The Girl Philippa

CHAPTER XXXIV

Dinner was ended.

Gray had retired to his room, persuaded by Madame de Moidrey, who bribed him by promising to read to him when he was tired of talking shop to Captain Halkett.

Sister Eila had returned to the east wing, which was convenient to her business as well as to her devotions.

Also, she had need of Father Chalus, who had come all the way from Dreslin on foot. For it was included in the duty of the parish priest to confess both Sister Eila and Sister Félicité; only the sudden perils and exigencies of home duties in Dreslin had detained him since the war broke out.

He was old, lean, deeply worn in the service of the poor – a white-haired man who looked out on the world through kindly blue eyes dimmed by threescore years of smoky candlelight and the fine print of breviaries – a priest devotedly loved in Dreslin, and by the household of the Château, and by every inhabitant of the scattered farms composing the little hamlet called Saïs.

It appeared that Sister Eila had great need of Father Chalus, for they had gone away together, into the eastern wing of the house. And the Countess, noticing their departure, smiled to herself; for, like everybody else, she was skeptical regarding the reality of any sins that Sister Eila might have to confess.

The young Vicomte d'Aurès had taken his leave with all the unspoiled, unembarrassed, and boyish cordiality characteristic of his race; also he departed in a state of mind so perfectly transparent to anybody who cared to notice it that Madame de Moidrey retired to the billiard room after his departure, looking very serious. She became more serious still when Peggy did not appear from the southern terrace, whither she had returned to mention something to Monsieur D'Aurès which she had apparently forgotten to say to him in the prolonged ceremony of leavetaking.

When fifteen minutes elapsed and no Peggy appeared, Madame de Moidrey rose from her chair, flushed and unsmiling. But before she had taken a dozen steps toward the southern terrace her younger sister reappeared, walking rapidly. When she caught sight of the Countess advancing, she halted and gazed at her sister rather blankly.

"Well, Peggy?"

"Well?"

"I am not criticising you or that boy, but perhaps a little more reticence – repose of manner – reserve – "

"Ethra," she said in an awed voice, "I am in love with D'Aurès."

"What!"

"I am. It came."

"Good heavens, Peggy – "

"I know! I said 'good heavens,' too – I mean I thought it. I don't know what I've been saying this evening – "

"When? Where?"

"Everywhere. Just now, on the terrace – "

"Peggy!"

"What?"

"You didn't say anything that could be – "

"Yes, I did. I think he knows I'm in love with him. I meant him to know!"

"Peggy!"

"Oh, Ethra, I don't remember what I said… And I think he cares for me – I think we're in love with each other – "

The girl dropped into a chair and stared at her sister.

"I'm bewitched, I think. Ever since I saw him that first time it's been so. I've thought of him all the time… He says that it was so with him, also – "'

"Oh, heavens, Peggy! Are you mad? Is he? You're acting like a pair of crazy children – "

"We are children. He's only a boy. But I know he's growing into the only man who could ever mean anything to me… He's writing to his father now. I expect his father will write to you. Isn't it wonderful!"

Ethra de Moidrey gazed at her sister dizzily. The girl sat with her face between her hands looking steadily at the carpet. After a moment she glanced up.

"It's the way you fell in love," she said under her breath.

Madame de Moidrey rose abruptly, as though a sudden shaft of pain had pierced her. Then, walking over to her sister, she dropped one hand on her dark head; stroked the thick, lustrous hair gently, absently; stood very silent, gazing into space.

When Peggy stood up the Countess encircled her waist with one arm. They walked together slowly toward the southern terrace.

A million stars had come out in the sky; there was a scent of lilies lingering above the gardens. Sounds from distant bivouacs came to their ears; no camp fires were visible, but the Récollette glittered like snow in the white glare of searchlights.

"That boy," said Peggy, " – wherever he is riding out there in the night – out there under the stars – that boy carries my heart with him… I always thought that if it ever came it would come like this… I thought it would never come… But it has."

Halkett, returning from a conference with Warner and Gray, came out on the terrace to take his leave. They asked him to return when he could; promised to visit the sheds and see the Bristol biplane.

Part way down the steps he turned and came back, asked permission to leave his adieux with them for Sister Eila from whom he had not had an opportunity to take his leave, turned again and went away into the night, using his flashlight along the unfamiliar drive.

