Why Joan? Part 35

"Why, I guess the railroad company'd help to buy me another if I wanted it--the engineer didn't signal for that crossing. But--I don't. You see," he murmured, looking down, "there were--well, there were sort of a.s.sociations with Lizzie."

Joan understood. Her flush deepened. "I suppose you feel about her as I do about Peggy," she said quickly. "My first horse! If anything were to happen to her, I'd never feel the same about another.--I'm sorry, Archie! We've had great fun out of the little car."

He shook his big shoulders as if trying to rid them of some burden. "Oh, what does the machine matter?" he said roughly. "What gets my goat is what you must be thinking of me, what your father must be thinking! Of all the dod-blasted he-idiots! Not to be able to take better care of a woman than that!"

"I think, and so does my father, that you took wonderfully good care of me! If it hadn't been for your nerve, your quickness.... Ugh!" she shuddered. "Dad says that not one man out of a thousand would have seen what to do in time to do it. In fact, he's waiting in the library to make you a speech before you go. Eloquence-with-gestures. Do you know, I never realized before that in some ways man is really woman's superior?

You've got yourselves better in hand, your muscles do what you tell them to. It was a good lesson for me." She smiled up at him. His miserable eyes touched her, and she held out her hand. "Why, Archie! what makes you look so ashamed?"

He ignored that friendly hand. "I'm thinking that if your father knew _all_ I'd done," he muttered, "he'd do something more to me than make a speech. Eloquence-with-gestures, all right! Gestures of the foot."

Joan decided to take the bull by the horns. "You mean when I came to, and you--kissed me? Why did you do that?" she asked, gravely. ("There!

Now the tooth is out," she thought.)

"Because I was a d.a.m.n fool," he groaned.

Joan's lips twitched despite herself. "Really, you're not very complimentary!"

But Archibald was beyond considerations of mere politeness. "Because I hadn't the decent horse-gumption to keep my feelings to myself! Had to go spilling 'em all over the place, insulting you with 'em!"

There was a pause. "You care for me, then?" prompted Joan.

Archie grinned, miserably. "Well, what do you think?"

"I'm afraid you do."

"You're dead right," he said.

Another silence followed this admission, and then he rose to go. "I guess that'll be about all from me!--Only I want you to know, Miss Darcy, I--I never meant to do such a thing--I never knew I had it in me!

Good Lord! When I saw you all crumpled up there in that gully, not moving at all, even when the train-gang came to pick you up--When I knew that I had done it, I--! And then you opened your eyes and looked at me.... Oh, h.e.l.l, what's the use?"

He turned blindly toward the door.

She had to catch at his coat-tails to stop him. "Archie! Wait a minute.--I'm going to make you a speech myself. In the first place, Archibald Blair, your sort of 'feelings' wouldn't insult anybody. They couldn't! I'm proud to have you care for me, and I'd be glad, too, if only I could--But it's not as if you were asking anything in return, is it?"

"Me?--_asking_? Good Lord, I'm not such a mutt as that!"

"Some day you will be 'asking,' Archie dear--a worthier girl than I am, I know--and she won't think you a mutt at all!"

He shook his head. "No, Miss Darcy. You've sort of spoiled ordinary girls for me."

She cried honestly, "I hope not! Oh, I do hope not! Because I was going to beg you to stay friends with me--I need friends. And I _can't_ keep you if you're going to go on feeling that way!"

"Sure you can," said Archie, his eyes lighting. "Just try me and see!

I'll make one of the best little old pals you ever saw, if you'll just forgive the fool way I acted. Now that the steam's sort of blown off, we--we understand each other."

"You're certain that we _do_ understand each other?" Her gaze met his squarely. "You're not going to expect things that can't ever be?"

"No, ma'am," said Archie.

Tears suddenly came into her eyes. There was a quality in this faithful, doglike devotion that made her feel ashamed. It deserved response; it deserved something better than mere affectionate grat.i.tude. But that was all she found herself able to give.

With a demonstrativeness rarer than he guessed, she caught his big hand in both of hers and held it for a moment to her cheek. When she let it go there was a tear on the back of it; which Archie, gazing at wonderingly, suddenly lifted to his lips.

It was in acts like this, little untaught gestures of pure reverence, that the boy belied his slang and his big ears and his general clumsiness, and harked back to the age of chivalry, when a gentleman was not ashamed to dedicate himself to the service of his lady, and be her very perfect knight....

After he had gone, Effie May wandered into Joan's room with a slight air of expectancy about her which the girl was too preoccupied to notice.

"You're lookin' sort of white about the gills, dearie," she remarked.

