2
Once Dare was safely on the high road towards recovery his progress was rapid. Before long he was able to walk into the maze of trails which led away from the end of the lake, and the day at length came when Dr. Bruneau lifted the ban.
Clad in fresh garments, Louise and Dare made a bonfire of the clothing and bedding and books from the cabin. “There go all the outlived parts of us,” Dare commented as the flames leaped up into the frosty blue-grey morning air. “We’ll be phoenixes. . . . I shall never be able to express my gratitude to you; a man has nothing to say to the person who has saved his life, any more than he has to say to the forces that originally gave life to him. He can only accept, marvel, venerate, and use!”
When the fire was low enough to be abandoned with safety, they turned towards the lake, sharing a sense of freedom and poignant exultation that could only find expression in a deep sigh. “There’s no sign of the boat,” Louise said. “Let’s walk. We can take it slowly, and it’s a glorious morning for walking.”
It was; but Louise couldn’t deny that it would have been pleasant to have been sought out, this particular morning, to have been called for and escorted back to the Castle. She would have warmed to some manifestation of extra thoughtfulness on the morning when all Hillside knew that she and Dare were to be released from their imprisonment. Besides, she was tired.
When, hand in hand, they reached the familiar short-cut across the meadow and saw the house standing out in cold sunlight from the base of Hardscrapple, Louise felt more keenly than ever before what a beautiful home she had possessed. The broad terraces and frost-nipped hedges, the withered flower stocks, the pretty hangings behind polished plate-glass, the bedroom balcony with its tubs of privet, the smoke ascending from the chimneys, the perambulator standing outside the door of the sun-parlor, the road bending away towards the dairy and barns,—it all held associations for her sweeter than she would have admitted, and her sense of joy in possession was flavored with a sense of the precariousness of possession. She recalled one of her introspective phrases, that “it was inherent in the nature of charm that it couldn’t be captured or possessed,—except in symbols or by proxy”. How terrible it would be to find oneself in possession of symbols from which the charm had departed!
A woman in black appeared at the door and came out on the terrace. Louise turned suddenly to Dare with a whimsical smile. “If you have only one funny, cross old lady in the world to represent your stock of sisters and cousins and aunts, and who really ought to have been a Mother Superior, you’re obliged to love her, aren’t you?”
Dare judged that you were.
“And if you love Aunt Denise, it’s perfectly obvious you can’t dote on people like Mrs. Windrom and Ernest Tulk-Leamington and lots of others. Don’t you agree?”
“I’ll agree fast enough, but I can only take your word that it’s obvious.”
“She really is pure gold under all that black,—but she’s so far under.”
Aunt Denise waited with outstretched hands. “You are both very welcome!” she cried, and turned to congratulate Dare. “Toi, mon enfant,” she continued, with her arm about Louise’s shoulders, and using the familiar pronoun for the first time since her arrival, “Tu as bien fait. Tu es vraiment la fille de ton père, et de ta pauvre mère. Du Ciel elle t’a envoyé du courage.”
Louise went indoors and her eyes feasted on the colorful tapestries, the shiny spaces, the blazing logs, the flowers, the vases and rugs and odors, the blue and gold vistas through high window-doors. As she entered the library Keble and Miriam looked up from a broad table littered with papers.
Keble came running to greet her. “Why, my dear, we weren’t looking for you so early! We planned to take the launch and fetch you.”
“Couldn’t wait.” She went to kiss Miriam. “It’s quite all right, dear. There’s not a germ left. We’ve exterminated the species. How is the campaign?”
“We’re in the throes of final preparations,” said Keble. “To-night is the big meeting in the Valley. The telephone has already been humming. Yesterday our enemies cut the wires; that shows that they dread us.”
“I’ll run off and let you work,” said Louise, “till lunch.”
“It’s to be a gala lunch,” Miriam warned. “Don’t give a single order. They’re all jubilant at your return,—so are we, dear.”
“Have they been starving you?”
“Do we look starved?”
Louise surveyed them. “No, you look jolly fit. I believe you have got along quite comfortably without me; I rather hate you for it.”
Keble kissed her. “Go see the monkey,” he suggested. “We’ll be out as soon as we get through this. Explain to Dare.”
As Louise closed the library door she combated a desire to cry, then went out not to see the monkey, but a friendly band of slaves that happened to include Katie Salter, ergo the monkey.
Lunch proved festive. Keble was excited; Miriam played big sister; and Aunt Denise reigned with clemency. Dare was still far below par, and his smile was wan; but he was sufficiently his old self to enter the spirit of the occasion.
Talk turned to politics. “You’ll come to-night, of course?” Keble invited Louise. “Your father has offered to put us up. We leave for Witney to-morrow morning. If you’re too tired to go on you can stay at your father’s till the tumult and the shouting die.”
“What about my patient?”
Dare answered for the patient’s welfare. “In the absence of his hosts, he will install himself at their table, take second helpings of everything, then pray for the speedy advent of the next meal, oblivious to the political destinies of the Dominion.”
“Glad to see your appetite back,” said Keble. “Does a man good to see you so greedy.”
After a stroll with Keble, Dare came back to the sun-parlor, where he found Louise checking items in a mail order. He took up a magazine and lay in the hammock.
“I’m ordering some winter provisions,” she informed him.
“You haven’t let much grass grow under your feet.”
“The grass has become knee-deep since I’ve been away.”
Miriam came to the doorway, but hesitated a moment on hearing this last remark, which alluded to goodness knew what. “We’re to be ready at four,” she said. “Keble wonders if you could put tea ahead a half hour.”
