



Produced by Al Haines








The Old Blood


By FREDERICK PALMER


AUTHOR OF

"The Last Shot," "My Year of the Great War," Etc.




A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers ---- New York


Published by Arrangements with DODD, MEAD & COMPANY




COPYRIGHT, 1916,

By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

      I  A HOME-COMING
     II  TWO GIRLS ON A TRAIN
    III  AN INVITATION
     IV  TOO MUCH ANCESTOR
      V  THE FLAVOUR OF GRAPES
     VI  AT MERVAUX
    VII  A FULL-FACE PORTRAIT
   VIII  ANOTHER PHASE OF HELEN
     IX  A MESSAGE FROM ALSACE
      X  THE VOICE AT HIS ELBOW
     XI  SHE SAID, "YES!"
    XII  THE GUNS SPEAK
   XIII  A MATTER OF GALLANTRY
    XIV  "IF I WISH IT!"
     XV  HELEN ASKS A FAVOUR
    XVI  A CHANGE OF PLANS
   XVII  UNDER FIRE
  XVIII  A RUN FOR IT
    XIX  A CHOICE OF BILLETS
     XX  UNDER ARREST
    XXI  A BIT FROM THE MOVIES
   XXII  VICTORY!
  XXIII  LONGFIELD DECIDES
   XXIV  HELEN ARRIVES
    XXV  HENRIETTE WAITS
   XXVI  A DIRECT HIT
  XXVII  A SMILING HELEN
 XXVIII  A "SITTING CASE"
   XXIX  IN HER PLACE AGAIN
    XXX  PETER SMITHERS IN ACTION
   XXXI  A THOUGHT FOR HELEN
  XXXII  LIGHT
 XXXIII  SPINNING WEBS




THE OLD BLOOD



CHAPTER I

A HOME-COMING

Perhaps a real story-teller, who leaps into the heart of things, would
have begun this story in France instead of with a railroad journey from
the Southwest to New England; perhaps he would have taken the view of
"our Philip's" mother that Phil fought the whole war in Europe himself;
perhaps given the story the name of "The Plain Girl," leaving Phil
secondary place.

A veracious chronicler, consulting Phil's wishes, makes his beginning
with a spring afternoon of 1914, when the Berkshire <DW72>s were
dripping and glistening and smiling and the air, washed by showers and
purified by a burst of sunshine, was like some rare vintage which might
be drunk only on the premises.

Complaining in a familiar way as it followed the course of a winding
stream, which laughed in flashes of pearly white over rocky shallows,
the train ran out into a broad valley--the home valley.  Not a road
that he had not tramped over; not a woodland path that he did not know;
not a mountain trail that he had not climbed.  The scene was bred in
his blood.

If Bill Hurley were at the station the auguries would be right, and
there he was, standing on the same spot where he had stood for twenty
years when the trains arrived; there, too, the stooped old station
agent in his moment of bustling importance.  By the calendar of Bill's
chin it was Tuesday; for Bill shaved only on Sunday and Wednesday
afternoons.  A man of observation and opinion this keeper of the gate
of Longfield, who let the world come to him and took charge of its
baggage and conveyed its persons to their destinations.  He was also a
dispenser of news.

"The Jerrods have got that new porch," he said.  "They'd been talking
about it so long that they're sort of lost-minded and dumb these days.
And Hanks has put in a new soda fountain and plate glass windows.
Ambitious man, Hanks.  Nothing can keep him from branching out."

"And nothing can change you, Bill."

"Me?  I guess not.  May wither a little when the winters are hard, but
you'll find me here fifty years from now.  H-m-m!" after looking Phil
over.  "Bound to happen to young fellers out of college.  Noticed it
often.  Something rubbed off you and something rubbed in out West, I
jedge."

"You have it--and in one of your epigrams, as usual," Phil agreed.

"Folks do say that I have a tolerable understanding of human nature,
not to mention a sententious way of saying things, which I've always
said comes from handling trunks.  Hear you're going to Europe."

"Always well informed!" Phil affirmed.

"Never denied it.  Well, you've earned the trip.  Three years out
there.  Made good, too, everybody says.  Soon as you've seen your folks
and eat your veal, you and me must have a talk about old times.  Trunk
and suit case?  Right!  Have 'em up in a quarter of an hour."

