The Old Blood Part 50

"It is Helen. I'm in great luck. My exhibition in New York is a success and I am going to America immediately. I came to say good-bye."

"Helen!"

He had not waited to write the word. It came out quite clearly. He was drawing her nearer to him with his hand-clasp, as he had before.

Now he would be touching her hair as he had before; but instead, his other hand, groping, had caught her arm. She was in a vise, dazed.

Then all that she had reasoned out of herself came surging back in consuming possession of her. Oh, G.o.d, why would he do that! What did he mean? It could not be--no, it could not be! She tried to draw away, but the effort was only a quiver.

"I can write better. My pad, please," he murmured.

It seemed very heavy and then very light to her as she brought it, tremblingly, wonderingly. A peal of bells was ringing soft notes in her ears and her brain was numb. She watched each letter as it was written, tracing out her fate. For she had admitted the thing to her heart, now. She could never put it out.

"It is hard to explain, but something told me that it was you--your spirit, your touch, that first day when I should have slipped but for you--and yet I knew it could not be. The pain devils never let me think quite clearly. Then you had seemed to avoid me and Henriette had said she would wait. It was understood with Henriette. It must be she; it was her place--and all the while your spirit, your touch, you in my mind and her face, her presence, and it hurt me to think that you neglected me. This awful wound--and you said that you were Henriette when I could not see and it should have been Henriette. And I was always thinking, musing, in my poor, hazy way of the girl with her cartoons and sketches--of you as I saw you seated against the wheat shock, across the table at Truckleford, rise on the other side of the sh.e.l.l-hole--everywhere you, the spirit of you--that, well, it had me.

Then I found out what the plot was and I was happy and about to tell you, when the pain devils interfered. Then I concluded to wait. Being shut up in my own world, perhaps I liked to watch the play. If you could take Henriette's place and deceive me, how could you care for me?

I enjoyed the comedy yesterday at Lady Truckleford's with something akin to your own mischievousness. But when you say that you are going away--well, I can't let you go if there is any way of keeping you.

Only you must not go without knowing that it is you, your spirit, which has pulled me through--you that I love. And you--do _you_ care?"

"Big and little, all kinds of yes, in every language!" she replied.

"Yes, every hour through all these weeks and long before that."

"I like the way you say it--it is so like you!" he wrote in answer.

And he drew her close to him again and held her so for a long time.

"I was about to----" Mischief and happiness were mixed in her explanation of the thing that Bricktop was about to undertake on her behalf.

"It does not matter to me--not if your nose were twice as large."

"But it does to me," she replied. "I am tired of feeling that I am looking over a mountain top every time that I tie my shoe-laces. Phil, we'll be getting our new faces at the same time, and I want to be as pleasing to you as I can. I'm a human woman."

He was smiling inwardly at this, if he could not yet with the muscles that nature intended for the purpose.

"And by the time that you can see me it will be the same Helen, only the Helen I want you to see always," she said, in final decision of her purpose not to delay acting on such a good impulse.

"I'm ready--and I'm so happy! Come on, Mr. Bricktop on Beauty!" she said, as she entered his office.

Bricktop emitted what he would have called a Comanche yell, which was utterly against the regulations about noise in that smooth-running, quiet British hospital; and the cause of it was not due to her readiness for the operation, but rather to his prompt diagnosis of the reason for the happiness beaming and rippling in her eyes.

When Henriette heard the news which her mother brought to her room to avoid the embarra.s.sment of her hearing it first from Lady Violet, who was babbling it in loud whispers right and left, Madame Ribot drew back in face of her daughter's anger, else she might herself have been the victim of such a blow as Helen had once received. Madame Ribot, irritatingly convinced that Peter Smithers had been having quiet fun at her expense on the ride from Paris, was inclined to lay the blame for the embarra.s.sing situation at the door of this unspeakable vulgarian.

She meant to cut him dead if she saw him again; but when it occurred to her that he would not mind, she was only the more irritated. Now she was concerned with the effect of defeat on Henriette, who, after her tempest, was silent, with eyes half closed and staring.

"Yes," said Henriette finally. "I'm not surprised." Her pride would not allow her to say so, but the battle from the first had been, to her mind, between her beauty which, by her criterions, ought to conquer, and something in Helen which frustrated it. "Yes," she repeated, turning to her mirror to arrange a strand of hair. She smiled into the mirror in her old conceit of self and the mirror smiled back. There are many fish in the sea!

