Hare and Tortoise (Davison)/Part 2/Chapter 3
THREE days later Louise stood on the terrace watching the departure of her guests. As the last car disappeared into the pines she thought of the day when Walter and his mother drove away from the cottage which she had named "Sans Souci." On that day she had tensely waited for some sympathetic sign from Keble, and he had withheld it. Now she knew that the balance was changed, that Keble was waiting for a sign from her. Yet all she could say was, "Thank God, that's over!"
Recently she had had no time to project her thoughts into the future. Until this family reunion was safely thrust into the past she had schooled herself to be patient, as she had done under the constraint of approaching motherhood. Both events she had regarded as primary clauses in her matrimonial pact, and the reward she had promised herself for executing them was complete moral freedom. She would admit nothing more binding in the pact, for she had made a point of benefiting as little as possible from it. If Keble had provided her with a home, she had managed it skilfully for him. If he had placed his bank account at her disposal, she had gone disproportionately deep into her own. An element unforeseen in the pact was that either party to it might, in the process of carrying out its clauses, develop personal resources for which the other could have little use but which, on sheer grounds of human economy, ought not to be allowed to remain unmined.
Keble had warned her that grappling with ideas might end in one of the ideas knocking her on the head. Which was nonsense. The danger lay not in grappling with ideas but in trying to dodge them, in letting them lurk in your neighborhood ready to take you unawares. If you went at them with all your might they were soon overpowered.
Yet going at them brought you face to face with other ideas lurking farther along the path, and before you knew it you were in a field where no one,—at times not even Dare—was able or cared to follow. And at the prospect of forging on alone your imagination staggered a little; an unwelcome emotion,—unwelcome because more fundamental than you had been willing to admit,—surged up and insisted that nothing in life was worth striving for that carried you out of the warmth of the old community of affection. For, whatever might be achieved through adventuring in wider fields, a catering to new minds would be entailed, an occasional leaning upon new arms, homage from new eyes and hearts. That was inevitable, since human beings were of necessity social. And the overwhelming pity of it was that you would always be conscious that the neatest mind in the world, though not the broadest, the most comfortable arms, though not the most expert, the most candid blue eyes, though not the most compelling, were those of the man from whom your adventurousness had drawn you away. The thought of entirely outgrowing them gave you a chill. When you had penetrated further into the forest of life's possibilities you couldn't go on indefinitely playing hide and seek among the trees with that old companion. He would stop at the edge of the forest, and you must make your way through it, alone.
As Louise sat on the terrace, a little weary after the continuous tension, recalling the appealing droop of Keble's lips as he had turned away from her a few minutes before, she was obliged to face the fact that some chord within her had responded to the appeal, despite her stern censorship. She was obliged to admit that even when her path became definitely distinct from Keble's, when she should finally throw all the weight of her personality into a passion worthy of her emotional possibilities, or that failing, into some project so vital that she would become oblivious to the trifles that filled so much of Keble's and Miriam's attention, she would not be able to extinguish the fragrance of the flower of sentiment that Keble had been the first to coax into blossom. Her feeling toward any new friend who might tread her path would exhale the odor of the phial of affection labelled "Keble", though that phial lay on a neglected shelf.
Even in the recklessness that had overtaken her beside Billy's grave, there had been some purring obligato, a running commentary to the effect that her wanton experiment was in Keble's name, that all the thrills in the universe were reducible to the quieter terms of mere charm, that all the charming things in life were reducible to "Keble", and it was inherent in the nature of charm that it could not be captured and possessed, except in symbols, or by proxy. One could be so profoundly loyal to one's personal conception of life,—a conception which exacted unflinching courage at the approach of new ideas and high venturesomeness in tracking down concealed ideas,—that one could accept clues from a stranger even though the accepting might involve a breach of what the world called constancy. Incidentally, the fact that her first breach, whatever it may have meant to Dare, was an erotic fiasco as far as she was concerned, had by no means discountenanced further experimentation. Life should pay her what it owed her, even if she had to pay heavy costs in collecting her due.
