.

CHAPTER VI

"Get up, Jo! Time you was gettin' up. Come, come--it's ten o'clock!"

A familiar, relentless voice penetrated Joan's consciousness at last, and she screwed her swollen eyelids down tighter and even managed a reproving snore, wondering whether the halcyon days would ever come when she might be allowed to sleep her sleep out in the morning. Probably not, so long as Ellen Neal was within calling distance. The woman had a horror of what she called s.h.i.+ftless ways. Once in a moment of special exasperation she had been heard to mutter, "That's the chief thing that's the matter with your pa--he's never ready to get up in the morning!"--a remark which had remained in Joan's memory.

Now the sheets were suddenly jerked off her, and the relentless voice continued, "No use pretendin' you're asleep when you ain't. Here's your breakfast they've sent up to you, child, just as if you was sick a-bed.

Humph!"

Suddenly reality came back upon her with full force--horrible reality; and she jumped up in bed and flung her arms around the old servant's neck, clinging tight, as she had done many a time before when something frightened her.

"Oh, Nellen, Nellen!" she moaned. "It's you! I thought you had deserted me, too!"

The woman stood immobile in this embrace, making no effort to return it.

But her eyes blinked a little.

"Sho! What would I want to do that for? Don't be silly--Look out! There now, if you haven't gone and upset the coffee all over them fancy sheets! Coffee's hard to get out, too. That's what comes of havin' your vittles in bedrooms, where they don't belong."

The tears, which had threatened to take possession of Joan again, turned into a burst of wild laughter, "No matter! Plenty more where they come from, Nellen. What is a lace-trimmed sheet to my new mamma? I expect the very dishcloths are hand-embroidered. Behold the abode of cash, Ellen, cas.h.!.+ Isn't it grand? Oh," she cried, her voice breaking, "_why_ didn't you come to me last night! Didn't you know how I'd need you?"

"I didn't know you was here, child, till I come this morning to see when him and her was expectin' you."

The girl's face fell. "Why, Ellen! Aren't you living here?"

"Me? In this house? I wouldn't so demean myself," said the other primly.

"Do you mean to say"--Joan's cheeks were hot--"that after all these years, and everything you've done for us, my father has _let you go_?"

Ellen tossed her head. "'Twan't none of his lettin', child. I told him that all things considered I'd ruther sew for my livin'. And so I would.

Your time's your own that way, and you see more of folks. I like folks.

I must say," she added conscientiously, "that woman--your pa's wife--was real kind about offerin' to get me work with a dressmaker. But Ellen Neal don't have to be beholden to n.o.body, thank you!"

"And where do you live?"

A mysterious smile twinkled in the woman's eyes. "Some day when you're good and sick of all this fancy flubdubbery" (she indicated with a disparaging hand the elegancies of the blue chamber) "you come and see where I live, Jo, and come often. I've got me two as nice rooms as ever you seen. And--I got my own furniture for 'em, too, real grand furniture I bought up cheap at an auction room. There's some carved chairs, and a walnut desk with a bookcase on top, and some blue velvet porteers, and a mahogany bed with the tester sawed off--"

Comprehension dawned on Joan. "Ellen! _Our_ furniture!" she cried.

Ellen nodded. "Some of it. As much as I could git. I'm keepin' it for you till you git a home of your own to put it in, Joie. I sort of thought your ma would want me to."

Joan was weeping again, not the devastating flood of the past night, but sweet and healing tears, as good for strained nerves as a summer rain is good for flowers.

"You old wretch!" she gulped. "Where did you get the money?"

The other grinned. "Any time Ellen Neal gets caught without plenty in her stockin'-fut, you may be sure the Scots blood is failin' her! I'm a whole lot richer than I'm willin' to let some folks know. Why, I could set idle, if I'd a mind to, the rest of my life--only I don't hold with settin' idle just because you got a right." (Long afterwards it occurred to Joan that Ellen, who was not given to discoursing on her own affairs, must have had some reason for thus bragging of her unsuspected riches.) "There's nothing," she added rather irrelevantly, "that makes a person contented with the place she's in like knowin' she can go somewhere else if she's a mind to."

What barrier there had been between servant and mistress--a fluctuating barrier at best, dependent upon Joan's varying conceptions of her own dignity--had gone down forever under that rain of grateful tears, and Joan felt free to ask some of the questions of which her heart was full--how, for instance, the affair between her father and Mrs. Calloway had begun.

