THE VOICE AT HIS ELBOW
Why no more news of the brilliant advance into Alsace? What meant the
official silence about Mulhausen and Liege? 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 naive, 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, our _conquistadore_--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."