The Old Blood Part 11

It was something new in her mother's voice which sent her across the room to put her arm around her mother's neck and press her own cheek against hers. Helen had been hungry for affection all her life, plain girls being quite human and wanting what they do not receive. In answer she had a pressure of her hand which was real, and she kissed her mother again and again on the cheek. Perhaps her mother had always loved her, but had not shown it.

Madame Ribot felt the tight grip of her daughter's hand with a sense of rea.s.surance. There was something strong about Helen. She would be dependable in a crisis.

"If we stay here together and don't trouble the war, probably the war will not trouble us," Madame Ribot continued. It was the maxim expressive of her temperament.

"Oh! I hadn't thought of it in that way!" Helen gasped.

"Besides, if you went to Paris and got into trouble I should have to come up and get you out." She was weary of having her daughter's arm around her neck and feeling that strange resentment against the world which she always suffered after looking long at Helen's features.

Helen drew away, her peculiar sensitiveness conscious of the old barrier.

Life for the next few days continued much as usual at the chateau, so far as Madame Ribot and Henriette were concerned. Henriette went on painting. But Helen could not draw. She wandered over the fields, her mind ever on the war. She was with the Belgians at Liege; with the French in Alsace. All three wondered, as the time approached, if the seventeenth cousin would come to Mervaux.

"Hardly," said Henriette.

"But I think he will," said Helen.

"Why should he? It's war time."

"Yes, why?" repeated Helen, with a searching look at Henriette, who lowered her eyes in a way that her sister well understood. Many young men had come to Mervaux for the same reason. Many had gone away trying to conceal their dejection. Henriette had enjoyed the visits, but not more than Madame Ribot who, looking on, lived over her own successes.

"Henriette does not know yet what it means to fall in love," thought her mother. "I hope that she will not for a few years more. A woman may do that only once. And Helen had not fallen in love, either. Poor Helen!" At intervals she could be sorry for herself by being sorry for Helen.

It was no surprise to her that the war did not keep the seventeenth cousin away from Mervaux or that his note was addressed to Henriette.

As the mails were now so irregular, he wrote, he would not wait for a reply, but would arrive on the morning of the day set, and should he find that the war interfered with their arrangements he could return to Paris in the afternoon. Helen rather waited to hear that he had included his regards to her, but Henriette made no mention of it.

Phil had had a glimpse of an English home and now he was to have one of a home in France, an intimacy which seldom falls to the lot of the tourist. Smiling as she knew how, a hostess with the charm of French manner, Madame Ribot received him, taking in, without seeming to do so, every detail, from the state of his nails to the cut of his clothes.

Her judgment of people was that of appearance and manner and position.

There were Americans who were nice and who were not nice and Englishmen and Frenchmen who were nice and who were not nice. She would have preferred a nice villain to an ill-mannered saint. For she had decided when quite young that it was not worth while wasting one's time with anybody who was not nice. At the same time, she insisted that she was not a sn.o.b and the great appeal to her of the French was their democracy. What she really liked about the French was their politeness, their cooking, their novels and their art of living. She decided that Phil was one of the nice Americans, though she had foreseen that he must be or Henriette would not have wanted to invite him to Mervaux. Helen never invited anybody. When quite young she had failed to distinguish between the nice and the unnice people.

The morning train from Paris to Mervaux had been taken off and the afternoon train was late. Henriette had met Phil at the station and Helen was away from the house when they arrived. After his glimpse of armed Europe rushing to conflict, after seeing and feeling the straining effort of the nations with every human being drawn into the maelstrom of one emotion, he had hardly conceived it possible that nature could have tucked away any three people in a spot so completely sequestered from the war.

He would not have come to Mervaux if it had not been for Henriette. He had admitted as much to himself going down on the train. When a man has seen a girl for an afternoon and a morning and keeps rehearsing the incidents of their meeting on his first holiday in Europe, he may well look forward to seeing her again with a certain personal curiosity.

