Why Joan? Part 45

She was strangely exalted. Her mind seemed to have slipped into a region of consciousness where things were made suddenly clear to her, troubling questions answered, doubts set forever aside.

"A gentleman," she kept repeating to herself. "A gentleman!"

It seemed to her in that moment a great thing to have been born a gentleman, even if one became nothing more; to know that whatever the fortunes of life, one would be able to meet them gallantly and unafraid, because of a something within stronger than personal will or habit: the sum of the wills and habits of many ancestors. She was sorry for the _canaille_, the Effie Mays, who had no such inner power to rely upon....

As they carried him into a doctor's office, Richard Darcy's eyes opened.

They pa.s.sed the face of his frantic wife unseeing, and came to rest upon Joan in some anxiety.

"You all right, Dollykins? Must not allow--mere trifle like this--upset--"

"Nothing shall upset me, Father," she said, smiling at him.

"Children so necessary--family traditions--"

She bent close to him. "My son is going to be proud to carry on the family traditions, dear."

His face cleared. "Good girl!" There was a little bubbling breath. "I promised Mary--"

But Joan never learned what promise it was that he had made, and doubtless broken, to his Mary.

CHAPTER XLII

Joan herself, like other self-reliant people, sometimes made promises which she was unable to keep. She had made such a one to her father.

Despite her best efforts, the fact and manner of his death did manage to upset her, disastrously.

The day came not long afterwards when for hours, years, they seemed to her, Joan was aware of nothing but pain, and of the fact that miserable, terrified Archie must somehow be got out of the way before she lost control of herself. She thought that when she could get enough breath to do it, she would ask him to go down town and bring her some ice-cream or something; but when she did open her lips they emitted, entirely without permission, a queer sound that was somewhere between a yelp and a croak.

"Goodness! This is no way for a gentleman to behave," she said to herself oddly; and must have spoken aloud, for the voice of Ellen Neal responded.

"There, there, my lamb! Yell all you want. You ain't no gentleman, thank goodness! but just a poor little girl who's got a right to holler all she likes. That's _one_ right the men-folks ain't going to deny us and get away with it--not them!"

Ellen as she spoke glared truculently at the doctor. It was not the first accouchement at which she had a.s.sisted, and at such moments she became feministic almost to the point of violence. Even Archie found it safer to remain out of reach of her accusing eye.

But long, very long afterwards, Ellen herself admitted him once more to the Presence, for the sake of the burden he carried--a subdued, queerly gentle Ellen, with all the acerbity gone from voice and manner, and in its place something rather beautiful. It was motherhood that glowed in her, had any one cared to notice; motherhood come by vicariously, as Ellen Neal came by all the loveliness in life.

"See, my lamb," she murmured, bending over the bed. "Open them pretty eyes and look who's here! Come close, Mr. Archie, and show her the present you've brought her. Quiet, now!--she ain't up to much. It's a surprise, Joie. Open your eyes and look!"

It was a surprise, indeed. Joan, by great effort, managed to focus her gaze on Archie's burden. She shut her eyes quickly, and opened them again. They were still there; not one, but two little wrinkled, fuzzy heads.

"Can you beat it?" demanded Archie, shakily, "Some little present, eh?"

He held them out to her.

Joan's lips moved, twitching. "From a Friend," was what she said; and Archie, recognizing a jest on sight, let out such a roar of joy that the twins awoke with pin-p.r.i.c.k wails, and a nurse came running, and he was thrust once more into outer darkness.

There a message was brought to him. "Your wife says why don't you telegraph President Roosevelt about it?"

And literal Archie did so....

But this was the last laughter heard in the house of Blair for many a weary week. Twins require more strength for their bearing and rearing than Joan, taken so unawares, was able to provide. The Major's final act of gallantry cost a good deal in the way of human life, which may, or may not, have been of more value than the life he saved.

Afterwards, when she was able to think again, Joan sometimes wondered whether his death was not perhaps an even more futile thing than his life had been; yet she would not have had it otherwise.

His widow had caused to be erected to his memory the finest granite monolith obtainable for money, bearing the inscription, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends"; and Joan, after her first startled distaste for the grandiloquence pa.s.sed, was able to appreciate how deeply the memorial must gratify the proud spirit of a Darcy, if it lingered near enough to know.

CHAPTER XLIII

Through the dim corridors, the silent halls Of Yesterday, the nuns move, whispering Their rosary. Without, a robin calls A drowsy blessing to his little mate, For it is late, And chapel aisles are filled with peace and prayer.

And Christ is there.

Ah, dreams that haunt these keys of ivory--!

_Et verb.u.m caro factum est_, they sing, And lo! the years are as a day to me.

