CHAPTER VI
AT MERVAUX
The trace of American blood in Madame Ribot's veins was only an echo, yet its presence kept her from being entirely European. She had never visited America; even her English had more than a touch of French accent. America was vast, distant, noisy, and little concerned her. Nothing much concerned her except her comfort. Her small, shrewd eyes served the ends of a sluggish disposition. In girlhood they had not kept her from being beautiful and in middle age they sat guardian over her health and the business of preserving the freshness of features which were strikingly like Henriette's.
Her phlegm, if phlegm it were, was reaction from days when she had enjoyed Monte Carlo no less than Paris. They were days that she never mentioned. Possibly they had brought prematurely the wrinkles which, in a later phase, she massaged as unpleasant landmarks. She fought to retain youth, while reliving it in Henriette.
M. Ribot, who was in the Argentine, belonged to the past, and the income dating back to an arrangement between lawyers came regularly from a lawyer and would come till her death or till she married again. There had been a grandfather who lived in a villa overlooking the Mediterranean. He had been fond of Henriette and said that his son, Henriette's father, was a fool and a blackguard and his daughter-in-law was a lucky, selfish, spoiled child. When he died he left Henriette an independent fortune.
The rest was wrapped in mystery and eccentricity, with Helen a sort of appendage. She and Henriette indistinctly remembered a quarrel between their parents in an apartment in Paris, which they overheard from an adjoining room without knowing what it meant. Later, the grandfather came and the father went away, without Madame seeming to mind his going. Helen did remember her mother saying to the father:
"You may have Helen, if you wish, but I shall keep Henriette;" and the grandfather added: "Yes, she stays in France. I shall stay in France, myself."
As the father would not have plain little Helen, the mother kept her. After her separation from her husband, Madame Ribot settled in the chateau at Mervaux and Henriette's money maintained a small apartment in Paris, where the family went in winter that Henriette might study painting; for all agreed that she had talent.
Helen wandered in the fields and talked to the peasants and kept on trying to draw. Her only lessons were from an old artist who had become interested in her when she was fifteen. His technique was excellent. He knew how, but he could not do it, as he said.
"You keep on drawing and drawing," were his last words, "and don't bother if any one thinks you an ugly duckling."
She did not mind the old artist calling her an ugly duckling. These two believed in the truth, the truth of art. No one had ever seen so much of the charm of her smile as he when they walked beside the Seine, went to the Louvre, browsed in old print shops, and he criticised her work, her miserable charcoals, as she called them. When he died Helen felt that she had lost her best friend and she went regularly to put flowers on his grave, smiling the while, even if her eyes were moist, as he who had no friends except her would have wished.
Her smiles were for the byways. She had many for the peasants and the villagers. They liked the strange, moody Helen better than the beautiful, gracious Henriette, and they liked to pose for her. Mère Perigord who sat outside her door crocheting on sunny days had been drawn a score of times by Helen.
"Keep on drawing and drawing!" This was really all of Helen's life. Henriette painted and Madame Ribot massaged her wrinkles, read many novels, took a long time to dress for dinner, a longer time to get up in the morning, and exchanged reminiscent letters with men and women who had belonged to the early period of her life. One might think that she was preparing to marry again, but the peasants and the servants knew better. They had dismissed the gossip over the thought in connection with the Count de la Grange, a neighbour of acceptable age but quite poor, and also in connection with General Rousseau, a major in the war of '70, another neighbour who was fairly well-to-do.
For years the thing had been going on. Almost every day the Count and the General called or came to dinner. Madame Ribot was their social world. They were ever telling her how young she kept; the Count with an indirection which was the most delicate flattery and the General with the brusqueness of a soldier, which had the charm of contrast with the Count's method. The two vying in gallantries of an old-fashioned kind made a situation all to Madame Ribot's taste, as her shrewd eyes turned from one to the other. Imagination and recollection, with the basis of the past to work on, completed her satisfaction.
When she received the letter from Henriette asking her to invite the seventeenth cousin to Mervaux, her characteristic of making much of little by reflection, which was as French as it was innate, enlarged it to a significant event. Thanks to the vicar of Truckleford, she was not uninformed of the statue in the square at Longfield; and she was not without pride in her blood. Her American mother had not been of the nouveaux, and from what Henriette said about Phil she grasped that he was of that breed of American sufficient unto itself, in the pride of a new nationality which does not need the label of nobility as assurance of quality. She could write a gracious letter and it pleased her to take some pains with the invitation to Philip Sanford.
