“If you do,” said Miriam, “Louise will be furious, and that will only make matters worse. It’s merely exhaustion. Even I have seen it coming.”
“I wish to God I’d fetched a nurse from Harristown when Dare was ill.”
“Louise wouldn’t have given up her patient if you had imported a dozen.”
Keble was vexed and bitterly unhappy. “What are you going to do with a woman like that!” he cried. “I don’t mind her having her own way; but damn it all, I object to her doing things that half kill her. That’s stupid.”
One of the most difficult lessons Miriam had learnt in her long discipleship under Louise was how and when to be generous. She saw an opportunity and breathed more freely. “I think it’s cruel of you to call her sacrifice stupid. If she breaks down it is not that she has undertaken too much; but that other people undertake so little. When Louise resolved to nurse Dare she did it because there was, as she said to me, no one else. But during that period she was putting the best brain-work into our campaign. The minute she was free she went to the Valley, worked like a horse, and turned the tide single-handed because, as she might have put it, there was nobody else. She thinks and acts for us all. It isn’t our fault if we are not alert enough to live up to her standard, but the least we can do when she becomes a victim to our sluggishness is to refrain from blaming her.”
“Well, Miriam, I give it up! I don’t understand Louise; I don’t understand Aunt Denise; I don’t even understand you. You women have one set of things to say for publication, and then disclose amendments which alter the color of the published reports. Each new disclosure rings true, yet they don’t piece together into anything recognizable. I no sooner get my sails set than the breeze shifts. . . . There’s only one thing left for me to do, and that is to go on as I began, just crawling along like a tortoise, colliding into everything sooner or later. By the time I’m eighty I may have learned something and got somewhere. If not I’ll just stumble into my grave, and on my tombstone they can write, ‘Poor devil, he meant well’.”
Miriam had been laughing at the funny aspect of his misery, but her smile became grim. “That isn’t a bad epitaph. I wish I could be sure that I’ll be entitled to one as good.”
Keble glanced at her curiously. “You’re morbid, Miriam. I don’t wonder, with the monotony of our life here.”
“No,” she corrected, despite the tyrant. “The life here has done more than anything to cure me of morbidness. Although, to tell the truth, I wasn’t conscious of the morbid streak in me until after I’d been here for a while.” To herself Miriam explained the matter with the help of a photographic metaphor: Keble’s personality had been a solution which brought out an alluring but reprehensible image on the negative of her heart; Louise’s character had been a solution which had gradually brought out a series of surrounding images which threw the reprehensible image into the right proportion, subordinating it to the background without in any way dimming it. Miriam was now forced to admit that one overture on Keble’s part, one token of a tyrant within him that reciprocated the desire of her tyrant, would have sufficed to overthrow all her scruples.
“I don’t see what you mean,” said Keble.