2
Although it meant twenty-four hours without sleep, Louise and Miriam next morning insisted on accompanying Keble as far as the Valley. The four took breakfast, along with Dr. Bruneau, at the Canada House as Miriam’s guests. They were weary, a little feverish, and inclined to be silent. Keble alone chatted with a volubility that betrayed his nervousness, his regret at the separation, and his excitement at the prospect of revisiting the home he had long ago abandoned. Louise was pale, and kept hiding in the depths of her fur coat. Miriam and the doctor sustained Keble’s talk, but could not relax the tension. The stage was due in fifteen minutes.
Suddenly Louise jumped up from the table, which was being cleared by an ill-kempt waitress with whom Keble had danced a few hours previously. “I nearly forgot . . . the snapshots of Baby for his grandmother. They’re still at the drug-store. I’ll run over and get them.”
“Let me go, dear,” Keble had risen.
“We’ll go together,” Louise proposed, and Miriam noted an eager light in his eyes.
On the snowy road he tucked his glove under Louise’s arm, and they picked their way across in silence to the drug-store.
When she had obtained the photographs and thrust them into an inner pocket of his coat, they returned more slowly towards the hotel.
“It will seem very strange,” he said, “without you and the monkey. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am at your refusing to come home with me.”
“A change from us will do you good . . . You’re to give my love and the monkey’s to everybody, and tell them I’m looking forward very much to their visit.”
Keble stopped in the middle of the deserted street, to face her with appealing eyes, and rested a hand on her arm. “Weedgie, that’s all so pathetically trite, for you! Tell me, sans facons, why wouldn’t you come, and why wouldn’t you let me take the snapshots of you as well as the monkey?”
She was a little timid. This was the Louise with whom he had originally fallen love, and whom he remembered even through her noisiest performances. “Because I’m perverse. I want your people, if they are going to make my acquaintance at all, to get their first impression of me in my own setting.” She couldn’t confess that she would have been gratified if his people had been a few degrees more pressing in their invitations to her. “If they like me in spite of it, or even if they don’t, I shall feel at least square with myself. But if they were to find me passable in their setting, then come out here and pooh-pooh the Valley, I should be—oh, hurt and angry.”
Keble shook her gently. “Rubbish!”
“Mrs. Windrom thought me crude,” she said, entirely without rancor. In her heart she thought Mrs. Windrom crude.
“Walter didn’t,” Keble retorted. “And Walter’s little finger is worth more than his mother’s eternal soul.”
“Walter is a man, dear. Mrs. Boots doesn’t like me, and her soul is worth thousands of little fingers,—or toes, rather.” She was stroking his coon-skin coat.
“Toes, rather? . . . Oh, I see—Boots, toes.”
Without warning he caught her in his arms and kissed her. “You preposterous person!” he laughed, a little abashed by his flare of passion.
They returned silently to the hotel porch, where they were joined by Miriam and the doctor. The stage had arrived and they were discussing the state of the mountain road. Keble climbed into the sleigh.
When everyone had said good-bye, and the horses had been set into motion, Keble turned to Miriam with a parting admonition regarding business letters, then added, “Keep an eye on Louise, now that she’s come to life again. And do give the monkey an occasional piece of sugar.”
The last injunction was a facetious allusion to a remark made some weeks previously by Mr. Brown, who had declared that Keble was spoiling the baby as much as his wife spoiled her circus horse.
When the stage had disappeared, Louise turned to Miriam with an air of being lost. “Isn’t it strange,” she said, “to think of going back alone! I never realized before how completely it’s Keble that makes the ranch go round. I feel like la délaissée,—you know the girl in the ditty: qui pleure nuit et jour.”
“Good gracious, Louise, don’t tell me you’re turning sentimental on top of everything.”
“It would only be re-turning. I’ve always been sentimental under the surface. At least I used to be with my dolls. And for some reason I’ve felt like a little girl this morning.”
A cloud passed over Miriam’s sky. Lack of sleep and the dissipation of the last week would sufficiently account for it. Faint lines indicated the inner boundaries of her cheeks, and her eyes had lost their agate-like clarity.
“You look like a tired little girl,” she said sadly. “I feel all of eighty.”