The Girl Philippa

CHAPTER XXII

Madame de Moidrey, strolling with Warner on the south terrace of the Château des Oiseaux, glanced sideways at intervals through the open French windows, where, at the piano inside, Philippa sat playing, and singing in a subdued voice ancient folk songs of the lost provinces.

Peggy Brooks, enchanted, urged her to more active research through the neglected files of a memory still vivid; Philippa's voice was uncultivated, unplaced, but as fresh and carelessly sweet as a blackbird's in May. Some of these old ballads she had picked up from schoolmates, many from the Cabaret de Biribi, where clients were provincial and usually sentimental, and where some of the ancient songs were sung almost every day.

Madame de Moidrey had not immediately referred to Philippa when, with Warner, she had strolled out to the terrace, leaving the two younger girls together at the piano.

They had spoken of the sudden and unexpected menace of war, of the initial movements of troops along the Saïs Valley that morning; the serious chances of a German invasion, the practical certainty that in any event military operations were destined to embrace the country around them. Warner seemed very confident concerning the Barrier Forts, but he spoke of Montmedy and of Mézières with more reserve, and of Ausone not at all.

They promenaded for a few minutes longer in silence, each preoccupied with anxious speculations regarding a future which began already to loom heavy as a thundercloud charged with unloosed lightnings.

From moment to moment the handsome woman beside him glanced through the open windows of the music room, where her younger sister and the girl Philippa were still busily interested in working out accompaniments to the old-time songs.

Philippa sang "J'ai perdu ma beauté":

They paused to listen to this naïve melody of other days, then strolled on.

Madame de Moidrey said:

"She is very interesting, your little friend from Ausone."

"I am glad you think so."

"Oh, yes, there is no doubt about her being clever and intelligent… I wonder where she acquired her aplomb."

"Would you call it that?"

Madame de Moidrey smiled:

"No, it is a gentler quality – not devoid of sweetness. I think we may label it a becoming self-possession… Anyway, it is a quality and not a trait – if that pleases you."

"She has quality."

"She has a candor which is almost disturbingly transparent. When I was a girl I saw Gilbert's comedy, 'The Palace of Truth.' And actually, I believe that your little friend, Philippa, could have entered that terrible house of unconscious self-revelation without any need of worrying."

"You couldn't praise her more sincerely if you think that," he said. "She offers virgin soil for anybody who will take any trouble with her."

"Oh," said Madame de Moidrey, laughing, "I thought I was to engage her to aid me and amuse me; but it seems that I have been engaged to educate her in the subtler refinements of civilized existence!"

"Don't you want to?" asked Warner, bluntly.

"Dear friend of many more years than I choose to own to, have I not enough to occupy me without adopting a wandering caissière de cabaret?"

"Is that the way you feel?" he said, reddening.

"Don't be cross! No; it isn't the way I feel. I do need a companion. Perhaps your friend Philippa is not exactly the companion I might have dreamed about or aspired to – "

"If you look at it in that way – "

"Jim! Don't be rude, either! I desire two things; I want a companion and I wish to oblige you. You know perfectly well I do… Besides, the girl is interesting. You didn't expect me to sentimentalize over her, did you? You may do that if you like. As for me, I shall consider engaging her if she cares to come to me."

"She will be very glad to," he said, coolly.

Madame de Moidrey cast a swift side glance at him, full of curiosity and repressed amusement.

"Men," she said, "are the real sentimentalists in this matter-of-fact world, not women. Merely show a man a pretty specimen of the opposite sex in the conventional attitude of distress, and it unbalances his intellect immediately."

"Do you imagine that my youthful friend Philippa has unbalanced my intellect?" he asked impatiently.

"Not entirely. Not completely – "

"Nonsense!"

"What a bad-mannered creature you are, Jim! But fortunately you're something else, too. For example, you have been nice about this very unusual and somewhat perilously attractive young girl. Few men would have been so. Don't argue! I have known a few men in my time. And I pay you a compliment."

She stopped and leaned back against a weatherworn vase of stone which crowned the terrace parapet.

"Listen, Jim; for a woman to take into her house a young girl with this girl's unknown antecedents and perfectly well-known past performances ought not to be a matter of romantic impulse, or of sympathy alone. What you tell me about her, what I myself have already seen of her, are sufficient to inspire the interest which all romance arouses, and the sympathy which all lonely youth inspires. But these are not enough.

"Choice of companionship is a matter for serious consideration. You can't make a companion of the intellectually inferior, of one who possesses merely the lesser instincts, of any lesser nature, whether cultivated to its full extent or otherwise. You know that. We shun what is not congenial."

