The Old Blood Part 33

Not until they reached the door did the three unlink arms. Helen, blinking into the lamplight of the hall, bent her head. She was swallowing as if she would try her voice before she said "Good-night!"

with the faintest smile, as for an instant her eyes looked into his and he saw something that reminded him of the brilliancy and fearlessness that had shone when she rose from the ground after the sh.e.l.l-burst, but now veiled.

Henriette paused and, as the door closed behind Helen, held out her hand to say her own good-night. After looking into Helen's eyes he was looking into Henriette's, which had the wondering grat.i.tude of the moment when he had laid her on the turf in the gully, and her smile, as her eyelashes flickered, added the touch of exquisite charm to her appealing beauty. Involuntarily in answer to it he drew her hand toward him.

"Henriette!"

She turned her head, her profile with parted lips toward him, and her cheek so near that impulse pressed his lips to it. At this she drew away, not quickly but steadily, looking back into his eyes, and after a tightening of her fingers drew them free. Then in a flutter, her own eyes luminous with surprise, she precipitately turned toward the door.

In her room, smiling into her mirror which smiled back, she was pleased with the way the thing had been done; but to Phil her figure, as it pa.s.sed through the doorway, became unaccountably the figure of Helen.

CHAPTER XXIII

LONGFIELD DECIDES

How Madame Ribot travelled third-cla.s.s all night to Boulogne, where she was crowded on board a steamer with Belgian refugees and American tourists, whom she found equally objectionable in interfering with her comfort, and then finally to London and Truckleford, was a narrative which excited such sympathy in the simple vicarage that life there was soon adapted entirely to her habits. News that her daughters were safe was a relief to her: but the announcement that they were on their way to join her brought a premonition of overcrowding.

The same kind of journey that she had made the three cousins made.

From London Henriette went on to Truckleford, but Helen astounded her sister by remaining in town, giving as her reason that she wanted to see if she could not sell some of her sketches. She said nothing of her trip to America, which she realised once she saw the crowds of stranded Americans must be given up for the present for want of steamer accommodation. Her _au revoir_ to Phil had been spoken at the Victoria Station; a handshake, with the understanding that they would meet at Truckleford. Thus they parted without his knowing her hotel. A few hours later she was sitting beside the desk of an agent while he looked over her few finished sketches. As businesslike as M. Vailliant, he told her to go home and do more, and he would try to dispose of those that were completed.

Something which had been working in Phil's secret brain had come to a head. The recollection of having been marched up a village street between two Prussian bayonets did not sit easily in the blood of his inheritance of freedom. The French were fighting against that kind of tyranny; those poor Belgian women and children on the steamer were the victims of it. When he stepped ash.o.r.e at Folkestone it was with the thrill of relief of one who has come to the home of another kind of principle, which was that of his inheritance. Here they were speaking his own tongue; here the system was individualism. The green pastures and hedges had an appeal which they lacked before he crossed the Channel. On the train an _attache_ of the Paris Emba.s.sy whom he knew had introduced him to a general, who had asked Phil to look in at the War Office. In London the press and the h.o.a.rdings called to arms. War was in the air; and he was young. Instead of trying to push his way through the crowd in front of the steams.h.i.+p offices, he went to a cable office and sent a despatch to Longfield:

"With your permission I am going to fight. Answer."

Dr. Sanford received this message only twenty-four hours later than one from Paris announcing that Phil was on his way to London. The girl in the telegraph office saw the Doctor pa.s.sing along the street on his afternoon const.i.tutional just after the despatch had been clicked in from New York. It was not her business to know what was in telegrams once she had transcribed them; but this one was like a hot breath from the cataclysm shot across the Atlantic into a quiet New England village. She pretended to be busy as she watched the Doctor. On this occasion his spectacles happened to be in the right-hand trousers'

pocket, which was the last one that he investigated. Ever since he had had to wear spectacles he had tried in vain to establish a system of carrying them in the same pocket; but in order to have it work he must think which was the right pocket when he put them in, rather than when he came to look for them.

The girl was amazed when he gave no indication of excitement after the reading, let alone a start of surprise, which "certainly beat me," to put it in her own language, "considering how he wors.h.i.+pped Phil and Phil was asking permission to be killed in Europe like he was asking permission to go fis.h.i.+ng. People are queer, and never so queer as when they get notice of sudden death or an elopement!"

When she asked, belying her gasping curiosity, if there was any answer, the Doctor said "None!" in his quiet, absent-minded way, as he folded the telegram and this time put the spectacles in his inside coat pocket.

