4
At breakfast Louise counted votes for a picnic by the river. “Those who don’t fish,” she suggested, “can sit under the willows and pretend there aren’t any mosquitoes, or play duck on the rock with Mr. Cutty and me.”
They had all come down in comically smart riding clothes. Miriam, with her tanned skin and well-worn khaki, looked like a native in contrast to Girlie in her grey-green whipcord. Girlie, whose horsemanship had been loudly heralded, was eager to try out a Mexican saddle.
Mr. Tulk-Leamington stroked his prematurely bald head. “What will you do if your pony bucks?” he asked.
Girlie languidly buttered her toast. “Ernest,” she chided, “you’re always stirring up mares’ nests.”
“Dear me!” cried Alice. “Do they buck?”
“In wild west novels they do,” said Girlie’s fiancé. “What will you do, Miss Eveley, if yours does?”
“I shall hang on and scream for Louise.”
Louise turned the tables on Ernest. “And you?” she inquired.
Mr. Cutty forestalled him. “He will soar into the firmament. You’ll find him on some remote tree-top. Can’t you picture a distraught owl trying to hatch out Ernest’s head!”
“Mercy!” Lady Eveley exclaimed, in meek distress. “They don’t really try to throw you, do they, Louise?”
This caused an uproar. Louise reached across the table to squeeze her hand. “Of course not, dear. They only try to throw teases like Mr. Tulk-Leamington and devils incarnate like Mr. Cutty. Sundown is a lamb; you’ll like him so well that you’ll be sorry when you arrive at the picnic. Besides I’ll ride beside you all the way.”
“Sundown wouldn’t throw a fly,” Mr. Cutty broke in. “Mrs. Eveley has to flick ’em off with her riding crop.”
Groans drowned this sally and Mr. Cutty nearly lost a spoonful of egg as a result of a lunge directed at him by the prospective owlet.
Through the babel, Keble and the older men, having exhausted the immediate possibilities of prize cattle, were discussing the half-completed golf course, oblivious to frivolous issues. Only once did Mr. Windrom seek to intrude, having overheard something about “throwing a fly,” and this sent the younger generation off into a new gale of unhallowed mirth.
Late in the afternoon the picnickers returned in various states of dampness and soreness, but exuding a contentment for which Louise’s vigilance was largely responsible. Dare and Mr. Cutty rowed to a secluded cove to swim; Ernest went to edit his official memoranda; Mrs. Windrom retired to sleep; Lady Eveley racked her head for words to fill up a letter; the old men resorted to billiards; and Girlie challenged Miriam at tennis.
Louise held court in the kitchen, where she had gone to make some special pastries and to wheedle, scold, encourage, bully, sting, and jolly the augmented staff into supreme efforts. She swore that the future of the Empire hinged on the frothiness of the mousse. The cream was not to be whipped a minute before eight; the grapes were not to be dried, but brought in straight from the ice-box in a cold perspiration, and Gertie was for heaven’s sake not to bump into Griggs on her way to the side table, as she had the night before.
When her batter was consigned to the oven she ran out to the greenhouse for flowers, and saw Keble and his sister stretched in deck chairs near the tennis court. She waved her shears and speculated as to the subject of their chat.
The subject, as she might have guessed, was herself.
“Why didn’t you give us an inkling?” Alice was saying. “Here you’ve been married nearly three years, and you’ve kept this spark of the divine fire all to yourself.”
Keble smiled with a mixture of affection and faint bitterness. “I didn’t exactly keep her, old girl. There’s no reason why you and Mother shouldn’t have got yourself ignited before this.”
Alice considered. “But we did ask her to come to us.”
“There are ways and ways of asking. Do you suppose she can’t feel the difference?”
Again Alice reflected. “You mean, I suppose, that if you had married Girlie, for instance, we would have commanded her presence, on pain of dragging her out of her lair.”
“I’m glad you see it.”
“Well, dear, wasn’t it just a bit your fault?”
“No doubt.”
“I mean, how were we to know what an original creature you had found out here? It isn’t reasonable; there can’t be another. We had nothing to go on but your laconic sketch,—‘wild flowers’, I remember, was your most enthusiastic description. But there are wild flowers and wild flowers, you know,—just as there are ‘ways and ways of asking’. There were gaps and contradictions in your accounts, and the burden of proof rested on you. We didn’t desire to place you in a false position. Even Claudia Windrom reported that Louise’s tastes were very western. I might have known that she was prejudiced, and we certainly ought to have given you more credit for perspicuity. But men are so blind . . . Then we were thrown off by Louise’s temperamental trip to Florida. You wrote a forlorn sort of letter saying that she had gone off on a holiday, and it was just after we had invited you both to come to the Riviera with us. That seemed strange.”
“What did you think I had married, for God’s sake,—an Indian squaw?”
“Don’t be horrid! . . . We weren’t at all sure you hadn’t married a hand grenade.”
Keble laughed. “I’m not at all certain that I haven’t.”