"Does the shoulder pain you?"

"No. But something else does, and I don't know just what. Oh, Effie May, what's the matter with me, anyway?" she burst out. "Sometimes I think I'm not a human person at all, but just a big inflated Ego, floating around like an observation balloon, taking notes!"

"Well, well, is that so?" murmured her step-mother, who had her doubts as to what an Ego might be. "I expect what you need for that floaty feeling, dearie, is a good dose of calomel--" and she hurried away to prepare it.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

There is a certain period of the year when all its widely scattered children home to Kentucky as surely as bluebirds home to the hollow stumps in March. It is the season of the May race meet.

All her life Joan had heard of the Kentucky Derby, and she looked forward to it with almost as much eagerness as her father. Derby Day means more to the Kentuckian than the running event that has become cla.s.sic. It means the reunion in street and club and hotel-lobby of neighbors from the various towns of a State where neighborliness is cultivated to the point of a fine art; of men who have been boys together; of friends whose ways have drifted far apart (for your Kentuckian is a great wanderer), and who have years to make up over the clinking gla.s.ses. During the spring race meet, Louisville ceases to be merely Louisville, and becomes Kentucky, the great old mother-home that leaves its stamp upon its children even into the third and fourth generation.

There is a good deal of sentiment about the Derby, a good deal of tradition; and there is as well a certain spirit of carefree, sporting, joyous _bonhomie_ whose like is not to be found perhaps on any other race-course in the world.

Joan, who loved crowds, got much pleasure out of the streets at this time. She took appreciative note of self-conscious belles from up-State, in picture-hats and peek-a-boo blouses, with a predilection for wearing long-stemmed roses pinned to their belts. She noted the young farmers who accompanied them, big-shouldered, square-chinned, clear-eyed, crimson with the sun--a st.u.r.dy, virile type, clumsy in their country-made clothes, but with well-stuffed wallets bulging their hip pockets. There is no poverty in the farming regions of Kentucky.

She learned to recognize the professional racing people, men in loud-checked clothes talking an incomprehensible jargon; shabby touts offering confidential tips to anybody who would listen; women wearing diamonds as large as peas, overdressed, coa.r.s.e-voiced, not easily distinguishable from their sisters of the underworld, except that their men accompanied them openly.

People of the larger world there were, too. The narrow streets were congested with great touring-cars bearing unfamiliar license tags; New York, Michigan, California. Once, hearing crisp Eastern voices at her elbow, Joan turned just in time to see some people she had met at Longmeadow disappearing into a hotel. For a moment her heart stood still. She thought Eduard Desmond was among them. But it proved to be another man, and Joan mingled hastily in the crowd, relieved that they had not noticed her.

In all this preparatory excitement Major Darcy was, as his wife put it, "busy as a bird dog." There were kinspeople from the Bluegra.s.s to be welcomed, cousins from Paducah, Maysville, Fayette County. Joan, who did not altogether share her father's enthusiasm for the ties of kins.h.i.+p, rather admired her step-mother's skill in side-stepping the Major's abounding sense of hospitality. Effie May had taken the precaution to fill her house with paper-hangers.

"What a shame! You'll have to take your cousins and things to the hotel, d.i.c.kie, or put 'em up at the Country Club, won't you? If I'd only thought!--" she murmured innocently; but catching Jean's suspicious eye upon her, she winked.

Joan returned the wink. She remembered her mother's patience under the constant influx of Darcy relatives. She had also seen the unfortunate Misses Darcy almost turned out of doors by the daily increasing numbers of their kith and kin. The bookcase in their parlor had become, surprisingly, a bed; and Miss Euphemia, the plump, as the one best fitted by nature for this ordeal, was spending her nights on a packing-box spa.r.s.ely mitigated by pillows.--Not that the Misses Darcy complained, however. They were long inured to the hospitalities of Derby week.

Effie May, indeed, was the only person of Joan's acquaintance who seemed unaffected by the general excitement over the Derby. She heard with apparent indifference that the Major had been able to secure a box directly opposite the judges' stand, and she declined to rise early enough to accompany him and Joan to Sunday morning breakfast at the Jockey Club, where enthusiasts met regularly to inspect and pa.s.s critical judgment on the offerings of the past week.

"Lord, child!" she said once in answer to Joan's surprise at this indifference. "Horses ain't no treat to me. You see, they used to be my bread and b.u.t.ter."

It was one of her few references to a past that rather intrigued her step-daughter.

"Were both of your husbands turfmen?" asked the girl, curiously.

Effie May gave a brief nod; and Joan did not somehow feel encouraged to further questioning.