CHAPTER IV
TOO MUCH ANCESTOR
"Helen's temper again!" exclaimed Mrs. Sanford to her husband, after Helen's outburst.
"Sometimes I do not wonder that Helen has a temper," said the vicar.
"But when a girl is as plain as she is, really it is the one thing she should avoid," persisted his wife.
"Yes, I suppose it is bad policy, when Henriette has all the good looks and the money," he replied.
Helen had now turned toward them and Phil and Henriette were going through the gateway. Mrs. Sanford drew a deep breath as one will who is about to undertake a duty and means to approach it softly.
"Did you give up your idea of becoming a nurse, Helen?" she asked casually.
It drew another flash from Helen's eyes, accompanied by a shudder of repugnance.
"I couldn't. I don't like the horror of it—seeing people cut up and everything! I knew I ought to and mother thinks I ought to; but I've delayed because I—— Oh, I know what you're thinking!" She stopped and shook several rebellious strands of hair free with a sudden movement of her head.
Gentle Mrs. Sanford let her hands drop into her lap, lowering her head in the relief of one who has tried and failed.
"Sorry!" Helen's attitude had quite changed. She kissed her aunt on the cheek. "I have an awful temper, haven't I?" Her change of mood had been reflected by her irregular features with singular expressiveness. "I was going to arrange the flowers for the table for our seventeenth cousin and also—do you think cook would let me?—try my hand at the American shortcake thing. I learned how to cook from Jacqueline. I'd rather be a cook than a nurse, if worse comes to worse. Cooks get very good pay."
"Helen! Shocking!" exclaimed Mrs. Sanford. Many gentlewomen were nurses. "You'll have to bargain with cook about the shortcake," she added.
"Didn't his mother make it back in Massachusetts? Why not Helen of Mervaux, if not Helen of Troy, in Hampshire? Cry Harry, England and St. George! In the name of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, allons!"
She was off to the kitchen, whose monarch said, in language of her own, that the way to eat strawberries was with their stems on and dipping them in sugar, or else as jam. In either case they had no relation to cake, and she was not taking cooking lessons from foreign countries.
"In other words, 'it's not done,' oh, England!" said Helen.
"Whatever you mean by that," began cook.
"It should be on British coats-of-arms instead of Dieu et mon Droit," Helen explained, without in the least explaining to cook. "I mean, I take the responsibility off your shoulders. If the American is poisoned I go to the gallows."
"Oh, very well!" agreed cook, as if convinced that a fatal result was inevitable but satisfied if her alibi were safely established.
Helen went to the task with a confident hand, while cook looked on with the same scorn that she would have regarded the introduction of poi or birds' nest soup into that loyal British household. Her task well under way, Helen returned to the garden to pick flowers for the table, the while humming French songs. She had finished with the flowers when Mrs. Sanford entered the dining-room to find her with her fingers outspread on the cloth, resting half her weight on them and looking at one of the family portraits on the wall.
"Still in love with your ancestor, Helen?" asked her aunt.
Helen was startled back from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
"Yes. I'm coming in here after dark and teach him to fall in love with me. He's the only man who ever will. Being three hundred years old he might take me because of my youth."
"My dear, where do you get all your strange ideas?"
"I wonder if he would like the strawberry shortcake thing?" Helen continued. "I'm sure he liked rum and took snuff and swore. And you'll please not to tell the seventeenth cousin that I made the cake. I take no risks."
The ring of her laugh remained in the room after she had returned to the kitchen. Helen was never more puzzling to her aunt than when she laughed; for then she was most French, and Mrs. Sanford ascribed much in Helen to Gallic inheritance.
"Poor dear!" thought her aunt. She was always thinking "Poor dear!" but she seldom gave voice to it—not in Helen's presence. It was the sure match to her temper. She would not bear to be "poor deared," as she called it, even by Henriette. Now Mrs. Sanford herself was regarding the portrait intently, and her husband entering joined her in its study.
"You see the likeness, too?" she asked, with a thrill of pride.
