CHAPTER XXXIII
SPINNING WEBS
War, which shakes human beings of all sorts and conditions together as dice in a box, had placed Peter Smithers and Madame Ribot side by side flying over a main highway of France in the automobile which, with his gift for managing things, he had at his disposal. Her own gift for managing things had secured a vehicle of transit from Paris on a visit to Henriette all to her taste, with companionship all to her purpose.
She was gowned with the simplicity which the war mode required, but most effectively. During the last week her mirror signs had been most favourable, while return to action after many years of retirement had quickened her wits and brightened her smile. Thanks to the way that she had kept her hand in with General Rousseau, Count de la Grange and others, the technique of her art had not deteriorated and she was practising on Peter with a finesse of adaptability to the subject of Henriette's tailor. It was an axiom of the circle in which she had been trained that no one was more susceptible to old world charm of her kind than self-made American millionaires.
"A good-looking woman," thought Peter, "and lots of style."
He was delighted to be better acquainted with her, as he must become in that five hours' ride. The car was a limousine, the cushions soft, the autumn day fair, and Madame Ribot was spinning webs as the rubber tires spun over the road.
"America must be wonderful," she said.
"It's a growing country," Peter replied. "Always growing out of its clothes and too many political tailors down in Washington changing the styles. But it's my country, all right, and we haven't got any Kaisers with their war bonnets on romping around over there."
"And such bold, creative, organising men"—she liked the adjectives and gave them a purring sound—"as you have made America."
"Well, America was there first, but we've certainly stuck a few skyscrapers about on the redskins' hunting preserves."
She smiled as Peter glanced around and the nature of his smile in return was the authority for a confidential tap-tap of the sole of her shoe on the hassock under her foot. Convenient hassock! Powerful, speedy car! Three millions!
"In England, where they recognise men of worth, they would have made you a peer," she remarked, with a sigh. She was putting it on thick, but was convinced that Peter liked it that way. For that matter, Count de la Grange liked it thick, too; and men were much alike.
"Do you think so?" he asked thoughtfully.
"I am certain of it."
"And then they would call me 'My Lord'?" he continued after a pause, almost coyly.
"Yes."
Peter smiled again to himself and at the back of the chauffeur's head.
"Such leaders as you in America do not make their money for sordid purposes. It means power," she went on.
"Perhaps," replied Peter, who remained thoughtful. "You have a way of putting things, Madame Ribot," he added, with another smile.
"You build in the joy of building; and with you, I should think that it was the joy of giving, too. It was easy to see when he was at Mervaux how devoted Phil was to you. He was always speaking of you."
"Was he?" Peter inquired eagerly. "Was he?" he repeated, with a touch of surprise in his tone.
"But it was admiration for you as a man, while it was clear that he meant to make his own way. How fond I became of him! How chivalrous he was to Henriette! How brave he had been! And now they say he will quite recover. I hope so, for his sake."
"He will!" replied Peter.
Tap-tap on the hassock! Soft, inaudible tap-tap!
"It's like some fairy tale, his story, isn't it?" she murmured; "his and yours. I can understand your happiness in seeing him make good, as you say in America, where you are giving the sturdy English language something of French piquancy, and your happiness in having him for your heir. It was as if you had found a son."
"He has not been told yet," Peter said quickly. The shoe pressed down nervously on the hassock in the interval before Peter, as he looked around at her again, added, almost sharply: "I am going to tell him myself when the time comes."
"And without his expecting it—that all is going to him?" she asked, quite casually.
"Yes. I've given my word," Peter replied. "All to be his to do with as he pleases when I'm gone—all except,—you see," again he looked around and Madame Ribot's lashes flickered, so steady was his glance, "you see, I believe in men or I don't. I back them or I don't, and I'm backing Phil, his character, his judgment—all except——"
he paused, still looking at her. It was not caressing time for the hassock. "All except some bequests of a few hundred thousand. And I guess," drily, "that Phil won't mind. He might waste it himself keeping up that farm if I don't waste it for him first."
He chuckled as he thought of the farm. Tap-tap went the shoe on the hassock in a riot of reassurance.
