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.
Possibly Philip did know something about art, as the result of a good deal of reading and his visits to galleries. Possibly, too, he had an innate appreciation of it. To Helen, his interest had momentarily rekindled the enthusiasm for her work which the war had stifled. As they took up drawing after drawing, she rather than he was the critic.
"Bad, but I like that part, there!" she went on. "This is sensational—not really good. Oh, cusses! Every time I look at that one it seems worse, and I thought it was so good at the start! Smudgy, but if you hold it off like that it's more like what I meant to do. One knows what one wants to do and then one's stupid fingers will not."
He was interested and more than interested, if silent. He was looking at her drawings and not her face. The effect was of the quality of her mind wrought by the cunning of her hand, and her voice was that of Henriette with a more emotional intonation than Henriette's, revealing the quality which even the cunning of her hand could not interpret. There was more than he had supposed in this cousin.
"Haven't you ever exhibited?" he asked.
As he looked around it was almost with the expectation of seeing Henriette's face, which should go with Henriette's voice and the fervour of her talk; Henriette in the glory of enthusiasm, the enthusiasm which he knew she must possess and which he would like to arouse. But it was the face of Helen, sunburned and plain—almost too plain to have done such drawings.
"You think that I ought to?" she asked soberly. It was odd that she should seek his opinion when she had had that of M. Vailliant. "I was going to when the war came," she went on, still soberly. Then came the burst of confidence and her features lighted, their mobility alive with recollection as she told about the scene in the dining-room, forgetting herself, mimicking M. Vailliant and her own fears and the climax. She boasted of the thousand francs. She told him what she meant to do with that perfectly enormous sum; how she was going on drawing as long as she lived, caring for nothing else.
"Why wasn't she always like that?" Phil wondered. She ought to let her emotions always shine out of her eyes, play in her features. Was she really plain? He was unconscious of it; conscious only of her amazing vitality which had a magnetism that made him the kind of rapt listener which is the best urging to another flow of talk.
"Here you are holding that drawing like a waiter with a card on a salver who can't get my lady to look up from her knitting!" she finally exclaimed.
"Then I'll look at another," he said. "I certainly have luck in cousins."
After her confidences the drawings had even more appeal. He seemed to understand them better; her talk made him a sort of comrade in their making. But she did not offer to do a charcoal of him. He suggested it himself, as a companion souvenir for the portrait by Henriette.
"A profile!" she said.
"You choose," he agreed. He would like that better; and he hoped that she would talk about her troubles in making her fingers obey her mind while she was doing it.
"I could do it now! Twilight is just right on your face—yes, yes!" She drew a long breath as she studied the profile in a moment of silence, which was broken by a voice which might have been her own.
"Haven't you loiterers started to dress yet?" It was Henriette in the doorway, a warning finger raised. The doorway made a perfect frame for her; all surroundings seemed to suit her. "I don't wonder you forgot time was passing if you caught Helen in one of her enthusiasms," she added. "Did she tell you how the war stopped her exhibition?"
"I'm going to have two portraits now," said Phil. "I begin to think well of myself! It won't take me ten minutes to dress."
"Nor me!" said Helen. "A wager! I'll be down first!" She preceded him, two steps at a time, up the stairs. "Do your best and see!" she called, as she darted into her room.
Her image in the mirror confronted her and she gave a cry as of amazement at it, which, however, did not permit her to waste any time. She came out of her room at the same instant that Phil opened his door, forgot her part again, and laughing in challenge dashed past him to the stairway, calling over her shoulder:
"Down first! Victory!"
What she wore was something in white to Phil, but the figure in its suppleness and grace—how like Henriette's it was!
Madame Ribot, who had put on her best gown and been an hour with a maid's assistance in the dressing, sat the guest opposite her, feeling that glow of satisfaction which aroused many recollections at having an agreeable man at the function of all functions to her—dinner as cooked by Jacqueline. Yet she would have dressed with equal care if she had been going to eat alone and her finger-nails would have been equally shiny with over-attention; for self-respect's sake, as she would have said. But all who rehearse like an audience when the curtain rises.
Helen was silent—her part. Plain girl in plain gown, she might have been the family governess or a companion. Time had drilled her well in the part, time with the memories of pin-pricks behind the scenes.
It was through guests that Madame Ribot kept in touch with the world, which was an easier way in this era of her existence than to go to the world. Phil was soon aware that she expected him to tell of his tour of the warring nations. From Henriette came occasional questions and from Helen an infrequent "Yes," as of passion suppressed, until they came to coffee. Then she let go of herself with questions of her own.
"Were the women just as mad as the men in Germany?"
"Quite."
"And the men in the troop trains, with 'Nach Paris' chalked on the wagon doors—the men who were singing, singing as they went out to kill—if one had to go alone up a road to try to murder or be murdered, would he sing then?"
