She reached home in the evening. She thought to find her father in his study. But they told her that, now, he usually sat alone in the great drawing-room. She opened the door softly. The room was dark save for a flicker of firelight; she could see nothing. Nor was there any sound.
"Dad," she cried, "are you here?"
He rose slowly from a high-backed chair beside the fire.
"It is you," he said. He seemed a little dazed.
She ran to him and, seizing his listless arms, put them round her.
"Give me a hug, Dad," she commanded. "A real hug."He held her to him for what seemed a long while. There was strength in his arms, in spite of the bowed shoulders and white hair.
"I was afraid you had forgotten how to do it," she laughed, when at last he released her. "Do you know, you haven't hugged me, Dad, since I was five years old. That's nineteen years ago. You do love me, don't you?""Yes," he answered. "I have always loved you."She would not let him light the gas. "I have dined--in the train,"she explained. "Let us talk by the firelight."She forced him gently back into his chair, and seated herself upon the floor between his knees. "What were you thinking of when Icame in?" she asked. "You weren't asleep, were you?""No," he answered. "Not that sort of sleep." She could not see his face. But she guessed his meaning.
"Am I very like her?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered. "Marvellously like her as she used to be:
except for just one thing. Perhaps that will come to you later. Ithought, for the moment, as you stood there by the door . . . " He did not finish the sentence.
"Tell me about her," she said. "I never knew she had been an actress."He did not ask her how she had learnt it. "She gave it up when we were married," he said. "The people she would have to live among would have looked askance at her if they had known. There seemed no reason why they should.""How did it all happen?" she persisted. "Was it very beautiful, in the beginning?" She wished she had not added that last. The words had slipped from her before she knew.
"Very beautiful," he answered, "in the beginning.""It was my fault," he went on, "that it was not beautiful all through. I ought to have let her take up her work again, as she wished to, when she found what giving it up meant to her. The world was narrower then than it is now; and I listened to the world. I thought it another voice.""It's difficult to tell, isn't it?" she said. "I wonder how one can?"He did not answer; and they sat for a time in silence.
"Did you ever see her act?" asked Joan.
"Every evening for about six months," he answered. A little flame shot up and showed a smile upon his face.
"I owe to her all the charity and tenderness I know. She taught it to me in those months. I might have learned more if I had let her go on teaching. It was the only way she knew."Joan watched her as gradually she shaped herself out of the shadows: the poor, thin, fretful lady of the ever restless hands, with her bursts of jealous passion, her long moods of sullen indifference: all her music turned to waste.
"How did she come to fall in love with you?" asked Joan. "I don't mean to be uncomplimentary, Dad." She laughed, taking his hand in hers and stroking it. "You must have been ridiculously handsome, when you were young. And you must always have been strong and brave and clever. I can see such a lot of women falling in love with you. But not the artistic woman.""It wasn't so incongruous at the time," he answered. "My father had sent me out to America to superintend a contract. It was the first time I had ever been away from home, though I was nearly thirty; and all my pent-up youth rushed out of me at once. It was a harum-scarum fellow, mad with the joy of life, that made love to her; not the man who went out, nor the man who came back. It was at San Francisco that I met her. She was touring the Western States; and I let everything go to the wind and followed her. It seemed to me that Heaven had opened up to me. I fought a duel in Colorado with a man who had insulted her. The law didn't run there in those days; and three of his hired gunmen, as they called them, held us up that night in the train and gave her the alternative of going back with them and kissing him or seeing me dead at her feet.
I didn't give her time to answer, nor for them to finish. It seemed a fine death anyhow, that. And I'd have faced Hell itself for the chance of fighting for her. Though she told me afterwards that if I'd died she'd have gone back with them, and killed him."Joan did not speak for a time. She could see him grave--a little pompous, in his Sunday black, his footsteps creaking down the stone-flagged aisle, the silver-edged collecting bag held stiffly in his hand.
"Couldn't you have saved a bit, Daddy?" she asked, "of all that wealth of youth--just enough to live on?""I might," he answered, "if I had known the value of it. I found a cable waiting for me in New York. My father had been dead a month;and I had to return immediately."
"And so you married her and took her drum away from her," said Joan. "Oh, the thing God gives to some of us," she explained, "to make a little noise with, and set the people marching."The little flame died out. She could feel his body trembling.
"But you still loved her, didn't you, Dad?" she asked. "I was very little at the time, but I can just remember. You seemed so happy together. Till her illness came.""It was more than love," he answered. "It was idolatry. God punished me for it. He was a hard God, my God."She raised herself, putting her hands upon his shoulders so that her face was very close to his. "What has become of Him, Dad?" she said. She spoke in a cold voice, as one does of a false friend.