"How I should like to see your farm!" she murmured.
"Perhaps you will. I'd like to show you around," said Peter.
"Delightful! Henriette feels that she already knows it and Longfield." Longfield was near Lenox and there were delightful people at Lenox. In case that she and Henriette went to the Berkshires they might not find it altogether a bore.
"The American in Henriette's blood is coming out," remarked Peter. "She resembles you very much; only," Peter smiled a little embarrassedly, "you seem too young to be her mother."
"Do I? I——" Madame Ribot flushed and looked down. Possibly it is not the male sex alone that likes it thick.
"Yes. I could hardly believe it at first," he added, with simple candour.
Tap-tap on the hassock, oh, most softly and confidentially! Would he make Phil an allowance? No doubt take him into partnership! And Phil would doubtless prefer to live mostly abroad—but not too fast!
"France is beautiful, isn't it?" mused Madame Ribot.
"Well, the people made it that way," he answered. "For sheer beauty as it was in the days of the fellows who got their meal tickets with bows and arrows you can't beat the Berkshires or the Blue Ridge. Yes, it's work, and these French have been at it a long time. They like to see things growing and so do I. Want everybody and everything busy and smiling, including the land. That's pretty good gospel."
"And we who live in Europe enjoy all the beauty which countless generations have made."
"Yes, like Phil will my farm," Peter replied. "But where I get even is in making the farm. Nearly ruined me, that farm!"
"You express everything so well!" exclaimed Madame Ribot admiringly.
"Do I?" Peter said, almost naïvely. "Well, you know that depends upon whom you are talking to," he added, in another burst of simple candour.
Madame Ribot's eyelashes flickered and tap-tap on the hassock! His compliments were different from the Count's, but none the less diverting. They flattered her with a sense of personal power in tune with the luxurious humming of the motor.
"It's been a most enjoyable journey," he remarked gallantly, as he assisted her to alight at Lady Truckleford's; while he thought: "Five hours of that was enough, and I think I gave her as good as she sent!"
"Henriette is absent for the moment," said Lady Truckleford to Madame Ribot. "She has gone to bring her Cousin Phil for tea."
The bandages off for another examination by Dr. Braisted, the autumn sunlight which kissed the tree-tops and cathedral spires and gave the Channel, which was calm that day, a gossamery sheen, was soft to Phil's irises in its caressing promise that next time the bandages were removed he should see even better.
People were now dim moving shadows to him; the windows of the ward bright squares in faintly perceptible walls. His hearing was good enough to differentiate in tones but not to make out words unless they were shouted. His pride still refused to let him speak and kept him not unhappily to his pad; for he had been so long without speech that his pencil was an old comrade to whom he disliked in a way to say good-bye. The pain devils' power had become so ineffectual that they were disregarded, pin-pricking grumblers at convalescence.
This afternoon both Henriette and Helen were present when the bandages were removed. He could see their figures dimly as two persons in a mist and hear their voices. He could tell the day nurse from the night nurse when either was speaking. But the voices of the two cousins were the same. He knew if either were at his side without discerning which; and marooned in his own world he often thought of this. He thought of many things, sometimes lazily, again acutely.
"Better, still better!" some one wrote on his arm after Dr. Braisted had gone.
"This is Henriette, isn't it?" he wrote, as it was. She wrote most of the messages these days.
"I'll sign my name after this," she wrote in reply, "so you will know. Helen is going, now."
"No cartoons to-day?" he asked.
"Not to-day," Helen herself wrote. "You have nearly won your brave fight," she added, using the phrase that Henriette had several times used.
"Yes. Good-bye, for the present."
She gave his hand the shake that was the signal of parting, and she was glad to go, glad to be on the move in the restlessness of the last few days which seemed to urge only flight. Feeling his hand close tightly she trembled under its grasp, but could not resist as he drew her nearer. His fingers groped about till they rested on her hair. Now he traced her features with the same feathery touch of the blind as he had Henriette's, down the smooth, high brow, past the long eyelashes and over the lump of nose, to the lips, which she pressed tight to keep them from quivering.
"I wanted to see if it were really you, Helen," he wrote. "Forgive me such bad manners!"
