CHAPTER X
THE VOICE AT HIS ELBOW
Why no more news of the brilliant advance into Alsace? What meant the official silence about Mulhausen and Liége? At Mervaux they read the papers no less helplessly than elsewhere.
The three cousins assisted Madame Pigou in finishing her harvest. No more soldiers passed along the road; Henriette went on with her painting, and Helen was absent on other missions. Phil was drifting and he found drifting pleasant, though it was carrying him onto the rocks.
"I ought to go or I'll be hit for good!" he thought, in moments of sanity.
Seventeenth cousinship was all very well, but he had better face the facts. He was a young man who had to earn his own living three thousand miles away; and here was a young woman in a chateau forty miles from Paris who had been bred in French ways. He saw only Henriette; he lived Henriette; and Madame Ribot who watched him realised better than he how serious was his case. But how could he go with the portrait unfinished? How could he go when he did not want to go; when he was perfectly willing to allow Henriette to go on for months painting his portrait?
Sometimes Helen broke her rule of leaving the two to themselves, to come and stand for a while and watch her sister at work. Phil grew rather to resent her presence on such occasions, for she was usually silent and Henriette became silent, too, as if under restraint. A fear that he had shown signs of regarding Helen as an intruder led him to remind her one morning at breakfast that she had not yet kept her promise to make a charcoal portrait as a companion to Henriette's painting to take back to Longfield. He realised that the suggestion was consummate egoism as soon as he had made it; the more so as she received it with a naïve, baffling surprise.
"You have forgotten it!" he said.
"Almost," she replied thoughtfully. "You are very polite."
For an instant she regarded him with fixed inquiry; then out of the depths of her eyes he saw the mischief bubbling forth as it had when she held the mirror up to him across the table at Truckleford. In that mood he knew that he must expect any unconventional sally.
"Portraits which please a father and mother proud of a handsome son are not exactly in my line," she said. "I like wrinkles and irregular features. It's a sort of specialism with me to pick out these as the salient points. There's no telling what I might do with you."
"Of course, Helen's forte is caricature," Henriette explained. "I quite understand her reasons"—she paused, lowering her head and looking at Phil through her lashes, daring a thrust—"after having spent days with your features."
"Not to mention that I have spent days with yours!" he thrust back.
"The penalty of not having had a profile view!"
"It is I who am to make the profile—I had forgotten that," said Helen. "We'll do it this morning. I feel in the mood."
He was not long in doubt as to the nature of the mood. It was an abandon of fanciful humour.
"Mind, you are not to look around at me, but at Henriette!" she said warningly, as they went up the path. "I'm strictly unofficial."
He had hardly settled himself in his pose when she broke out laughing. He looked around inquiringly.
"You are breaking the rules!" she cried. "Remember, you got yourself into this and you must play the game. I'm making a profile."
"I can't help it, can I, because I am so fond of myself that I want more and more pictures of myself?" he complained quizzically. "Posing may yet become a disease with me."
"You will be crying too much cousin as well as too much ancestor," said Henriette, entering into the spirit of the occasion. He was at their mercy.
"It's the third degree of cousinship!" he said.
What would the class of 1911, let alone P. O'Brien, the foreman of the construction gang at Las Palmas, say if they saw him now? P. O'Brien, at least, would not call it "a man's job." There were two voices in his ears: one from lips he could not see and the other from those he could.
Leisurely, Henriette mixed her colours, inclining her head this way and that as she did when she looked at her hair in the mirror. Then the graceful arm rose and the slim fingers, holding the brush daintily, put a dab on the canvas.
"Did you wear spurs?" asked the voice of the unseen person.
"What?"
"Don't look around! I mean, did you wear spurs when you were in the Southwest? Of course you did, hugeous Spanish spurs and an enormous sombrero and woolly sheepskin trousers."
"As you say!" Phil replied.
"You see, I am doing cartoons of our hero's life," Helen explained. "Here he is as he saw himself and the Rocky Mountains when he first arrived, with his college diploma under his arm."