On making the shocking discovery that marriage was no solution of her destiny, she had vigorously bestirred herself, only to make the even more shocking discovery that she was shedding her husband as a caterpillar sheds its cocoon. Now, poised for flight, she could cherish a tender sentiment for the cocoon but could scarcely fold her wings and crawl back into it.
She recalled the cruel little poem, still unaccounted for, which had thrown open a door in her mind.
Who are but one part of an infinite me,
Should I not slight the rest?
Those lines had come at her with a reproachful directness. In them, or rather in the blue pencil which marked off the poem on its printed page, she had read Keble's impatience with her limitations. Her reason had seen in the lines a justification against which her heart rebelled. From that moment she had been disciplining her heart. So effectively indeed, that now,—were it not for that appealing little droop and for the sentimental fragrance which still clung to her,—she might have flung the poem at him and cried, "Voilà la monnaie de ta pièce. I've learned my lesson in bitter thoroughness. Now it is I who point to 'rude necessary heights' intent upon a goal you are unable to see."
The nature of the goal was not clear even to herself, nor could she exactly define the help that Dare had given her in mounting towards it. Certainly the upward journey had been easier since he had first appeared, and certainly her climbing prowess had seemed more notable in moments when she and Dare on some high ledge of thought had laughingly looked down at Keble and Miriam exchanging mystified glances, in which admiration for the agility of the two on the ledge was blended with misgivings as to the risks they ran.
Although she was lured upward by the hope of wider views, there were times when she scrambled and leaped for the mere joy of climbing. There were other times when she was intoxicated by a sense of the vastness of causes to be advocated and the usefulness of deeds to be done. She had visions of jumping up on platforms and haranguing masses of people till they, too, were drunk with the wine of their own potentialities. She had only the sketchiest notion of what she or they were to accomplish. The nearest she came to a definite program was the vision of a new self-conscious world blossoming forth into unheard-of activity, giving birth to new institutions and burying the old. Any cause would be hers provided it were intelligent, energetic, and comprehensive. In the joy of being awake she needed to rouse the world from its lethargy, make it cast away its crutches. In her consciousness of rich personal resources she needed to make everybody else dig up the treasures latent within themselves. Most of all, she desired that the world should "get on", that its denizens should abandon their moral motorcars and leap into moral aeroplanes until something still more progressive could be devised.
Despite the vagueness of her goal there was no lack of impetus in her pursuit of it, and every day, on a blind instinct which she had learned to revere, she did deeds in point, deeds which, when done, proved to be landmarks, in a perfect row, on her route towards the unknown destination. This encouraged her to believe that the future would help her by showing a tendency to create itself.
The visit of Keble's family had proved a negative hint as to the nature of her goal, for clearly her direction was not to be one that led into a bog of kind, complacent social superiorishness. Whatever errors she might make she would not end by being gently futile, like her mother-in-law; she would not turn into a wet blanket like Girlie, nor a noisy, nosy Christmas-cracker like Mrs. Windrom. Alice Eveley had been the most satisfactory woman of the four, yet Louise particularly hoped she would not land in Alice's bog; for Alice, while intelligent, had turned none of her intelligence to account; while bright, she shed only a reflected light; while frank, she could politely dissemble when downrightness would have been more humane; and while sympathetic, she held to conventions which had it in them to insist upon mercilessness. Alice was, one could sincerely admit, a jolly good sort, but only because she had not opposed favoring circumstances of birth, wealth, and privilege. Girlie was a less jolly good sort because she had avoided even the gentle propelling force of favoring circumstances and loitered in back eddies,—she had been "dragged" to Italy, for instance, and had brought back no definite impression save that of a campanile which had made recollection easy for her by leaning! Alice at least floated down the middle of the stream. But neither had struck out for herself, and Louise's complete approval was reserved for people who swam. In that respect the men of the party had had more to commend them.
