The Old Blood Part 7

THE FLAVOUR OF GRAPES

When Helen came down to breakfast she was wan and years older in appearance than Henriette, who was blooming and cheerful.

"Working again! Confess--I saw the light in your room," said Henriette. "You try too hard."

"There's no doubt of it," agreed Helen. "I can't help it. It's the fault of mistaking taste for talent in moments of impulse, and some kind of a knot in my brain."

"Poor dear!" said Mrs. Sanford in instinctive sympathy before she could catch herself. Then she drew back in her chair, prepared for the tempest.

But this time Helen did not appear even irritated; she had become more than ever inexplicable to her aunt.

"Poor dear!" she repeated absently. "If one talks about one's self one must expect to be talked about."

The vicar turned to Phil's experiences in the Southwest. Was it really wild? And how did one live? As Phil pictured his life in swift, broad strokes, Helen was listening intently and some of the fire returned to her eyes.

"There is one thing I have not told," he said gravely, as they went out on the lawn. "I think that it ought to be told even in the presence of the ancestor, though he may disown me."

"More American humour," thought Mrs. Sanford, convinced that she now knew the signals and prepared to laugh even if she did not understand the joke.

"My first task was cleaning out cattle cars!"

But Mrs. Sanford did not laugh. She was aghast. Even the vicar was visibly shocked. Helen spoke first.

"I hope you did it well," she said.

"No fear!" he rejoined.

"We wondered why you did not go to work for Peter," said the vicar.

They, too, knew of Peter Smithers. Even in England Philip could not escape the shadow of the rich man who might leave him a fortune, which Mrs. Sanford had already imagined as restoring the estate in Hampshire.

Perhaps Phil guessed as much, for he related with relish the essence of his last interview with Peter. The vicar and his wife looked depressed; they longed to tell him that he had been unwise.

Helen was laughing as she had last night into the mirror, at the picture which she conjured of Peter stamping down the path at Longfield in anger.

"Splendid!" she exclaimed, almost hilariously; and then was still, as their eyes met.

"You'll make your own fortune, which is better," said Henriette.

"A hundred a week is all there is in sight at present," Phil replied.

"We have little time before the train goes if----" the vicar urged.

It was the ancestors again. The warrior of the portrait had the cool and damp distinction of having his bones under a stone in the church floor which had been trod by generations of worshippers. Later cousins were in the churchyard, their chiselled names grown faint. The vicar's kindly face glowed as he indulged in his favourite topic of genealogy.

Helen imagined the ancestors in the garbs and prejudices of their time come to life and pa.s.sing in review before the transplanted and surviving branch.

"I suppose," she suggested, in the way she had of speaking aloud to herself, as if the thought were not worth considering by other people but pleased her, "I suppose that Peter Smithers would say that these are all dead ones and it's the live ones that count."

Of course she should not make such remarks. Still, she would and people would stare at her in wonder, even as the vicar and his wife were staring at that moment. Phil looking hard at a tombstone had a quiver to his lips which he would have denied bore any relation to a smile.

"I was only thinking how much nicer it must be to be alive and touring Europe for the first time with the money you had earned, instead of being an ancestor," she explained. "I like Peter for giving his money to the clubhouse. Ancestors did nothing for him."

"You don't seem to care for ancestors?" Phil suggested.

"Oh, yes, lots--generically," she answered. "They built cathedrals and churches like this and had a horrid good old human time in the doing of it. As for one's own ancestors, it depends upon how much they have done for you."

"You are quite surpa.s.sing yourself at iconoclasm to-day," said her sister gently and sympathetically.

Helen nodded as if she knew it, and could not help herself.

"Everything depends upon the flavour of the grapes," she replied. The sisters were searching each other's eyes in a new and surprising way to both. The grapes were sweet to Henriette; they were sour to Helen.

"It is the hard work last night," said Henriette, slipping her arm around her sister. "Those charcoals may come right yet."

Helen was silent, unresisting, unresponsive, her face like ill-moulded clay, and Henriette a personification of apology to Phil.

"According to story-books, Peter may yet fall on his knees and beg you to take his fortune," she added to Phil. "So much for Peter Smithers.

He doesn't worry you, does he? It's delightful having seventeenth cousins like you."

"And like you!" he replied to the challenge. "And you will not let me miss the train."

They had time to walk and his bag had already gone. Helen was subdued, remaining with her uncle behind Phil and Henriette.

"Remember at Mervaux, the sixth of August!" Henriette called from the platform.