He looked at her very intently, the dull red still flushing his face; and she surveyed him critically, amiably, amused at his attitude, which was the epitome of everything masculine.

"What are you going to do about her?" he inquired at last.

"Offer to engage her."

"As what?"

"A companion."

"Oh. Then you do appreciate her?"

Madame de Moidrey threw back her pretty head and laughed with delicious abandon.

"Perhaps I don't appreciate her as deeply as you do, Jim, but I shall humbly endeavor to do so. Now, suppose, when you go back to the Golden Peach, you send Philippa's effects up here, and in the meanwhile I'll begin my duty of finishing Philippa's education – for which duty, I understand, I'm engaged by you – "

"Ethra, you are a trump! And I don't really mind your guying me – "

"Indeed, I'm not guying you, dear friend! I'm revealing to you the actual inwardness of this entire and remarkable performance of yours. And if you don't know that you are engaging me to finish this young girl's education while you're making up your mind about your sentiments concerning her, then it's time you did."

"That is utterly – "

"Please! And it's all the truer because you don't believe it! … Jim, the girl really is a pathetic figure – simple, sweet, intelligent, and touchingly honest… And I'll say another thing… God knows what mother bore her, what parents are responsible for this young thing – with her delicate features and slender body. But it was not from a pair of unhappy nobodies she inherited her mind, which seems to seek instinctively what is fine and right amid the sordid complexities of the only world she has ever known.

"As for her heart, Jim, it is the heart of a child – with one heavenly and exaggerated idol completely filling it. You! … And I tell you very plainly that, if I were a man, the knowledge of this would frighten me a little, and make me rather more serious than many men are inclined to be."

He bit his lip and looked out across the southern valley, where already the August haze was growing bluer, blurring the low-hanging sun.

She laid a friendly, intimate, half humorous hand on his arm:

"In all right-thinking men the boy can never die. No experience born of pain, no cynicism, no incredulity acquired through disappointment, can kill the boy in any man until it has first slain his soul. Otherwise, chivalry in the world had long since become extinct.

"You have done what you could do for Philippa. I am really glad to help you, Jim. But from now on, be very careful and very sure of yourself. Because now your real responsibility begins."

He had not thought of it in that way. And now he did not care to.

To sympathize, to protect, to admire – these were born of impulse and reason, which, in turn, had their origin in unconscious condescension.

To applaud the admirable, to express a warm concern for virtue in difficulties, meant merely sincere recognition, not the intimacy of that equality of mind and circumstance which existed per se between himself and such a woman as Madame de Moidrey.

The very word "protection" implies condescension, conscious or unconscious. We may love what we protect; we never, honestly, place it on a pedestal, or even on a mathematical level with ourselves. It can't be done.

And so, in a vague sort of way, Warner remained incredulous of the impossible with which Madame de Moidrey had smilingly menaced him.

Only, of course, she was quite right; he must not thoughtlessly arouse the woman in the girl Philippa.

But there is nothing in the world that ought more thoroughly to arouse the best qualities of manhood in a man than the innocent adoration of a young girl. For if he could really believe himself to be even a shadow of what she believes he is, the world might really become the most agreeable of residential planets.

As Warner and Madame de Moidrey entered the music room through the open French windows, Philippa turned from the piano and her soft voice died out in the quaint refrain she had been accompanying.

She rose instinctively, which was more than Peggy did, having no reverence for age in her own sister – and Madame de Moidrey came forward and took the girl's slender hands in hers.

"Have you concluded to remain with me?" she asked, smilingly.

"I did not understand that you had asked me," said the girl gravely.

"I do ask you."

Philippa looked at Warner, then lifted her grey eyes to the elder woman.

"You are very kind, Madame. I – it will be a great happiness to me if you accept my services."

The Countess de Moidrey regarded her, still retaining her hands, still smiling.

"You have a very sweet way of making the acceptance mine and not yours," she said. "Let us accept each other, Philippa. Will you?"

"You are most kind, Madame – "

"Can kindness win you?"

"Madame, it has already."

The American widow of the recent Count de Moidrey felt a curious sensation of uncertainty in the quiet self-possession of this young girl – in her serenity, in her modulated voice and undisturbed manner.

An odd idea persisted that the graciousness was not entirely on her own part; that there was something even more subtle than graciousness on the part of this girl, whose delicate hands lay, cool and smooth, within her own.

It was not manner, for there was none on Philippa's part; not reticence, for that argues a conscious effort or a still more conscious lack of effort. Perhaps, through the transparent simplicity of the girl, the older woman's intuition caught a glimpse of finer traditions than she herself had been born to – sensed the far, faint ring of finer and more ancient metal.