"I must think this over a little before I speak to mother about it," he thought, after he had turned into the street and as soon as he was capable of thinking--such had been the blow of the message. The shadow of the statue lay across his path at the time. He looked up at the ancestor questioningly. The ancestor kept on charging British redcoats.

Dr. Sanford took a long way around back to the house. Every familiar landmark seemed to recall some boyhood anecdote of Phil. If only there had been two boys or a girl! With all of his thinking he was blank-minded when he sat down in his favourite chair on the porch.

"What's happened, dear?" Mrs. Sanford asked at once. She knew his signs of emotion better than the telegraph girl.

"Why, I have another cable from Phil," he replied.

"Is he ill or hurt? Don't hold back--I want to know!"

"No, he's well. It isn't that. It's--well--it's asking our permission----"

"I know! He wants to fight!"

Now, how could she guess that? But she was an amazing woman, as he had often said.

"Yes." He pa.s.sed the cablegram to her.

"I'm not surprised," she said, after reading it. "I'd been fearing it all along."

"Yes, he could not stand by and see such wrong done without wanting to strike his blow. I honour him for it."

"But he's Phil--the only boy we have!"

"I am leaving it to you," the Doctor concluded. "He will not if you say not."

"We'll think it over," said Mrs. Sanford.

When they broke silence and began a discussion of the pros and cons it was only to return to silence; for they were merely rehearsing the heads of trains of thought that occurred to both of them in a vicious circle. At the supper table Jane realised that something was wrong, and poignantly wrong.

"If it's about Phil," she blurted out, "I guess I'm ent.i.tled to know!"

When they told her, she said:

"Against that thieving Kaiser and for them poor little Belgiums! He just couldn't help it! That's Phil all over. But it ain't the United States' war, it's Europe's; and all I've got to say is that maybe he'll never come back. He'll just be killed and buried over in them furrin parts."

"We've thought of that, Jane," replied Mrs. Sanford.

"You're going to let him do it!" gasped Jane. "He won't, though, if you say not."

"Buried in furrin parts!" Jane repeated in fresh horror. This was the most awful aspect of it to her. If one insisted on being killed it ought to be at home, where he could be laid in the family plot.

After supper the Doctor and Mrs. Sanford went into the study, though it was early September and hot. There they sat silent as the flow of still waters which run deep.

"I leave it to you and to him," she said quietly, after a time.

Dr. Sanford hunted in his desk and found a telegraph blank, and rapidly in his fine, small hand which was suggestive of his mental self-possession when he had a pen between his fingers, he wrote:

"Yes, by Jehovah, fight if your heart is in the cause and you are not fighting for fighting's sake."

After Mrs. Sanford, who had been sitting very still, had read it she nodded. The decision was made. It takes such occasions as this to prove that fort.i.tude still survives in quiet people who live on quiet village streets.

Before going to bed Dr. Sanford wrote to the vicar of Truckleford:

"It has been our aim to teach Phil self-reliance and to decide for himself. He is going to fight for the same kind of a cause that the ancestor fought for, this time with the British. He is very far away from us, but we are happy to think that he will have a second home with you."

He showed the letter to Mrs. Sanford, who approved it.

As soon as Phil received the cable he moved on the War Office. As he approached that enormous pile of stone he felt his inconsequence and quizzically wondered if anybody had ever laughed inside its solemn halls. Would the General whom Phil had met on the train see him? An august person who attended at the door allowed him to write his name on a slip of paper, and after a while a messenger conducted him to the General's office, through the long, gloomy corridors, which seemed to protest against the activity which the war had brought.

The General was doing the work of five men because there were so few officers who knew how to do that kind of work and trying, English fas.h.i.+on, not to make any show of it, in order to preserve his appearance of poise and leisureliness. He asked Phil what his training had been and then stepped into an adjoining room, where he spoke to another general. The door had been left open, so that the other general could look over the slim figure, with its well-moulded features, which stood awaiting the result.

"Rather got me, his wanting to fight, so different from the usual soldier of fortune type," he said. "Nice chap, well set up, from one of the great American colleges. Just the man for the guns. That _attache_ fellow said he came from good old stock, which you can see for yourself."

He returned, after the other general had written the name of Philip Sanford on a sheet of paper, to say that Philip Sanford would be gazetted a second lieutenant of artillery. They were making second lieutenants rapidly at the War Office in those days. Phil did not know anything about guns, but, then, he knew as much as many other second lieutenants of artillery.