Alice watched him curiously, then abandoned the flicker of curiosity and proceeded to give Louise her due. “It’s not so much her brilliance,—though that’s remarkable,—but her tact! My dear, she could run a political campaign single-handed. I’ve never seen the Windroms so beautifully managed in my life. You know we can’t manage them; at our house one of the trio is always falling out of the picture. But Louise! the instant she sees an elbow or a leg or a Windromian prejudice sticking out she flips it back in, or widens the frame to include it, and nobody the worse. Her way of setting people to rights and making them feel it is they who are setting everybody else to rights is impayable . . . And the best you could say for her was wild flowers!”
“Since Mrs. Windrom was first here a good deal of water has flowed under the bridges.”
“I’ll wager it has. Louise wouldn’t be found camping by a stagnant pool.”
Again she watched her brother curiously. He was gazing into the distance, at nothing.
“Sometimes I feel stagnant beside Louise,” he admitted, put off his guard by the unwonted charm of a sisterly chat.
Alice patted his shoulder, with a gesture tender but angular. “Father is purring with pleasure at the way you’ve stuck to your guns, sonny, although, naturally, he wouldn’t say so for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. In the beginning he used to shake his head in scepticism and sorrow. Now he never lets a dinner guest get away from the house without dragging in you and your colonizing enterprise. Mother, of course, has always doted and still does; but she would have, if you’d gone in for knife-grinding. She would never conceive the possibility of any one doubting you. I frankly did,—not you, but your schemes.”
“There’s plenty to be done yet,” Keble said. “It will take twenty years. Sometimes the future looks as steep to me as Hardscrapple.”
“It won’t look so steep when you’ve got your second wind. I’m full of rosy hopes for you. What’s more, I’m jolly comfortable here. I thought I was going to hate it. I’ve been well fed and waited on. I’ve been amused and sauced by a witty child who isn’t in the least awed by my accursed standoffishness. I think the most remarkable thing about Louise is that she is kind, through and through, without having to be; she could always get her own way without bothering to be kind . . . I’ve also discovered the thrills of being aunt to the most entrancingly ridiculous and succulent infant I’ve ever beheld. Most of all I’ve seen Father and Mother exchanging furtive glances of pride. What more could any old maid ask for.”
Miriam and Girlie joined them. “It’s too warm for tennis,” Girlie complained. “We’re debating whether to go for a swim.”
Alice thought it an excellent idea, provided she was not included.
“But these mountain lakes are icy!” Girlie shivered at the thought.
“Not if you dive in, instead of wading,” said Miriam. “Louise taught me that.”
“I’m too tall. I might stick fast. Besides one looks so distressed in borrowed bathing clothes.”
“And the only secluded cove is pre-empted!” Keble sympathized.
“Oh, without a costume I’d be afraid of sinking. It would seem just like a bath, and one goes straight to the bottom of the bath-tub.”
The bathing project having died of inanition, Miriam and Girlie went indoors.
“I’m trying to think where I’ve seen her before,” Alice said, following Miriam with her eyes. “I keep associating her in my mind with white sails, and strawberries. . . . Louise has known her a long while?”
“For years.”
“Delightful woman! So sensible. How lucky that she is able to help you with your accounts. You never could add.”
“Rather. I don’t know how we could get on without her.”
“Is she stopping long?”
“Well, we can’t put her in a pumpkin shell, like Peter, and keep her forever.”
“She must feel rather cut off from her own people, out here. Where is her home?”
“She used to live in Washington. She has seen what are known as better days.”
“One guesses that . . . For heaven’s sake, Keble, who is she? You know I’m only beating about the bush.”
“She never speaks of her family. Most of it’s dead.”
“Cread—Cread.” Alice was lying in wait for an image that kept eluding her, when suddenly she captured it. “Cowes! Of course. Before the war, at the Graybridge place . . . You remember Aurelie Graybridge,—she was Aurelie Streeter of New York. It was a garden party, after a race, and Admiral Cread was there with the American Ambassador. How stupid of me to have forgotten! I must remind her.”
Keble was uneasy. “I don’t think I would, Alice, unless she does first. She’s uncommonly reticent about herself. She came out here for a complete change, you see.”
“No, I don’t see,” said Alice, impatiently. “That’s just the point. But I’ll hold my tongue . . . I wonder why she hasn’t married.” It always seemed odd to Alice that other women didn’t marry. “Some man like Dare. I suppose he’s young for her,—yet not enough to matter.”
“I’ve thought of that,” Keble reflected. “Discussed it with Louise once. But they don’t seem to be attracted . . . Dare is a splendid chap. There’s no resisting him when he gets going. He has given us all a healthy fillip.”
“You have been lucky in your companions, you and Louise!” Alice commented.
“Rather! Oh, hello, here’s the car with the people from the Valley. We’re going to show you some natives to-night.”
“Who is the funny little man in front?”
“That is the best-informed and most highly esteemed ‘character’ within a radius of sixty miles,—and incidentally my father-in-law.”
“The ominous lady in black looks like the Empress Eugénie come back to mourn her own loss!”
Keble was puzzled. “I haven’t the faintest notion who she is,—good Lord! unless it’s Madame Mornay-Mareuil, whom we’ve been expecting off and on for weeks!”
They had risen from their chairs. “Go and meet them,” said Alice. “I shall lie down a while before dressing.”