But even the men moved in a hopelessly restricted current. One could point out so many useful directions in which they wouldn't dream of venturing. That was where Dare had shown to advantage. Even though Dare had kept his tongue in his cheek, his real superiority had been manifest to Louise. Compared to Mr. Windrom, a renowned old Tory, Dare was a comet shooting past a fixed star. Mr. Windrom had undoubtedly swum, but only in the direction of the political current in which his fathers had immersed him. Dare, like herself, had swum against the current. Like herself and her father and Aunt Denise and misguided Uncle Mornay-Mareuil, Dare had emerged from obscurity and poverty. She and Dare had swum to such good purpose that they had attained the smoothly running stream that bore on its bosom the most highly privileged members of civilization. And while momentarily resting, they had caught each other's eyes long enough to exchange, with a sort of astonished grunt, "Is this all!" Was it to be expected that they should stop swimming just because every one else was contented with civilization's meandering flow? To have done so would have been to degrade the valor that had gone into their efforts thus far.
Yet the mere fact that they had reciprocated a glance of intelligence had been pounced upon by one of the privileged members as evidence of treasonous dissatisfaction with the meandering current, and Mrs. Windrom's last words to her, pronounced in a voice which every one was meant to hear, were, "Do say good-bye to Mr. Dare for me. I'm sorry he's not well; but I know what a devoted nurse you will be."
Of course Alice and Lady Eveley and Miriam and all the others might have good enough memories to associate Mrs. Windrom's remark with Walter's accident, but the chances were that they would not, and that left in their minds an equivocal association between her devotion as nurse and the particular case of Dare's indisposition. Louise was aware that Mrs. Windrom meant her remark to convey this hint, and while she didn't care a tinker's dam for Mrs. Windrom's approval, she did object to underhandedness.
Walter had swum, and although he might not have the prowess of herself and Dare, still he had shown enough independence of the complacent stream to qualify in the class which included Dare, herself, and,—by a narrow margin,—Keble and Miriam. For Miriam had not merely floated. If she had not made as good progress as Walter or Keble, she was none the less to be commended for the distances she had covered, for Miriam was handicapped in having no family or money to lean back on in moments of fatigue and discouragement.
Alice had lost some of her standing with Louise by saying to Miriam before departing, "I hope we shall see something of each other in the future, Miss Cread. I take it that you will be returning east this autumn."
It was natural enough for Alice to "take it" that Miriam would be returning. But, in the light of that trifling episode during the dance, Louise felt that Alice's express assumption of Miriam's departure was almost a hint; and having learned to read Miriam's countenance, she was almost sure that Miriam had felt the remark to be, if not a hint, at least a warning. And that Louise resented; for the fact that Alice had not been born athletic enough to strike out for herself gave her no right to curb the athleticism of others. And if it was a warning, and if Alice justified it to herself on the score of sisterly protection, then how did Alice justify her many sisterly neglects? Louise felt that if she had been in Alice's place when Keble, sick of the war, had first struck out into the wilds, no power on earth could have prevented her from following at his heels to fry bacon over his camp fires. If she had had a brother she would have guarded and bullied and slaved for him with the single object of making him what Minnie Hopper as a little girl would have called "the champeen king of the circus."
Whether Miriam's continued sojourn was in the best interests of all concerned was another matter. Obviously Miriam, despite her protests, desired to stay. But that was none of Alice Eveley's business. It was a matter for Miriam alone to decide, and she should not be hampered in her decision. In a sense it was Keble's business too. Certainly not his wife's, though long before Keble's sister had appeared on the scene, Louise had sometimes arrested herself, as Alice had done, and chosen a different course in order not to break in on some apparent community of interest between her husband and Miriam Cread.
A perambulator appeared at the corner of the terrace, propelled by a stolid nursemaid. The monkey, rosy and fat, was making lunges at a white hillock in his coverings which he would have been surprised to know was his own foot. On seeing his mother he abandoned the hillock to give her a perky inspection. His bonnet had slid down over one eye, and the tip of his tongue protruded at the opposite corner of his mouth.
Louise broke into a laugh. "Katie! Make that child put in his tongue or else straighten his hat. He looks such an awful rake with both askew."
Katie missed the fine point of the monkey's resemblance to a garden implement, but, as Dare had recognized, Katie was as immortal in her ignorance as philosophers are in their erudition. She straightened the monkey's headgear, this adjustment being less fraught with complications than an attempt to reinstate his tongue.
"His granpa and gramma come into the nursery before breakfast," Katie proudly announced. "They said it was to give me a present, which they done,—but it was really to see the monkey again."
