Dr. and Mrs. Sanford sat on one of the benches in the court, at times furtively clasping hands as they thought of what was going on in the operating-room. Peter Smithers and Helen were walking up and down; and they, too, were silent. All felt their helplessness. Everything was with the skill of that red-headed dental surgeon. The eyes of the men in pain lying on the grass or resting on other benches were bright with sympathy, peering out from the white balls of bandages. Phil's was the worst case ever admitted, and theirs had been bad enough. The magician they knew had only made the attempt for the sake of those two old people sitting as quiet as if they were of stone.
Surprise appeared in the faces of the Sanfords, Peter, and Helen as Henriette came under the Oral Surgery sign. She met their glances with one of appealing inquiry, as she stood hesitant, looking from one to another. It occurred to Dr. and Mrs. Sanford how beautiful she was, and again for the thousandth time to Helen. The father and mother could not help thinking of the thing that they had promised to keep out of mind, as they saw the contrast between the two, with the well-moulded features of Henriette and the irregular ones of Helen in repose.
"Nothing yet!" said Peter. "We wait."
There was a glint of passing sharpness in his shrewd eye. She smiled in the face of it as one will who asks not to be misunderstood; then joined him and Helen in their pacing.
"You have been so wonderful to Cousin Phil," she said to Peter.
"Bricktop will do it!" remarked Peter, closing his fist and giving it a little shake. "Wonderful, did you say? Me?"
"Yes," she smiled up at him. "I did not know that there could be such men as you in the world."
"Lots of them in America!" replied Peter. "Growing them is one of our national industries! Competition is hard and they knock one another about so much some of 'em get calloused, I suppose."
"How worthy Phil is of all your generosity we found at Mervaux," Henriette continued.
"Yes. He's in there!" Peter concluded, nodding toward the operating-room.
"Yes!" she murmured. "It's too awful!"
She, too, was silent, taking her cue from his evident desire. As she paced beside him she had an atmospheric feeling of the power of the man as something absolute and indomitable, centred on fighting with his will for a decision in favour of Phil. He made talk of any kind seem petty.
When the door of the operating-room opened they heard its swing, noiseless as were its hinges. Dr. and Mrs. Sanford rose mechanically in answer to that signal; the others turned in their tracks. As Bricktop appeared in the doorway two pairs of old eyes saw him indistinctly through a swimming haze. They were going to learn now if Phil would ever be to their sight as he was before, or—— Bricktop's round face drawn with effort lighted with a smile, as he held up his hand.
"You've done it! By God, you've done it, Bricktop!" Peter cried, rushing toward him.
"Right!" said Bricktop. "Unless there is some setback in the next two or three days. I don't think there will be. Expect to make him as good as new, only a few little scars!"
Two pairs of old eyes still saw that red head like a sun through a fog, but they had heard his words. They did not cry out; their only demonstration was to clasp hands. Helen could not speak, only look at Bricktop with glorious wonder in her eyes, which he was quick to see.
"We beat the Boches to it, eh?" he said to her.
Peter, too, had become silent in his inexpressible happiness, after he had wrung Bricktop's hand.
"If now he should recover his sight!" Henriette exclaimed abstractedly, her words apparently the beginning of a train of thought too rapid to be expressed in speech.
"He will!" said Helen and Peter together.
Phil was being wheeled from the operating-room back to the ward. Bricktop beckoned the waiting group to come in; then bade them pause at the door until Phil was transferred from his carriage to the bed. The nurse said that he had recovered consciousness, though there was no sign of it in his motionless form.
"You tell him!" said Bricktop to Helen.
"Bricktop has done it! You win!" she wrote on his arm.
Many days awaited him, with the pain devils in their last big dance, but with every day meaning less torture. His hearing had become distinct enough to perceive an ordinary conversation around his chair as a faint hum. The silver harness still clinched his jaw and the bandages were still over his eyes.
"Quite as he was before—only a few scars," Bricktop, whom Henriette had met coming out of his office, said in answer to her inquiry when she was on her way to Phil.
Mr. Eyes happened to be coming along the path at the time. Henriette joined him and together they crossed the court.
"What hope?" she asked. She put the question to him with increased fervour every time that she saw him; and of late she had chanced to see him frequently.
"I am going to change the bandages," he replied.
Sometimes the great man had doubts about the system of bandages, which nine out of ten specialists would not have favoured, perhaps; but when he considered an operation he fell back on them as the only way. Shell-shock was baffling, freakish, in its results, and the truth was that he was groping in professional darkness to save Phil from eternal darkness. Yesterday he had strengthened the application. A matter of daily routine the change of the bandages. It brought him every afternoon to the ward and always Helen was there to receive him, the same look of confident anticipation in her eyes, as yet unfulfilled.
He pressed his hand on Phil's forehead, and this Phil had long ago come to recognise as Mr. Eyes' private signal which preceded the removal of the bandages. He was particularly welcome to-day, as Phil had had a kind of restless sensation back of his eyeballs. As the medicated pad was withdrawn, a gurgling outcry rose from his throat and he leaned convulsively forward, fingers outstretched, opening and closing as if he were trying to grasp at a reality that might escape.
"It's not true! Imagination again!" snarled the pain devils; but they could not deceive him about this.
