CHAPTER VII
A FULL-FACE PORTRAIT
But the war did come. It came, perhaps, to teach the foolish people of a beautiful world how beautiful it was and how foolish they were.
Helen did not have to wait on the note from M. Vailliant to know that there would be no exhibition. The war had killed her little ambition, along with millions of others. Widespread human tragedy enveloped the personal thought. Some other person in some other age seemed to have done those charcoals, which still lay stacked on the corner table in the sitting-room. Her thoughts went forth with the able-bodied villagers who had left their harvests to fight for France. Their going was, as yet, Mervaux's only direct contact with the war. The sky remained the same; the sunshine was equally glorious; the shade equally pleasant at mid-day; and Jacqueline was making equally good omelets.
What were the Ribots to do? The girls thought that they ought to try to help France. Everybody ought when France was about to fight for her life. But Madame Ribot decided to the contrary. She was irritated with the war and she meant that it should trouble her as little as possible.
"But not to be in Paris in a time like this!" protested Henriette.
"How lucky to be out of Paris!" said Madame Ribot. "All the trains full of soldiers, and there will be trouble about passes, General Rousseau says."
She placed great reliance on the General. He said that there was no danger. This time the tables would be turned on the Prussians. She, too, believed in a French victory. It was not as it had been in '70. The French were ready. Where could the war disturb her as little as at Mervaux, in the lap of the hills a mile away from the main road?
"Then I'll go, mother," said Helen. The objections to Henriette's going to Paris could not apply to her.
"No, we shall all stay here," Madame Ribot replied.
"But I have my thousand francs," said Helen. "I'll run up for only two or three days."
"No. You would not go when I thought it best," said Madame Ribot pettishly. "Now when I need you, you want to go. You were always very contrary."
"Oh—I—forgive me! I did not know that you thought of it in that way—that you needed me."
"We must all be together. I should worry about you."
"Of course you would! I didn't think of that. Oh, mother!"
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 reassurance. 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 Liége; 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 snob 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 buttonhole, 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 passed 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.
"Yes. Mother insists on a permanent exhibition," she replied deprecatingly.
He went from one to another, admiring, listening to her comments, and when they had been through the rooms he turned to her, saying:
"It's very wonderful to me. I stand a little in awe of you—you who have been in the Salon. I have great luck in cousins and I am luckier still in having an invitation to Mervaux."
She had not expected him to speak of the pictures in any critical fashion. How could he know anything about art? She liked his simple attitude. It was always more satisfactory than that of those who pretended to know and did not.
"And it's time for me to dress for dinner," she said, "though you need not hurry. Dinner at eight."
He had not thought of Helen while he had been looking at the pictures. After Henriette had gone he saw Helen huddled in the depths of a big chair in a corner half hidden by the open door, reading. With the brilliant light of Henriette departed, smaller lights became visible. Helen also was his cousin. But he felt a peculiar awkwardness in speaking to her. He was even afraid that one of her tempers might break on him. He hesitated, as he thought of something to say, and his glance fell on the pile of charcoal drawings on the side table.
"Are those your drawings?" he asked.
"I plead guilty," she responded equivocally.
"May I look?"
"Of course. Please do, if you would like to," she said. "They explain themselves," she added, without rising, "and it's at your own risk."
He took up one of the drawings.
"But I think it corking!"
"Honestly?" she asked. "Let me see which one it is!" She sprang up and looked over his shoulder, suddenly changed into a being of glowing vitality.