Louise got up, giving Dare’s hammock a little shake. “Tea at four instead of four thirty, do you hear, Mr. Dare dear? Are you thrilled?”
“Couldn’t make it three thirty, could you?”
Louise had caught Miriam’s arm and was towing her into the hall. “Don’t look so glum,” she commanded. “Let’s find Gertie and tell her tea at four, then pack our bags.”
“What will you wear?” Miriam asked, surveying Louise’s khaki and wondering what Louise had meant by “glum”.
“What I have on,” replied Louise.
“What! Riding breeches on the platform?”
“Pooh, everybody in the Valley knows my legs by heart! Besides, an election eve mass meeting isn’t like a speech from the Throne.”
Miriam was wondering whether she should ask for an explanation of “glum”, but remained silent as Louise “told Gertie tea at four”, then led the way upstairs. In Louise’s room, however, the chatter irritated her, and again Louise intrigued her by saying, “For heaven’s sake, Miriam, what’s up?”
“Nothing that I know of.”
“Something is.”
“Well if it’s anything,” Miriam temporized, “it’s so little that it’s practically nothing. Besides it’s none of my business.”
“All the more, then.”
“The more what?”
“Necessary to spit it out, darling. Excuse my vulgarity. It’s only my real nature coming out in the joy of getting away from that shack. If not your business, probably mine. Fire away.”
“You’ll think me Mrs. Grundyish.”
“Anything to do with the patient?”
“Thanks for helping me. With Mr. Dare dear, so to speak.”
“Oh!”
“It’s only that,—well, now you’ve brought him through, shall you need to be as attentive to him?”
“Conspicuously attentive?”
“It amounts to that.”
“People been saying catty things?”
“People always do.”
“You and I don’t let ‘people’ dictate our actions.”
Miriam stopped to ask herself how much territory Louise’s “you and I” might be meant to cover. “No,” she assented, “yet there’s something to be said for not giving people unnecessary topics for gossip, especially now that the Eveleys are on exhibition. It would be a pity if your generosity were to be misinterpreted.”
Louise snapped the cover of her bag and sat on a chair facing Miriam. Her face had become serious. “Miriam, dear, are you sure you know why you are so agitated about my attentions to Dare?”
Miriam bit her lip. Had Louise guessed that her appeal was in the nature of a final effort to make Louise intervene between herself and the tyrant which had been inciting her to snatch at any fact or appearance favoring the disloyal cause? “Whatever the cause of my agitation, as you call it, I hope you won’t dismiss my caution as mere meddlesomeness.”
Louise got up and came to place her hands over Miriam’s knees, with an impulsive yet earnest directness. “Our lives are fearfully unstable, dear. We’re constantly raising little edifices in ourselves which we think are solid; then along comes some trickle of feeling and washes the edifice away, leaving only a heap of sand. The problem is to find materials within us more reliable than sand, impervious to chance streams of feeling, with which we can reinforce our edifices, so that they will see us through a lifetime . . . Only after a series of washouts do we recognize the necessity of using a durable mortar, and it takes still longer to discover what materials in us are durable and how to mix them. We’ve only experience to go by. I don’t think I’m over-conceited in saying that I’ve learned my lesson; and I don’t think I’m claiming too much for Dare when I say that he has learned his. In any case we’re answerable only to ourselves, and I don’t see why any one need worry.”
Miriam’s agitation was now undisguised, though its cause was not called into question. Only her impatience restrained her from weeping. “I don’t understand you,” she finally said. “You have outlandish moods which make you do outlandish things, then you offer outlandish explanations in the form of universal laws . . . How are ordinary mortals to be helped by your offhand statement that the solution of personal complications is to find some durable material to cement everything together? That’s begging the question. If you have the durable materials within you, they should protect you from washouts; on the other hand, if you suddenly find yourself in a mess and discover simultaneously that you’re nothing but sand and water, what are you going to do? You can’t borrow concrete from your neighbors.”
“Yes you can. That’s what churches and philosophy and art and schools are for. The other name for concrete is Wisdom. There’s heaps of it in the world; one has only to help oneself.”
“Again you’re begging the question. That wisdom abounds doesn’t imply that everybody is wise enough to prefer it to folly.”
Louise got up and walked back to her dressing table. “But there, as Dare once reminded me, is where nature steps in. If people are hopelessly weak-willed, they have to be cared for and put up with; it’s not their fault. But nature’s average is quite high on the side of strength. Human beings are on the whole wise, just as they are on the whole healthy. And each human being who feels himself weak in spirit can take a spiritual tonic or go in for spiritual gymnastics, and if he doesn’t get better, why I suppose he just becomes a spiritual corpse . . . We’re getting almost morbidly serious about nothing on earth. I haven’t the vaguest idea what started us,—oh yes, your objection to my Mr. Dare dear. Let’s go and see if tea’s at four yet.”
“Louise!” Miriam cried, in a half-choked voice. “What a treasure you are.”
“Don’t be prosy,” said Louise, brushing Miriam’s forehead with her lips. “That fawn thing of yours wears like iron, doesn’t it. I’m in rags. If Keble gets in we’ll make him stand us a trip to New York for some duds.”
Miriam was grateful for the delicacy which had led Louise to terminate her homily with a flippant flourish, thus giving Miriam an opportunity to withdraw intact from the compromising currents into which she had nervously forced the interview. But the tyrant felt cheated, and only subsided at the tea-table when Keble drew Miriam into a final consultation and Louise challenged Dare to a toast-eating competition.