Only lines of hieroglyphic simplicity, and Phil in enormous spurs and sombrero, with a great roll of parchment under his arm, was looking down on some ant-hills. Only lines, but the nose and the chin under the sombrero's were unmistakably Phil's.
"Now, as our hero sees himself roping his first steer—and as he really was!" she went on. "We are all for realism."
A Phil with one arm akimbo, who roped the steer with his thumb and little finger holding a thread, was followed in the next scene by a Phil fluttering heaven high and a steer romping across the prairie.
"What next in the hero's progress?" she continued. "Undaunted, he goes on his way, our conquistadore—is that the right word in Spanish, cousin?"
"Yes," admitted Phil, who could not see the drawings or confess his curiosity about them.
Henriette went on painting, with intermissions when she lowered her head behind the easel to hide her amusement, perhaps, and others when she murmured an apology for Helen; but she was charming all the time.
"Yes, I have it!" said Helen. "He saves pretty Pepita, the stern, old governor's daughter, from the revolutionista bandittistas—copyright reserved, plot perfectly original. But how does he save Pepita? With one fell glance of his eye?"
Phil moved a trifle restlessly, but said nothing.
"No, there are too many revolutionistas! He might subdue four or five, but not all of them—not even he, particularly when he has left his college diploma in his tent—and the dark Spanish girl must be saved. It shall be six-shooters—big six-shooters! 'Tis done!"
Phil was seeing Henriette's face and hearing a voice like Henriette's, but with a richness, a variety of tonal range, and a whimsicality and infectiousness which hers lacked. It went perfectly with Henriette's smile at times, for she was enjoying the situation.
"Our hero triumphs!" Helen continued. "He restores the beautiful belle to her true lover, but with rare nobility of soul hides the mortal wound which her eyes have given him. For she is not for him. Now he starts for home to found some more American colleges and foreign missions, his pockets bulging with gold—thus—home to his first love, the girl in the kitchen at Longfield who makes strawberry shortcakes. Here he eats a strawberry shortcake as big as a mountain. Yet another transition—he is in Europe. Majestic he sits and the little cousins look up at him and worship this Gibson man from the United States of Amerikee. Thus he and thus the little cousins! This is triumph, indeed! Now our story is told. We depart."
"Wait!" cried Phil, springing up. "For what I have suffered I want to see the result."
He faced a Helen shaking with laughter, teasing, delightful, in its spontaneous ring. Every fibre in her body seemed to be laughing. She would not have been unattractive then, even had her nose been lumpier than it was.
"It will be painful, I warn you!" she said. He was looking over her shoulder. "How do you like the local colour? I put in one cactus for that."
"That is enough for Mexico," he agreed. "And may I have them? Father will double up when he sees them and Jane will roar."
"I was doing them to make myself laugh," she said soberly, turning her head. He caught a gleam from her eyes baffling in its brightness, as a sharp sunbeam through a lattice. "If they make other people laugh, so much to the good in war time."
"Which means that I may have them?"
"Yes. But I have yet to make my charcoal of you; so back to your pose, please. This is a serious business."
He recognised that it was by the unattractive way that she drew down her lips as she ceased smiling. A serious business! Though he did not look at her, he could feel her presence; the intensity that she put into her work. He could hear the "Oh, cusses!" muttered under her breath, which were only interjections in the course of series of questions and comments, jumping from Longfield and back again. He found himself interested in answering. He betrayed his enthusiasms, his ambitions, and his love for his country, which was as simple and as inherent as that of the peasants in the fields for their France.
"America is to-morrow!" he said.
This voice of the girl unseen had transformed him from the atmosphere of cartoons to that of a fine reality. He was speaking better than he knew and answering Helen's questions to the enchanting face of Henriette who, in her rapt listening while her brush was still, urged him on no less by her smile and charm than Helen with her voice of emotion.