"The moment he alighted at the station. We'll seat him under it at dinner—a plot!" said the vicar, smiling, and he caught her hand in his in a way that would have been pleasant to an observer. But if there had been an observer it would not have happened.
Voices were heard on the lawn and they looked out to see Phil and Henriette returning. His American accent which had sounded strange at first grew attractive to Mrs. Sanford. She herself showed him to his room to make sure that everything was right. The hot water "can," as he would have called it, was standing in the wash basin covered with a towel to retain the heat. His bag was unpacked and his toilet articles were laid out.
"The maids do that for you in England?" he said.
"Don't yours?" she inquired.
"Not Jane in a thousand years. She would regard me as a mollycoddle if I permitted it. Sometimes they do it in country houses which are as big as hotels on the hills outside Longfield."
"Strange!" she murmured.
"And I am to put my shoes, I mean my boots, outside the door at night?" he asked.
She was not quite certain of herself, being apprehensive of some American joke back of the question.
"Of course," she said.
"I'll try, though it is going to give my Puritan conscience a twinge," he said drily. "I'll try if you will not tell Jane when you come to visit us in America. Whatever happens, I mean never to lose my standing with Jane."
She laughed without understanding why, except that she was liking this frank American cousin better and better. Indeed, the glow of a new emotion, sounding through years which had had their omnipresent sadness, had possessed her since she had looked at the portrait in the dining-room. The cheer of it was in her voice as she called outside Henriette's door to know if she needed anything; and then after she had passed Helen's door she remembered Helen and called to her also.
Henriette made a leisurely business of her toilet before the mirror. Why shouldn't she? It was merely a fit expression of sincere gratitude for nature's kindness. She might enjoy the grace of the movement of her fingers in caressing expertness around the face that she saw as she arranged her hair.
Helen come up from the kitchen with a blistered finger and her cheeks hot from the oven heat, saw that same face looking back at her. Often she had wished for some magic that would show a new one. Plain people, she thought, ought at least to have a change of plain faces for variety's sake. If others were as tired of her own as she was, she wondered how anybody on earth could look at it except as a punishment.
As long as she knew that her face was clean, why should she pay any attention to it? She might have made more of her hair, which fell below her waist in abundant glory; but if she took pains with it she had that face in front of her during the process. So she ever gave her hair a hurried doing in order to escape enforced companionship with her features. To-night they insisted on a prolonged glance of attention. She made a grimace which was reflected back, and then she laughed at the reflection, making light of her self-consciousness, only to become more self-conscious and blushing, as if caught in a secret. For she saw that she was at her best when she laughed. Then her mobile features, including the lumpy nose, made harmony with the beaming mischief of her eyes and the gleam of her regular teeth.
"If I wore a mask over my nose and a perpetual grin I might be an advertisement for a dentist, at least!" she thought, only to purse out her lips in a "Poof!" as she turned away from the mirror. Then a sigh, whose prolongation apprised her of its existence and brought a shrug of disgust. The next impulse turned her to some charcoal drawings on the table—her own offspring. She loved them, punished them, disowned them at intervals. Now she took up one after the other, critically turning her head, wrinkling her brow, grumbling under her breath, and even sticking out her tongue in indecorous fashion at her own handiwork.
"I never can!" she cried. "I'm no good! Oh, cusses!"
So long was she preoccupied with the inspection, oblivious of seventeenth cousins and the strawberry shortcake thing, that she had to "jump" into her gown when the gong sounded, which was no new thing for her. It was not much of a gown. That being the case, why not jump into it? If it appeared to be thrown on it would be more harmonious with her style of beauty. What did it matter, anyway, when the harder you tried to draw the worse you drew?
The gown which Henriette wore was a good deal of a gown, as even the eye of the man who grasps effects (which are all that he is meant to grasp) and not the details which make the effects might see. Its simplicity, perhaps, made it as suitable for dinner at the vicarage as at a more pretentious board. Experts who charge more for their talents than for the material they use had fashioned it to make the most of Henriette, a delightful task because she supplied talent with such a good start. However, she was not satisfied with the gown after her inspection of it before the mirror, though possibly better pleased when she saw its effect on the seventeenth cousin.