The letter posted, she had a twinge of loneliness. She missed Henriette. Her affection for her daughter was compounded with selfishness. She liked the sight of Henriette at her easel; Henriette in her morning gown; Henriette in dishabille, throat and shoulders bare and her figure worthy of her features. Thus she herself had looked in youth, she knew. If she had only had Henriette's eyes! She was pleased that her daughter had fine eyes, yet almost envied them. Still, Henriette was a part of herself; a flower from her stem; a pleasant reminder of youth which kept her young. As an inheritance Henriette had her mother's gift with men, plus her own gift of art; for it was art that made her different from her mother.
Henriette's letter from Truckleford had made no mention of the thing that Madame Ribot had had most in mind as the object of the girls' visit to the Sanfords. Helen, who had written only once and at other times sent love through Henriette, had not mentioned it, which was more suspicious still. So Madame Ribot wrote directly to Mrs. Sanford, who answered that "Helen was in such a temper at mention of the subject that I did not pursue it."
"The little devil!" exclaimed Madame Ribot.
It was not the first time that she had made such reference to Helen. In the fulness of irritation she started a letter to Helen, peremptory, upbraiding; but did not finish it. The recollection of three days which she had once spent nursing her husband in a hotel room, when they were travelling in Algeria where no nurse could be obtained, rose before her. Besides, anger was wrinkle-making. And what was the use? She tore up the letter and turned from her desk to her manicure set.
Her plan had been for Helen to remain in England and enter a training school for nurses. England was a better place for that sort of thing than France and it meant that Helen would be established quite independently some distance from home and earning her living in an honourable way. Not that she had put the plan as clearly as this to Helen, but she had written it to Mrs. Sanford, trusting to that gentle soul's persuasion to carry it into effect.
"If Helen only had a little grit!" thought Madame Ribot. "Now if it were Henriette——"
Awaiting the girls' return, on the mantelpiece of the dining-room, with a number of letters for Henriette was a letter from Paris for Helen. When she opened it she forgot any twinge of suffering because her mother had kissed Henriette on both cheeks and embraced her, while giving the other daughter a dab on one cheek. Helen was breathing very hard and holding the letter so tight in her fingers that it trembled. She had read it through twice to make quite certain that her eyes were not deceiving her, before her cry of delight made Madame Ribot and Henriette, who was running through her own letters to see which she should open first, turn.
"Oh, it is good—good—good!" she repeated. "M. Vailliant is coming to look at my charcoals to see if I have enough for an exhibition. If I have that means I shall make a lot. You're bound to, everybody says, at one of his exhibitions."
Neither Madame Ribot nor Henriette had spoken. They seemed startled by the violence of her enthusiasm.
"Aren't you glad?" Helen asked, suddenly becoming very still.
"Glad! Who should be glad if not I?" said her mother feelingly.
Henriette slipped her arm around Helen's waist.
"And I, you dear mouse, when you've worked so long and hard! It's a triumph," she said.
Helen nestled her head on her sister's shoulder and drew deep, long breaths, while Madame Ribot took up the letter.
"I don't want you to be too set-up for fear you may be disappointed," she said. "M. Vailliant says if there are enough to be worth while. He is only coming to look over your work."
"Yes—yes," said Helen, sobering. "I had the exhibition already open. Enough and worth while! We'll see—you will help me to decide. I'll bring them all down and we can go through them together. From the way he writes he may come to-day."
She hurried away and returned directly with the first portfolio of the drawings which she had kept—for she had destroyed many in moments of depression—and having laid them on the table went for another and still another.
"I never realised that I had done so many!" she exclaimed, in amazement at the size of the stack.
"Mère Perigord twenty times!" smiled Henriette.
Madame Ribot was appalled by the task, though she had seen and heard so much of Helen's charcoals. She and Henriette stood by perfunctorily, while Helen turned severe critic. None of them seemed good to her, as she thought of how they would look on a wall at an exhibition, with connoisseurs picking them to pieces.
"Oh, cusses! I can't do it! I never can!" she declared. "My fate is to wear a white cap and feed people broth and keep their temperature chart in order!" She slapped one Mère Perigord in the face in disgust.
"Remember," said Henriette, "that charcoal is very limited."
