2
Miriam, on the heels of the Windroms, paused to look over the railing of the balcony. All her coaching had been leading up to this event, and there was Louise acquitting herself with a virtuosity that effaced Miriam from this setting as completely as Fate had effaced her from her own.
The grey-blue twilight which came through open doors and windows dimmed the orange of the lamps. An incredibly regal personage dominated the assembly, and above a discreet hum Miriam heard a penetrating, dark-toned voice saying, “Vous allez me pardonner, ma chère Louise, d’être descendue un peu en retard. J’ai du défaire une malle. Voilà six jours que je voyage sans changer de robe. Vous jugerez si je suis contente d’être installée—et dans quel petit palais! Maintenant vous allez me présenter ces dames.”
Slim and brown, nimble and compact, Louise brought her guests in turn to Madame Mornay-Mareuil. Miriam was annoyed that Louise should have failed to recognize in her trying aunt a grande dame of unchallenged authority. With instinctive deference, the company had grouped itself about her, and Miriam smiled with a trace of vindictive satisfaction, for she had been as quick as Louise to resent the unconscious patronage in Girlie Windrom’s way of beginning a remark with, “Of course, out here——”
She went to Dare, who was standing aloof, near a window. “Have you kissed the queen’s hand?” she inquired.
“Not yet . . . The little doctor seems to have put one over on the Eveleys!” Dare’s lips went down with a cynical humor which Miriam noted as new. There was also something new in his eyes. “I for one,” he said, “am glad.”
“Why?”
“Simply in the name of poetic justice. It’s time Mrs. Eveley got a bit of her own back,—and Boadicea there will get it for her with a vengeance.”
Miriam gave him a smiling nod and went to obey Louise’s summons.
Dismayed by the astonished hush which had fallen over the hall when Aunt Denise had appeared on the staircase and come slowly towards her, Louise had quickly appreciated the dramatic value of the intrusion, and when she had manoeuvred every one safely to the table she acknowledged that the preliminary touch of solemnity had given her dinner party a tone which, instead of diminishing, would incalculably augment the triumph she had, for months now, determined that it should be. She had known Aunt Denise only as a formidable quantity in her background, an aunt she had seen during a single summer, after her mother’s death, but with whom she had corresponded in a sentimental desire to maintain contact with the only relative she could claim, except for some half mythical cousins in Dublin. That her letters to Aunt Denise and her gifts of needlework had been seeds sown on fertile ground was now abundantly manifest; for Aunt Denise had assumed a protective kinship and had made that mysterious kind of “impression” of which she herself, for all her success, would never learn the secret.
Of the whole company only Girlie, with her defective focusing apparatus, had failed to pay immediate homage. In a pretty white dress, she had perfunctorily acknowledged Aunt Denise’s graciousness and begun to turn away, when the old lady transfixed her with relentless black eyes. “I suppose it is the fashion to walk with a bend nowadays,” Aunt Denise had said. “It doesn’t give the lungs a chance.”
Girlie had blushed and straightened, but Aunt Denise had withdrawn her eyes and turned them more charitably on little Mrs. Brown.
A stock soup had been simmering on the back of the stove for two weeks. By the time she had tasted it, and found it perfect, Louise’s spirits were at their highest voltage, and her eyes flashed down the table till they encountered Miriam’s, which gave back a signal of felicitation. Miriam, between Dare and Jack Wallace, was beating time to an argument sustained by Lord Eveley and Pearl Beatty against Mr. Windrom and Amy Sweet, the latter lending her aid in the form of giggles, for which three sips of wine,—the first in her life, and drunk in open contempt of the pledge Mrs. Boots had once persuaded her to sign,—were responsible.
Aunt Denise was getting acquainted with Keble, treating him with a respect that struck Louise as being inherently French. She wondered whether French women had a somewhat more professional attitude towards males than women of other races. Keble looked happy, but his French was buckling under the strain, and Aunt Denise did him the honor of continuing the conversation in English, an important concession.
Of all the scraps of talk Louise could overhear, the scrap which most gratified her,—and she wondered why it should,—was a homely exchange in which her father and Lady Eveley were engrossed. “It’s the pure mountain air,” Dr. Bruneau was explaining. “He couldn’t have a better climate to commence life in.”
“That’s what my husband was saying. You know, when Keble was ten months old we took him to Switzerland——”
“Isn’t it, Mrs. Eveley?” broke in a voice at Louise’s right.
“Isn’t what, Mr. Boots? Mr. Cutty was pounding with his fork and I didn’t hear.”
“Had to pound,” Mr. Cutty defended himself, “to drown Ernest. He’s telling Mrs. Brown I stole plums from her garden.”
“Well, didn’t you?”
“But justice is justice, and the point is, so did Ernest,—and his were riper!”
Louise leaned towards Mrs. Brown, “Do spray arsenic on the rest of the plums dear, and abolish Mr. Cutty. Wasn’t what what, Mr. Boots?”
Mrs. Windrom forestalled him. “Mr. Boots tells me that the settlers are all turning socialists because farming doesn’t pay. Do you mean to say you make no effort to combat such a state of affairs?”
“I dare say we ought to take more interest in politics.”