Mrs. Sanford had seated Philip under the portrait across from Helen. When Henriette was seated at his side, the gown which had set off her figure so attractively as she entered the room became only the vase from which rose the flower of her white shoulders and the white column of neck supporting the small head. She did not appear to direct the talk, yet it seemed only natural that she should be its creative spirit. Mostly it was between the two. The vicar and his wife were glad enough to listen and to exchange glance after glance at the portrait behind Phil's chair. Henriette frequently spoke of "we," which meant herself and Helen, as if they were inseparable; and if Helen spoke it was in answer to some reference which her sister made to her.
"I am the talker, you see," she said, "and Helen is the wise one."
"If I keep still," Helen interjected, "and let Henriette say that I'm wise, she is so convincing that lots of people think that I really am."
Phil was not the first traveller who hardly realised that he was having a meal at the same time that he sat next to a pretty girl at dinner. An exclamation from the others first apprised him that the strawberry shortcake thing had arrived. By all external criteria it might have come from the kitchen at Longfield. The main body was properly accompanied by a satellite bowl of crushed berries.
"You cut it," said Helen to Phil.
He did as bidden.
"Now!"
He tasted it with judicial care.
"Amazing!" he declared. "Let no one say that England's insularity means lack of adaptability. Next to my mother's, it is the best I've ever eaten. I must give my compliments to the cook."
"I will for you," put in Helen.
"But the object is proselytisation," said Phil. "I wait on the opinion of others."
The vicar took a mouthful and then another; his wife followed the same process; and—well, they both had second helpings. The strawberry shortcake thing had won no less a victory at Truckleford than had Virginia ham.
"It wasn't the taxation without representation on Virginia ham and shortcake that led to your Declaration of Independence, was it?" the vicar asked jocularly.
"No, that was tea," Phil replied. "Afterwards we became a nation of coffee drinkers, further to prove our independence."
"When you come to Mervaux," Henriette said, "Jacqueline will make you forest strawberry tartlets as only a French cook can and omelets so light that they have to be weighed down lest they fly out of the window when they are brought to table. We're all for art at Mervaux."
She again had the monopoly of his attention.
"Do you allow spectators?" he asked. "May I lie on the grass and watch you paint, or shall I be required to pull up trees and rearrange the landscape?"
"It depends. I——" she murmured thoughtfully as she stirred her coffee.
Helen did not hear what they were saying. If they were preoccupied with each other, she was preoccupied with the portrait. The living face underneath the frame was in the same pose as its prototype. Phil's unconsciousness of what was so apparent to other eyes gave dramatic point to the situation. At last she could restrain herself no longer. She cut into Henriette's sentence with her outcry:
"Look! You must look!"
For him there was a sudden transition from a concentration of attention on Henriette to Helen's eyes, flaming with intensity, not lacking in mischief, as she leaned across the table.
"Where?" he asked.
"I didn't mean to shout as if there were an alarm of fire. Look at the portrait behind you!"
He turned and under the lettering of "General Thomas Sanford" he saw a clear-cut, positive face, lean, with a humorous curve to the mouth and eyes surveying the world with ready candour. When he turned back he was conscious of a silence and that all were watching him.
"Don't you see it?" asked Helen, speaking what was in the mind of the others.
"The portrait, yes. What has happened to it?" he asked. He was a little wary of something lurking in the eyes of the plain girl opposite him. They seemed to have unexplored depths. If she were having some joke on him he would feel his way, this stranger in foreign climes, and leave the next move to her.
"Of course you don't," she said. "Wait! Everybody wait!" She was gone on the errand of her impulse.
"You never know quite what Helen is going to do next," Henriette explained.
"Her French blood," murmured Mrs. Sanford.
Helen returned bearing a mirror which she had taken from above her washstand.
"Of course you didn't see it. They say that if one met his double in the street he would be the last to recognise it," she told Phil, as she held the mirror at such an angle that both General Thomas Sanford's face and his own were reflected.