Light had come into his black night, soft, dreamy, vague, amazing light—just light, light, light! There were no people in it, no houses, no trees, only light which seemed like silver gauze hung before his eyes and yet to stretch to the ends of the world. It had brought something dead to life as by miracle, with a touch as soft as eiderdown, sending little thrills knitting in and out all through him. Light for the first time since he had heard that hurtling scream of the shell! Light was in his brain, his veins, his tissue, singing and frolicking as it opened the doors of dark places. He wanted to embrace it, fondle it, run it through his fingers with a miser's greed of gold and gather a store of it while he might. Out of the light, as if traced by the hand of light, a message was being traced on his arm.
"What is it, Phil?" Helen asked him.
He would not attempt to speak again. He had forgotten himself when he made that gurgling outcry. It was one of the idiosyncrasies of his sick man's pride that he would not try to talk before the one who wrote on his arm. The sounds that he emitted through the bandages and silver harness must be like a stuttering idiot's lisp, as he expressed it, and he thought of himself as repulsive enough to her brave eyes without that. Speech would return normally, the throat expert had said, when the removal of Bricktop's apparatus should give it a chance.
"Light!" he wrote. "Just light, without seeing you or where I am. It seems as if I were hung up in the ether, without seeing sky or earth and light held me up and I ate it and drank it and breathed it. Oh, it is good, good!"
"Yes, good!" repeated phlegmatic, kindly Mr. Eyes, who had brought light to many people for large fees from the rich and for nothing for those who live in the alleys. Light was his business. Yet he, too, must find some outlet for his emotion, which was to pat Helen on the head. General Ears had taken only a thousand yards, while General Eyes felt as triumphant as if he had taken five miles of first line trench, ten thousand prisoners and a hundred guns. It was the knock-out blow for the little pain devils.
When he had made some experiments and put on fresh compresses and was about to go, he said, choosing his words carefully:
"I think that I may safely say, barring unforeseen complications, that he will entirely recover his sight with time. How about that?" he added, to Helen.
Her eyes were moist with happiness. She was incapable of speaking. Her first coherent thought was that Phil himself did not yet know.
"Victory!" she wrote on his arm. "You will completely recover your sight, on the high authority of Mr. Eyes himself."
For a space he made no movement. His consciousness was absorbing a transcendent fact. Helen sat beside him, waiting. Henriette, who had remained all the while in the background, silent except for a prolonged cry of delight, came nearer and stood on the other side of him, also waiting. At length he wrote:
"Soon I shall see you!"
"Yes," Helen replied.
"And father and mother, too. Tell them quick—and Peter and Bricktop and Helen—everybody!"
"Yes. I will go instantly."
She should have thought of this before, she said to herself, as she hurried away on her mission.
Henriette was left alone with Phil. She regarded him with lashes half-closed and with her lips set in a way much like Madame Ribot's. As she grew older she would more and more resemble her mother. A step and another, slowly, gracefully, as she bent her lithe figure, her eyes opening now in venturesome inquiry as she took the place which Helen had just vacated. She had written on his arm a good deal of late and, fascinated by the accomplishment, had even practised on her own arm in her room. Phil received the hand-clasp which signalled Helen's return.
"A messenger has gone," she wrote. "Wouldn't you like to take a walk in the court?"
"Yes," was the answer. "It will make the happiness still more real to feel my legs under me."
She directed his steps as Helen had directed them many times. The men of pain lounging in the court looking out through the holes in balls of white, watched two figures pacing in rhythmic step which was familiar when their backs were turned; but when facing them, the girl who was like a picture was in place of the picture girl. They wondered about it; wonder was a habit of their tired minds. She was beautiful, surpassingly so, soothing to the eyes, and she played Helen's part, too, by smiling at them as she passed. Her smile was more radiant than Helen's. It was a better short-acquaintance smile, one of them thought, while Helen's sent a warming, lasting glow all through you and was better for easing pain. Of the two, they would rather have Helen about every day. The men of pain were not articulate, but little that passed in the court escaped their eyes. If a sparrow lighted on a roof or a nurse appeared at a window, they knew it.
Then, just as Phil and Henriette had made a turn with their backs to them, they saw Helen appear under the sign and something happened that puzzled pain-weary heads. At the very point where the court was in view the picture girl stopped short at the sight of the two who were promenading. For an instant she was perfectly still, only an instant, as she looked at the backs of Phil and the girl who was like a picture. Then she put her hand up to her head abruptly, as one will who recollects something, and turned away before the two had wheeled to walk back toward the Oral Surgery sign.
It was a pantomime that set the men into a prolonged quandary. Some had an idea, from the way that Helen put her hand up to her head, that there had been a flash of pain as sharp as any they had ever known through it; others thought that she was relieved to find another in her place. Perhaps both were right, and all kept thinking of it after Phil and Henriette had gone indoors.
When she had led him to his chair and drawn the coverlet over his legs as she had seen Helen do, she gave him the hand-clasp which meant "good-night." In answer, he gripped her hand tightly and drew her toward him. The other hand moved slowly back and forth in the air till its fingers touched her hair. Then, with the feathery touch of the blind, he traced the line of her forehead. A frown like her mother's gathered as he went on to her eyes, her nose, her lips, and her chin.
"It is the first time that you ever did that," she wrote on his arm.
When she brought his pad and he began writing, her head was bent, lips tight, eyes squinting with intensity, as she watched the tracing of each word.
"Yes. I often wanted to——" Her frown had gone. Her head rose as she drew a deep breath and smiled as she would at herself in the mirror. His pencil hesitated, then went on. "——but thought that you might think I was rude. You don't think so, now?"
"No. You did it beautifully, wonderfully," she replied. "It was the next best thing to knowing that you could really see me. And soon you shall."
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 yoursuccès 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—doyoucare?"
"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.