A FULL-FACE PORTRAIT
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 Liege; 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.