HENRIETTE WAITS
At dinner Phil was seated again under the English ancestor, only to
find that this did not mean an escape from ancestors, as he was facing
the American. The vicar had had the photograph of the statue at
Longfield framed, and on the opposite side of the room the man of
Massachusetts seeking the blood of British redcoats was charging toward
the man of Hampshire, who, with uptilted chin, was defying all comers.
"At breakfast some morning you may find the table overturned, chairs
broken and the dining-room all gory," Phil said.
"Really!" gasped Mrs. Sanford. She was so serious about the ancestors
that at first she took him literally.
"The American is better dressed for such an affair," Phil continued,
"but I fancy that the Briton did his fighting in shirt-sleeves, too.
He was in that ornate get-up only when he posed for his portrait."
"They would both be in shirt-sleeves for this cause!" declared the
vicar.
"Yes, and perhaps for the cause for which the American fought, too,"
Phil suggested.
"Very likely. I am proud of them both!" said the vicar.
But he and Mrs. Sanford were proudest of the living Sanford who was
going to fight in the cause of the moment. The hour was the living
hour of blows. Here was one who was about to strike a blow for a
childless pair, who had never so much wanted a son as then in order
that they might give him for their country. A son of their blood had
come to them, now. They wanted to know more about him, his boyhood,
his school-days, and the campaigns of the revolutionary
ancestor--everything that put links in the chain of inheritance. Phil
complied when he realised the genuineness of their interest, but found
himself stumbling in details.
"Father knows everything he did," he said. "In fact, we have his
diary; but I confess----"
"Too much ancestor!" put in Helen.
It was the first that she had spoken, and even this exclamation was
casual and disinterested. Seated across from him as she had been at
the first dinner, her plain part in her plain gown was much the same as
then, only she was more subdued. Henriette was by his side, in the
same part of beautiful woman and beautiful gown. She added her
questions to the vicar's. Madame Ribot's only question was about Peter
Smithers.
"We must get him to Europe," she said, when the vicar and Mrs. Sanford
were declaring that now Phil's father and mother would surely come to
England on their long-promised visit.
"I'd like to see Peter in Europe," said Phil.
"So should I!" declared Helen irresistibly. "I should like to have
seen him having a set-to with von Stein."
What a cartoon! A whole series of Peter Smithers in moods of rage and
humility; Peter shaking his fist; Peter threatened with firing squads
and blank walls; Peter and old von Stein--there you had a contrast!
Her eyes were dancing; she was laughing to herself as the pictures
flitted before her vision, only to bite her lip when she noticed her
mother's stare and lapse into the marking-time attitude which she had
planned to take her through the meal.
"Yes, of course we must invite Peter," said Madame Ribot. "Do write to
Dr. Sanford about it."
"Do, please!" chimed in Henriette.
The vicar was looking to Phil for his lead in the matter.
"By all means!" he said.
Just then his glance happened to meet Helen's, and hers seemed to
convey a repressed irony, which melted into that blankness of
expression with its self-effacement that always puzzled him. Always
the artist--always changing, he thought, while Henriette's charm was
unvarying.
"And you will stay on here?" he said to Henriette.
"No. I, too, am going to do my bit," she replied.
She was to take a course in nursing and go to France with Lady
Truckleford's hospital unit.
"You were so good at binding up the wounded soldier's arm in the gully
that I foresee a great success," said Phil.
She flushed slightly, averting her glance. Always her blushes were
accompanied by the appropriate manner and gesture. When she looked
back at him her face was in repose, her lips parted faintly, her eyes
deep wells of grateful recollection--the Henriette whom he had carried
from the roadside to the gully.
"We shall both be in France," she said; "you fighting and I
nursing--both doing our bit."
In that deliciously pregnant second before she took a last sip of
coffee her smile implied more than her words.
When they went out on the lawn Madame Ribot asked Helen to fetch a
shawl, and after she had placed its silken folds around her mother's
shoulders she slipped away into the darkness, the others in their
preoccupation not missing her. Madame Ribot at ease in a long chair,
the others walked up and down until again came a motor's purr to the
gateway and Lady Truckleford appeared to talk of war relief. She was
bubblingly talkative, was Lady Truckleford, delightfully fussed over
her hospital project, and demonstrative over Henriette, who seemed to
have won her affections completely. It was quite late when she
departed.
"We'll renew that walk to-morrow, shall we?" Henriette said to Phil as
they parted on the stairs. While she was undressing her mother came
into the room.
"You were very beautiful to-night, dearie," said Madame Ribot, taking
her daughter's hands in hers. "And it's settled between you and Cousin
Phil?"
Henriette smiled.
"That means that it is?"
Again Henriette smiled, in a confident way.
"It is!" said Madame Ribot. "Well----" and she kissed Henriette
good-night, closing the scene without further inquiry, as became a wise
woman who knew or thought she knew her daughter. "It's splendid about
Helen," she added, pausing in the doorway.
"Very!" Henriette replied. "Yes, she's found her place drawing for the
press."