"How?" repeated Ellen grimly. "Well, when a lone female and a lone he-male ain't got nothin' to keep 'em apart but an alley-fence, and her with paint on her face till she looks like a fat sixteen, and food on her table every day as good as a two-dollar table d'hote, what can you expect? I wa'n't surprised myself. Nor," she added quietly, "I don't believe your ma would be, Joan."

"Oh, but how it must have hurt her!"

Both spoke in low tones, as if the spirit of Mary Darcy might be lingering near enough to overhear.

"I ain't so sure about that," mused Ellen. "I ain't so sure! Your ma always set great store on havin' the Major comfortable--'Ellen,' she said to me that last day, when we knew what was comin'--'Ellen, be sure to keep him _comfortable_ here at home, so he won't be lookin' for it somewheres else.' There's worse things can happen to a widow-man than gettin' married again."

"Oh, but if I'd been here to look after him myself!" wailed Joan. "If you had only told me what was happening! I might have come back and stopped it!"

"About as much chance as stopping a fire-hydrant that's blown the top off. You're a smart child, Joan, always was; but you don't stand a show against that woman your pa's married--nor I wouldn't want you to," she added cryptically. "You wasn't raised that way.--Anyhow it wasn't none of my business. And just remember this, child, it's none of yours. It's none of yours!"

After she had gone, a sense of something heartening and bracing remained with Joan; and as she brushed out her straight, heavy hair with new silver-backed brushes which bore her own initials, a typical Ellenism recurred to her: "There's nothing that makes a person contented with the place she's in like knowing she can go somewheres else if she's a mind to."

"At least," she thought suddenly, "I'm independent of father. Mother left her property to me--I can get it whenever I ask for it.... And now I understand why!"

Mary Darcy had been a very far-sighted woman.

CHAPTER VII

It was long before Joan recovered from the dazed sensation her father's little surprise had produced in her mind. Perhaps she never did quite recover from it. Something died within her; a naf belief in the wisdom of her elders, the ultimate rightness of existing things, which once gone never returns again. If it is true that we live in experience rather than in years, Joan came to her majority over night.

It was her father's att.i.tude which amazed her most. Had he seemed in the least apologetic, in the least ashamed or embarra.s.sed by the quality of the woman he had put into her mother's place, she would have been ready to pity and console and help him make the best of a grave mistake. But the Major's att.i.tude was that of the cat which has not only eaten the canary, but digested it and found it extremely beneficial to the system.

Far from seeming apologetic, he appeared rather proud of his performance. There was something almost pathetic in his content with his new prosperity, with the ease and luxury of the establishment of which he found himself head.

Joan sometimes thought, with a scornful sort of pity, "How Dad must have _hated_ to be poor!"

Certainly he took to wealth, to which he had always professed himself indifferent, with an alacrity which surprised his daughter.

She had opportunity to notice, too, for the first time in action, Richard Darcy's chief and perhaps sole equipment for the unequal battle of life; his talent for making friends. Not for keeping them--that is a separate art, calling for certain efforts, certain reticences, above all certain abstentions of which Richard Darcy was temperamentally incapable. But in the art of creating admiring and useful acquaintances out of raw material he had few equals, even among his own profession.

Mary Darcy had kept herself and her child for the most part aloof from these easily acquired friends of her husband, though they were invariably quite presentable--(as has been hinted, the Major had no use whatever for what he called "the canile"). Possibly this was owing to some odd Puritan scruples on Mary's part about combining business with pleasure....

But now that business had no longer to be combined with pleasure, Richard Darcy was free to exercise to the full his gift for being agreeable, without afterthought. It was perhaps fortunate that his new wife had made few friends of her own, a fact which left him unhampered in the matter of what he called quite seriously "resuming his position."

Joan found that he was no longer forgotten in the city of his youth. The older residents had already been made aware by means of engraved and crested announcements that Richard Throckmorton Darcy had returned to their midst for the purpose of wedding one Effie May Smith Calloway, and that the bridal pair would be at home after a certain date at a very good address on Elmtree Street. Whither quite a respectable number of them hastened, if only out of curiosity, to leave cards.

What they found was an extremely affable, leisurely, and prosperous-looking host, an establishment which appeared able and willing to maintain those traditions of Southern hospitality which have latterly fallen somewhat into disuse, and a rather silent young girl whose manner atoned for the perhaps excessive cordiality of her step-mother. Some of the callers did not come again, even under pressure; but on the whole Joan realized that the old friends in whom she had almost ceased to believe were about to take the Darcy family belatedly to their bosoms, indifferent to the subst.i.tution of a Mrs.