"Blessings brighten," she reminded herself, grimly, "as they take their flight!..."
She came presently under the soothing spell of the old cathedral, a shabby, not very beautiful edifice left stranded in a neighborhood no longer its own, but whose pews still bore the names of the town's first citizens, gentlemen who had been her father's boyhood playmates, and whose fathers had worshiped there with his father. Oddly enough, considering how little time she had spent within its walls, the echoing dimness of it gave Joan her first sense of home-coming. This old house of God, that had witnessed so many ends and so many beginnings of human endeavor, had gathered into itself the heart of a city.
A warm heart, it was, thought Joan; despite those speculative glances fixed upon her. She recalled people's kindness to Archie in his trouble, their quick response to any call upon their sympathy, their willingness to give every stranger his chance. She remembered their invincible hospitality, whether in wealth or poverty; the ardor with which they entered into the interest of the moment, be it work or play, their generous admiration for any fellow-citizen who made a success in the world. A warm heart, she thought, and a loyal one.
She understood in that moment why it was that the people of this little city rarely drifted too far away to come back again. Just as the human body claims in the end its six feet of earth for a resting-place, so must the human spirit claim its bit of the world for a resting-place, a Neighborhood. The tragedy of a wandering life such as Nikolai's was, she saw, in its detachment from common human interests, from a Neighborhood. Better a tree, with its roots in friendly soil, as he had once said.
Cast her out though it might, Joan knew that her Neighborhood was here, here among her father's people....
A trolley-car clanged past, and the challenge of the peanutman came cheerfully in at the open door. "Pop-corn, Lady? Yere's your fine fraish roasted peanuts, right off the hopper!"
The little lads in the choir stirred restlessly to this voice of the summer outside. "Lead, Kindly Light," they warbled in a piercing young treble, with now and then the Bishop's robust tones added in a hospitable effort to make the thing go.
Joan's irrepressible fancy recalled the last occasion on which she had heard this noble anthem. It was at the Country Club, where some irreverent wag was playing it in rag-time; and Effie May had danced to it merrily, Lightfoot Ef with her indulgent Major. Joan wondered whether Lightfoot Ef might be remembering, too, and smiling perhaps in her coffin....
But out at the cemetery her queer sense of elation vanished. Here, in the shadow of her father's monolith, with Mary's modest headstone on one side, a yawning grave on the other, at her feet two mounds so small as hardly to be noticed, the aloneness of the human soul suddenly smote her with such force that she could not stand under it. Was she never to know again that human touch of hands and of lips? Was her only neighborhood after all to be this quiet city of the dead?
She went quite dizzy and might have fallen, but for the quick arm that supported her; whose in that bitter moment she neither knew nor cared. But she was not surprised to find herself presently alone in a carriage with Archie.