Ethra de Moidrey went into the house to keep her promise to Gray, and found him tired but none the worse for his participation at dinner.

Philippa and Warner had come in to visit him; the Countess found the book from which she had been reading to him since his arrival. He turned on his pillow and looked at her, and she seated herself beside the bed and opened the book on her knees.

"Do you remember where we left off?" she asked, smiling.

"I think it was where he was beginning to fall in love with her."

The Countess de Moidrey bent over the book. There was a slight color in her cheeks.

"I had not noticed that he was falling in love," she observed, turning the pages to find her place.

Philippa said to Warner:

"Could we walk down and see the searchlights? They are so wonderful on the water."

"Probably the sentinels won't permit us outside our own gates," he replied. "I know one thing; if you and I were not considered as part of the family of the Château, the military police would make us clear out. It's lucky I left the inn to come up here."

The Countess had begun reading in a low, soft voice, bending over her book beside the little lamp at the bedside, where Gray lay watching her under a hand that shaded his pallid face.

Something in her attitude and his, perhaps – or in her quiet voice – seemed subtly, to Philippa, to exclude her and the man with her from a silent entente too delicate, perhaps, to term an intimacy.

She touched Warner's arm, warily, not taking it into her possession as had been her unembarrassed custom only yesterday – even that very day.

Together they went out into the corridor, down the stairway, and presently discovered Peggy on the southern terrace gazing very earnestly at the stars.

That the young girl was wrapped, enmeshed, in the magic of the great web which Fate has been spinning since time began, they did not know.

Still stargazing, they left her and walked down the dark drive to the lodge where, through the iron grille, they saw hussars en vedette sitting their horses in the uncertain luster of the planets.

Overhead the dark foliage had begun to stir and sigh in the night breeze; now and again a yellowing leaf fell, rustling slightly; and they thought they could hear the Récollette among its rushes – the faintest murmur – but were not sure.

He remembered her song, there in the river meadow:

And thought of the white shape on the bank – a true folk song, unfinished in its eerie suggestion which the imagination of the listeners must always finish.

Yet he said:

"Was he killed – that vedette on the Récollette, Philippa?"

She knew what he meant, smiled faintly:

"Does anybody see Death and live to say so?"

"Of course I knew," he said.

They turned back, walking slowly. He had drawn her arm through his, but it rested there very lightly, scarcely in contact at all.

"What a fine fellow Halkett is!" he said.

"Your friends should be fine, Jim. Our friends ought to reflect our own qualities and mirror our aspirations… That was written in one of my school-books," she added with that delicate honesty which characterized her.

"You reflect my aspirations," he said, unsmiling.

"Oh, Jim! I? Do you imagine I believe that?"

"You might as well. It's true enough. You have just mirrored for me my hopeless aspiration toward that perfect and transparent honesty which I haven't attained, but which seems always to have been a part of you."

Sister Eila passed them in the starlight, her young head bent over the rosary in her hands, moving slowly across the lawn.

Their passing on the drive did not seem to arouse her from her meditation; she seated herself on a stone bench under a clump of yews; and they moved on in silence.

As they reached the terrace a shot sounded down by the river; another echoed it; the rattle of rifle fire ran along the valley from, north to south; a rocket rose, flooding the hill beyond the quarry road with a ghastly light.

Peggy Brooks, white as death, came over to Philippa and took her hands into both of hers.

She had begun to learn what love meant, with the first blind shot in the dark, and all the passion and fear within her was concentrated in wondering where those leaden messengers of death had found their billets.

She said in a ghost of a voice:

"Is there going to be a battle here?"

"Not now," replied Warner. "Probably it's nothing at all – some nervous sentry waking up his equally nervous comrades… What a horrible light that rocket shed!"

The shots had died away; there was no more firing.

Vignier had come around; he was an old soldier, and Warner spoke to him.

"Perhaps a cow," he said with a shrug, " – the wind in the bushes – a hedgehog rustling. Young soldiers are like that in the beginning. And still, perhaps they have caught a prowler out there – an Uhlan, maybe, or a spy. One never knows what to expect at night."

"Do you think that our valley will see any fighting, Vignier?"

"Does that not depend, Monsieur, on what is to happen beyond the Vosges? They have dug line after line of trenches across the valley and the plateau as far as Dreslin. Those are positions being prepared in advance, to fall back upon in case of disaster in the east."

"I thought that was what this trench digging meant."

