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!”