The Old Blood Part 30

He strode out to the powerful motor-car that was always in waiting for him.

CHAPTER XXI

A BIT FROM THE MOVIES

Without any regard to melodrama, when Henriette looked out of the window after von Eichborn had rung the bell and saw him on the steps she was frightened. The look in his eyes as he left her had been burning in her recollection--the kind of look a woman never forgets.

His smile as he bowed to her now was characteristic of his good opinion of himself.

"Having an idle moment I came to call," he said.

"Oh, thank you!" she answered wildly.

He waited for her to come to the door, but she stood still, pressing her fingers to her temples in blank quandary. Possibly a sense of self-accusation heightened her distraction. She had been polite to him; she had rather opened the way to this visit. How was she to escape? She looked around at her wits' end and saw that Helen was in the room.

"I can't see him, I can't!" she exclaimed. "You must get me out of it!

I never want to speak to him again!"

She turned to the door opening onto the stairway and ran through it, leaving Helen looking after her in doubt as to what it all meant.

Von Eichborn, having formed the habit in a month of war of walking into chateaux without formality, waiting no longer for Henriette to come into the hall, entered the sitting-room. Helen's back was turned to him and he easily mistook her figure for Henriette's.

"I accepted the invitation from the window, which I found very charming," he said, "though from your present att.i.tude I might be led to think that I am not welcome."

Rather slowly Helen turned, possibly in a certain cynical antic.i.p.ation of his visible surprise when he saw her face instead of the one which had led him, an aide, to absent himself from the General's side. Even that martial self-possession of a darling of Berlin drawing-rooms was temporarily thrown off its balance.

"Oh!" gasped von Eichborn.

"Yes," said Helen, thoughtfully looking him over with a lift of her chin, "I'm Henriette's sister." Inwardly she was "fighting mad," but her eyes were coldly staring.

"Your voices are alike, but you do not look alike," von Eichborn managed to say. He screwed his eyegla.s.s into his eye.

"Really! You have quick perceptions!" she remarked.

Von Eichborn dropped his eyegla.s.s and flicked his gloves, which he was carrying in his hand, against the table.

"And the sister? I came to see her."

"She does not want to see you, and I'm sure I don't. You would be a dreadful bore." All quite judiciously as she looked him over; the Helen of impulses, when she ought to have been diplomatic for Phil's sake, according to melodramatic ethics.

"Bore!" That darling of Berlin salons a bore! "Look here, you shrewish, homely little brute, I've nothing to do with you!" he blurted. "Tell your sister I'm here--if she is your sister. I think you're only a servant."

Still Helen was looking him over with cool, superior eyes.

"Very bad-mannered, too!" she remarked.

"But perceptions correct. Shrewish and homely, yes!"

n.o.body on earth had ever spoken to him in this fashion before. He did not think such disrespect was possible. He was red-faced and stuttering as he took a step toward her, raising his gloves as if he would strike her as he often had struck his soldier servant; but his hand dropped in face of her unflinching stare.

"Look here! Do you know that I am an officer on the staff of the army in possession of this village? I'm going to be billeted here and I propose to choose my room."

He moved toward the door that led to the stairs.

"Certainly!" she answered, pa.s.sing through it ahead of him. He was dumbfounded at her compliance and suspicious of its promptness.

"Henriette, the beast is going to billet himself here!" she shouted up the stairs. "You pa.s.s through the other way and I will meet you outside and we'll go to the cure, who will speak to the General in command about it. The General may be a decent, respectable man."

Von Eichborn drew back from the doorway. Again he tried to fasten his eyegla.s.s in his eye; again it would not stick. As Helen looked around at him after her call to her sister, with that in her stare which made him appear the most ridiculous little puppy that ever left a kennel, he mumbled:

"Unnecessary!"

Then she saw Phil hurrying across the grounds. She only knew how glad she was to see him and that she felt limp in her relief as he appeared in the room, looking so strong and ready for any eventuality. It was another picture of him that she would never forget.

Von Eichborn, as he turned in surprise and stood there between the two, was sheepish and confused as a human being, before his sense of authority and position vented its truculence with a snarling irony of inference.

"You seem not to have been looking after your cousins," he said. "I judge that the pretty one is quite devoted to you and the shrew here keeps guard in your absence."

Something carried Phil a step nearer to von Eichborn involuntarily; and what came into his eyes was distilled of that old blood and tempered by three years in the Southwest.

"And you, I judge," he replied, "are a cowardly beast, going about sneaking into homes when no men are present and others in your uniform are under fire!"

Cowardly was the word that sent von Eichborn out of his head with anger. He struck at Phil's face with his gloves, but missed. The rest was very simple. Von Eichborn went sprawling. His descent was rapid and unexpected and the stunning effect of the impact was accentuated by the way his head hit the floor.

"Good! good!" Helen cried, clapping her hands. "It was never done better in the movies! Good! goo----" The word was unfinished, her jaw dropping aghast with the seriousness of the situation.

When von Eichborn came to and realised what had happened, that he had been brutally knocked down by a civilian, he reached for his revolver.

There was murder in his little eyes. But Phil had already taken the revolver out of its holster.

"You have struck a Prussian officer on duty!" he stammered as he got to his feet. "That is death, as you will find out as soon as I can bring some men."

He was going past Phil out of the door; but Phil barred the way.

"Wait!"

And von Eichborn had to wait. The position was strange. Here was the darling of Berlin salons and the aide of the General who commanded a division of troops which possessed the land balked by a mere civilian, a mere tourist; neither being armed. It was humiliating, disgusting, shameful. Von Eichborn could not try to force his way to the door for fear that he might be knocked down again.

"Yes, wait and consider," Phil added. "Let's not do anything rash, but think it over. Now----"

"Phil, don't!" Helen broke in wildly. "You, an American, don't realise. He can have you shot for striking him."

"After he struck me?"

"That has nothing to do with it!" put in von Eichborn hoa.r.s.ely. "I'm an officer!"

"It's all true what he says!" said Helen. There was no banter of melodrama about her now. The scene had become tensely real and horrible.

"But it does not stand to reason! It's----"