Louise had risen and gone over to shake the white hillock, an operation which revived the monkey's interest in that phenomenon.
"Any one would think he was their baby!" she said sharply.
As she was turning to go into the house she met Miriam, whose face was anxious. "Oh, there you are," Miriam began. "I wish you would go up to Dare. They can't make him drink the things you left for him. Now he's arguing with Aunt Denise, who says he's in a fever. He says he's not, and he's saying it with feverish intensity."
Louise gave a start. "Miriam! Papa had two cases of smallpox a few weeks ago. Those Grays, you know,—down the river."
"Wasn't it one of the Gray girls that Dare rescued the day we went to Deer Spring? She had climbed a tree and couldn't get down."
They hurried upstairs. "You wait here," Louise ordered, leaving Miriam at the door of the bedroom.
"Thank God it's you," said a half delirious voice, as she appeared, and Dare sank back into bed.
Louise made a rapid diagnosis, then turned to Aunt Denise. "I think it's smallpox," she whispered. "Will you fumigate the nursery? You'll find everything in the medicine chest. I'll have him moved to one of the cabins. Je sais ce qu'il faut faire."
There was no timorousness in Aunt Denise. A competent, strong woman herself, she took competence and strength and a stern sense of duty for granted in any member of her family.
When she had gone Louise went to the door to report to Miriam. "Get somebody to take a few blankets over to your old cabin. Then find Mr. Brown and have him send up some sort of stretcher. Mrs. Brown will help you straighten the cabin and build a fire to air it. Then telephone Papa."
"What are you going to do?" Miriam ventured.
"Nurse. There's no one else. Besides he wouldn't obey a stranger. You won't mind keeping an eye on the house, will you? Don't let Aunt Denise be too thrifty. Above all, keep Keble from fretting. He rears like a horse when he's frightened."
"But can you keep from catching it?"
"I can do anything I make up my mind to. Now hurry, dear."
Miriam was seriously alarmed, yet Louise's confidence was tonic. Moreover this development gave her an elasticity of motion of which she was a little ashamed.
When Keble returned for luncheon he found the table set on the terrace and a strong odor of disinfectants issuing from the house. Miriam explained, and although Keble was familiar with his wife's rapidity of organization, he was bewildered to find that she was installed in a cabin across the lake, and that his first visit to her was already scheduled. He was to accompany Miriam in the launch at three. Louise would talk to them from the boat-slip, where they would leave supplies.
"That's all very well," he agreed. "But what about Louise?"
"Nurses always protect themselves," Miriam reassured him. "And Louise would be the last woman to make a blunder."
It was harder than she had foreseen to keep Keble from panic, for every reassuring remark seemed merely to arouse new images of disaster. He was sorry for Dare but considered it clumsy of him to have collected Thelma Gray's germs.
"You would have done the same," Miriam reminded him.
"But I wouldn't have gone prowling bareheaded all over the northwest after a warm evening of dancing," he said with a sharper accent.
Miriam had been sleepless after the dinner party, and at dawn from her window had seen Dare, dishevelled, cross the meadow through the wet grass and let himself into the house. It came to her as a shock that Keble had witnessed this incident, of which no mention had been made. Had Keble, too, spent a sleepless night? Had that any bearing on his habit, more conspicuous of late, of nervously whistling, and leaving his seat to wander about the house? Miriam was a little unstrung and was grateful for the presence of Aunt Denise, whose rigidity held the household together, even if it occasionally stood in the way of a free and easy routine.
Miriam and Keble were at pains to conceal from each other their consternation at the situation created by Louise's prompt retirement into quarantine. Aunt Denise, the most straight-laced person at Hillside, was probably the only person in the neighborhood who took Louise's step as matter of course. Keble was proud of his wife's medical talent; it emphasized her womanliness, and it was the essentially feminine qualities in Louise which he had unflaggingly admired. Yet he was tormented by the thought of her self-imposed duties, and if he had had to choose a patient for her he would probably have chosen anyone rather than Dare. He was also angry at her unconditional veto on a trained nurse from Harristown.