In the midst of the selection a limousine rolled up to the door and a roly-poly little man, with close-cropped beard and eyes as shrewd as Madame Ribot's own, alighted and sent in the card of "M. Vailliant, Art Dealer."
Madame Ribot received him. As he entered the room Henriette was standing by the near side of the table in front of Helen, in whose heart was great fear, any faith she might have had in her charcoals shrivelling in his presence. M. Vailliant bowed to both, his glance swiftly moving about the room as if counting the number of the scattered drawings; but to Henriette, whose beauty dominated her surroundings, he made a particularly low bow.
"Mademoiselle, I see that you are ready for me," he said, with still another bow to Henriette. And Helen felt the shrivelling sensation more deeply.
"Both my daughters are artists, and one paints," said Madame Ribot, with the reflection of pride in the tribute which M. Vailliant had instinctively paid to Henriette, some of whose paintings were on the walls. Indeed, they were everywhere about the chateau. "I am rather fond of this one, myself," she added, nodding toward a landscape which faced the dealer. It had had honourable mention at the Salon, but it had not sold.
Looking from Henriette to the picture and then back at Henriette, the art dealer breathed an "Ah!" in a way that implied that a place in the Salon was the obvious one for Henriette.
"Naturally, I know of your work," he said, with another bow.
"My daughter has never had an exhibition, though she has quite enough pictures now," went on Madame Ribot. "There are others in the next room. Perhaps you would like to see them, too."
Most charming Madame Ribot was when she was interested in any purpose, and she led the way into the room, Henriette meantime standing in the doorway and studying M. Valliant's face. Helen remained beside her pile of charcoals, trying to resist the desire to fly to the fields away from the whole business. She could feel her heart pounding and her temples throbbing. When she had a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece she realised that it was from herself that she particularly wanted to escape.
"Excellent technique," M. Vailliant remarked. "But an exhibition of paintings—that is a great undertaking. One of the big houses will take you up one day and make your vogue. There is no hurry."
"It was mother who was speaking of the exhibition, not I," said Henriette casually. "You came to see my sister's charcoals."
"So I did," agreed the dealer. "Charcoals are more in keeping with the modest pretensions of my establishment. Quick returns and small profits, as they say at the Bon Marché."
"You will stretch a point for her, won't you?" said Henriette, as she drew aside to allow him to return to the other room. "She's worked so hard and it means so much to her."
But Helen had overheard. A dash of red shot into her cheeks, as her shoulders gave a nervous shrug. The dealer looked from the beautiful to the plain girl with that sense of contrast between the two which Helen had felt a thousand times.
"Where do I begin?" he asked, almost perfunctorily.
Some one had told Helen that one should blow one's own trumpet to an art dealer; that many an artist had been started on a career by making the most of his personality. But when she was conscious of how poor her drawings were she could not play the herald of her own skill. As for personality, one must have something to start with.
"Those four I picked out for the least bad," she said, handing them to him.
Not a sign on the dealer's face, as he looked them through, while her temples throbbed.
"More academic than the one I had seen—better drawing, but——" he shook his head.
The throbbing ceased. Helen knew the truth. There would be no exhibition. She felt faint; there was no heart left in her.
"And these?" asked M. Vailliant, looking at a time-coloured board on top of a pile on a chair.
"Discarded. They were too awful—some of them just dashed off for fun."
"Oh!"
M. Vailliant spread his legs as he bent over the pile; he puffed out his lips and sucked them in, his only sign of emotion, as he began separating the drawings into two piles% Then he applied the same process to those on the table, without question or comment. Helen did not know what to make of him. She was dizzy with curiosity and hope. When he was through, still silent like some general over a war-map, this master of artistic fate, who knew that the real master was the public who paid his rent, made a single pile of those which he had chosen.
"And these?" He found he had missed some against the wall behind a portière.
"Oh, cartoons I call them—not a bit worth while!" said Helen. "Caricatures, perhaps. I just did them for the sport of it."
M. Vailliant did not seem to hear her. He went through the cartoons twice, still keeping up that motion of his lips as if he were alternately blowing soap bubbles and sucking in a string.
"Have you ever tried etching?" he asked.
"No. I'd like it, but—I——" gasped Helen.
"I would if I were you," he said, so very matter-of-factly that she was puzzled. "Ever tried painting?"
"I—yes——" she faltered. His shrewd eyes were looking at her sharply.
