Part 10 (2/2)

A thousand francs! was her mundane thought. She could live on that a long time in Paris, drawing and studying. It did not matter how plain she was. She might have a nose as big as a prize potato and yellow eyes and rat teeth. People were not going to look at her, but at her pictures. Her face need never hurt her again. She did not know that she had a face when she was drawing. She was young, with the long span of years stretching straight before her--straight, straight, like the great main roads of France! It was all clear--unless war came. But it could not come. It was too hideous a thought. The world was too beautiful to be drenched with blood; too wise to be so foolish.

Returning homeward she thought of many things; even of that seventeenth cousin and how she would like to do a charcoal of him. She would, while Henriette painted him. With no idea of the time that had elapsed, dust-covered, a rent in her gown from a thorn-bush, she burst in on her mother and sister, who were halfway through dinner.

”You are a sight!” said Madame Ribot. ”Do change before you sit down!”

Upstairs in her room she looked into her mirror with a new sense of defiance.

”Oh, you are plain, but do you think that matters?” She held her hands up in front of her face. ”Five fingers like everybody else and they can hold a crayon or a brus.h.!.+ Silly!” She laughed again and the mirror laughed back in the glorious secret of--triumph was the word, this time.

”M. Valliant must really think highly of your charcoals,” said Henriette at table, ”or he wouldn't have taken the painting.”

”Yes, that was very surprising,” said Madame Ribot.

”But remember I got the thousand francs! Isn't that the proof of the pudding from an art dealer. I'll set up a studio in Paris, a tiny one in a garret, and get my own meals--thrifty me! And I'll be away from home, mother, as much as if I were nursing--I mean, I'll be independent, as I ought to be.”

She went on talking about her plans, unconscious that Henriette and even her mother were slightly inattentive.

CHAPTER VII

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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.ses, 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!”

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