"Yes, it is I," she answered aloud, as she released his hand; and though she came to her feet convulsively she appeared quite steady as she said to Henriette:
"Any day when the bandages are off he may see so well that he can tell one person from another."
There was a brittle silence, with Henriette motionless and looking past her sister at a fixed point.
"It's done! It has all come out right," continued Helen, her fingers driven into her palms and a triumphant sort of stoicism in her tone. Still Henriette looked past her and said nothing.
"I——" There she stopped herself. "I must be going," she added, the words coming in a burst as she went toward the one thing distinct to her eyes, the stream of light from the open door, with the precipitancy of one who has been giddily crossing a narrow bridge and hastens the last steps as loss of equilibrium threatens.
"Any day he may see so well that he can tell one person from another!" Henriette repeated. "Well," with a shrug after a pause. Then she smiled as she would into her mirror as she wrote on Phil's arm:
"Shall we walk over to Lady Truckleford's for tea?"
"Yes," he replied.
He had been there twice already. It was the longest journey he had made on foot since he had been wounded; a welcome change of routine; a bold undertaking. Dr. and Mrs. Sanford, who were coming to see him, met the two as they were crossing the court. Henriette greeted them with her winning smile and insisted that they, too, must come to the Trucklefords'. The gravelled path was too narrow for the four to walk abreast and the father and mother fell in behind the erect figure of their son, arm in arm with Henriette.
"She is very beautiful!" whispered Mrs. Sanford to her husband.
"Yes."
Their looks met and held, but they said nothing. Phil's wish was theirs and they had made a promise. At the crossing of the road they met Peter, who could not wait for Phil to come to the Trucklefords', but must go to him; and Henriette stopped to tell him how much better Phil's eyes were and to learn about her mother's journey from Paris. Every word reflected her radiant delight at seeing him again. Then he dropped to the rear to talk with the Sanfords, who glanced at the two ahead and then at him significantly.
"Resembles her mother," said Peter. "Inherited her good looks."
"We shall see her, too?" said Mrs. Sanford, as if awed at the thought.
"Yes. All we need for a family reunion is the old pair at Truckleford."
"And Helen!" put in Mrs. Sanford.
"And Helen!" said Peter absently. He was not in talking mood. He did not utter a syllable, but chewed at his under lip till they were in the grounds of the old chateau which had been transformed into a hospital. "I'm backing Phil!" he muttered stubbornly to himself, then.
Madame Ribot hurried forward to embrace Henriette, while Lady Truckleford made sure that the shy old clergyman and his wife felt at home. Although her ideas might be vague about the nature of the charities which she patronised, she was a genuine and discerning hostess.
"It's clear who is the hero here," she said, nodding toward the group forming around Phil. Madame Ribot was most demonstrative of all over him. She insisted herself upon writing on his arm how brave he was and how every one admired him.
"She certainly does put it on thick!" thought Peter. "And likes it thick!" he added, in recollection of the ride from Paris.
"My arm blushes!" Phil wrote on his pad in reply.
"How clever!" exclaimed Lady Violet.
She must write on his arm, too. Writing on Phil's arm bid fair to become a fad with the Truckleford lot. What was she to say? She never had an idea when she wanted one, which was something understood by her friends but most puzzling to herself. All she could think of was three millions.
"This is Lady Violet Dearing, and I don't know of anything that has ever appealed to me so much as the wonderfully brave fight you have made," she wrote at last. "Every day that Henriette brought news that you were better I felt like cheering, it was so splendid."
"Thank you, Lady Violet," he replied.
Talk ran around him but always had him in mind, this man with head swathed in bandages, unable to speak or see or hear for present purposes, who had become a romantic figure since it was known that he would inherit three millions.
"And he does not know!" exclaimed Madame Ribot suddenly. "It does seem a pity." She smiled her best with a kind of challenge to Peter.