Phil drew back startled after a first glance, to look into Helen's eyes expressive of her intense enjoyment of the situation; and then irresistibly he looked again in the mirror. Two and a half centuries stood between the two Sanfords. Add thirty years to those of the man sitting at the table and dress him in the same garb as the man in the portrait and it would be difficult to tell them apart. Phil was not more thrilled than confused. And then another face appeared beside his in the mirror. It was Henriette's, peeping in at the edge, her lips parted in a teasing smile.
"Very like, isn't it?" she said softly.
"Yes," he murmured to the reflection; and the reflection was gone, leaving him alone with that of the ancestor.
"The old blood!" exclaimed the vicar, with deep emotion. "His brother was the founder of the American family and your father and you and I are the only male descendants. Wait!" And he left the room.
"Which means that the plot thickens, I suppose," Phil remarked, with an accusing look at Helen.
"Honestly, I'm in the dark about his intentions," she said, still holding the mirror. The humour of the situation suddenly smote her, and she was laughing as she had into that same mirror before dinner. She noted a shade of surprise in his eyes, and realisation that the cause of it was his discovery that when she laughed she did have a certain charm that brought the blood to her cheeks. She had been caught posing—nothing less. The laugh died; not even a smile remained. The lump of nose, the irregular features, the broad mouth—she was her plain, usual self again.
"Go on laughing!" he exclaimed, unconsciously voicing his thought in his surprise. "I mean——" embarrassedly, "it's your joke. I believe your conscience is already troubling you for the trick."
"It is a mirror conscience," she answered, looking back at him soberly; and then, from the infection of surprise in his eyes, a gathering, quizzical smile spread until it broke in another ripple of laughter.
"That is a new kind of conscience, Helen. Explain!" said her sister.
"To you, too, Henriette?" said Helen. "I've only just found it, myself."
"Apparently it is in the backs of mirrors," murmured Henriette.
"I don't blame Henriette for never looking at the back, do you?" Helen asked Phil.
Phil thought a little revenge was due him for having a mirror set in front of him for the purpose of a comparison of physiognomies.
"Hardly. I envy the mirror!" he said, turning to her. But she had dropped her gaze to her coffee cup and took a deliberate sip before looking up.
"It is always pleasant to say foolish things nicely," she remarked.
"But he is sincere. If he weren't it would be accusing him of blindness, wouldn't it, cousin?" put in Helen mischievously.
"Absolutely!" he managed to say, conscious that he was not having much revenge and that things were getting brittle; while Mrs. Sanford, pretending to smile, could not quite follow the nimble conversation.
Helen laughed again to cover the misadventure of her unruly tongue, and Phil laughed, too, though he did not exactly know why. Henriette was taking another deliberate sip of coffee. They were not aware of the vicar's return until he stood behind Phil's chair.
"Look again, cousin!" Helen bade him.
He was of a mind not to, but could not control his curiosity. The vicar was holding against the frame beside the face of the ancestor a photograph of the statue in the square at Longfield.
"Your father sent it to me," he explained.
"Not a double, but a treble!" exclaimed Helen.
"It's the way of the blood," continued the vicar. "It skips generations, but it's always there—early in the seventeenth century, late in the eighteenth, and now early in the twentieth."
"But the one in the eighteenth was a wicked rebel, disloyal to our German king!" Helen put in again, yielding to temptation. "Old Thomas, there, would have disowned him."
"Helen!" admonished her aunt. "It was only a family quarrel."
"But I believe that old Thomas would have been on George Washington's right hand," said Helen. "He looks it."
Meanwhile, Phil was looking at the three faces, so similar that he might well have been in doubt which was his own. If he were expected to rise and make a fitting speech it was beyond his sense of humour.
"Help! help! Too much ancestor!" he cried out; and half rising he seized Helen's hands, pushing the mirror away at the same time that he held her at arms' length. "You began it!"
She was flushing to the roots of her hair. How strong he was! How silly she had been!
"No, the ancestor! Ancestors begin everything for everybody!" she retorted. "And if you will let go of me I will put the mirror away."