"That is what it means, Monsieur Warner. They tell me that our soldiers are going to operate the cement works day and night to turn out material for platforms and emplacements. I know that they have gone into our western woods with loads of cement and crushed stone. The forest is full of fantassins and chasseurs-à-pied. It is certain that some general will make our Château his headquarters en passant."

He had scarcely spoken when, far away in the darkness, a noise arose. It came from the direction of the lodge gate, grew nearer, approaching by the drive.

The Countess, reading to Gray, heard it, laid down her book to listen. Gray listened too, raising himself on his pillows.

"Cavalry have entered the grounds," he said quietly.

"I shall have to go down," she said. At the door she paused: "Will you remember where we left off, Captain Gray?"

"I shall remember. It is where he has completely fallen in love with her."

The Countess de Moidrey met his calm gaze, sustained it for a moment, then with a smile and a nod of adieu she turned and went out into the corridor. As she descended the stairs she placed both hands against her cheeks, which burned slightly.

The hall below was already crowded with officers of somebody's staff; the pale blue tunics of chasseurs and hussars were conspicuous against the darker dress of dragoons. The silver corselet of a colonel of cuirassiers glittered in the lamplight; twisted gold arabesques glimmered on crimson caps and sleeves; the ring of spur and hilt and the clash of accouterments filled the house.

As the Countess set foot in the hall, a general officer wearing the cross of the Legion came forward, his red cap, heavy with gold, in his gloved hand.

"Countess," he said, bending over the hand which she smilingly extended, "a thousand excuses could not begin to make amends for our intrusion – "

"General, you honor my roof. Surely you must understand the happiness that I experience in reminding you that the house of De Moidrey belongs to France and to the humblest and highest of her defenders."

The General, whose clipped mustache and imperial were snow-white, and whose firm, bronzed features denied his years, bent again over the pretty hand that rested on his own.

Then, asking permission to name himself, in turn he presented the members of his military family.

Included was a thin blond man of middle height, with a golden mustache twisted up, cinder-blond hair, and conspicuous ears. He wore a monocle, and was clothed in a green uniform. General of Division Delisle presented him as Major-General Count Cassilis, the Russian Military Observer attached to division headquarters.

For a few moments there was much bending of tight-waisted tunics in the yellow lamplight, much jingling of spurs and sabers, compliments spoken and implied with a gay smile and bow – all the graceful, easy formality to be expected in such an extemporized gathering.

Peggy and Philippa appeared, followed by Warner; presentations were effected; servants arranged chairs and brought trays set with bottles of light wine and biscuits, preliminary to an improvised supper which was now being prepared in the kitchen.

General Raoul Delisle had known Colonel de Moidrey; he and the Countess formed the center of the brilliant little assembly where half a dozen officers surrounded Peggy and Warner.

But the effect of Philippa on the Russian Military Observer, General Count Cassilis, was curious to watch.

From the instant he laid eyes on her, he had continued to look at her; and his inspection would have had all the insolence of a stare had he not always averted his gaze when hers moved in his direction.

When he had been named to her, he had bowed suavely, and with characteristic Russian ceremony and empressement; but the instant her name was pronounced the Russian Observer had straightened himself like a steel rod released from a hidden spring, and his fishy blue eyes widened so that his monocle had fallen from its place to swing dangling across the jeweled decorations on his breast.

And now he had managed to approach Philippa and slightly separate her from the company, detaining her in conversation, more suave, more amiably correct than ever.

Already in her inexperience with a world where such men are to be expected, the girl found herself vaguely embarrassed, subtly on the defensive – a defensive against something occult which somehow or other seemed to menace her privacy and seemed to be meddling with the natural reticence with which, instinctively, she protected herself from any explanation of her past life.

Not that Count Cassilis had presumed to ask any direct question; she was not even aware of any hint or innuendo; yet she was constantly finding herself confronted with a slight difficulty in responding to his gay, polite, and apparently impersonal remarks. Somehow, everything he said seemed to involve some reference on her part to a past which now concerned nobody excepting herself and the loyal friends who comprehended it.

And, from the beginning, from the first moment when this man was presented to her, and she had looked up with a smile to acknowledge the introduction, she experienced an indefinite sensation of meeting somebody whom she had seen somewhere years before – years and years ago.