I kneel among the quiet ones again To lay the pain, The joy of life, where light and shadow meet At Jesus' feet.

Some time earlier, during the period when girl-emotions translate themselves into verse as naturally as bird-emotions translate themselves into song, Joan had composed these lines, with the odd prescience that frequently came to her when she "took her pen in hand." She had stepped aside from a heated game of handball one day to jot them down; and her play-fellows, evincing no particular surprise, had murmured to each other, "Leave Joan alone. She's writing Poetry." For poetry is as much a part of convent school-life as is handball.

Now she was back among "the quiet ones" again, fulfilling her own prophecy, come to lay her burden of pain and joy, if not at Jesus' feet, at least in the safekeeping of his handmaidens. In her plain black frock, such as convent girls wear, with her hair down in a braid and a small ap.r.o.n tied about her waist, to protect her skirt from embroidery-floss, the nuns found it hard to believe it was Joan Blair who had come back to them out of the world, and not Joan Darcy. Only this was a Joan who played harder than her younger self had ever played, entering into the gaiety of the school, the basket-ball, the charades, the skating-matches, the fancy-dress impromptus, with a feverish eagerness which saddened the good ladies to see. Strange, vivid, restless young creature--what she had learned of life in the short while she had been away from them! Love, motherhood, and loss--the loss that is saddest of all losses to women, be they wives or maids or _religieuses_. While they in their silent corridors and hidden gardens had listened to month after quiet month rung away by the bells, praying, dreaming, working; tending the young life about them into blossom, sometimes carrying with candles one of their number back to a still place beyond the children's playground, sometimes--not often now--receiving into their ranks one who had done with the world's ways even before she came to know them. Truly "the quiet ones," blessed with the peace of those who resign their wills to the will of G.o.d.

Joan, gazing into their serene, pure, almost childlike faces, envied them from her heart; but, being Joan, she asked herself wonderingly how they could be so sure it was the will of G.o.d to which they resigned themselves. Intelligent, fine-natured women, deliberately turning their backs on life, deliberately closing eyes and ears to what went on in the street just outside their cloister, lest it distract them from contemplation of their immortal souls--Joan shook her head sharply; and putting a veil over her hair, slipped into the chapel, where a voice behind the cloister-screen was repeating the rosary of the Sacred Heart:

"Oh, sacred heart of Jesus, burning with love for us, Inflame our hearts with love for Thee."

The beautiful voice rose and fell in almost pa.s.sionate cadence, as if it were pleading. It ceased abruptly; and another, older voice took up the words, with mystic tenderness. There was a faint fragrance in the place--indeed throughout the old building--of incense and dying roses, which Joan always called to herself "the odor of sanct.i.ty." It came back to her sometimes poignantly in the most unexpected places.

A very old lay-sister, in a white coif and shoes that creaked a trifle, pottered about among the statues of the saints, arranging small lamps and vases of flowers, always dropping as she pa.s.sed the altar a business-like little curtsey. Now and then a child with a veil over her head would slip in at the door, and genuflect, and sink to her knees for a moment's prayer. Sunlight streamed in, multi-colored, through ruby and purple and amber gla.s.s, across the white marble Christ who stood with hands outstretched and head bowed, suffering little children to come unto Him....

Joan, who had been reading Renan (a fact which would have certainly caused her expulsion from that place had it been known), quoted to herself:

"In our bustling civilization, the memory of the life of Galilee has been like the perfume of another world."

It seemed to her one of the true miracles that it should indeed have persisted through our bustling civilization, through persecution and indifference, through cra.s.s hysterical religiosity, even to this day; if only in such places as her convent school, and little country churches here and there, and in the homes of the very poor. That lovely, pastoral, gentle life of Galilee, exquisite as the name itself--who could not have been good in Galilee?

"If Archie had lived then, he would have followed Christ," thought Joan suddenly. "Followed him, and fought for him, too. And he'd never have let the Jews get hold of him!"

It was the first time she had thought of her husband in many days....

Archie's letters came with faithful regularity, but he was one of the personalities who do not carry well by letter. He informed her that he missed her, but she was not to hurry home on his account; that Ellen was keeping down the grocer-bill nicely; that the new man he had put on the road wasn't doing well and he thought of putting Johnny Carmichael in his place; that one of the water-pipes had burst and made a spot on the wall, but nothing to fret about; and that if she needed more money be sure to let him know. Or words to that effect.

Archie, somehow, was never quite in the picture. She was better able to reconstruct her lost girlhood without him.

And Archie understood. It was he who had suggested the Convent when Joan's doctor admitted himself dissatisfied with her condition, her slow return to normality.