To Louise the fitness of her conduct was a matter of so little consequence that it did not enter her head. In the beginning she saw that she would have a trying case on her hands. Although her presence had a soothing effect on Dare, his unfamiliarity with illness made him a difficult patient, and Louise had to adopt drastic methods, a cross between bullying and ridiculing him into obedience. Her greatest difficulty came in changing his wrappings, an operation which had to be performed with the least possible variation in temperature. Dare obstructed the task by struggling to free himself, and by trying to prevent her from bathing him with her lotions.
In one access of delirium he sat up, glared at her with unrecognized fury, and shouted, "Get to hell out of this room, before I break in your skull!"
Whereupon she walked straight to the bed, pinned his shoulders to the pillow, and retorted, "Don't you say another word till I tell you to; if you order me out I may go, and if I do there'll be no one to give you a drink. Now lie still."
She held his eyes until she saw a return of lucidity. He collapsed, and said feebly, "Have I been bad? I can't have you overhearing me if I ramble."
She had overheard many illuminating scraps of confession. "Listen, Mr. Dare dear," she said, with tears in her eyes. "If you're going to get well soon, you must be perfectly quiet. The rambling doesn't matter, but try to fix it in your mind that you mustn't be rough. You're so terribly strong!"
"What's the use of getting well?" he moaned.
A few moments later his good intentions were consumed in the heat of new hallucinations. "Is that Claudia?" he shouted. "Oh God, it must be a thousand in the shade."
Sometimes he hummed a few bars of a lively melody, in appallingly unmusical tones. With a remorse that closed her ears to the grotesqueness of the performance Louise recognized the tune of their dance.
In a few days the ranch settled down to the new order. Miriam and Keble made daily visits to the boat-slip, the doctor came as often as he could arrange the long trip, sometimes remaining overnight, and Mrs. Brown, her mind on the nights when Mrs. Eveley had sat and held Annie's hand, cooked tempting dishes and brought them to the window. She also took turns at sitting outside Dare's window while Louise lay down in the tiny sitting room of the cabin. Twice during the doctor's visits Louise had gone for a short gallop, but gave up the practise on learning that Dare had asked for her during her absence.
At the Castle Aunt Denise ruled with a sway that awed the servants but failed to produce the industry that Louise could inspire with a much laxer code. Keble and Miriam, after faint attempts to restore an unanalyzable comfort that had departed with Louise, fell into step behind Aunt Denise and were always relieved when the time came to go out of doors or repair to the library on business. During the first days Keble had been haunted by a fear that illness would break out in the house. Once in the middle of the night when he had been awakened by the sound of crying he ran to the nursery, half expecting to find the monkey speckled like a trout. Katie, with a trace of asperity, persuaded him that Baby was only suffering from wind, and this seemed plausible, for at the height of their wrangle the monkey relapsed into an angelic slumber, broken only by a motion of lips that implied health of the serenest and greediest description.
Miriam found a deep, wistful contentment in trying to keep Keble's mind occupied. In the evenings Aunt Denise played patience and retired punctually at ten. Miriam usually remained another half hour at the piano, then Keble went alone to read in the library with his pipe and a decanter. He grew more taciturn than she had ever seen him, and this mood she dreaded, for it stirred the rebellious ego within her which had grown during the past months to unmanageable proportions.
En revanche Keble had moments when a new side of him came to light, an amiable, tender side which Miriam had long felt he took too great pains to suppress. After mornings and afternoons during which each had been employed in personal work or diversion, after evenings of music or cards or reading, there was an indescribable charm for her in the recurrence of Keble's boyish moods, when his man's mask was laid aside. It might be the recounting of some lark at school; it might be an experience in the trenches or in a corner of Greece or China during his bashful tour of the world; it might even be an admission of incurable dudishness in the face of some recent native provocation. Whatever it was, it was the essential Keble, the Keble whom Miriam might have met in a London drawing-room. His wife induced playful moods in him, but rarely did the playfulness Louise provoked keep within the bounds of veiled, correct irony. For his wife's delectation Keble rendered his playfulness ever so slightly frisky, exaggerating the caricature of himself; whereas for her, Miriam liked to persuade herself, he projected a more ironically shaded sketch of himself which amused without being distorted.
