Running Sands Part 43

"Please," said Muriel; "I have all I want."

"All?" smiled her husband.

"Of course I have. You've got me such loads of lovely things already that I don't know what I am to do with them all and where to pack them.

You know you have got me ever so much, Jim."

"For yourself, perhaps I have got you a few things, dearie; and I'm glad you like them. But I have always heard that Paris was the place to get some other sort of things. Aren't there some of those--some little things--some little lace things that we ought to get against the arrival of the newcomer? I am so proud, Muriel, and I want the newcomer to know I am."

Muriel's voice faltered.

"So soon----" she said.

"We might as well make what preparations we can while we are in the city where the best preparations can be made. No, no. You must come. Come along."

She went with him, pale and silent, and Jim led her through shop after shop and forced her, by good-natured insistence, to buy baby clothes.

She protested at the start; she tried to cut the expedition in half; she endeavoured to postpone this purchase or that; but he would not heed her. He urged her to suggest articles of the infantile toilette of which he was totally ignorant; when she declared that she knew as little as he, he made her translate his questions to the frankly delighted shop clerks. He had been inspired with the idea that, by such a process as this, he could bring her to a proper point of view in regard to the approaching event, and he did not concede failure until Muriel at last broke down and fainted in their _taxi-metre_.

The next morning she told Jim that she wanted to go away.

"All right," said Stainton: after his journey from Lyons he had slept long and heavily and was still very tired. "Where'd you like to go?"

"I don't know. Anywhere. I'm not particular."

"Well, we'll think it over to-day and look up the time-tables."

They were in their sitting-room at the hotel. Muriel parted the curtains and stood looking out upon a grey day.

"I don't want to think it over," she said.

"But we've got to know where we're going before we start."

"I don't see why. Besides, I said I wasn't particular where we went. I want to go to-day."

"To-day?" Jim did not like to rush about so madly, and his voice showed it.

"Why not? Look at the weather. Half the time we've been here it's been like this. I don't think Paris agrees with me."

He softened.

"Aren't you well?"

"No."

"What is it? My dear child!" He came toward her.

"Don't call me that," she said.

"Why not, Muriel?"

"It sounds as if you were so much older than I am. Jim----" She put her hand in his--"I'm horrid, I know----"

"You're never that!"

"Yes I am. I'm horrid now. You don't know. I'm not ill, but I'm so tired of Paris. It grates on my nerves. Let's go away now. The servants can pack, and we can be somewhere else by evening."

Again Muriel took refuge at the window.

"There's Switzerland," she said. "I should like to see the Alps."

"Isn't it rather early in the year for them?"

"I don't think so."

"It'll be cold, dear."

"Well, we can stand a little cold, Jim. If we wait till the warm weather, we shall run into all the summer tourists."

She had her way. The servants packed, and Jim went out to make arrangements. In an hour he was back.

"All right," he triumphantly announced. "I've ordered our next batch of mail sent on as far as Neuchatel. We can get a train in forty-five minutes to Dijon, where we might as well stop over night. I found a ticket-seller that spoke some sort of English--and here are the tickets.

Can you be ready?"

She was ready. They started at once upon a feverish and constantly distracting journey.

The night was pa.s.sed at Dijon. In the early morning they boarded their train for Switzerland, went through the flat country east of Mouchard, then swept into the Juras, climbing high in air and looking over fruitful plains that stretched to the horizon and were cut by white strips of road which seemed to run for lengths of ten miles without deviation from their tangent. The train would plunge into a black tunnel and emerge to look down at a little valley among vineyards with old red-tiled cottages cl.u.s.tered around a high-spired church. Another tunnel would succeed, and another red-tiled village and high-spired church would follow. Mile upon mile of pine-forest spread itself along the tracks, and then, at last, toward late afternoon, far beyond Pontarlier and the fortressed pa.s.s to the east of it, there was revealed, forward and to the right, what Muriel mistook for jagged, needle-like clouds about a strip of the sky: the lake of Neuchatel with the white Sentis to the Mont Blanc Alpine range, the Jungfrau towering in its midst.

But a day at Neuchatel sufficed Muriel; on the next morning she wanted to move on. She made enquiries.

"We might motor to Soleure," she said to Stainton, and when the motor was finally chosen, she decided for the train and Zurich.

"Why, they say there is nothing much to see in Zurich," Jim faintly protested.

"Let's find out for ourselves," said Muriel. "Besides, we have done almost no travelling, and that's what we came for, and now you've no business and nothing else to do."

So they were en route again on the day following, by way of Berne, through the wooded mountains, past the loftily placed castle of Aarburg, past picturesque Olten and Brugg with its ancient abbey of Konigsfelden, where the Empress Elizabeth and Queen Agnes of Hungary had sought to commemorate the murder of the Emperor Albert of Austria by John of Swabia, five hundred years before. They saw the hotels of Baden and the Cistercian abbey of Wettingen, and they came, by noon, to Zurich.

They lunched and took a motor drive about the city. In the midst of their tour, just as they were speeding through the Stadthaus-Platz on their way to the Gross-Munster, Muriel said:

"I believe you were right, after all, Jim. There isn't much to see here.

Let's go on to-morrow."

It was a tribute to his powers of prediction.

"Very well," he answered. "As a matter of fact, I should like to go back to the hotel this minute and lie down."

She would not hear of that.

"Oh, no!" she protested. "There is the Zwingli Museum, the Hohe Promenade, and the National Museum to see. We mustn't miss them, you know. What would Aunt Ethel say?"