"We all beg your pardon for embarrassing you. It was not a plot and we are all very interested," said the vicar, his eyes twinkling.
The photograph of the Revolutionary hero which her uncle laid on the table Helen took up; and the change of subject so earnestly desired by every one she wrought in another impulse.
"What do ancestors count," she said, "beside a piece of work like this! It's the best he ever did and there is not his equal in all this island—nowhere outside of France. It's power—the purity of line! Who wouldn't charge led by such a figure as that!"
"Now, Helen, when you are through with your ecstasy shan't we go out on the lawn?" said her uncle, patting her hand.
The force of her enthusiasm had something compelling which led Phil to look at the photograph over her shoulder as if it were something he had never seen; but upon her uncle's hint he saw a plain, dull face yielding assent and he was conscious of a vitality suddenly turned limp.
Henriette took the photograph from her sister's hand.
"The best thing of his I have seen," she remarked, examining it. "Inspired by his subject. He has just missed the arm, I think. I should like to have a copy. Shall we walk?" she asked Phil, leading the way. "We ought to have a portrait of the seventeenth cousin as well as of the ancestors," she continued. "I may try portraiture again when you come to France. You will find it easier to pose than to tear up trees, for we have some very large trees at Mervaux, I warn you."
"I hope it will not be in profile," he replied.
Wasn't he going to France to see her? Perhaps she understood the intimation, as she pretended to study his face in the light of the doorway.
"I think a full face will be best!" she decided. "What a glorious night!"
Moonlight and the soft air of the English summer time redeem the soggy, rheumatic winters with their overcast days. A carpet of sod cut by the shadows of moon rays which gave lustre to her eyes! In months to come there were to be other evenings equally fine by nature's gentle beneficence, but none like this. There never could be again; for something was coming to the world which would leave nothing in human relations the same.
The cousinly party walked up and down or stopped to chat in changing groups, Henriette and Phil mostly together and Helen sometimes quite by herself. The happiest of all were the vicar and his wife. They were old enough to take happiness in its full measure; to enjoy that of their own years and by reflection that of youth.
"Are you pleased with him?" asked Mrs. Sanford when two white heads, much like the two at their dinner three thousand miles away, rested on their pillows.
"Yes, my dear. I shall write to Dr. Sanford that we claim part of his son. He is our Philip, too."
"Our Philip!" she repeated. "The family does not die out," she said, in relief at some of the weight of an old burden lifted.
"It survives very worthily over the seas," said her husband.
"How beautiful Henriette was to-night. She grows more charming as she matures, though I confess young people of this age puzzle me. I couldn't help thinking what a splendid pair they made. Ah, blood will tell!"
"And Helen grows more temperamental."
"Poor dear! I don't know what will become of her."
With accustomed leisure Henriette had taken off her gown. It had served well that evening. To her delicate sense it was a living thing, a servant subject to praise and reproach. Caressingly she laid it aside. The buckles of her slippers smiled at her, and she held the foot which she withdrew arched and turned it for inspection before thrusting it into the softer slipper fitted to enjoy the bare intimacy of such a small foot. Still more leisurely she undid her hair and brushed it, conscious that the picture in the frame before her was the same that she had momentarily set in the mirror beside a seventeenth cousin's at table.
Helen—poor dear!—hung up her gown carefully enough, though with no more interest than if it were a towel; and she kicked first one of her slippers almost ceiling high and caught it and then the other, in enjoyment of an old trick of hers. Mirrors were of no use to her in undoing and brushing her hair; yet as she laid the brush back on the table she had a glimpse of herself and it was the smiling self. She laughed at that self, only to find that it was less plain-looking than the smiling self; and then she was angry. The mirror conscience stabbed her with the thought that she was posing, trying to be attractive.
"He must have fancied that I was flirting!" she mused. "I flirt with anybody!"
When she went to bed it was to toss and think of many things, consequent and inconsequent, and of no one thing for long, and when she found herself sobbing she turned on the light and took up her charcoals. But they seemed crude and self-accusing, and she turned to drawing pictures out of her fancy, which at last made her eyelids heavy as it had on many other occasions.