The Old Blood Part 4

"Ripping!"

They broke out laughing at this, and the best feature of her laughter was the persistent radiance in her eyes. A pa.s.sing labourer who noted the pair silhouetted against the skyline thought:

"Life is sweet to them--youth and good looks."

She returned to the subject of walks.

"Before we consider the one in the Berks.h.i.+res," she said, "you're not returning to America without coming to France to see us, are you?"

He had carefully allotted every day of his time abroad, which did not include any visit to Mervaux. But when the allotment was made he had not met the seventeenth cousins.

"You can be properly at home and watch Helen draw or me paint," she went on. "Helen musses about with charcoals and I with oils. You will see what life is like in the French country. Mother will write inviting you. Will you come?"

Her glance was cousinly and insistent. The glance did it. He decided that he would cut out Vienna and go to Mervaux for the second week in August of that year, 1914.

CHAPTER IV

TOO MUCH ANCESTOR

"Helen's temper again!" exclaimed Mrs. Sanford to her husband, after Helen's outburst.

"Sometimes I do not wonder that Helen has a temper," said the vicar.

"But when a girl is as plain as she is, really it is the one thing she should avoid," persisted his wife.

"Yes, I suppose it is bad policy, when Henriette has all the good looks and the money," he replied.

Helen had now turned toward them and Phil and Henriette were going through the gateway. Mrs. Sanford drew a deep breath as one will who is about to undertake a duty and means to approach it softly.

"Did you give up your idea of becoming a nurse, Helen?" she asked casually.

It drew another flash from Helen's eyes, accompanied by a shudder of repugnance.

"I couldn't. I don't like the horror of it--seeing people cut up and everything! I knew I ought to and mother thinks I ought to; but I've delayed because I---- Oh, I know what you're thinking!" She stopped and shook several rebellious strands of hair free with a sudden movement of her head.

Gentle Mrs. Sanford let her hands drop into her lap, lowering her head in the relief of one who has tried and failed.

"Sorry!" Helen's att.i.tude had quite changed. She kissed her aunt on the cheek. "I have an awful temper, haven't I?" Her change of mood had been reflected by her irregular features with singular expressiveness. "I was going to arrange the flowers for the table for our seventeenth cousin and also--do you think cook would let me?--try my hand at the American shortcake thing. I learned how to cook from Jacqueline. I'd rather be a cook than a nurse, if worse comes to worse. Cooks get very good pay."

"Helen! Shocking!" exclaimed Mrs. Sanford. Many gentlewomen were nurses. "You'll have to bargain with cook about the shortcake," she added.

"Didn't his mother make it back in Ma.s.sachusetts? Why not Helen of Mervaux, if not Helen of Troy, in Hamps.h.i.+re? Cry Harry, England and St. George! In the name of _Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, allons_!"

She was off to the kitchen, whose monarch said, in language of her own, that the way to eat strawberries was with their stems on and dipping them in sugar, or else as jam. In either case they had no relation to cake, and she was not taking cooking lessons from foreign countries.

"In other words, 'it's not done,' oh, England!" said Helen.

"Whatever you mean by that," began cook.

"It should be on British coats-of-arms instead of _Dieu et mon Droit_,"

Helen explained, without in the least explaining to cook. "I mean, I take the responsibility off your shoulders. If the American is poisoned I go to the gallows."

"Oh, very well!" agreed cook, as if convinced that a fatal result was inevitable but satisfied if her alibi were safely established.

Helen went to the task with a confident hand, while cook looked on with the same scorn that she would have regarded the introduction of _poi_ or birds' nest soup into that loyal British household. Her task well under way, Helen returned to the garden to pick flowers for the table, the while humming French songs. She had finished with the flowers when Mrs. Sanford entered the dining-room to find her with her fingers outspread on the cloth, resting half her weight on them and looking at one of the family portraits on the wall.

"Still in love with your ancestor, Helen?" asked her aunt.

Helen was startled back from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

"Yes. I'm coming in here after dark and teach him to fall in love with me. He's the only man who ever will. Being three hundred years old he might take me because of my youth."

"My dear, where do you get all your strange ideas?"

"I wonder if he would like the strawberry shortcake thing?" Helen continued. "I'm sure he liked rum and took snuff and swore. And you'll please not to tell the seventeenth cousin that I made the cake.

I take no risks."

The ring of her laugh remained in the room after she had returned to the kitchen. Helen was never more puzzling to her aunt than when she laughed; for then she was most French, and Mrs. Sanford ascribed much in Helen to Gallic inheritance.

"Poor dear!" thought her aunt. She was always thinking "Poor dear!"

but she seldom gave voice to it--not in Helen's presence. It was the sure match to her temper. She would not bear to be "poor deared," as she called it, even by Henriette. Now Mrs. Sanford herself was regarding the portrait intently, and her husband entering joined her in its study.

"You see the likeness, too?" she asked, with a thrill of pride.

"The moment he alighted at the station. We'll seat him under it at dinner--a plot!" said the vicar, smiling, and he caught her hand in his in a way that would have been pleasant to an observer. But if there had been an observer it would not have happened.

Voices were heard on the lawn and they looked out to see Phil and Henriette returning. His American accent which had sounded strange at first grew attractive to Mrs. Sanford. She herself showed him to his room to make sure that everything was right. The hot water "can," as he would have called it, was standing in the wash basin covered with a towel to retain the heat. His bag was unpacked and his toilet articles were laid out.

"The maids do that for you in England?" he said.

"Don't yours?" she inquired.

"Not Jane in a thousand years. She would regard me as a mollycoddle if I permitted it. Sometimes they do it in country houses which are as big as hotels on the hills outside Longfield."

"Strange!" she murmured.

"And I am to put my shoes, I mean my boots, outside the door at night?"

he asked.

She was not quite certain of herself, being apprehensive of some American joke back of the question.

"Of course," she said.

"I'll try, though it is going to give my Puritan conscience a twinge,"

he said drily. "I'll try if you will not tell Jane when you come to visit us in America. Whatever happens, I mean never to lose my standing with Jane."