"Have you anything that you've done?"
"Yes, but it's awful—just splotches of colour. I see colour that way. Shall I get it?" she asked.
"Why not? Let's see the whole shop while we are at it."
Helen ran upstairs, wondering if he were making fun of her. Not one word of praise had he spoken. He had given no sign of enthusiasm. Yet he had asked her if she had ever tried etching and wanted to see this painting which she drew from under a pile of clothes on the cupboard shelf. Well, if the great art dealer had come from Paris to see the whole shop, then he should see it. Let him be amused. She did not care. He could not hurt her feelings; he should not see that she minded when he told her the worst.
"Helen's painting is only for fun," Henriette was explaining to M. Vailliant as they waited for Helen's return. "Please don't be too critical. She is very sensitive."
"Oh, no. I realise that she is not a serious painter like you, Mademoiselle. I thought I should like to see what ideas of colour she had. Why not?" M. Vailliant mused, as he picked out two from the pile of charcoals on the table and laid them on top in a sort of bored, add-six-and-multiply-by-four manner.
When Helen returned with her painting, a little thing of a wet shepherd and his dog in a burst of soft, apologetic sunlight through the mist, he took it from her with a casual nod and having set it on the mantelpiece stepped slowly backward and resumed his lip-movements, which he interrupted long enough to ask Helen if she had had any lessons in painting.
"I've only watched Henriette and taken some of her colours and splotched, as I call it," she replied almost defiantly.
But he only muttered, "Impressionistic!" between his puffs and suckings.
"Yes, that is what I should say!" put in Henriette.
"I know it!" exclaimed Helen, with an abruptness that startled him out of his mannerism into an intense glance at her. She was laughing, her chin up, the regular teeth showing in a white line. If ever eyes had invited any critic to shoot his sharpest darts they were hers. "And the exhibition?" she demanded. "Shall we hold it in the Salon itself or at the Louvre?"
M. Vailliant opened his mouth as if he were about to say something emotional; then rubbed his chin and stepped to one side to have another look at the painting.
"Of course I don't think it is as good as Millet—not quite," Helen proceeded, forcing her measure a trifle. "Isn't it wonderful to find a genius at Mervaux so unexpect——" She broke off her satire helplessly.
"Quite!" said M. Vailliant, looking at her and rubbing his chin again. "I'll put the painting on the back wall to lighten up the gallery—good contrast, line and colour," he went on. "This is the lot I have chosen for the exhibition," he said, indicating the pile on the table.
"You mean it! You mean it!"
But the smile on M. Vailliant's face told her without words that he did; and reaching across the table, in her quick impulse, she took his hands in hers. He felt their pressure tighten so that his soft palms were almost doubled over as, unheeding her mother's exclamation at the action, she demanded:
"Do you think that I ought to go and learn to be a nurse, or can I make my living drawing these things?" And as suddenly as she had seized his hands she drew away and spread out hers in an appeal: "Honest! No nice little phrases, but honest!"
"Nursing!" exclaimed the dealer, lifting his hands with outstretched fingers, horror written on his face. "Giving sick people medicine and adjusting bandages! You, my girl! No! Who ever suggested it?"
She seemed to draw nearer, though she stood motionless, such was the intensity of her inquiry.
"A living, I mean! I must decide! I can't stand it any longer!"
M. Vailliant rubbed his chin again and became the business man.
"I'm willing to give you the chance," he said. "We'll hold the exhibition—provided there isn't war. War! That's the end of everything—no art sold then. And the news is bad, very bad to-day. Yes, I'll give the exhibition if you will agree to terms. Talking business and no nonsense, now."
The terms were that he should have the disposal of all her work for three years on the regular commission basis. Helen agreed in a voice that sounded hollow in her own ears.
"If there were not a prospect of war——" He looked again at the painting. "Well, even if there is going to be war I'll buy these two top drawings and the painting for a thousand francs. Check now. Do you agree?"
Then M. Vailliant permitted himself to smile without rubbing his chin; and he kept on smiling as he wrapped up the painting and the charcoals.
"I think we'll make them go," he said. "If there isn't war I'll come down and get the others for the show and we'll have a talk together, young woman, about the future. If there is war"—he gave his shoulders a Gallic shrug. "I go to join the colours. Who knows? There is only France, then."