As he conversed with her, standing there by the table with the lighted lamp partly concealed by his gold-slashed shoulder, the vague impression of something familiar but long forgotten came at moments, faded, returned, only to disappear again.

And once, a far, pale flicker of memory played an odd trick on her, for suddenly she seemed to remember a pair of thin, conspicuous ears like his, and lamplight – or perhaps sunlight – shining behind them and turning them a translucent red. It came and vanished like the faint memory of a dream dreamed years and years ago. As she looked at Count Cassilis, the smile died out in her eyes and on her lips, and the slightest feeling of discomfort invaded her.

Toasts were offered, acknowledged, compliments said, glasses emptied.

The General of Division Delisle spoke diffidently of quarters for himself and his military family, and was cordially reassured by the Countess.

There was plenty of room for all. It was evident, too, that they had ridden far and must be hungry. Servants were summoned, rooms in the east wing thrown open to the air; the kitchen stirred up to increased activity for the emergency; the officers piloted to the rooms assigned them.

Down on the drive a shadowy escort of hussars waited until an orderly appeared, shining, with his breast torch, the path to the stables.

Then three sky-guns jolted up out of the darkness and halted; a company of infantry tramped by toward the garage; the horses of the staff were led away by mounted gendarmes; and three big military touring cars, their hoods and glass windows grey with dust, began to purr and pant and crawl slowly after the infantry.

Everywhere sentries were being set, taking post on every terrace, every path and road, and before the doorways of the great house.

A single candle burned in the chapel. Beside it sat Sister Eila, intent on her breviary, her lips moving silently as she bent above it.

The fifth part of the breviary, Matins, Lauds, and the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, absorbed her.

The whole of the breviary services, the duty of publicly joining or of privately reading aloud so as to utter with the lips every word, is generally incumbent upon all members of religious orders.

But Sisters of Charity, forming as they do an activereligious order, are excepted.

Nevertheless, they are always bound to some shorter substitute, such as the Little Office, or to some similar office. And though the hours for devotion are prescribed, the duties of mercy sometimes interrupt the schedule which must then be carried out as circumstances of necessity permit.

Philippa, entering the chapel, caught sight of Sister Eila, and knelt without disturbing her.

The girl had experienced an odd, unaccustomed, and suddenly imperative desire for the stillness of an altar, for its shelter; for that silent security that reigns beneath the crucifix and invites the meditation of the pure in heart.

How long she had been seated there in the shadows she did not know, but presently she became aware of Sister Eila beside her, resting against her as though fatigued.

The girl put her arm around Sister Eila's neck instinctively, and drew the drooping head against her shoulder.

They had not known each other well.

That was the beginning.

CHAPTER XXXV

The growling and muttering of German guns in the north and northeast awoke Warner in his bed.

Sunrise plated his walls and ceiling with gold; the morning air hummed with indefinite sounds and rumors, the confusion and movement of many people stirring.

He stood for a moment by his window looking down over the plateau and across the valley of the Récollette.

Everywhere cavalry, infantry, artillery, baggage trains, automobiles, bicycles, motor cycles were moving slowly eastward into the blazing eye of the rising sun and vanishing within its blinding glory.

Two French aëroplanes had taken the air. They came soaring over the valley from the plateau, filling the air with the high clatter of their machinery; pale green ribbons of smoke fell from them, uncoiling like thin strips of silk against the sky; flag signals were being exchanged between officers gathered on the terrace below and a group of soldiers at the head of the nearest pontoon across the river.

Poles supporting field telephone and telegraph wires stretched across the lawn, running south toward the lodge gate. Another line ran east, another west.

Parked on the lawn were a dozen big automobiles, the chauffeurs at the wheels, the engines running. Behind these, soldier cyclists and motor cyclists sat cross-legged by their machines, exchanging gossip with a squadron of hussars drawn up on the other side of the drive.

There were no tents visible anywhere, but everywhere in the open soldiers were erecting odd-looking skeleton shelters and covering them with freshly cut green boughs from the woods. Under one of these an automobile was already standing, and under others hussars stood to horse.

Across the rolling country, stretching over valley and plateau, the face of the green and golden earth was striped, as though some giant plow had turned furrows at random here and there, some widely separated from the rest, others parallel and within a few yards of one another. A few dark figures appeared along these furrows of raw earth, moved about, disappeared. It was evident that the trenches of these prepared positions were still in process of construction, for carts were being driven to and from them and men were visible working near some of them.