CHAPTER XXV
HENRIETTE WAITS
At dinner Phil was seated again under the English ancestor, only to find that this did not mean an escape from ancestors, as he was facing the American. The vicar had had the photograph of the statue at Longfield framed, and on the opposite side of the room the man of Massachusetts seeking the blood of British redcoats was charging toward the man of Hampshire, who, with uptilted chin, was defying all comers.
"At breakfast some morning you may find the table overturned, chairs broken and the dining-room all gory," Phil said.
"Really!" gasped Mrs. Sanford. She was so serious about the ancestors that at first she took him literally.
"The American is better dressed for such an affair," Phil continued, "but I fancy that the Briton did his fighting in shirt-sleeves, too. He was in that ornate get-up only when he posed for his portrait."
"They would both be in shirt-sleeves for this cause!" declared the vicar.
"Yes, and perhaps for the cause for which the American fought, too," Phil suggested.
"Very likely. I am proud of them both!" said the vicar.
But he and Mrs. Sanford were proudest of the living Sanford who was going to fight in the cause of the moment. The hour was the living hour of blows. Here was one who was about to strike a blow for a childless pair, who had never so much wanted a son as then in order that they might give him for their country. A son of their blood had come to them, now. They wanted to know more about him, his boyhood, his school-days, and the campaigns of the revolutionary ancestor—everything that put links in the chain of inheritance. Phil complied when he realised the genuineness of their interest, but found himself stumbling in details.
"Father knows everything he did," he said. "In fact, we have his diary; but I confess——"
"Too much ancestor!" put in Helen.
It was the first that she had spoken, and even this exclamation was casual and disinterested. Seated across from him as she had been at the first dinner, her plain part in her plain gown was much the same as then, only she was more subdued. Henriette was by his side, in the same part of beautiful woman and beautiful gown. She added her questions to the vicar's. Madame Ribot's only question was about Peter Smithers.
"We must get him to Europe," she said, when the vicar and Mrs. Sanford were declaring that now Phil's father and mother would surely come to England on their long-promised visit.
"I'd like to see Peter in Europe," said Phil.
"So should I!" declared Helen irresistibly. "I should like to have seen him having a set-to with von Stein."
What a cartoon! A whole series of Peter Smithers in moods of rage and humility; Peter shaking his fist; Peter threatened with firing squads and blank walls; Peter and old von Stein—there you had a contrast! Her eyes were dancing; she was laughing to herself as the pictures flitted before her vision, only to bite her lip when she noticed her mother's stare and lapse into the marking-time attitude which she had planned to take her through the meal.
"Yes, of course we must invite Peter," said Madame Ribot. "Do write to Dr. Sanford about it."
"Do, please!" chimed in Henriette.
The vicar was looking to Phil for his lead in the matter.
"By all means!" he said.
Just then his glance happened to meet Helen's, and hers seemed to convey a repressed irony, which melted into that blankness of expression with its self-effacement that always puzzled him. Always the artist—always changing, he thought, while Henriette's charm was unvarying.
"And you will stay on here?" he said to Henriette.
"No. I, too, am going to do my bit," she replied.
She was to take a course in nursing and go to France with Lady Truckleford's hospital unit.
"You were so good at binding up the wounded soldier's arm in the gully that I foresee a great success," said Phil.
She flushed slightly, averting her glance. Always her blushes were accompanied by the appropriate manner and gesture. When she looked back at him her face was in repose, her lips parted faintly, her eyes deep wells of grateful recollection—the Henriette whom he had carried from the roadside to the gully.
"We shall both be in France," she said; "you fighting and I nursing—both doing our bit."
In that deliciously pregnant second before she took a last sip of coffee her smile implied more than her words.
When they went out on the lawn Madame Ribot asked Helen to fetch a shawl, and after she had placed its silken folds around her mother's shoulders she slipped away into the darkness, the others in their preoccupation not missing her. Madame Ribot at ease in a long chair, the others walked up and down until again came a motor's purr to the gateway and Lady Truckleford appeared to talk of war relief. She was bubblingly talkative, was Lady Truckleford, delightfully fussed over her hospital project, and demonstrative over Henriette, who seemed to have won her affections completely. It was quite late when she departed.
"We'll renew that walk to-morrow, shall we?" Henriette said to Phil as they parted on the stairs. While she was undressing her mother came into the room.
"You were very beautiful to-night, dearie," said Madame Ribot, taking her daughter's hands in hers. "And it's settled between you and Cousin Phil?"
Henriette smiled.
"That means that it is?"
Again Henriette smiled, in a confident way.
"It is!" said Madame Ribot. "Well——" and she kissed Henriette good-night, closing the scene without further inquiry, as became a wise woman who knew or thought she knew her daughter. "It's splendid about Helen," she added, pausing in the doorway.
