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.