Helen, who had thought that she had conquered happiness, was far from
it. She had cried out to her mirror: "Oh, if it weren't for that nose
I wouldn't be such a fright!" only to call herself a fool. The result
of her conflicting emotions was to hurry downstairs and look up the
railroad timetables. Then she went to her mother's room, a pale,
distrait figure of impatience, with face drawn.
"I'm going to take the seven-o'clock train in the morning," she said.
"It's my work, you see."
She had come quite close to her mother's side so abruptly that it was
disturbing to her mother's composure.
"You know best about that," said Madame Ribot, looking up at Helen's
features with a return of the old wonder that Helen should be her child.
"Please explain and say good-bye to the others, won't you?"
"Yes. And, Helen, it's all settled between Henriette and Cousin Phil,
isn't it?"
"If she wishes."
"If she wishes! What do you mean by that?" Madame Ribot had turned in
her chair with a penetrating glance from her little eyes.
"Why, what I say. But I don't know. I----"
Helen wavered.
"You were with them all the time at the chateau?"
"Yes. If she wishes," was all that Helen could say, her voice
crackling in its dryness.
"That she has not wished it on other occasions. I see!" murmured
Madame Ribot. "She does this time."
"Good-bye!"
"Good-bye! You've done wonderfully, Helen. Of course, it is better
than nursing if you continue to make it go. You see, I was anxious
about you if anything happened to me."
"And I've been very trying sometimes. I'm sorry!"
There was something whose place even successful drawings for the press
could not supply--affection. Helen was singularly hungry for it
to-night.
"Of course you will write us and come down to see us!" said Madame
Ribot.
"Of course!" Helen repeated.
She wished to be taken into her mother's arms, but it did not happen.
And she was glad when the dawn, which found her awake, came and she
softly glided downstairs on her way to the station.
Peter Smithers on his "little farm" in Massachusetts, walking about and
surveying the latest improvements and his high-bred cattle and swine,
was hardly conscious that a woman leisurely undoing her hair in a
vicarage in Truckleford was thinking of him. He had a fortune, poor
man; and he was not unused to being the object of plots as the result
of its possession. In her day Madame Ribot had been as fond of
spinning webs of intrigue as she had of late the threads of
recollection which had helped to pass the time.
"Phil will come out of this war with European habits formed," she
thought. "His Longfield will seem very tame to him, then. He may win
distinction--but his family is enough. The one other thing
needful"--it was the thing that Peter Smithers had. As a loving and
dutiful mother her part was clear. "Peter Smithers must be brought to
Europe; and then I----" Madame Ribot smiled at herself in the mirror,
conscious that a long lapse of inaction need not necessarily have
weakened her powers. She could already hear the soft purr of Peter
Smithers's powerful car at the gate.
Nor did Peter, looking through the hothouses of that miserable little
farm of his, know that the two white heads of an English vicar and his
wife were thinking of him.
"That ten days in the chateau seem to have had one result, unless my
eyes deceive me," said the vicar in a half-whisper, as if the secret
held back for this family conclave might be overheard by the walls.
"You saw it, too?" said Mrs. Sanford. "Of course, as a woman I saw it
at once. And, Franklin, don't forget about inviting Peter Smithers.
Hasn't it all turned out wonderfully! And Helen, too!"
"Oh, it's ripping about Helen, ripping!" exclaimed the vicar. "That
little warrior! I always believed in her."
"But her mother did seem to me anything but appreciative."
"She never is, except when she is ordering people about."
"Yes, so I've found!" assented Mrs. Sanford.
"And you have done your best to make her happy in that respect," said
the vicar.
"It's the easiest way, my dear, and she is our guest."
The next day the two did not allow any interruption from them to
interfere with Henriette's walk with Phil, but rather gave their
blessing of smiles. Henriette set the direction, which was to the same
hill as before; and the quiet scene of Hampshire valleys in September
had an appeal to him that it had not had before the war. For a remote
ancestor of his had fought for this as the later one had fought for his
New England valleys.
"I feel the call of both this and France," said Henriette. "How can
one think of painting!" Indeed, the portrait lay with its back against
the wall at Mervaux. She had forgotten to bring it and had never been
more dissatisfied with anything that she had done.
The spell of the art in which she really excelled was upon Phil; a
deeper one than ever, owing to her more serious mood and the serious
business before him, and it grew all the way from valley to hilltop and
afterward in the leisurely descent. He spoke of his fortune. All he
had was his pay as a second lieutenant.
"You have fortune enough," she said, pausing and giving him a long,
full glance; "the fortune of war! It is the same that it always has
been. The man goes away to fight!"
"And the woman waits!" he said.
"Yes, she waits!" she replied. Her smile was gentle and wonderful.
"Isn't that enough?" she asked, giving him her hand in a prolonged
clasp and then turning her cheek for the pressure of his lips.
"Quite!" he agreed.
She liked the way of it much better than a speech in the moonlight.
Anything but that!