Part 15 (1/2)

CHAPTER X

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 a.s.sisted Madame Pigou in finis.h.i.+ng her harvest. No more soldiers pa.s.sed 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 cousins.h.i.+p 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 nave, 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 cousins.h.i.+p!” he said.

What would the cla.s.s 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.