4
A singular, poignant peace brooded over Hillside through the long months of Miriam’s second winter at the ranch. While the outer world stood transfixed with cold, its lakes and streams frozen and its heart stifled under the snow, the people indoors went about their tasks and diversions with an orderliness that recalled old times to Louise and Keble and tended to persuade Miriam that her doubts about herself had been exaggerated.
To break the monotony of correspondence, books, cards, and skiing trips there had been countless boxes to unpack in the unfinished house on the hill: boxes of furnishings and ornaments, music to try over and books to catalogue. To give unity to the winter, there was the dramatic suspense of waiting for the human miracle. The attitude of Louise combined tolerance of Keble’s solicitude with amusement at Miriam’s half-embarrassed excitement. For the rest she accepted with common sense a situation which she privately regarded as an insult on the part of fate.
The apathy which Miriam had noted so uneasily in the early autumn had not disappeared, although it had lost its trance-like fixity, in the place of which had come a more regular attention to daily tasks, a quiet competence. Miriam’s admiration for Louise had steadily grown, despite her distrust of Louise’s intellectual “climbing” and her half-acknowledged envy of Louise’s power to enslave Keble, to give Dare Rolands for his Olivers, and to bind maids and cooks, farm hands and horse wranglers, neighbors and creditors together in a fanatical vassalage. On none of her slaves did Louise make arbitrary demands. If she exhorted or scolded them, it was always apropos of their success or failure in being true to themselves. If Miriam’s admiration ever wavered, it was on occasions when Louise, carried away by her own élan, cut capers merely to show what capers she could cut,—like an obstreperous child shouting, “Watch me jump down three steps at a time.”
But recently Louise had not been cutting capers, and as she sat before a fire that gave the lie to the incredible temperature that reigned beyond the storm doors, calmly stitching garments for an infant whose advent was distasteful to her, Miriam regarded her with the protective affection she might have felt for a sister ten years her junior.
“I can’t make you out,” she said. “In your place I would be obnoxiously proud of myself.”
“When I was first married I wanted him. Then as time went on I hoped there wouldn’t be any him at all. Saw to it, in fact. I’ve been negligent.”
“Why him?” Miriam inquired.
“Because it’s my duty to produce a member of the ancient and honorable House of Lords. His forebears expect it. As for me, I’d rather have a monkey.”
Grimness had replaced the old zest and elasticity, and Miriam noted with surprise that this single fact completely altered the personality of the household. If the present mood proved permanent, she reflected, the Castle, for all their pains, would have the character of a house to let.
Dare had left in the late autumn and would return in the spring, perhaps remaining for the house-warming which was to be the occasion of a visit by members of Keble’s family. At the time of Dare’s departure Miriam had watched Louise with intense curiosity. She had longed to know the nature of the rôle played by Louise’s heart in her relation with Dare,—a relation which both so freely acknowledged to be exhilarating. During one of their final evenings Louise had said to Dare, “When you leave Hillside I shall climb to the top of Hardscrapple, chant a hymn to the sun, and dive head first into the canyon, for there won’t be anything to live for, except Keble and Miriam, and they’re only the land I’m a fish on, whereas you’re the water I’ll be a fish out of!”
To which Dare had instantly retorted, “Indeed I’m not the water you’re a fish in. I’m the whale you’re a swordfish attacking, and I shall be glad to get back east where there’s nothing I can’t either swallow or out-swim.”
Miriam had been exasperated at not being able to read between the bantering lines. For there must be a situation, she reasoned; two such abounding persons, no matter how adroit, could never have got so far into each others’ minds without having got some distance into each other’s blood.
But the situation, whatever it was, was not divulged, and Miriam was denied whatever solace her own unruly heart might have derived from the knowledge that Keble’s wife’s heart was also unruly.
Whether Louise’s sense of duty had a share in it or not, a “him” was duly produced and ecstatically made at home. Even his mother ended by admitting that he was “not a bad little beast.” She had vetoed Keble’s plan to import a nurse from England, and had trained Katie Salter for the post. As motherhood had once been Katie’s passionate avocation, Louise could think of no better way to translate into deeds the spirit of her outlandish funeral sermon on neighborliness than to promote Katie from the wash-house to the nursery.
Keble and Miriam came in from an hour’s skating one afternoon late in December to find Louise at the tea-table submitting to Katie’s proud account of the prodigy’s gain in weight. She was mildly amused to learn that the tender hair on the back of babies’ heads was worn off by their immoderate addiction to pillows.
Keble leaned over the perambulator, not daring to put his finger into the trap of his son’s microscopic hand lest its coldness have some dire effect. He had an infatuated apprehension of damage to his child, having so recently learned the terrific physical cost of life. His tenderness for the infant had a strange effect on Louise. It made her wish that she were the baby. Tears gathered in her eyes as she watched him, still aglow from his exercise and fairly hanging on Katie’s statistics.
She began to pour tea as Miriam threw aside her furs and drew up a chair. Miriam had hoped, in common with Keble and Katie Salter, that Louise’s indifference would disappear as if by magic when the baby came within range of the census. She was forced to admit, however, that Louise was not appreciably more partial to her son than to Elvira Brown or Dicky Swigger.
“Could you desert him long enough to drink a cup of tea?” Louise inquired after a decent interval. She liked the solemn manner in which Keble talked to the future member of the House of Lords. Like Gladstone addressing the Queen, Keble addressed the baby as though it were a public meeting. “You must make due allowance for the incurable knick-knackery of woman kind,” he was saying, as he smoothed out a lace border in which two tiny fingers had become entangled and against which,—or something equally unjust,—a lusty voice was beginning to protest.
“He’s not as polite as you are, if he does take after you,” Louise commented when Keble had praised the toasted cheese cakes.
Keble judged this a fair criticism, and Miriam was of the opinion that a polite baby would be an unendurable monstrosity. “I like him best of all,” she said, “when he kicks and twists and screams ‘fit to bust his pram’, as Katie says. Although I’m also quite keen about him when he’s dining. Yes, thanks, and another cheese cake . . . And his way of always getting ready to sneeze and then not, that’s endearing. And his dreams about food.”
“You wouldn’t find them half as endearing if you had to wake up in the middle of the night and replenish him.”
“Oh I say, Weedgie! Must you always speak of him as though he were a gas-tank, or a bank account!”
“Pass me your cup. After skating you also want a lot of replenishing, like your greedy heir. Now let’s for goodness’ sake talk about something else,—the New Year’s dance for instance.”
Keble was always ready nowadays to talk on any subject in which Louise showed signs of interest. The recognized household term for it was “trying to be the water Louise is a fish in.”