"Hardly!"
"And it would be murder, then. It isn't now!"
"The distinction between war and homicide," Phil replied.
Helen was leaning her elbows on the table, her chin cupped in her hands, all eyes, and eyes on fire. She compelled his attention.
"Did you see any one who was stopping to think why they were going to war—why? why? Not what the papers print and the professors say and the Kaiser prays—why in their own hearts? The reason that all the other nonsense hides?"
"The Kaiser tells them that they are fighting in defence," said Phil. "They take their reasons from him."
"Pardon me, that is no answer."
"Because the Germans are pigs—all are!" interjected Madame Ribot. "I have never met one who wasn't, even their princes. They are spoiling the Riviera."
"Conquest, though Rome, as I read my history, never called it that," Phil went on, keeping to Helen's theme. "They want their neighbours' fields. It's a get-rich-quick sort of game in internationalism."
"And the French?"
"Only want to keep their fields, to keep their France!" he said. "This was in every face, it seemed to me: to keep their France."
"So the French are in the right, not because we live with them and love them, but at the very bar of justice!" said Helen. "All the peasants in Mervaux are in the right! Oh, I'm glad that I am not a German! And here we sit over our coffee so comfortably and those millions rushing to death! What poor little mortals we are! How lacking in imagination! Each with his little concerns in his own little hole—I grieving because the war spoils my exhibition! No one thinks of the agony of black years for the multitude of mothers and wives. It is too ghastly! Not one wants to die! Who should want to die when the world is so beautiful? Yet they go out to die!"
"Helen, you are overwrought!" said her mother. "There must be wars; there always have been wars."
"One might say that about thistles," Helen replied half inaudibly, staring at the tablecloth.
"And what can we do?" persisted Madame Ribot, who had held back her protests less because of the spell of Helen's fervour than from a hostess's politeness due to Phil's evident interest. "Yes, what would you do, my dear? Become avivandiére? Surely not nurse! You have admitted that your nerves could not stand the sight of blood——" Madame Ribot broke off. She did not like to think of the sight of blood herself.
"Perhaps they would now," said Helen with some determination, after a pause. "This is different."
"I am not sure!" Madame Ribot replied promptly, for her decision was made that Helen should remain at Mervaux during the war. "And shan't we go out of doors?"
"You feel very deeply," said Phil to Helen as they passed into the grounds where, in utter stillness, the trees cast long shadows from the light of the half moon.
"Every one does," she replied, "only I forget and blurt out my feelings. Perhaps—oh, that is the great hope—the war will do good in its way—good to those who survive!"
"We'll not talk about the war!" said Madame Ribot.
With the soft air of a summer evening, the sense of security and seclusion, the glow after a good meal and bedtime approaching, Madame Ribot had not the slightest desire to think of horrors. She was content to be as she was and where she was, serene, unworried. They were not going to speak of the war, but they did, as every one would while it lasted, no matter how strong his resolution. The war was here in Mervaux, at Truckleford, at Longfield, everywhere and in every mind. It was a maelstrom, drawing all thoughts toward it.
"When the troops come back triumphant, I want to see them march under the Arc de Triomphe," Henriette said. "I hope it will be in the spring, when the horse-chestnuts are in bloom."
"You are sure that they will win?" Phil asked.
"Aren't we already in Alsace and aren't the Germans stopped at Liége?"
It did look like early victory then. Hadn't General Joffre issued his manifesto from Mulhausen? But could Madame Ribot have foreseen what was coming along the great main road one day she would not have been so serene and Helen would not have felt that she was pinioned in her helplessness in the midst of tragedy.
For Phil it was singularly restful. He had been on the go for weeks. He had collected impressions without digesting them; and the prospect of the coming days at Mervaux was sufficient for him.
Helen had kept silence faithfully after they were out of doors. As she said good-night the hand that she gave him was strangely lifeless and her voice lacked its customary vibrant quality. When she reached her room she stood motionless for a long time, looking out at the moon. The change which the war had wrought was not the only inexplicable one that had come over her.
"I hope that he does not stay!" she said at last.
Quite a sensational thing happened in the Ribot household. Usually Madame Ribot had breakfast in her room and about ten went for a walk in the garden. The morning after Phil's arrival she was on hand to pour coffee in the dining-room and to serve one of Jacqueline's omelets.
"Mother, this is epochal!" said Henriette.
"An inspiration!" said Madame Ribot, who could never be accused of the hypocrisy of feigning strenuosity. She was a frank advocate of repose and it had not deserted her even with this departure from custom. "I did it for our seventeenth cousin. I want him to feel at home."
She liked the seventeenth cousin. He was good-looking; he had good manners. His American quality appealed to her French quality. She would have liked to show him to her friends as a seventeenth cousin, which would have been proof of the quality of her own origin on the American side.