"Well," he responded and in a way that made everybody silent. This business of the giving of three millions was in nowise as wonderful to him as to them. He had long ago decided on the gift and merely bided the time of announcement. "Well," he repeated as he rose; and, with a peculiar smile to Madame Ribot, added: "I think he is well enough now. You may write it, Miss Ribot, as I dictate it. So: 'Peter is speaking, Phil, and he is telling you that he has made a will that makes you his heir when he goes over the river—but with the exception of two or three hundred thousand dollars in bequests and what I waste on my farm.'"
"Peter!" Phil muttered the one word through the bandages. Then his hand went out searching for Peter's and held it fast for a long time; while for once everybody on the lawn at tea at the Trucklefords' was silent. Finally he wrote on his pad: "I shall try to be worthy of it. Yes, I'll assist you in ruining the farm in any way you say."
"It's Phil, all right!" exclaimed Peter, with a satisfied laugh. "I am backing him!" That was all there was to it—this dramatic episode.
"Ripping!" remarked one of the young officers.
Madame Ribot's foot was softly tapping the sward as she watched Phil on Henriette's arm leaving the grounds. Dr. and Mrs. Sanford and Peter followed, and silently until they passed under the Oral Surgery sign, when Peter said:
"I did not mean to do it that way. I was going to let Helen tell it for me, but someway she makes three millions seem insignificant. They were interested in the three millions over at the Trucklefords'. I had passed my word, and if I didn't tell it might look—well, it gave them something to pass the time at tea, and I'm backing Phil. That's all there is to it, backing Phil, leaving it to him."
On her way back to her quarters Helen was conscious that she was following the path; conscious of having answered the greeting of people whom she knew in passing. She would not have noticed the letter waiting for her on the table in the hall of the nurses' quarters unless her attention were called to it. She took it up with only a casual glance until she had closed the door of her room when the firm's name on the left-hand corner of the envelope recalled the fact that she had an exhibition of drawings on in New York. This was the first steadying fact, a life-buoy to grasp at, in the misery that had overwhelmed her. When she tore open the envelope a number of newspaper clippings fluttered out. On one she caught a glimpse of the name of Ribot in a headline, which had such a banal effect that she let the clipping lie where it had fallen.
"As I have written already, the first week in October was the only time I had open," she was reading the manager's letter mechanically at first. "But it does not seem to matter when Miss Helen Ribot exhibits. As for your succès d'estime, read the enclosed reviews. More to the point, perhaps, is that I have already sold fifteen of your drawings. Thinking that this might be as welcome as the clippings, I enclose a check for a thousand dollars on account.
"As to your question about settling in America, I know that M. Vailliant advises against it; but my answer to him is that art is international and any artist works best in the surroundings which he likes best. One does or does not become an American. If you catch our spirit, as I think you will, then your place is secure, whether you do what you call real drawings or something more popular. I prefer your real drawings—and more of them, please.
"I want another exhibition in the spring and shall reserve the last week in February for you unless I hear otherwise, hoping, however, that you will be with us before then. Let me know your steamer and I shall meet you at the pier. My wife joins me in asking you to stay with us until you have found a satisfactory studio.
"P.S. Won't you send a photograph of yourself? One of the magazines which is making a special article on your work wants it. Perhaps you have something which some friend has drawn of you; or, better, which you have done of yourself."
The letter pointed the way; it threw out the bridge on the other side of the promised land.
"And a picture of myself!" she thought, when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. "No, I'll not send that." They would have to see her, though, and they would say in America, as everywhere else, How plain she is!
"I don't have to exhibit my face, though!" she declared defiantly. "I needn't meet people except those who have to do with my work."
Those unfinished sketches which she took out of her trunk for examination still seemed to have been done by another hand. She had lost her zest. The world wanted her drawings and she was not caring whether or not she ever made another one—that was the truth of her mood to-night. But she thought of herself as tired. A long walk after dinner and a good sleep would clear the cobwebs out of her mind. Yet she was looking out of her window at the stars after midnight and saw the sun-up after a restless night.
Once in America she would begin afresh; all her old verve and love of art would return. She could not start too soon. Leave to go to Paris, first! Bricktop could arrange this and meanwhile she could get her discharge from the hospital. She would go—go! She could not wait another day.