"America is to-morrow!" repeated Helen. "I like that thought. You take in all who come to give them a chance for your to-morrow; amalgamate the prejudices that made this war. You live for the rising rather than the setting sun and you love your country not in a boasting way, but in the blood. Is that it?"
"Yes, it's in the blood after all these generations; and we want to breed it into the blood of every newcomer."
"Even the Germans—the Huns?"
"They should cease to be Germans in America in the same way that my ancestors gave up their European allegiance and fought in order that the newcomers should be free from it. If they prefer to be German, let them stay in Germany."
The afternoon wore on as under a spell wrought unconsciously for him with the beauty of Henriette before him and a certain magnetic force at his elbow—which suddenly snapped as Helen said:
"I don't know—probably I'll never do it any better! Thank you!"
By this he understood that the drawing was finished. He rose as one will when the end of an incident impels physical release.
"Enough for to-day!" said Henriette, a touch of sharpness in her voice as she rose, too.
Helen looked exhausted and numb. She had put all her vitality into a sheet of cardboard.
"You, too, Henriette!" exclaimed Phil, as he looked at the result.
At the bottom of the drawing of Henriette, with arm uplifted as about to lay brush to canvas, and of himself in the pose which Helen had arranged, was scrawled, "Seventeenth cousins." Both Henriette and Phil flushed, and Helen looked from one face to the other lingeringly, keenly. She had caught the grace and charm of her sister as something inviting, vivid and finished as art itself, and the note of the man was of a downright simplicity of clear profile which seemed to see nothing except the face before him.
"You think it bad!" said Helen. "It is—it is! But I warned you that I can't do anything but put the person as I see him into line."
In the resulting impulse, which had a certain desperation about it, she grasped the edge of the cardboard in both hands to tear it in two.
"No!" said Henriette peremptorily. "I never liked anything you have done better."
"But I'm used to tearing up things when they displease me!" persisted Helen stubbornly.
"At least, wait!" remonstrated Phil. "It is wonderful of Henriette."
"And of you, cousin!" said Henriette.
Phil took the picture from Helen's hands, which now released it in the relaxation of philosophical disinterestedness. What he saw was a man in love with a woman at an easel, and the man was himself. The truth hit him fairly between the eyes.
"Sometimes I don't know what comes out in my own pictures till I look at them a second time—and this is not so bad for me. Have it if you want it," Helen added, as she bent to pick up her drawing materials, "and I'll go and wash my smudgy hands." Rather hurriedly, as if some one or something were pursuing her, she went toward the house.
In a quandary Phil watched her out of sight. When he turned again to Henriette her back was toward him and she was taking her canvas off the easel. How like was her figure to the one which had disappeared under the trees!
"Helen has a distinct gift, hasn't she?" Henriette remarked.
"Yes, and a distinct character," Phil replied thoughtfully.
"A touch of melancholy. Even mother and I never know what she will do next."
He folded the easel and took it under one arm, carrying Helen's charcoal under the other, while Henriette carried the portrait, and they started slowly back to the house.
"It was wonderful what you said about America," she said, looking at him with appealing seriousness.
"Why?" he asked.
"It was a breath of the real America," she answered. "I've fallen into the provincial French view. America is to-morrow! I like that. You've made me feel the call of America; aroused the dormant American corpuscles in my blood," she continued, gazing thoughtfully at the path and then up at him. "I want to go to America. I'd like to see those Rocky Mountains and I'd like to pay a return visit from Mervaux to Longfield."
"You would? But you'd find it quiet—little to do."
"Is there much to do at Mervaux? Shouldn't I have my painting? My American corpuscles would make me feel at home."
She had carried him a stage farther on his course, dispelling the doubts which had occurred to him as a warning to pause.
"I—I——" he began. His throat seemed out of order; he was stuttering. Madame Ribot's call from the doorway of the house came as a mixture of relief and unwelcome interruption.
"Somebody will be late for dinner if they do not hurry," said Madame Ribot. "And the news is not good. Even Count de la Grange, who has just been here, admits that it is not. However, he doesn't think that anything will happen to disturb us here."