Beyond the station was the old wooden bridge, which spanned the river
here running deep and sluggish under drooping, solicitous willows.
Then the avenue of maples; and at the end of the vista of deep shade,
in the bright light of the little square, the statue of a strenuous
gentleman in bronze who, sword in hand, was charging British redcoats.
For Longfield had a real work of art, though not all Longfield
appreciated the fact yet and certain Puritan sections were inclined to
regard anything called a work of art with suspicion.

In boyhood Phil had heard so much about the hero at home that he seemed
a bore.  To-day that spirited, indomitable figure gave him a thrill.
With a fresh eye he realised its quality and something deeper than that
in a wave of personal gratitude to a famous sculptor, also a son of
Longfield, known in other lands where the ancestor was unknown, who had
taken the commission out of civic pride for a small fee and the
satisfaction of putting his best into a chivalrous subject after having
received a large fee for doing a statesman in a frock for the grounds
of a State capital.

Phil recalled how his father and mother and the Sons of the Revolution,
and also the Daughters thereof, had favoured a full Continental uniform
for the hero.  But the sculptor had had enough of coats.  Not lacking
in that pithiness of expression which is salad to genius, he had told
the family and societies and committees and all such that either he
would have his way or they could employ a mortuary chiseller and a
tailor, who would gratify their conceptions of martial dignity by
clothing a gallant gentleman who had fought free-limbed on a hot August
day in an overcoat, muffler and mittens and two suits of underclothes,
which would have meant death to freedom from sunstroke and that the
Declaration of Independence might be a relic in the British Museum.

Coatless, hatless, sleeves rolled and shirt open at the throat, young
and lean, with every fibre attuned to conflict, the "rebel" who had
helped to found a nation now served the purpose not of stopping a
British charge, but of bringing touring automobiles to a standstill
while their occupants appreciated, either by virtue of their own taste
or by the desire to be in fashion with the taste of their superiors,
what many considered to be the best work of a master, in contrast with
the graveyard effigies, which had the martial spirit of Alaskan totem
poles, from the same mould in other squares, to glorify the deeds of
local regiments in the Civil War.

Longfield was proud of the statue because it attracted so much
attention and because it was Longfield's and yet resentful because it
attracted more attention than the elms.  Tourists thought that other
villages had equally as noble elms as Longfield--equally patched and
scarred.  Longfield knew better.  Its elms were without comparison.
From the selectmen's point of view the cost of nursing was
considerable, too, which gave further merit over the statue, which cost
nothing for upkeep.

Besides, the elms were old when the hero was a child.  They marked the
epoch of the village's birth, even as the maples marked that of the
railroad's coming.  Nothing in Old England is quite as old as New
England.  Not even the pyramids are as old as a New England elm.
Europe may repair and renovate cathedrals; New England repairs and
renovates elms.  The Puritan Fathers planted trees on such broad main
streets as that of Longfield, with stretches of green border of old
turf now curving around the massive trunks that supported their stately
plumes--a street which Phil saw in its age, its serenity and its spring
freshness with the appreciation of one come from the Southwest, plus
the call of old association which absence strengthens.  To him the
Berkshires were the hills of all hills; Longfield the village of
villages; this street the street of streets; and the most majestic elm
stood beside a path which led to the house of houses.  Home-coming had
kindled his sentiment.  He had been long enough out of college not to
be ashamed of a little of it, if he did not have to mention it to
anybody.

It was this mood in its desire to find all home pictures unchanged that
had kept him from naming his train; and he had taken one arriving in
the afternoon in the hope of witnessing the scene which was set for
that hour in the routine of the Reverend Doctor and Mrs. Sanford, of
Longfield.  Their chairs in the accustomed places on the porch, the
father was reading and the mother sewing in their conscious and
unspoken companionship.  What a delightful pair of sequestered old
dears they were!  How worldly he felt beside them!

They had not heard his steps.  He paused until his mother should see
him, for he knew that she would be the first to look up.  When she did,
her little outcry, as she put her hand impulsively on the doctor's knee
to draw the attention of an absent-minded husband, was also entirely in
keeping with his anticipation and with the dependability of habit in
Longfield, which was not the least of its charms.  She was well on her
way to meet him before his father had taken off his spectacles and
placed the marker in his book.  After Philip had embraced them they
were silent, taking in the reality of him who had been so long absent
and possibly a little awed at the presence of this sturdy, tanned only
son--come to them late when they had almost given up ever having any
children--who had been out battling with that world which was confusing
and forbidding to them.

