How Madame Ribot travelled third-class all night to Boulogne, where she was crowded on board a steamer with Belgian refugees and American tourists, whom she found equally objectionable in interfering with her comfort, and then finally to London and Truckleford, was a narrative which excited such sympathy in the simple vicarage that life there was soon adapted entirely to her habits. News that her daughters were safe was a relief to her: but the announcement that they were on their way to join her brought a premonition of overcrowding.
The same kind of journey that she had made the three cousins made. From London Henriette went on to Truckleford, but Helen astounded her sister by remaining in town, giving as her reason that she wanted to see if she could not sell some of her sketches. She said nothing of her trip to America, which she realised once she saw the crowds of stranded Americans must be given up for the present for want of steamer accommodation. Her au revoir to Phil had been spoken at the Victoria Station; a handshake, with the understanding that they would meet at Truckleford. Thus they parted without his knowing her hotel. A few hours later she was sitting beside the desk of an agent while he looked over her few finished sketches. As businesslike as M. Vailliant, he told her to go home and do more, and he would try to dispose of those that were completed.
Something which had been working in Phil's secret brain had come to a head. The recollection of having been marched up a village street between two Prussian bayonets did not sit easily in the blood of his inheritance of freedom. The French were fighting against that kind of tyranny; those poor Belgian women and children on the steamer were the victims of it. When he stepped ashore at Folkestone it was with the thrill of relief of one who has come to the home of another kind of principle, which was that of his inheritance. Here they were speaking his own tongue; here the system was individualism. The green pastures and hedges had an appeal which they lacked before he crossed the Channel. On the train an attaché of the Paris Embassy whom he knew had introduced him to a general, who had asked Phil to look in at the War Office. In London the press and the hoardings called to arms. War was in the air; and he was young. Instead of trying to push his way through the crowd in front of the steamship offices, he went to a cable office and sent a despatch to Longfield:
"With your permission I am going to fight. Answer."
Dr. Sanford received this message only twenty-four hours later than one from Paris announcing that Phil was on his way to London. The girl in the telegraph office saw the Doctor passing along the street on his afternoon constitutional just after the despatch had been clicked in from New York. It was not her business to know what was in telegrams once she had transcribed them; but this one was like a hot breath from the cataclysm shot across the Atlantic into a quiet New England village. She pretended to be busy as she watched the Doctor. On this occasion his spectacles happened to be in the right-hand trousers' pocket, which was the last one that he investigated. Ever since he had had to wear spectacles he had tried in vain to establish a system of carrying them in the same pocket; but in order to have it work he must think which was the right pocket when he put them in, rather than when he came to look for them.
The girl was amazed when he gave no indication of excitement after the reading, let alone a start of surprise, which "certainly beat me," to put it in her own language, "considering how he worshipped Phil and Phil was asking permission to be killed in Europe like he was asking permission to go fishing. People are queer, and never so queer as when they get notice of sudden death or an elopement!"
When she asked, belying her gasping curiosity, if there was any answer, the Doctor said "None!" in his quiet, absent-minded way, as he folded the telegram and this time put the spectacles in his inside coat pocket.
"I must think this over a little before I speak to mother about it," he thought, after he had turned into the street and as soon as he was capable of thinking—such had been the blow of the message. The shadow of the statue lay across his path at the time. He looked up at the ancestor questioningly. The ancestor kept on charging British redcoats.
Dr. Sanford took a long way around back to the house. Every familiar landmark seemed to recall some boyhood anecdote of Phil. If only there had been two boys or a girl! With all of his thinking he was blank-minded when he sat down in his favourite chair on the porch.
"What's happened, dear?" Mrs. Sanford asked at once. She knew his signs of emotion better than the telegraph girl.