"Very!" Henriette replied. "Yes, she's found her place drawing for the press."
Helen, who had thought that she had conquered happiness, was far from it. She had cried out to her mirror: "Oh, if it weren't for that nose I wouldn't be such a fright!" only to call herself a fool. The result of her conflicting emotions was to hurry downstairs and look up the railroad timetables. Then she went to her mother's room, a pale, distrait figure of impatience, with face drawn.
"I'm going to take the seven-o'clock train in the morning," she said. "It's my work, you see."
She had come quite close to her mother's side so abruptly that it was disturbing to her mother's composure.
"You know best about that," said Madame Ribot, looking up at Helen's features with a return of the old wonder that Helen should be her child.
"Please explain and say good-bye to the others, won't you?"
"Yes. And, Helen, it's all settled between Henriette and Cousin Phil, isn't it?"
"If she wishes."
"If she wishes! What do you mean by that?" Madame Ribot had turned in her chair with a penetrating glance from her little eyes.
"Why, what I say. But I don't know. I——"
Helen wavered.
"You were with them all the time at the chateau?"
"Yes. If she wishes," was all that Helen could say, her voice crackling in its dryness.
"That she has not wished it on other occasions. I see!" murmured Madame Ribot. "She does this time."
"Good-bye!"
"Good-bye! You've done wonderfully, Helen. Of course, it is better than nursing if you continue to make it go. You see, I was anxious about you if anything happened to me."
"And I've been very trying sometimes. I'm sorry!"
There was something whose place even successful drawings for the press could not supply—affection. Helen was singularly hungry for it to-night.
"Of course you will write us and come down to see us!" said Madame Ribot.
"Of course!" Helen repeated.
She wished to be taken into her mother's arms, but it did not happen. And she was glad when the dawn, which found her awake, came and she softly glided downstairs on her way to the station.
Peter Smithers on his "little farm" in Massachusetts, walking about and surveying the latest improvements and his high-bred cattle and swine, was hardly conscious that a woman leisurely undoing her hair in a vicarage in Truckleford was thinking of him. He had a fortune, poor man; and he was not unused to being the object of plots as the result of its possession. In her day Madame Ribot had been as fond of spinning webs of intrigue as she had of late the threads of recollection which had helped to pass the time.
"Phil will come out of this war with European habits formed," she thought. "His Longfield will seem very tame to him, then. He may win distinction—but his family is enough. The one other thing needful"—it was the thing that Peter Smithers had. As a loving and dutiful mother her part was clear. "Peter Smithers must be brought to Europe; and then I——" Madame Ribot smiled at herself in the mirror, conscious that a long lapse of inaction need not necessarily have weakened her powers. She could already hear the soft purr of Peter Smithers's powerful car at the gate.
Nor did Peter, looking through the hothouses of that miserable little farm of his, know that the two white heads of an English vicar and his wife were thinking of him.
"That ten days in the chateau seem to have had one result, unless my eyes deceive me," said the vicar in a half-whisper, as if the secret held back for this family conclave might be overheard by the walls.
"You saw it, too?" said Mrs. Sanford. "Of course, as a woman I saw it at once. And, Franklin, don't forget about inviting Peter Smithers. Hasn't it all turned out wonderfully! And Helen, too!"
"Oh, it's ripping about Helen, ripping!" exclaimed the vicar. "That little warrior! I always believed in her."
"But her mother did seem to me anything but appreciative."
"She never is, except when she is ordering people about."
"Yes, so I've found!" assented Mrs. Sanford.
"And you have done your best to make her happy in that respect," said the vicar.
"It's the easiest way, my dear, and she is our guest."
The next day the two did not allow any interruption from them to interfere with Henriette's walk with Phil, but rather gave their blessing of smiles. Henriette set the direction, which was to the same hill as before; and the quiet scene of Hampshire valleys in September had an appeal to him that it had not had before the war. For a remote ancestor of his had fought for this as the later one had fought for his New England valleys.
"I feel the call of both this and France," said Henriette. "How can one think of painting!" Indeed, the portrait lay with its back against the wall at Mervaux. She had forgotten to bring it and had never been more dissatisfied with anything that she had done.
The spell of the art in which she really excelled was upon Phil; a deeper one than ever, owing to her more serious mood and the serious business before him, and it grew all the way from valley to hilltop and afterward in the leisurely descent. He spoke of his fortune. All he had was his pay as a second lieutenant.
"You have fortune enough," she said, pausing and giving him a long, full glance; "the fortune of war! It is the same that it always has been. The man goes away to fight!"
"And the woman waits!" he said.
"Yes, she waits!" she replied. Her smile was gentle and wonderful. "Isn't that enough?" she asked, giving him her hand in a prolonged clasp and then turning her cheek for the pressure of his lips.
"Quite!" he agreed.
She liked the way of it much better than a speech in the moonlight. Anything but that!