This qualm she could dispel by reminding herself that at the time of her advent Louise and Keble had been drifting apart through very lack of an interpreter. Then it was Keble’s language which had been too precious for his wife, and Louise herself had taken energetic steps to increase her vocabulary to meet the demand. Would Keble take steps to learn her new words? At least there was evidence that he suffered at not being able to speak them. But after all Keble was a man, and no man should be expected to grope in the irrational mazes of a woman’s psychology. It was a woman’s duty to make herself intelligible to the man who loved her; Miriam was tenaciously sure of this. Yet Louise nowadays made no effort to share her ideas with Keble; she merely challenged him to soar with her, and when he, thinking of Icarus, held back, she went flying off with Dare, who certainly made no effort to bear any one aloft, but whose powerful rushing ascensions either filled you with a desire to fly or bowled you over.
Dare, for all his impetuosity, was, like Louise, prodigiously conscientious; but like her he was more concerned with the sense of a word than with its orthography. He was too certain of the organic and creative nature of experience to live according to any formula. You felt unwontedly safe with him, just as you did with Louise, but safe from dangers that only he had made you see, dangers on a remote horizon. As you ambled along, with nothing more ominous than a cloud of dust or a shower of rain to disturb your pedestrian serenity, Louise and Dare would swoop down, armed to the teeth, gleefully to assure you that nothing fatal would happen, that accidents to limb held no terrors for moral crusaders worthy the name; then, leaving you to stand there in bewilderment, they would swoop off again to catch up with unknown squadrons beyond the rim of vision, whence, for the first time, a muffled sound of bombing came to your ears. And your knees would begin to tremble, not on their account,—oh dear no, they could take care of themselves,—but on your own. Suddenly your pedestrian course seemed drab to you,—long, weary, prosaic; but you lacked wings, weapons, zeal, and endurance.
Louise was a Spartan both morally and physically. She could ignore transgressions of the social code as easily as she could ignore bodily discomforts. Recently Miriam had seen an example of each. When Pearl Beatty, the schoolteacher, had been made the topic of scandalous gossip which echoed through the Valley, Louise in defiance of her husband and the public had fetched Pearl to the ranch for a week-end, and said to her in effect, “Pearl dear, I’ll see that you don’t lose your job, provided you don’t lose your head. If it’s a man you want, wait till you find the right one, then bring him here and I’ll protect you both. But if it’s a lot of men you want you can’t go on teaching school in our Valley; it’s too complicated. The only way to play that game with pleasure and profit,—and I doubt whether you’re really vicious enough,—is to save your money, go to a big city, buy some good clothes, and sit in the lobby of the leading commercial hotel until fate’s finger points.” As a result of this manoeuvre some of Pearl’s thoughtless exuberance rushed into a channel of devotion to Louise, who seized the occasion to build up in the girl a sense of her own value and then bullied the Valley into respecting it.
As for physical courage, only a few days previously Louise, uttering an occasional “Oh damn!” to relieve her agony, had stoically probed with a needle deep under her thumb-nail to release a gathering that had formed as a result of rust poisoning, while Miriam stood by in horror.