Sometimes the second impression is convincing of a temporary squint in the eye at the time of the first. He had remarked on the way from Truckleford to London that he had been hit rather in the spirit of banter; but four weeks later he was in need of disillusioning. Though parenthetically it may be said that he did not put the situation to himself in such bold terms.

The stroll through the grounds of the chateau in the hour before dinner should have brought the disillusioning process well into being. But if it had even started it was arrested when Henriette picked a rosebud and fastened it in his b.u.t.tonhole, an old form of illusioning or of reinforcing an illusion which loses nothing of its charm if the young woman be beautiful and smiles up at you when the rose is in place.

"We shall begin the portrait to-morrow, shan't we?" she asked, as they turned leisurely back toward the house.

"You still want to do it, despite the war? Won't it take some time?"

he said.

"No longer than if there were no war. Mother will not let you go away immediately. Besides, didn't I hear you say that you could not get a sailing for some time? At least, we can make a start."

"I'm quite ready," he agreed. He was ready, even if the portrait took much longer than expected.

"And I keen to begin, painter fashion, when I have a subject that I enjoy. Then the likeness to the ancestor--you see, the Sanfords very much want one of you to hang opposite the ancestor's. I promised it to them and I thought I'd make a copy of the ancestor to send to your father. Would you like it? Would he? We cousins when we are seventeenth through such a grand old ancestor must stand together."

Phil tried to find words of acceptance adequate to the offer.

"The favour is really on my side; it's an opportunity," she pursued.

He was conscious that she was looking intently at his profile, and when he glanced toward her she lowered her long lashes and raised her hand to brush back a strand of hair which was really not much out of place.

Then she looked back at him thoughtfully, as one who had been engrossed in a problem.

"I'm not sure but a profile one would be better," she said.

"I thought we had settled that point," he parried.

"It would make you different from the ancestor."

"That's an advantage, but----"

"Well----"

"Can't you make it full face? The ancestor's not quite that."

They had stopped and were looking directly at each other in the enjoyment of this verbal fencing.

"As you are now?" she suggested.

"Exactly!"

"I think it would be excellent," she admitted, after a pause of further thoughtful observation, squinting her eyes ever so little, then opening them wide as she pa.s.sed final judgment.

"Good! It's so much more companionable."

"Yes, we can talk as I paint."

"Which is bound to give the subject life!" he concluded, as they started on.

"And the painter, too," she added.

As they drew near the house he saw Helen standing in the doorway. She seemed not to see him, but bent down to pull some burrs off her gown and then ran her hand with a sweeping motion across her forehead. She had watched the scene between Henriette and Philip on the walk and to her it had the familiarity of an habitual process of the life of her family. It was not the first time that she had had to greet a guest who accepted her only because she was Henriette's sister.

Her self-consciousness was not minimised by her disarray after her walk, though its depths were in the recollection of her tempers at Truckleford and her absurd action about the portrait and of having yielded to tears in her room, all as part of some strange influence which she could not understand. Without calling to him she advanced, with something of the manner of a culprit who expects reproof.

"We are glad to see you at Mervaux," she said, holding out her hand.

Phil was reminded with a start almost of fresh discovery how like Henriette's was Helen's voice. But her face, without a sign of expression, seemed characterless. How could this girl belong to the same family as Henriette and the well-groomed mother? At the same time he felt a certain pity for her. She excited his curiosity in that awkward moment of silence after she had spoken her set phrase of welcome.

"You look tired, Helen. You have walked too far," said Henriette, solicitously slipping her arm in her sister's.

This, too, was as something foreseen by Helen; the next speech in the play. She was unresponsive at first, her own arms hanging by her side.

Then spasmodically, as one who comes out of a fit of absent-mindedness, she raised her hand and pressed it over Henriette's against her waist, a look as for pardon in her eyes. It was not for Phil to note all the little signs that count. He had looked away from Helen to Henriette.

"Some of your pictures?" he said to Henriette when they entered the house, nodding toward the walls.