"Well, soon I'll have his harness off and then Phil can speak," said Bricktop, who had a slack half-hour and was in a talking mood, which meant that you had to follow his lead or rather trail on his swell like a small boat in tow of a fast cruiser. "And let me tell you that if he hadn't had a good constitution and a nerve of steel there wouldn't have been a chance. Another thing—you! You gave the inspiration to his will that kept the blood going out into the veins of all that tissue that had to wait to be fitted into its place. Why, you and I, Helen, have done a stunt that makes me wonder if the good Lord did not give a special dispensation to my clumsy old fingers in this case!"
She had heard this before. It helped her now and it hurt, too, as she listened, trying to smile.
"And he——"
"Yes, while I get my breath you may put in a word edgewise," continued Bricktop, with a gesture of amused condescension.
"He will be quite as he was before?"
"Quite, as I keep repeating. A few little scars that will go away in time. You see, it was a peculiar kind of side-wipe; doesn't need much skin grafting. Why, what you can do with people's faces! If everybody were taken young nobody need be bad-looking. We straighten crooked teeth, reconstruct mouths. Why not faces? Why, there was a woman in New York who felt badly about her face and I gave her a brand-new one. Could have had plenty of patients of that kind and made loads of money. It might have been 'Bricktop on Beauty' instead of 'Bricktop on Jaws.' Suggestion was too alliterative—I stuck to jaws."
Helen was laughing. One had to laugh when Bricktop, red-headed, freckled, with a manner as distinctly his own as any great comedian's, was going full tilt. Besides, they were comrades, these two; they understood each other.
"Why shouldn't everybody be pleasing to the eye? They will be, one of these days," he went on excitedly. "Why, Helen, I could make you good-looking——"
He clapped his hand over his mouth.
"My mother said that I would talk myself to death some day!" he gasped. "Well, I've said it!"
She was smiling at his confusion in a way that cured it.
"You could! You could!" she exclaimed banteringly, as if she were teasing him for such a good opinion of himself.
"Yes, you bet I could!" he declared.
"Even my nose?" she said, with a defiant sort of scepticism.
Before she could prevent him he had thumb and forefinger on that nose and was pinching it and feeling of it in a way that made her cry out, "Stop!" indignantly and draw away.
"Perfectly easy! You have the cartilage for a Number One nose," he went on, his professional eagerness undisturbed. "All that happened was that the good Lord intended to make you fine-looking—and only the nose stands in the way—and was called off on a hurry case before He had sculped down the material. There's too much of it!"
"I know it!" proclaimed Helen defiantly.
Bricktop was making gestures in his habitual fashion to indicate what he would do with that curse of hers if he were to have a chance.
"Why, I wouldn't need to leave any scar except just in the dip of the nostril and under the point, where they wouldn't show." His professional ambition was excited; a greedy look was in his eyes. "Shame! Absolute shame not to do it! Unfair to your friends, unfair to yourself—to everybody!"
"Of all the ridiculous——" gasped Helen, breaking again into laughter of the kind that hides that undercurrent of seriousness which often gives to badinage its cutting edge.
"Come on! It's a cinch!" pleaded Bricktop. "Just bandages over your nose for two weeks, then bandages off and everybody saying what a good-looking woman Helen is. Come on!"
People would say that she was good-looking, all for the ridiculous business of making some cuts in her nose! Imagine her going about while her nose was bandaged! Preposterous! But in America, where nobody knew her? Some little scars that nobody would notice!
"Can you get me leave? Can I go away somewhere?" she asked.
"Yes. You are attached to my shop, now."
"And then to America!" she exclaimed.
"What! To America! You!"
"I'm going to become a citizeness."
"Good!" cried Bricktop. Back of his enthusiasm was more than welcome to his native land. It meant that she could not be heart-broken because there was another in her place—or, didn't it mean that?
"When will you do the starting?" she asked. "The sooner the better!"
"Now!" answered Bricktop. "And I'll send you away in my car—needn't go to bed!"
"I'll run and pack my things—and I'll say good-bye to Cousin Phil, for I shan't see him again!"
She was proud of the matter-of-course manner of the remark. This perfectly fantastic business of having her nose remodelled had put her in the mood which should make light of everything.