"I await your mother's invitation," Phil replied.

His last view of her was the uplifted arm as she waved her handkerchief. Of course he had said that he would return to Truckleford now that he had found the way and the vicar even talked of accepting the invitation to Longfield, which is the way of such partings. But America is far away.

Philip was alone in the compartment, very much alone as pictures recollected from the down journey pa.s.sed before his mind. The glance across the aisle at the first meeting; Henriette's face reflected in the mirror beside his; her figure preceding him along the path as they ascended the hill above the village; little confidences on the walk to the station. These are well-known symptoms. Acting as his own diagnostician, this modern youth only four weeks from the cactus country thought:

"I wonder if I have been hit! And Helen? I don't quite make her out.

She's not uninteresting, though. I wonder how long it will take Henriette to do a portrait! I hope she is one of those painstaking artists who has intervals of rest and conversation. But maybe Madame Ribot won't write to me," scepticism which he dismissed as unpleasant.

It stood to reason that the mother of such a girl as Henriette would do anything that she wanted. "I should, myself," he decided.

To him as an American the a.s.sa.s.sination of the heir to a European throne and his consort, which he read in the newspapers that evening, had the thrill of horror of a railroad or a steamship disaster. It could have none of the seriousness that it had to every European, who had that "balance of power," as they called it, in the back of the head of his individual existence. He read; he sympathised in a generic twinge of pity, and was little further concerned. In the afternoon of the next day he should be in Holland and in the evening, had he not chosen to spend a few days with Rembrandt and wooden shoes, he could have been in Berlin, a journey in distance equivalent to that from Buffalo to New York or Chicago to Omaha.

What contrast in language and people! Miss Wooden Shoes was as boyhood pictures made her: and leisurely England, too; but where was the phlegmatic old German with his china-bowl pipe? He realised the energy of the new Germany, galvanised by some higher will of leadership, with the resentment of its _verboten_ system which is inevitable to all Americans who have not been educated in Germany and themselves fallen into step, and particularly to a Sanford of New England.

He met Americans wherever he went, in hotels, on trains, and in picture galleries, catered to for the dollars they dropped by the way into open palms, privately criticised for the very liberality which made them welcome, not to mention also for their brusqueness, their air of success and sometimes their spread-eagleism. But they did not care as long as they had the freedom of the playground. European politics or world politics did not concern them, come from the fatness of their new world beyond the seas. The last tourist summer of its kind!

Philip studied the newspapers with the help of college German which is good enough on grammar but floundering in pa.s.sing the time of day. His keen mind began to catch the sense of how an a.s.sa.s.sination affected that balance of power; he felt the pressure in the air before a cloud burst; the suspense of the sparks running along the fuse from Sarajevo to the powder magazines--but all objectively, with no presage of how subjective it was to become to him.

Then one day all the youth of that nation moved as with one thought and purpose, as the football eleven goes onto the gridiron--which was the simple comparison that he made. For forty years they had been drilling for this struggle and all the years and days and hours of the forty years broke in c.u.mulative force for the blow. How it made him think; that a people could act together in this fashion; that a million and two million men could go each to his place as the fireman to his on an alarm! It seemed as if they should sweep all the world before them, like the breaking of a dam down a river bed.

Youth was not bothering how to get home. It was on the scene and that was enough. But about Mervaux and seventeenth cousins? Should he see either? While in Berlin he had received so insistent a letter of invitation from Madame Ribot that he had decided to spend less time in Paris and more in Mervaux than originally planned, if it were agreeable.

Somehow he got on board a train in Switzerland, and sitting up all night in a stifling second-cla.s.s compartment he reached Paris. His fellow-pa.s.sengers were thinking of how to obtain money on letters of credit and how to find berths on a transatlantic steamer. His own pa.s.sage had already been engaged on a French ship from Havre.

In Paris was a man who was more important to Phil than kings and generals. The manager of the corporation which had promoted him and paid the wage that gave him the holiday had just arrived from Vichy by automobile. Mr. Ledyard was in a state of mind! The credit of the world thrown out of gear; no answers to his cablegrams; stock markets closed, while the pa.s.sage he had engaged from Boulogne on a German steamer was of about as much use to him for crossing the Atlantic as a team of Esquimaux dogs. When Phil entered the room Ledyard had been ringing in vain for a servant, who was already with the colours. He was glad of some one to talk to, this man of power whom Phil had met only twice: once on being employed and again on his return from the Southwest to promotion.