"It's such a blessing to have you here, Miriam," he confessed one evening. "I should have gone quite dotty alone with Aunt Denise; Louise and Dare would have come back and found me with a rosary around my neck, gibbering the names of saints. I believe you were sent to us by some kind providence of God to be a universal stop-gap in our strange ménage. I wonder you bear up under the strain."
She was tempted to say, "I was sent to you not by God but by Walter Windrom," but she couldn't. Nor could she smile, for his timid candor gave her a pretext for reading into his remark some depth of feeling for which the tyrant within her clamored. But she succeeded in replying, "Oh I bear up wonderfully,—so well, in fact, that if everything were to run flawlessly I think I should be selfish enough to pray for another gap, that I might stop it!"
The tyrant had forced the words into her mouth, but her anxiety was dispelled by his manner of taking them. He passed his hand over his hair and said, whimsically, sadly, "Well, I don't see any immediate prospect of gaplessness . . . I suppose most ménages are the same, if you were to explore into them. They muddle along, sometimes on an even keel, more often pitching about in cross currents. And I suppose one half of the ménage always feels that the other half is at fault, and there's no way of judging between them, because no two people are born with the same mental apparatus."
Disconcerted at the length he had gone, with a characteristic desire to efface the self-revelatory words, he came abruptly out of the mood by adding, "Is it apparatuses, or apparati? I see I've been talking nonsense again,—good-night."
Miriam wished that he had not seen fit to go back on his semi-confession, but she could not deny herself the comfort his soliloquy had given her, and for some days it served as a sop to her tyrant.
She had moments of futile compunction as she saw Louise growing haggard. Twice a day Miriam appeared at the boat-slip, but quite often Louise had seized those moments for a short nap, and there was nothing to do but leave the packets and messages on the jetty and return, or go for a walk with Grendel. She found in herself a dearth of inspiration when it was a question of making the day less tedious for her friend. Louise with her resourcefulness would have thought out endless ways of diverting her, had she been Dare's nurse. Miriam had pleaded to be allowed to assist. It was not only that she wished to spare Louise; she envied her the opportunity as well as the skill that called into play such magnificent services. Her own life seemed barren in contrast. Although ten years her junior, Louise had been at the very heart of life, had loved, been loved, suffered, given birth, and grown strong through exercise. Miriam envied her the gruelling experience she was going through. She blushed to think how incompetent she herself would be in Louise's place, and how prudish; but incompetence and prudishness could be outgrown, and she longed to outgrow them.
She resented the fact that Keble seemed not to notice the degree of strain on Louise, the dark rings under her eyes, the drawn mouth. Louise was partly responsible for his failure to see, for whenever he called at the slip she forced herself to be bright and facetious. But any woman would have seen through Louise's brightness, and Keble as a man far less obtuse than most, ought to have seen through it, ought not to have wrung their hearts by his casual manner of calling out, in a recent leave taking, "Don't overdo it, Weedgie; we mustn't have you breaking down."
A night finally came when the little doctor announced that the crisis was passed, that the patient would recover. Only then did he admit that he had almost despaired. Had it not been for Louise's vigilance, Dare would not have survived a week, for he was one of those giants who often succumb under the first onslaught of a complication of ailments.
"Louise has been splendid," Keble acknowledged. "It's lucky for Dare that they were such good chums."
The doctor turned on him with a suddenness that surprised Miriam no less than Keble. "You don't understand Louise," he said. "She would take as much pains to cure a wounded dog as she would to cure the Governor-General. She would do as much for the stable boy as she would do for you; under certain circumstances, more. For she gives her strength to the helpless. Dare was helpless, body and soul. If you had watched him tossing and heard him moaning your eyes would have opened to many things. He was not only physically lost, he was lost in spirit. An ordinary nurse would have tended his body. Louise has tended his spirit. By a thousand suggestions she has restored his faith in himself, created him. For you that spells nothing but the service of a clever woman for a friend. What do you know about service? What do you know about friendship? What do you know about the sick man? What do you know about life? What do you know about Louise? Precious little, my boy!"
The doctor disappeared in a state of exaltation, leaving Keble bewildered. "There's a blind spot in me somewhere, Miriam," he said. "Can you put your finger on it?"