He slipped his arm around his mother's waist.  She took his hand in
hers with a fluttering of mothering impulse, as he directed their steps
by the side path which led to the garden, while the father, brought up
the rear.

"You've been successful, Phillie," she said, the thought uppermost in
mind coming out first.  "It was such an undertaking and we're so
pleased."  She might have said proud, but that was a vain word.
Self-warned about the weakness of parents with only sons, it had been
her rule never to spoil Phil with praise.

"Yes, I've done pretty well for a----" and he glanced around at his
father in the freemasonry of a settled comradeship.

"For a minister's son!" put in the father, chuckling.

"I had to," Philip proceeded.  "I was right up against it.  It was
rough stuff at first and Mexico the limit!"

"What language!" exclaimed the father, who could be a purist on
occasion.

"Very expressive!" said the mother, defending her son.  "It must have
been rough, indeed."  She would have forgiven Philip if he had said
damn that afternoon.

"In other words," observed the Reverend Dr. Sanford, "when it came to
the rough stuff Philip was no piker!  I've been studying up so as to
make you feel at home," he added, with another chuckle.

"What do you think my first job was?" Phil said.  "I didn't tell you
that.  It was cleaning out cattle cars."

"Oh, Phil, no!"  She looked down at her son's hands as if wondering how
such horrors could be.

"He has washed them since," observed the father.

"Now you're both up to your old tricks, teasing me!" she said
admonishingly.  "And, Phillie"--she pressed a point of unsatisfied
maternal curiosity which his letters had never answered--"you never
told us why it was that you did not go to work for Peter--that is, your
side of it.  You seem to have had a quarrel with him."

In a sense Peter Smithers was one of the Sanford family.  He had been a
clever village boy whom Phil's grandfather had taken under his wing
some forty years ago, and the type of clever village boy who does not
need sheltering wings for long.  Middle age found him the head of a
great manufacturing business in New Jersey.  Hieing homeward, New
England fashion, he had built himself a big country place back in the
hills, which he referred to as "my little farm."  People spoke of him
as a millionaire, but he insisted that he was dirt poor.  He was a
bachelor, with no heirs, a fact which Mrs. Sanford, more practical than
the clergyman, could never forget when she thought of the future of her
son.

"What was Peter's side?" Phil asked.

"He said that you didn't want to begin at the bottom of the ladder."

"And yet he began at the bottom of a cattle car," said the father.

"I didn't mind a humble beginning," said Phil, "but from the way that
Peter spoke I was afraid there wasn't in his establishment a place so
humble but if I took it I might be the ruin of his business.  You see,
mother, I was cleaning out those cattle cars on the orders of a
stranger.  I knew that he was not hiring me because my grandfather had
done him a favour."

"Peter did not mean it that way.  It's only his manner," persisted his
mother.  "I think he was really hurt about it.  I suppose you know that
he is going to give all his money for founding a school and club for
his employees.  He talks of nothing else."

"I can hear him, mother."

But there Peter and his eccentricities and philanthropic projects
vanished from mind at sight of an expense of gingham apron filling the
kitchen doorway and covering the ample form of Jane, grinning and
beneficent, who, as she herself said, was no skittish young thing who
didn't know a good place when she had it, which accounted for the
Sanfords having retained their general houseworker.

Diplomacy and gratitude demanded that homage be paid to Jane; and
affection which began with childhood greeted Patrick, the gardener,
leaning on his hoe and sucking in his pipe, as Phil had seen him a
thousand times.  Unchanged the garden with its bounteous colour, its
perfume, and green and budding and flowering promise of plenty in that
little world walled in by larches from the neighbours on either side in
the village world in turn walled in by the hills, gone golden in high
lights and dark in shadows in the recesses of the woods with the
lowering slant of the sun's rays.

"There is no place like it," said Phil.  "My roots are in this soil as
deep as the elms."

Unchanged Patrick, whose articulation was sufficient indication without
explanation that he had not yet brought himself to wear store teeth
except at funerals and on Sundays, or on any other occasion when he
wore a starched collar.

"Strawberries are ripe," said Jane.  "Do you still like strawberry
shortcake, Phillie?"

"M-m-m--yes!"

"That sounds natural.  It's the way you used to say it when you was
little.  Lord, but you did have an appetite down to your soles!  Now,
see here----"  Jane squared herself, eyeing him very sternly.

"Yes, Jane?"

"Do you think that your mother can make better strawberry shortcake
than me?"

"Jane, the