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 finishing 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 cousinship 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 cousinship!" 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.
"Did you wear spurs?" asked the voice of the unseen person.
"What?"
"Don"t look around! I mean, did you wear spurs when you were in the Southwest? Of course you did, hugeous Spanish spurs and an enormous sombrero and woolly sheepskin trousers."
"As you say!" Phil replied.
"You see, I am doing cartoons of our hero"s life," Helen explained.
"Here he is as he saw himself and the Rocky Mountains when he first arrived, with his college diploma under his arm."
Only lines of hieroglyphic simplicity, and Phil in enormous spurs and sombrero, with a great roll of parchment under his arm, was looking down on some ant-hills. Only lines, but the nose and the chin under the sombrero"s were unmistakably Phil"s.
"Now, as our hero sees himself roping his first steer--and as he really was!" she went on. "We are all for realism."
A Phil with one arm akimbo, who roped the steer with his thumb and little finger holding a thread, was followed in the next scene by a Phil fluttering heaven high and a steer romping across the prairie.
"What next in the hero"s progress?" she continued. "Undaunted, he goes on his way, our _conquistadore_--is that the right word in Spanish, cousin?"
"Yes," admitted Phil, who could not see the drawings or confess his curiosity about them.
Henriette went on painting, with intermissions when she lowered her head behind the easel to hide her amus.e.m.e.nt, perhaps, and others when she murmured an apology for Helen; but she was charming all the time.
"Yes, I have it!" said Helen. "He saves pretty Pepita, the stern, old governor"s daughter, from the revolutionista bandittistas--copyright reserved, plot perfectly original. But how does he save Pepita? With one fell glance of his eye?"
Phil moved a trifle restlessly, but said nothing.
"No, there are too many revolutionistas! He might subdue four or five, but not all of them--not even he, particularly when he has left his college diploma in his tent--and the dark Spanish girl must be saved.
It shall be six-shooters--big six-shooters! "Tis done!"
Phil was seeing Henriette"s face and hearing a voice like Henriette"s, but with a richness, a variety of tonal range, and a whimsicality and infectiousness which hers lacked. It went perfectly with Henriette"s smile at times, for she was enjoying the situation.
"Our hero triumphs!" Helen continued. "He restores the beautiful belle to her true lover, but with rare n.o.bility of soul hides the mortal wound which her eyes have given him. For she is not for him. Now he starts for home to found some more American colleges and foreign missions, his pockets bulging with gold--thus--home to his first love, the girl in the kitchen at Longfield who makes strawberry shortcakes.
Here he eats a strawberry shortcake as big as a mountain. Yet another transition--he is in Europe. Majestic he sits and the little cousins look up at him and worship this Gibson man from the United States of Amerikee. Thus he and thus the little cousins! This is triumph, indeed! Now our story is told. We depart."
"Wait!" cried Phil, springing up. "For what I have suffered I want to see the result."
He faced a Helen shaking with laughter, teasing, delightful, in its spontaneous ring. Every fibre in her body seemed to be laughing. She would not have been unattractive then, even had her nose been lumpier than it was.
"It will be painful, I warn you!" she said. He was looking over her shoulder. "How do you like the local colour? I put in one cactus for that."
"That is enough for Mexico," he agreed. "And may I have them? Father will double up when he sees them and Jane will roar."
"I was doing them to make myself laugh," she said soberly, turning her head. He caught a gleam from her eyes baffling in its brightness, as a sharp sunbeam through a lattice. "If they make other people laugh, so much to the good in war time."
"Which means that I may have them?"