Mrs. Boots, who was beyond Mr. Cutty, left Dare long enough to interpose, “Why not persuade Mr. Eveley to be a candidate in the coming elections?”
Dare had seized his reprieve to whisper to Miriam, “Does all this, to-night, make you feel fearfully alone?”
Miriam looked up as though he had startled into flight some bird of ill-omen, but made no reply.
Dare leaned a little closer. “I fancy we’re lonely for rather similar reasons.”
Miriam hesitated. “First of all I’m not sure what you mean. Second, if you mean what I dare say you do,—aren’t you rather bold?”
“Oh yes,” he replied. “Very likely.”
He returned to his glass, then added, “Your acknowledgment that I was bold satisfies me of the accuracy of my guess. As we were in the same boat I couldn’t resist the temptation of bidding for a crumb of commiseration. It would have been reciprocal. So my boldness wasn’t more rude than it was humane.”
“You’re excused,” said Miriam, “under the First Offenders Act.”
Girlie Windrom, in a commendable spirit, took an opportunity to express the hope that Madame Mornay-Mareuil, her vis-à-vis, had not found the long train journey too fatiguing.
Madame recounted her impressions of the trip and found that Lord Eveley was in agreement with her regarding the exorbitant prices charged in western hotels. Accustomed as he was to express his opinions in public platform style, he soon had Keble’s half of the table as audience, while Louise gathered in loose threads of talk at her end. The back of her dinner was now broken and she was standing with one foot triumphantly resting on its prostrate form. When the ices arrived she couldn’t resist announcing that the accompanying cakes had been made by herself. The exclamations were silenced by Aunt Denise who lifted her voice to complain of Louise’s cheer.
“Your table groans with luxuries, my child. You have forgotten the lessons in thrift I taught you when you were a girl.”
For the first time the little doctor turned from Lady Eveley. “I am to blame for that,” he said. “You see, sister, after you had left us, Nana and Louise tried to make me eat wooden cakes made without eggs, according to your instructions. I can’t digest wood, so I extracted from Louise’s curly head, one by one, all the notions you had put into it, and we lived extravagantly ever after,—it’s a sinful world, va.”
To soften for his sister the laughter that greeted his defense of Louise, Dr. Bruneau added, “With you it was different, since those who have rich spiritual lives don’t need rich food. Louise and I, poor heathens, had nothing to indulge but our appetites.”
“You are free to do so,” returned Aunt Denise, in no wise discomfited. “My lessons were only the principles of economy and sacrifice our mother had taught me, the principles which, if you remember, mon frère, made it possible for you and me to have an education.”
The company seemed relieved to find that royalty could, on occasion, be “answered back”, and Lord Eveley’s hearty laugh at the mischievous but not unkind sally had been followed by a scrutinizing glance which hinted that the statesman had found a mind worth exploring.
By the time the fruit had appeared, duly perspiring, Louise had only two worries left. First, the quiescence of the Windroms smote her conscience: she felt that she had been gratuitous in warning Mrs. Windrom, while leaving Aunt Denise a license to talk which Aunt Denise had been well-bred enough not to abuse. Second, she was not entirely easy in her mind regarding Dare’s silence. He had done his duty by the pastor’s wife, yet there was some boding unhappiness in his manner. Before the house was opened Dare had always set the key. Under the old conditions he would have taken the whole company into his hands and played with them. And while his moodiness was, in one sense, a deeply stirring tribute, at the same time there was in it something which made her feel remorseful, and afraid,—not for herself. It was as though her conscience were pointing out to her the consequences of extravagance in her moral kitchen. In the intellectual cakes she had baked for herself and Dare there had perhaps been too many emotional ingredients. They were rich and many had been eaten. Dare was conceivably experiencing this evening the ill effects.
In the midst of her reflections Lord Eveley surprised her by rising and delivering a little speech which was at the same time a dedication of the house and a tribute to its mistress. Anything in the nature of orthodox ceremony intimidated her. There were toasts,—and Miriam had never told her what one was supposed to do in such a contingency. Moreover she hadn’t meant to drink her last glass of wine, and rather dazedly wished she hadn’t.
After dinner the company divided for bridge and dancing, and Louise seized a moment to lay a sympathetic hand on Dare’s coat-sleeve.
“Are you so bored?” she whispered.
“It’s not your fault,” he replied, and the unsmiling negligence of his manner bore witness to the ease with which he and Louise could fit into each other’s mood.
“It won’t last much longer,” she said. “It” referred to the house party, but Dare chose to misinterpret.
“No,” he replied, “I’m going to Japan.”
Her eyes fell. When she raised them again she noticed, with a chill, that Mrs. Windrom, from the opposite corner, had been watching their tête-à-tête with hawklike vigilance.
“Come and dance,” she said, drawing him toward the hall.
There another little shock was in store for her. Alice Eveley, flushed and flattered after a dance with Jack Wallace, was proceeding across the room, when suddenly she stopped short and chose a new direction.
On looking towards Alice’s abandoned goal to see what had caused her to change her mind, Louise observed that Keble and Miriam were absorbed in an unsmiling tête-à-tête of the kind that had made Mrs. Windrom feign a sudden interest in Mrs. Brown’s cameo brooch.
She raised her arms for her partner’s embrace, and was swept into the dance.