Far deeper than her dread of anything Louise might do was a dread engendered by lack of confidence in herself. Within herself there was some gathering of emotion for which, unlike Louise, she hadn’t the courage to probe. As she had told Louise at their first meeting, responsibility could frighten her; and she now shrank before the responsibility of her inclinations. The most she dared admit to herself was that she was growing too fond of the life around her. In her first youth she had fancied herself a real person in a pleasantly artificial setting, mildly enamoured of glittering symbols of life; in this faraway corner, renovated by solitude, physical exertion, and obligatory self-analysis, she saw herself as an artificial person in a pleasantly real setting, enamoured of life itself. She had come to teach, and had remained to learn. In the old days a horse had been a sleek toy upon which one cantered in Rock Creek Park or Rotten Row or the Monte Pinchio gardens until a motor came and fetched one home to lunch. A dog had been a sort of living muff. Camping expeditions had been an elaborate means of relaxing overwrought nerves. Nowadays a horse was a friend who uncomplainingly bore one great distances, who discovered the right path when one was lost. A dog was a companion who escorted one through fearsome trails, who retrieved the grouse one hit, and kept watch by night at the cabin door. Camping expeditions were a serious means to some explorative end; one slept on the hard ground under a raincoat simply because there was nothing else to sleep on, and eagerly looked forward to doing it again. Men and women whom one would once have sent down to the kitchen for a cup of tea were now one’s convives. And far from losing caste on this level, one acquired a useful perspective of society and a new conception of one’s identity. Association with a girl like Pearl Beatty, for instance, not only opened one’s eyes at last to some blunt facts about one’s own nature, but also furnished the clue to scandals concerning which one had been stupidly supercilious in the days when life consisted in the automatic fulfilment of projects announced beforehand on pieces of cardboard.
Yet for the first time in a dozen years she was not sure of herself. So far she had been loyal in thought as well as deed, but the present inventory of herself revealed claims for which she had also little rebellious gusts of loyalty. Louise herself counted for something in this development, since however much one might deprecate Louise’s bold convictions, one couldn’t deny that they were often ingratiating. “It’s more honorable to hoist your own sail and sail straight on a reef than it is to be towed forever!” When Louise tossed off remarks of that sort one was tempted to lengths of experiment that one would once have drastically disapproved. Louise’s philosophy might end by producing inedible fruits, but meanwhile there was no denying the charm of the blossoms she flaunted under one’s windows and virtually defied one not to smell.
As long as Louise was plying at verbal thunder and lightning, Miriam’s confidence in herself underwent to qualms. For at such times, she, in comparison with Louise, personified all that was discreet. But when Louise’s effervescences died down, when the last waterspout of her exultant proclamations had collapsed on a lake of apathy too deep and dark to be penetrated, Miriam felt the wavelets radiating to the shore at her feet, gently communicating a more daring rhythm to her own desires.
The first definite effect of these reflections was Miriam’s decision to leave. Otherwise she would be forced to come to an understanding with herself and run the risk of discovering that she was ready to—steal.
It was late in September. Dare’s army of workmen were fighting against time to complete the exteriors of the new house and outbuildings before winter. Miriam drew rein as her horse reached the top of the hill from which she had obtained her first glimpse of the lake more than a year ago. The sun was not yet up, but the world was expecting it. The lake which only yesterday had been an emerald was now a long, flat pearl encircled in a narrow, faintly amethystine mist which like a scarf of gauze broke the perpendicular lines of the farthermost shore. In it were mirrored the colossal rocks forming the jagged V of the canyon, and threadbare clouds of pale rose and jade, lemon and amber. The oily brown log cottages silhouetted near the outlet had the pictorial value of black against the living pearl of the water, and Louise’s flower beds were banked with something mauve dulled by dew. Frost-bitten, orange-red geraniums in wooden urns raised high on crooked tree-stumps made hectic blurs on each side of the main cottage. Farther off, and higher than the tops of the pine trees which rose above the pervasive lavender mist, were clusters of yellow and crimson foliage and slender tree trunks that stood out like strokes of Chinese white. Higher yet were stretches of rusty gorse which finally straggled off to bare patches of buff-hued turf ending in the rock walls of Hardscrapple, whose irregular peaks, four thousand feet above, were faintly edged with silver light.
At the end of the pine ridge to the right of the lake, surmounting a broad meadow, standing out from the wooded slope of the mountain, and bringing the whole landscape to a focus, was the Castle with its severe lines, its broad balconies and high windows. One terrace dominated the lake, while another looked over the top of the pine ridge towards the distant valley where the river twisted its way for thirty miles through a grey-green sage plain broken by occasional dark islands of pine and bounded on the farther side by patchy brown and green risings culminating in a lumpy horizon.