Part 8 (1/2)

”Business will go to the devil!” said Ledyard. ”Everybody is going to draw in and wait to see whether or not the world is coming to an end.

I'd like to drive the Kaiser's war bonnet down over his head and strangle him. I confess that I never felt so helpless in my life. I can't even get a second-cla.s.s pa.s.sage. Steams.h.i.+p company paid no attention to my wires. First come, first served.”

”I have a pa.s.sage on a French liner for the sixteenth,” said Phil, ”two in the cabin, if it will be any use to you, sir.”

”Will it be any use? Taken, if it's six in the cabin,” said Mr.

Ledyard. ”And you return when you can get a comfortable pa.s.sage; your salary goes on.” He considered the favour worth Phil's salary for years. ”I shouldn't stay in Paris if I were you,” he went on. ”You might be caught in a siege. These people can't hold the Germans.

Manufacturing power and efficiency will be the big factors in this war, and the Germans are ready. You have seen that, haven't you?”

”Yes. Amazing--it's a lesson.”

”My English friends won't see Germany; they live too close to her. But an American ought to, even if he resents her. It's between the Germans and the British navy. The French can't stand up to it. I only wish they could.”

Phil could not agree. It was a different atmosphere which he had found in Paris from that in Berlin, but no less impressive. Here was the wall to hold the battering-ram which he had seen in movement for the shock on the other side of the frontier. The emotional French were going silently to their places no less promptly than the Germans; democracy against Kaiserdom, the closed shops with ”_Sous le drapeau_”

chalked on the shutters, the quietness of prayer and resolution which possessed all France as one human being had taken possession of him.

All the world at war, and he was walking down the Champs-elysees, the greatest street in the world, its pavement white in the moonlight and silent except for an occasional footfall. Somewhere over the hills in the direction of Rheims was Mervaux. If the Ribots were still there and wanted him, he would pay them at least a call.

CHAPTER VI

AT MERVAUX

The trace of American blood in Madame Ribot's veins was only an echo, yet its presence kept her from being entirely European. She had never visited America; even her English had more than a touch of French accent. America was vast, distant, noisy, and little concerned her.

Nothing much concerned her except her comfort. Her small, shrewd eyes served the ends of a sluggish disposition. In girlhood they had not kept her from being beautiful and in middle age they sat guardian over her health and the business of preserving the freshness of features which were strikingly like Henriette's.

Her phlegm, if phlegm it were, was reaction from days when she had enjoyed Monte Carlo no less than Paris. They were days that she never mentioned. Possibly they had brought prematurely the wrinkles which, in a later phase, she ma.s.saged as unpleasant landmarks. She fought to retain youth, while reliving it in Henriette.

M. Ribot, who was in the Argentine, belonged to the past, and the income dating back to an arrangement between lawyers came regularly from a lawyer and would come till her death or till she married again.

There had been a grandfather who lived in a villa overlooking the Mediterranean. He had been fond of Henriette and said that his son, Henriette's father, was a fool and a blackguard and his daughter-in-law was a lucky, selfish, spoiled child. When he died he left Henriette an independent fortune.

The rest was wrapped in mystery and eccentricity, with Helen a sort of appendage. She and Henriette indistinctly remembered a quarrel between their parents in an apartment in Paris, which they overheard from an adjoining room without knowing what it meant. Later, the grandfather came and the father went away, without Madame seeming to mind his going. Helen did remember her mother saying to the father:

”You may have Helen, if you wish, but I shall keep Henriette;” and the grandfather added: ”Yes, she stays in France. I shall stay in France, myself.”

As the father would not have plain little Helen, the mother kept her.

After her separation from her husband, Madame Ribot settled in the chateau at Mervaux and Henriette's money maintained a small apartment in Paris, where the family went in winter that Henriette might study painting; for all agreed that she had talent.

Helen wandered in the fields and talked to the peasants and kept on trying to draw. Her only lessons were from an old artist who had become interested in her when she was fifteen. His technique was excellent. He knew how, but he could not do it, as he said.

”You keep on drawing and drawing,” were his last words, ”and don't bother if any one thinks you an ugly duckling.”

She did not mind the old artist calling her an ugly duckling. These two believed in the truth, the truth of art. No one had ever seen so much of the charm of her smile as he when they walked beside the Seine, went to the Louvre, browsed in old print shops, and he criticised her work, her miserable charcoals, as she called them. When he died Helen felt that she had lost her best friend and she went regularly to put flowers on his grave, smiling the while, even if her eyes were moist, as he who had no friends except her would have wished.

Her smiles were for the byways. She had many for the peasants and the villagers. They liked the strange, moody Helen better than the beautiful, gracious Henriette, and they liked to pose for her. Mere Perigord who sat outside her door crocheting on sunny days had been drawn a score of times by Helen.

”Keep on drawing and drawing!” This was really all of Helen's life.

Henriette painted and Madame Ribot ma.s.saged her wrinkles, read many novels, took a long time to dress for dinner, a longer time to get up in the morning, and exchanged reminiscent letters with men and women who had belonged to the early period of her life. One might think that she was preparing to marry again, but the peasants and the servants knew better. They had dismissed the gossip over the thought in connection with the Count de la Grange, a neighbour of acceptable age but quite poor, and also in connection with General Rousseau, a major in the war of '70, another neighbour who was fairly well-to-do.

For years the thing had been going on. Almost every day the Count and the General called or came to dinner. Madame Ribot was their social world. They were ever telling her how young she kept; the Count with an indirection which was the most delicate flattery and the General with the brusqueness of a soldier, which had the charm of contrast with the Count's method. The two vying in gallantries of an old-fas.h.i.+oned kind made a situation all to Madame Ribot's taste, as her shrewd eyes turned from one to the other. Imagination and recollection, with the basis of the past to work on, completed her satisfaction.