It took her only a half-hour to pack. Her wardrobe was simple and her speed in keeping with that of people who have simple wardrobes was heightened by a delirious excitement. She was going, going! She did not want to wait another day, another hour. In America all would be right—fortune and new friends; another Helen Ribot. The determination and courage which had faced Phil's wound and helped to bring him back to life had not allowed her to think of him, except that she must say good-bye to him. She was galvanised by her own will, compelling a philosophy which should let nothing interfere with its light-hearted measure as she entered the ward.
There he was, sitting in his chair as she had seen him for many weeks. An end of all writing of messages; of the hand-clasps of good-morning and good-night; of a texture of existence woven into his—but "Stop!" said will. The thing was over! Hurry down the curtain! Avoid melodramatic anti-climaxes! How glad she was that he had thought of her as visiting him rarely and as more interested in her drawings than in him! And she was more interested in them than in any man that ever was or would be! There was no joy, no career for her except to make white paper live with her touch. Now she knew herself. That letter had closed all doors behind her and opened doors into another existence. She had wrought herself into a state of mind which enabled her to take his hand in the accustomed way, with no more thrill than if it were any one else's. She was proud of the firmness as she wrote:
"It is Helen. I'm in great luck. My exhibition in New York is a success and I am going to America immediately. I came to say good-bye."
"Helen!"
He had not waited to write the word. It came out quite clearly. He was drawing her nearer to him with his hand-clasp, as he had before. Now he would be touching her hair as he had before; but instead, his other hand, groping, had caught her arm. She was in a vise, dazed. Then all that she had reasoned out of herself came surging back in consuming possession of her. Oh, God, why would he do that! What did he mean? It could not be—no, it could not be! She tried to draw away, but the effort was only a quiver.
"I can write better. My pad, please," he murmured.
It seemed very heavy and then very light to her as she brought it, tremblingly, wonderingly. A peal of bells was ringing soft notes in her ears and her brain was numb. She watched each letter as it was written, tracing out her fate. For she had admitted the thing to her heart, now. She could never put it out.
"It is hard to explain, but something told me that it was you—your spirit, your touch, that first day when I should have slipped but for you—and yet I knew it could not be. The pain devils never let me think quite clearly. Then you had seemed to avoid me and Henriette had said she would wait. It was understood with Henriette. It must be she; it was her place—and all the while your spirit, your touch, you in my mind and her face, her presence, and it hurt me to think that you neglected me. This awful wound—and you said that you were Henriette when I could not see and it should have been Henriette. And I was always thinking, musing, in my poor, hazy way of the girl with her cartoons and sketches—of you as I saw you seated against the wheat shock, across the table at Truckleford, rise on the other side of the shell-hole—everywhere you, the spirit of you—that, well, it had me. Then I found out what the plot was and I was happy and about to tell you, when the pain devils interfered. Then I concluded to wait. Being shut up in my own world, perhaps I liked to watch the play. If you could take Henriette's place and deceive me, how could you care for me? I enjoyed the comedy yesterday at Lady Truckleford's with something akin to your own mischievousness. But when you say that you are going away—well, I can't let you go if there is any way of keeping you. Only you must not go without knowing that it is you, your spirit, which has pulled me through—you that I love. And you—do you care?"
"Big and little, all kinds of yes, in every language!" she replied. "Yes, every hour through all these weeks and long before that."
"I like the way you say it—it is so like you!" he wrote in answer. And he drew her close to him again and held her so for a long time.
"I was about to——" Mischief and happiness were mixed in her explanation of the thing that Bricktop was about to undertake on her behalf.
"It does not matter to me—not if your nose were twice as large."
"But it does to me," she replied. "I am tired of feeling that I am looking over a mountain top every time that I tie my shoe-laces. Phil, we'll be getting our new faces at the same time, and I want to be as pleasing to you as I can. I'm a human woman."
He was smiling inwardly at this, if he could not yet with the muscles that nature intended for the purpose.
"And by the time that you can see me it will be the same Helen, only the Helen I want you to see always," she said, in final decision of her purpose not to delay acting on such a good impulse.