"You are to stay as long as you please," she went on. "If Longfield is your American home and Truckleford your English home, then Mervaux is your French."
"Not as long as I please," Phil replied. "One must have a sense of self-denial."
"Very well said," she countered. It was worth while coming down to breakfast to hear him say it. "Perhaps I shall insist that it be as long as the hostess pleases. What then?"
Yes, what would he say to that? Her shrewd eyes reflected a teasing spark which when she was young must have been as effectual as Henriette's.
"But I might not know the signs," he said, "and mistake my pleasure for yours."
"I should tell you."
"Does that mean that you think I should have to be told?" He was enjoying this play of words as much as she.
"No, not you, cousin. You are the kind to whom one would always hate to sayau revoirand could never say good-bye."
"This is almost a flirtation," said Henriette. "At least he must stay till the portrait is finished. We shall start at once."
"I begin to feel awfully stuck on myself, as we say at home!" said Phil. "Do I sit for both portraits at the same time?" he asked, turning to Helen.
Henriette also looked at her sister rather quickly. Helen's eyes smiled above her coffee cup, which hid the lump of nose; they, too, had a teasing spark.
"No," she replied. "Oils take much longer than charcoal. Let Henriette get started before I butt in. Isn't that it—butt in?"
"Yes, the correct American for your meaning—though a little archaic now—but not for mine," he said. "I'm ready for all the artists. Let them come."
"Not this morning," Helen concluded.
She had already put on her sun hat and gone when Madame Ribot smilingly from the doorway watched Henriette and Phil, her easel under his arm, going up the path. The bordering trees of the little estate were on a terrace which gave a broad view. Here Henriette set up her easel and put Phil in a rustic chair in the position that pleased her, his only condition that he sit facing so he could watch her at work being granted. She was the real picture to him; the one that made it worth while to pose. He could look past her over the fields rolling away to the horizon, with the rows of trees of the main road marching across the foreground.
Human specks dotted the fields, women, old men, and boys who had been at work since dawn harvesting the grain, since the able-bodied men were away at war. A figure which he recognised approached a nearby group. The bent backs straightened. Faintly he could hear their voices as they passed the time of day, and then a laugh all round as Helen became one of them in effort as well as in spirit, raking and binding the sheaves.
For the time being he said nothing about it to Henriette, but occasionally his glance stole away from her toward Helen, who kept on with her labour. The breeze carried her voice and laugh, which was like a rich echo of Henrietta's, and at length he heard her singing a French song, in which the other workers joined. Time passed rapidly watching the figures in the field and Henriette—too rapidly.
"We are started, though there is nothing to see," said Henriette finally. "We will rest till after luncheon."
The peasants, too, had stopped work. They were seating themselves on the sheaves or sprawling on the hard, dry, yellow stubble for their mid-day meal. He heard them laugh at some sally of Helen's before she started across the field toward where he was sitting. Flushed from the sun and exercise, she cried out, as she approached:
"They say I do it like a veteran! It was great fun—and I was helping France!"
Phil had been envying her the exercise and told her so.
"There's room for volunteers," she suggested. And she looked at him and then at Henriette. "I dare you both to come out there this afternoon!" she added.
"Done—if your sister will let me off! Will you?"
Henriette shot one of her quick glances at Helen.
"Perhaps you will volunteer, too," Helen parried.
"Why not? I'm game!" Henriette replied.
"Good! It's the best way of helping that I know. They are very hard pressed to get the grain cut before it is overripe. It will be straight sickling this afternoon on the Pigou patch. Poor Madame Pigou's son is at the front and she has only Jean who is but ten to help, and she's too poor to hire a reaper."
When Madame Ribot heard the plan she smiled and nodded approval, reminding Henriette that she must wear gloves in order not to blister her hands. She herself, under her parasol, walked out to see them begin.
Madame Pigou, with deep wrinkles around her kindly mouth and hands already stiffened by labour at forty, protested at first.
"Such work is not for you," she said to Henriette. "Nothing takes it out of your back more than sickling, unless it's hoeing."
"Oh, none of us expects to be as adept as you," replied Henriette, "or as Helen, who has a natural talent for such things."
"Mademoiselle Helene," said Madame Pigou, with an affectionate smile of fellowship at Helen, "is one of us. Thank you all—thank you for the sake of Armand. I shall write him how you helped," she added.
"Mind that you don't overdo!" Madame Ribot warned Henriette as she started back to the chateau.
Henriette did not overdo. With skirt tucked above her slim ankles and an old pair of gloves up to her elbows, she used her sickle much as she had her brush, cutting her small swaths handily after she had learned the trick and often stopping to deride her own efforts or to boast of them very merrily, holding the attention of every one on herself. It was no cross to her that she did not keep up with the others. Madame Pigou complimented her for another reason. It was wonderful that Henriette should cut even a single sheaf; the condescension of a beautiful princess who used a real trowel and some real mortar in laying the cornerstone of a public building.
