Joan's liking for her kind-hearted neighbor had suffered a sudden eclipse. Ellen was right about her—"Lady is as lady does." It was worse than vulgar to force herself upon them at such a time—it was unfeeling, indecent. She envied her father's poise. She had never seen him appear to such advantage as upon this trying occasion, in his new, cheap black suit which had not as yet had time to acquire spots and wrinkles, his fine features showing the ravages of sorrow, his handsome gray head bent courteously toward this voluble companion as though her every word were priceless. Manners, she reflected, cannot be assumed on occasion like garments, but are a part of the very texture of a personality. She could not imagine her father anything but suavely courteous, even under the most untoward circumstance.
Nevertheless, beneath her pride in him lingered an odd fear lest, now that he had an audience, he might be moved to oratory over her mother's grave. With Richard Darcy emotion and the expression of it were usually simultaneous. Joan's unresponsiveness (a trait which she hated in herself, but could not help) had hitherto kept her father somewhat in check; but in the presence of a kindly warmth of sympathy like Mrs. Calloway's there was no telling what might happen.
The Major, however, contented himself with murmuring, as he approached the grave, "She was very, very dear to me!" in so touching a voice that Mrs. Calloway openly wiped her eyes, exclaiming, "You poor man! Don't you think I understand—I, who've laid away two of them?"
Joan moved hastily out of earshot, leaving the pair to reminiscence. Talk of things that hurt was to the girl like pouring acid upon an open wound; but if it helped her poor father, by all means let it help him. She had never made the mistake of thinking that because his grief was facile it was any the less strong and real. His utter helplessness, his stunned amaze that the wife he so sorely needed could have gone away and left him to bear the vicissitudes of life without her, were as piteous to his daughter as the wailing grief of a child. If she could have comforted him in any way other than by speech she would have done so. In the presence of great emotion she was dumb—though she sometimes thought she might be able to write him what she felt. Often at night she lay awake for hours, wondering how she could drive out of his eyes that baffled, frightened look which always came when things went wrong with him, and which only her mother had been able to banish....
It haunted her all through the months which followed, that look of her father's; and sometimes in the midst of school-girl gaieties she would fall suddenly silent, thinking that she had no right to enjoy herself because he was there alone in the city of his childhood which seemed to have forgotten him. Joan was not yet quite the hard young egotist she intended to become.
And so when toward the end of her journey the train slid into a pleasant country, mellow with the evening sun, long reaches of rolling pasture and hill and fertile bottom-land that meant Kentucky, something welled up in the girl's heart deeper than glamour of place, stronger than regret for her sheltered little past, than fear and hope for her unguessed future; perhaps the deepest and strongest feeling life plants in the human soul—the blood-tie. Weak or brave, fraud or fool or honorable gentleman—perhaps a little of all these things—it was her father who waited there for a woman to come and make him a home again; and Joan was ready.
CHAPTER IV
The fellow-traveler who had incurred Miss Darcy's displeasure by a too-active sympathy was much pleased, being of a sentimental turn of mind, to witness a family reunion which presently took place in the station at Louisville. A tall, slender gentleman of a youngish Confederate colonel type—gray mustache and imperial, with a soft hat set very slightly to one side of his handsome head—detached himself from the crowd with a cry of, "Here I am, Dollykins!"
Whereupon the girl dropped all her belongings, and cast herself upon him speechless, to be lifted well off the ground and hugged and kissed very thoroughly.