And after a moment she felt that courtesy, deference, and propinquity alone held Philippa's grave grey eyes; that the soul which looked fearlessly and calmly out of them at her could not be lightly flattered or lightly won; and that, released from their conventional duty, those clear eyes of grey would seek their earthly idol as logically as the magnetic needle swings to its magnet.

Very subtly, as she stood there, the sympathy of the older woman widened to include respect. And, unconsciously, she turned and looked at Warner with the amused and slightly malicious smile of a woman who detects in a man the characteristic obtuseness from which her own and feminine instinct has rescued her just in time to prevent mistakes.

Then, turning to Philippa, she said:

"Our family of three is a very small one, dear, but I think it is going to be a happy one… What was that song that you and Peggy were trying when we came in?"

"It is called 'Noblesse Oblige,' Madame. It is a very ancient song."

"It is as old as the world," said the Countess. "Peggy, will you try the accompaniment? And will you sing it, Philippa?"

"If you wish it, Madame."

The Countess de Moidrey stepped aside and seated herself; the grey eyes left her to seek and find their magnet; and, having found it, smiled.

As for the magnet himself, he stood there deep in perplexity and trouble, beginning slowly to realize how profoundly his mind and affections had already become involved in the fate of a very young girl, and in the problems of life which must now begin to threaten and confront her.

sang Philippa —

The Countess de Moidrey rested her face on her hand, looking curiously at the young girl from whose lips the old phrase fell so naturally, so confidently, with such effortless and inborn understanding —noblesse – noblesse oblige.

CHAPTER XXIII

Philippa's trunk had gone to the Château des Oiseaux, and the Inn of the Golden Peach knew her no longer.

Warner, who usually adored the prospect of a month all alone after his class had left for the season, found to his surprise that he was experiencing a slight sense of loneliness.

The inn, the garden, seemed to him uncommonly still; and at first he thought he missed the gallinaceous chatter of the Harem, then he was very sure that he regretted Halkett acutely.

Ariadne, sitting in the sun by the deserted summer-house in the garden, always greeted him with a plaintive little mew which, somehow or other, sounded to him pointedly reproachful.

The cat evidently missed Halkett, perhaps Philippa. Warner remembered that he had been requested to be polite and agreeable to Ariadne, and, whenever he recollected these obligations, he dutifully hoisted the animal to his shoulder and promenaded her. For which, no doubt, the cat was grateful, but as she was also beginning to shed her coat in preparation for a brand-new set of winter furs, Warner found the intimacy with Ariadne slightly trying.

There were no other guests at the inn. Now and then during the next three or four days officers stopped their automobiles for a few moments' refreshment, or to replenish their gasoline tanks. But early one morning a big motor truck, driven by a little, red-legged, boyish pioupiou, and guarded by three others, equally youthful, took away the entire supply of gasoline and ordered Madame Arlon to remove the sign advertising it.

They drove away through the early autumn sunshine, singing the "Adoro," not the one best known, but that version attributed to the Scottish Queen, and they looked and sang like three little choir boys masquerading in the uniforms of their fathers.

Warner had been sketching in the meadow across the road that day, feeling restless and unaccountably depressed. It was one of those still, hazy mornings in early August, when the world seems too quiet and the sky too perfect for inaction or repose.

He had pitched his easel near the river, perhaps because it remained busy; and where, if any troops or military trains passed along the quarry road, he could see them. Also, from there he could look down over the road hedge and see the motor cycles whiz by and military automobiles with a streak of crimson, turquoise and silver uniforms in the tonneau.

But none came. Two or three gendarmes, with white and yellow trappings, passed toward Ausone at a gallop while he sat there, but across the river nothing stirred save a kestrel soaring.

According to the Petit Journal d'Ausone of the day before, war had already burst over eastern Belgium full blast and the famous forts so long celebrated as impregnable were beginning to crumble away under an avalanche of gigantic shells.

As he sat there under the calm sky, painting leisurely, relighting his pipe at intervals, he tried to realize that such things as bombardments and sieges and battles were going on to the north of where he was – not so very far north, either. But he could not seem to grasp it as an actual fact. For the monstrous and imbecile actuality of such a war seemed still to remain outside his comprehension; his intelligence had not yet accepted it – not encompassed and digested the fact – and he could not get rid of the hopefully haunting feeling that presently somebody or something somewhere or other would stop all this amazing insanity, and that the diplomats would begin again where they had left off only a few days ago.