Part 11 (1/2)

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 rea.s.surance. 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 sn.o.b 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 b.u.t.tonhole, 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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.”