"Good!" exclaimed Madame Ribot. "And Helen gets a great fortune," she added.

"Yes."

"I must go and see her!" said Madame Ribot.

But Helen was not at her quarters. No one knew where she had gone, except Bricktop, who said that he had sent her away in Peter's car for a rest. But after her plea of parental right he directed her to the little house which Peter had taken for the Sanfords.

Helen was sitting in a long chair in the small garden, punctuating the happiness of two white heads and of Peter himself by her remarks about her nose, which was in bandages, and how she was going to help Peter ruin his farm; which he said she could ruin in any way she pleased without regard to priority of claim in that line by either himself or Phil.

Instead of cutting Peter, when she was actually in the presence of the personified millions Madame Ribot was most affable to him, as well as to the Sanfords, speaking of the common feelings of mothers when she embraced Mrs. Sanford. To Helen she was demonstratively maternal, kissing her on the forehead and cheek many times and stroking her hand; and Helen reciprocated, the light in her eyes welcoming belated affection long craved, which crowned her happiness. When they spoke of her coming to America, Madame Ribot expressed her delight, but in her inner consciousness, despite her flare, something cold and logical built of the past and her predilections told her that she would never go. And that same day she slipped away to Paris and back to her old routine.

The next time that Phil sat under the portrait of the English ancestor and facing the American ancestor the Jehovah cablegram, now framed, was also on the wall. There were still some patches of plaster on his chin, but otherwise he looked the same; only there had come to him a great experience of battle, of suffering, of reflection, taking youth over the boundary into a manhood which still might be boyish.

Across from him in her old place was Helen, while Peter made the seventh of the party. Phil could see her as clearly as the first night that he was at Truckleford; he could hear every inflection in her voice, though the doctors said that he must have a long rest, free from shocks. In the lamplight the tiny scars on the lobes of her nose did not show, and he rather wished that they did. He did not want them to go away.

"You know, Helen is really very good-looking," the vicar had said again and again to his wife, who kept replying that it was perfectly evident.

The high white forehead, the fine eyes, the glorious hair--they were no longer under a handicap, as Peter put it. Mischievous challenge was still the privilege of the eyes and the expressive mouth seemed always smiling these days. The Helen that the world saw was the real Helen, radiant with the spirit that had kept a man from slipping and cried "Good!" after that upper cut, which was still a source of many chuckles to the vicar and the Marquis of Truckleford.

The call was home. She was eager for her first glimpse of the valley of Longfield; to be welcomed at the station by Bill Hurley. "One becomes an American, or he does not;" she was one already.

"I should not need any one to direct me," she said. "Across the bridge, up Maple Avenue, turn to the left in front of the ancestor along the path under the elms--and that is it, a simple, old frame house in a yard facing the biggest elm of all."

"Don't forget the farm!" Peter suggested. "I don't mean to be as lonely as I have been."

She smiled to Peter in the way that he liked to have her smile at him.

"For that, you follow the main road past the ancestor on up the hill.

Turn in between two great stone pillars and keep along a winding drive which gives you glimpses of herds grazing, and you will come to another simple frame house. Then keep along another drive on that little farm past screens of larches and the garage and you will come to the stables and the dairy and the barns."

"Right!" said Peter. "By George! I believe it's time I enlarged that house or built a new one, or the big barn will get ashamed of it."

The two white heads of Truckleford felt that they, too, knew Longfield.

Their promise was given that one day they would undertake that formidable journey from their insular home across the Atlantic and taste Virginia ham and sweet corn on their native heath. Peter had told them how he would send them spinning over the highways to the suburbs of Boston, to Cape Cod and the White Mountains, and skirting the gleaming silver of the Hudson to Manhattan, where the skysc.r.a.pers rise from their granite beds.

Only the presence of Bricktop was needed to round out this dinner party at the vicarage; but he was too busy in France making the relatives and the sweethearts of other maimed men rejoice, to accept any invitations.

"I was backing Phil," Peter mused, after he had lighted his cigar; and, as Bill Hurley had repeatedly said, Peter was "n.o.body's fool."

"Phil ain't, either," Bill concluded, after he saw the girl that Phil brought home from the wars.

THE END