"I'm ready—and I'm so happy! Come on, Mr. Bricktop on Beauty!" she said, as she entered his office.
Bricktop emitted what he would have called a Comanche yell, which was utterly against the regulations about noise in that smooth-running, quiet British hospital; and the cause of it was not due to her readiness for the operation, but rather to his prompt diagnosis of the reason for the happiness beaming and rippling in her eyes.
When Henriette heard the news which her mother brought to her room to avoid the embarrassment of her hearing it first from Lady Violet, who was babbling it in loud whispers right and left, Madame Ribot drew back in face of her daughter's anger, else she might herself have been the victim of such a blow as Helen had once received. Madame Ribot, irritatingly convinced that Peter Smithers had been having quiet fun at her expense on the ride from Paris, was inclined to lay the blame for the embarrassing situation at the door of this unspeakable vulgarian. She meant to cut him dead if she saw him again; but when it occurred to her that he would not mind, she was only the more irritated. Now she was concerned with the effect of defeat on Henriette, who, after her tempest, was silent, with eyes half closed and staring.
"Yes," said Henriette finally. "I'm not surprised." Her pride would not allow her to say so, but the battle from the first had been, to her mind, between her beauty which, by her criterions, ought to conquer, and something in Helen which frustrated it. "Yes," she repeated, turning to her mirror to arrange a strand of hair. She smiled into the mirror in her old conceit of self and the mirror smiled back. There are many fish in the sea!
"Good!" exclaimed Madame Ribot. "And Helen gets a great fortune," she added.
"Yes."
"I must go and see her!" said Madame Ribot.
But Helen was not at her quarters. No one knew where she had gone, except Bricktop, who said that he had sent her away in Peter's car for a rest. But after her plea of parental right he directed her to the little house which Peter had taken for the Sanfords.
Helen was sitting in a long chair in the small garden, punctuating the happiness of two white heads and of Peter himself by her remarks about her nose, which was in bandages, and how she was going to help Peter ruin his farm; which he said she could ruin in any way she pleased without regard to priority of claim in that line by either himself or Phil.
Instead of cutting Peter, when she was actually in the presence of the personified millions Madame Ribot was most affable to him, as well as to the Sanfords, speaking of the common feelings of mothers when she embraced Mrs. Sanford. To Helen she was demonstratively maternal, kissing her on the forehead and cheek many times and stroking her hand; and Helen reciprocated, the light in her eyes welcoming belated affection long craved, which crowned her happiness. When they spoke of her coming to America, Madame Ribot expressed her delight, but in her inner consciousness, despite her flare, something cold and logical built of the past and her predilections told her that she would never go. And that same day she slipped away to Paris and back to her old routine.
The next time that Phil sat under the portrait of the English ancestor and facing the American ancestor the Jehovah cablegram, now framed, was also on the wall. There were still some patches of plaster on his chin, but otherwise he looked the same; only there had come to him a great experience of battle, of suffering, of reflection, taking youth over the boundary into a manhood which still might be boyish.
Across from him in her old place was Helen, while Peter made the seventh of the party. Phil could see her as clearly as the first night that he was at Truckleford; he could hear every inflection in her voice, though the doctors said that he must have a long rest, free from shocks. In the lamplight the tiny scars on the lobes of her nose did not show, and he rather wished that they did. He did not want them to go away.
"You know, Helen is really very good-looking," the vicar had said again and again to his wife, who kept replying that it was perfectly evident.
The high white forehead, the fine eyes, the glorious hair—they were no longer under a handicap, as Peter put it. Mischievous challenge was still the privilege of the eyes and the expressive mouth seemed always smiling these days. The Helen that the world saw was the real Helen, radiant with the spirit that had kept a man from slipping and cried "Good!" after that upper cut, which was still a source of many chuckles to the vicar and the Marquis of Truckleford.
The call was home. She was eager for her first glimpse of the valley of Longfield; to be welcomed at the station by Bill Hurley. "One becomes an American, or he does not;" she was one already.
"I should not need any one to direct me," she said. "Across the bridge, up Maple Avenue, turn to the left in front of the ancestor along the path under the elms—and that is it, a simple, old frame house in a yard facing the biggest elm of all."