"I'm afraid we're both blind," she said feebly. "At least we haven't their elemental clairvoyance. The doctor is doubtless right in his flamboyant way, and we are right in our pitiful way. We can only try, I suppose, to be right at a higher pitch."
"By Jove," Keble suddenly exclaimed, with a retrospective fear, "it was a closer shave than we had any idea of. I wonder if Louise realized."
Miriam smiled bitterly. "You may be quite sure, my dear Keble, that she did. If you have been spared a great load of pain, you may take my word for it that it's Louise you have to thank."
Keble was pale. In his eyes was the look which Miriam had seen on another occasion, just before the birth of his son. "Then I do wish," he quietly said, "that my friends would do me the kindness to point out some of my most inexcusable limitations, instead of letting me walk through life in a fool's paradise."
Miriam was ready to retort that even such a wish reflected the amour propre that determined most of his acts, but she had been touched by the emotion in his eyes and voice,—an emotion which only one woman could inspire. "I think we're all trying desperately to learn the ABC's of life," she said.
She was unnerved by the self-abasement that had stolen into his expression. For the first time in her life she went close to him and took his hand in hers. "Don't mind if I've spoken like a preacher," she pleaded in a voice which she could control just long enough to finish her counsel. "The sermon is directed at my own heart even more than yours."
He returned the pressure of her hands absent-mindedly, and she sought refuge in her room.
Keble was restless and turned towards the library through force of habit. A book was lying face down on the arm of his chair, but after reading several sentences without hearing what they were saying, he got up and poured himself a glass of whisky.
He would have gone to the piano, but Miriam's superior musicianship had given him a distaste for his own performances. He wandered through the drawing-room to the dimly-lit hall, and found himself before the gramaphone. Every one had gone to bed, but if he closed the shutters of the box the sound would not be loud enough to disturb the household. At haphazard he chose a record from a new supply.
A song of Purcell's. He threw himself into a deep chair. The opening bars of the accompaniment were gentle and tranquilizing, with naïve cadenza. A naïve seventeenth century melody, which was taken up by a pretty voice: high, clear, pure.
Those words! He leaned forward, and listened more intently.
"I attempt from love's sickness to fly—in vain—for I am myself my own fever—for I am myself my own fever and pain."
As though a ghost had stolen into the dark room, Keble started slowly from his chair. His eyes riveted on the machine, he paused, then abruptly reached forward to stop it, inadvertently causing the needle to slide across the disk with a sound that might have been the shriek of a dying man.
For a long while he stood holding the disk. Only when he became conscious of the startled beating of his heart did he throw off the spell.
He was staring at the record in his hands—the ghost. He dreaded the noise that would be made if he were to drop it on the floor,—even if he were to lay it down carefully and snap it with his heel.
He got up swiftly, unbolted the door, and walked out in the cold air to the end of the terrace, past the stone parapet, down the grassy slope to a point overhanging the shore of the lake. Far, far away, through the blackness, were tiny points of light, marking the location of the Browns' cottage. His eyes sought a gleam farther along the shore, but there was nothing in all that blackness to indicate Miriam's old cabin.
They were there, perhaps asleep, perhaps wearily wakeful, with only their souls left to fight for them against some vague, sinister enemy. Perhaps she was watching over him as he slept; preparing his draughts; stirring the fire with a little shiver. Perhaps she, too, had been approached by spectres. Perhaps she was ill, despairing, afraid. Tears came into his eyes.
He could feel the disk pressing against his fingers, and the tiny hard rills through which the needle had traced its uncanny message.
"What do you know of the sick man!" Above the mysterious silence of the night a phantom voice, thin, clear, dainty, was singing the answer into his understanding: "I attempt from love's sickness to fly, in vain; for I am myself my own fever and pain." It could so airily sing, as though it were a toy song and a toy sentiment, words which were as irrelevantly indicative as flowers nodding over a grave.
Many years ago he and Walter had played a game called "scaling". You chose round, flat pieces of slate and sent them whirling through the air.
He scaled, and waited for the splashing sound far out on the water.
Poor little record, it had meant well enough.