Leaving behind a contract and a check and a young woman still and wide-eyed, he rode away. Not until he was out of the grounds did he permit himself a long-drawn breath of satisfaction, as he leaned back on the cushions and lighted a cigarette, this cold trader in art.
"My emotion got away from me again!" he said. "I'll never be a real dealer if I can't control it. Why, if you discovered a Rembrandt you oughtn't to let on! It didn't matter with that girl, though. Nice chateau. Mother seemed well-to-do, but how eager the girl was for the thousand francs! One never knows. Probably oughtn't to have mentioned etching. Better for her to stick to charcoals and make a vogue. My enthusiasm again! Splotches of colour, as she says—not enough. But I think there is more to come. As for the other's painting—faint stuff, without soul; teacher-taught-me stuff—pouf! But if Mlle. Helen only had her sister's beauty I'd have a dry point of her for the exhibition, introduce her about—surely would be a go. But no beautiful woman can ever paint. Everybody admires her so much as a subjective work of art that she can never improve in her objective art. Why should she? One good thing that Mlle. Helen is so plain—no danger of her ever marrying. She's suffered, that's it—that's the quality you must have! And the likeness in voice between those two girls, except when she was laughing or became emotional. Then she was rather attractive. The fire in her, her talent, shone out of her eyes and made you forget how plain she is. She wouldn't be so plain, either, if it weren't for the nose. Some enemy wished that nose on her! Well, I made her happy. Think of that, you hard-headed Parisian, you brought triumph for that girl!"
Triumph was not the word to describe Helen's feelings after M. Vailliant's departure, as in the reaction of exhaustion, which required that she dab the moisture out of her eyes, she leaned against the wall. Relief, joy, gratitude! Through a mist she saw her mother and Henriette looking at her, their strange, puzzled expression not defined. She grasped only the fact of them and their nearness. All rancour had passed out of her heart. Her vitality surging back, she put her arms impetuously around her mother's neck and kissed her.
"Don't choke me!" gasped Madame Ribot.
"I didn't mean to! But I shall you, Henriette!" and she embraced her sister, in turn.
"I should say you would!" gasped Henriette.
"I'm afraid that repose is foreign to your nature," said her mother.
"It must be," returned Helen, as she released Henriette. "Oh, I've been ugly to you sometimes, because I couldn't help drawing and knew I ought to, but I'll never be again! It's all too good. I want to be alone with it!"
Emancipation was the real word. She went forth into the open air, freed from the cage, to test her wings. More strands of hair loosing as she raced along, she struck the fields and through the village, calling out to all the people she knew, but not stopping to talk, and on up to a hilltop, where the plotted glory of the farmlands lay before her, with the fields of grain waving gold.
A thousand francs! was her mundane thought. She could live on that a long time in Paris, drawing and studying. It did not matter how plain she was. She might have a nose as big as a prize potato and yellow eyes and rat teeth. People were not going to look at her, but at her pictures. Her face need never hurt her again. She did not know that she had a face when she was drawing. She was young, with the long span of years stretching straight before her—straight, straight, like the great main roads of France! It was all clear—unless war came. But it could not come. It was too hideous a thought. The world was too beautiful to be drenched with blood; too wise to be so foolish.
Returning homeward she thought of many things; even of that seventeenth cousin and how she would like to do a charcoal of him. She would, while Henriette painted him. With no idea of the time that had elapsed, dust-covered, a rent in her gown from a thorn-bush, she burst in on her mother and sister, who were halfway through dinner.
"You are a sight!" said Madame Ribot. "Do change before you sit down!"
Upstairs in her room she looked into her mirror with a new sense of defiance.
"Oh, you are plain, but do you think that matters?" She held her hands up in front of her face. "Five fingers like everybody else and they can hold a crayon or a brush! Silly!" She laughed again and the mirror laughed back in the glorious secret of—triumph was the word, this time.
"M. Valliant must really think highly of your charcoals," said Henriette at table, "or he wouldn't have taken the painting."
"Yes, that was very surprising," said Madame Ribot.
"But remember I got the thousand francs! Isn't that the proof of the pudding from an art dealer. I'll set up a studio in Paris, a tiny one in a garret, and get my own meals—thrifty me! And I'll be away from home, mother, as much as if I were nursing—I mean, I'll be independent, as I ought to be."
She went on talking about her plans, unconscious that Henriette and even her mother were slightly inattentive.