"Don't forget the farm!" Peter suggested. "I don't mean to be as lonely as I have been."
She smiled to Peter in the way that he liked to have her smile at him.
"For that, you follow the main road past the ancestor on up the hill. Turn in between two great stone pillars and keep along a winding drive which gives you glimpses of herds grazing, and you will come to another simple frame house. Then keep along another drive on that little farm past screens of larches and the garage and you will come to the stables and the dairy and the barns."
"Right!" said Peter. "By George! I believe it's time I enlarged that house or built a new one, or the big barn will get ashamed of it."
The two white heads of Truckleford felt that they, too, knew Longfield. Their promise was given that one day they would undertake that formidable journey from their insular home across the Atlantic and taste Virginia ham and sweet corn on their native heath. Peter had told them how he would send them spinning over the highways to the suburbs of Boston, to Cape Cod and the White Mountains, and skirting the gleaming silver of the Hudson to Manhattan, where the skyscrapers rise from their granite beds.
Only the presence of Bricktop was needed to round out this dinner party at the vicarage; but he was too busy in France making the relatives and the sweethearts of other maimed men rejoice, to accept any invitations.
"I was backing Phil," Peter mused, after he had lighted his cigar; and, as Bill Hurley had repeatedly said, Peter was "nobody's fool."
"Phil ain't, either," Bill concluded, after he saw the girl that Phil brought home from the wars.
THE END
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Adventures of Gerard . . . . . . . . . A. Conan Doyle
Adventures of a Modest Man . . . . . . R. W. Chambers
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes . . . . A. Conan Doyle
After House, The . . . . . . . Mary Roberts Rinehart
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Alton of Somasco . . . . . . . . . . Harold Bindloss
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Andrew The Glad . . . . . . . Maria Thompson Daviess
Ann Boyd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Will N. Harben
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Anna the Adventuress . . . . . E. Phillips Oppenheim
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Ariadne of Allan Water . . . . . . . . Sidney McCall
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At the Mercy of Tiberius . . . . Augusta Evans Wilson
Auction Block, The . . . . . . . . . . . . Rex Beach
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Awakening of Helena Ritchie . . . . Margaret Deland
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Bar 20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clarence E. Mulford
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Better Man, The . . . . . . . . Cyrus Townsend Brady
Beulah (Ill. Ed) . . . . . . . . . . Augusta J. Evans
Black Is White . . . . . . . . George Barr McCutcheon
Blaze Derringer . . . . . . . . Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.
Bob Hampton of Placer . . . . . . . Randall Parrish
Bob, Son of Battle . . . . . . . . . Alfred Ollivant
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Britton of the Seventh . . . . . Cyrus Townsend Brady
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Cab No. 44 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . R. F. Foster
Calling of Dan Matthews, The . . . Harold Bell Wright
Cape Cod Stories . . . . . . . . . Joseph C. Lincoln
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Caravaners Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden
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Carmen . . . . . . . . . . (Geraldine Farrar Edition)
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Cash Intrigue, The . . . . . George Randolph Chester
Castle by the Sea, The . . . . . . . H. B. M. Watson
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Colonial Free Lance, A . . . . Chauncey O. Hotchkiss
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Counsel for the Defense . . . . . . . . Leroy Scott
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Cry in the Wilderness, A . . . . . . . Mary E. Waller
Cynthia of the Minute . . . . . . Louis Joseph Vance
Dark Hollow, The . . . . . . . . Anna Katharine Green
Dave's Daughter . . . . . . . . Patience Bevier Cole
Day of Days, The . . . . . . . . . Louis Joseph Vance
Day of the Dog, The . . . . . George Barr McCutcheon
Depot Master, The . . . . . . . . Joseph C. Lincoln
Desired Woman, The . . . . . . . . . . Will N. Harben
Destroying Angel, The . . . . . . Louis Joseph Vance
Diamond Master, The . . . . . . . . Jacques Futrelle
Dixie Hart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Will N. Harben
El Dorado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Baroness Orczy
Elusive Lsabel . . . . . . . . . . . Jacques Futrelle