Helen, humming snatches of song, kept her swath even with Madame Pigou. Her plain features as she bent to her work seemed in keeping with it. There was truth in Madame Pigou's saying that she was "one of us." But Madame did not set a fast pace, for she saw that Helen meant to hold her own.
When Phil had finished a swath he turned and cut toward Henriette in hers, and thus they met face to face as he nipped the last straws from in front of her sickle; her face flushed, too, with exercise, as they both stood erect, he with head bare, his sleeves rolled, drawing a deep breath and stretching his supple, square shoulders.
Helen pausing to rest had a glimpse of him thus; and it occurred to her how he must have looked far away in the Southwest when he was directing the workmen in railroad-building. Then she sent the sharp knife athwart the bundle of straws that she had gathered in her hand.
"A good, straight man!" whispered Madame Pigou. "He knows how to work."
"So I was thinking," murmured Helen absently. Then, a sheaf finished, she looked up again to see them standing in quite the same position of confidential comradeship. "Cousin, more praise!" she called, and repeated in English what Madame Pigou had said of him.
"A real compliment, this!" he replied.
"And tell him that he should put on a hat," said Madame Pigou. "The sun is hot."
"Not so. Not to me. I like it. I play tennis in August bare-headed."
"The Americans stand the sun better than we," said Madame Pigou.
"But he is not an Indian. He is white," Helen explained. "American summers are hotter."
For Madame thought that most of the population of the States were Indians. Phil caught what she was saying.
"A white Indian, but not savage!" he called.
It had all been as good as play to young Jean, watching these grand people from the chateau reaping, until a distant sound on the road attracted his attention. It was the faint tramp of men and the rumble of guns. As the head of a column of infantry appeared past the screen of a stretch of woodland, he cried out, "Soldiers!" and ran.
The cry was taken up far and near over the fields. Most of the harvesters started toward the road and with them went Henriette and Helen and Phil. But not Madame Pigou. She stood watching the figures all of a pattern in their uniforms, moving like automatons sharp cut against the skyline, and then bent to her work. Her son could not be among these battalions. She knew that he was in Alsace. Buxom peasant girls and toothless old men and women standing by the roadside called out the joyful God-speed of their hearts to the soldiers of France.
The men in their red trousers and blue coats knew nothing of where they were going; and the gunners astride their horses and seated on the gun-carriages and caissons looked as if they did not care, if only action soon came. Still they kept coming, that myriad-legged, human caterpillar, its convolutions following the grade of the road in either direction to the horizon. It seemed a creature of irresistible man-power and still coming, when the cousins started back to their field.
"They are between us and the Germans, those brave fellows!" said Madame Pigou, her features in a transport of joy, with a long look toward the moving blue silhouettes sharpened now by the low sun. What more was there to say?
"I hope we shall not see them driven back," Helen whispered in English.
She took the lead in insisting that Madame Pigou stop work. If she did not, they would not help her to-morrow. They walked back to the village with her.
"In America the women do not work in the fields," Phil managed to say in French.
"What do they do?" asked Madame Pigou. "Ah, I understand. They are all rich."
Jean who had gone ahead came running toward them with a letter which the postman had left during the day at the cottage. There was an inarticulate explosion of breath from Helen. She had recognised the nature of the letter, though the peasant woman had not.
"The first in our village!" Helen whispered to Phil.
He understood her meaning. How could they ease the blow for the mother was their thought, as her calloused fingers tore open the envelope? There was no way. They had to watch it fall.
"Dead on the field of honour!" she repeated to herself. She half closed her eyes as silently she adjusted herself to fate's decree, then folded the message and placed it in her bosom. "It is for France! It is war!" she said, this woman of a race that knows well what war is and what it brings. "Jean, you must be my man, now. Armand is dead!"
Jean, hoarse from cheering the battalion on the road, nestled against his mother.
"Thank you for helping me!" she said simply, turning to the others.
Her stoicism seemed to have its roots in the soil itself, tilled and fought for by centuries of ancestors. But the suppressed suffering in her eyes as she spoke had brought the war nearer to Mervaux than the throb of marching infantry and the thunder of guns and nearer to Phil than anything he had seen or felt before.
"Letters of that kind are dropping all over France," said Helen, when she described the incident to her mother.
"Don't!" said Madame Ribot. "Don't let us dwell upon it!"
So it was not mentioned at dinner. Yet though the food was equally good, Madame Ribot equally genial and Henriette equally sparkling, none could help thinking of Madame Pigou; and the fact of that column on the way to the front brought a suggestion of possibilities.
"Remember that you are to remain as long as you please," said Madame Ribot to Phil as she bade him good-night. "I feel some way that—well, you give us a sense of security."
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, ourconquistadore—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."