The row down at the river house was more noise than fight, so far as results seemed to indicate. It was all about a small dame jeanne of fine brandy, which an Indian by the name of Long-Hair had seized and run off with at the height of the carousal. He must have been soberer than his pursuers, or naturally fleeter; for not one of them could catch him, or even keep long in sight of him. Some pistols were emptied while the race was on, and two or three of the men swore roundly to having seen Long-Hair jump sidewise and stagger, as if one of the shots had taken effect. But, although the moon was shining, he someway disappeared, they could not understand just how, far down beside the river below the fort and the church.
It was not a very uncommon thing for an Indian to steal what he wanted, and in most cases light punishment followed conviction; but it was felt to be a capital offense for an Indian or anybody else to rape a demijohn of fine brandy, especially one sent as a present, by a friend in New Orleans, to Lieutenant Governor Abbott, who had until recently been the commandant of the post. Every man at the river house recognized and resented the enormity of Long-Hair's crime and each was, for the moment, ready to be his judge and his executioner. He had broken at once every rule of frontier etiquette and every bond of sympathy. Nor was Long-Hair ignorant of the danger involved in his daring enterprise. He had beforehand carefully and stolidly weighed all the conditions, and true to his Indian nature, had concluded that a little wicker covered bottle of brandy was well worth the risk of his life. So he had put himself in condition for a great race by slipping out and getting rid of his weapons and all surplus weight of clothes.
This incident brought the drinking bout at the river house to a sudden end; but nothing further came of it that night, and no record of it would be found in these pages, but for the fact that Long-Hair afterwards became an important character in the stirring historical drama which had old Vincennes for its center of energy.
Rene de Ronville probably felt himself in bad luck when he arrived at the river house just too late to share in the liquor or to join in chasing the bold thief. He listened with interest, however, to the story of Long-Hair's capture of the commandant's demijohn and could not refrain from saying that if he had been present there would have been a quite different result.
"I would have shot him before he got to that door," he said, drawing his heavy flint-lock pistol and going through the motions of one aiming quickly and firing. Indeed, so vigorously in earnest was he with the pantomime, that he actually did fire, unintentionally of course,—the ball burying itself in the door-jamb.
He was laughed at by those present for being more excited than they who witnessed the whole thing. One of them, a leathery-faced and grizzled old sinner, leered at him contemptuously and said in queer French, with a curious accent caught from long use of backwoods English:
"Listen how the boy brags! Ye might think, to hear Rene talk, that he actually amounted to a big pile."
This personage was known to every soul in Vincennes as Oncle Jazon, and when Oncle Jazon spoke the whole town felt bound to listen.
"An' how well he shoots, too," he added with an intolerable wink; "aimed at the door and hit the post. Certainly Long-Hair would have been in great danger! O yes, he'd 'ave killed Long-Hair at the first shot, wouldn't he though!"
Oncle Jazon had the air of a large man, but the stature of a small one; in fact he was shriveled bodily to a degree which suggested comparison with a sun-dried wisp of hickory bark; and when he chuckled, as he was now doing, his mouth puckered itself until it looked like a scar on his face. From cap to moccasins he had every mark significant of a desperate character; and yet there was about him something that instantly commanded the confidence of rough men,—the look of self-sufficiency and superior capability always to be found in connection with immense will power. His sixty years of exposure, hardship, and danger seemed to have but toughened his physique and strengthened his vitality. Out of his small hazel eyes gleamed a light as keen as ice.
"All right, Oncle Jazon," said Rene laughing and blowing the smoke out of his pistol; "'twas you all the same who let Long-Hair trot off with the Governor's brandy, not I. If you could have hit even a door-post it might have been better."
Oncle Jazon took off his cap and looked down into it in a way he had when about to say something final.
"Ventrebleu! I did not shoot at Long-Hair at all," he said, speaking slowly, "because the scoundrel was unarmed. He didn't have on even a knife, and he was havin' enough to do dodgin' the bullets that the rest of 'em were plumpin' at 'im without any compliments from me to bother 'im more."
"Well," Rene replied, turning away with a laugh, "if I'd been scalped by the Indians, as you have, I don't think there would be any particular reason why I should wait for an Indian thief to go and arm himself before I accepted him as a target."
Oncle Jazon lifted a hand involuntarily and rubbed his scalpless crown; then he chuckled with a grotesque grimace as if the recollection of having his head skinned were the funniest thing imaginable.
"When you've killed as many of 'em as Oncle Jazon has," remarked a bystander to Rene, "you'll not be so hungry for blood, maybe."
"Especially after ye've took fifty-nine scalps to pay for yer one," added Oncle Jazon, replacing his cap over the hairless area of his crown.
The men who had been chasing Long-Hair, presently came straggling back with their stories—each had a distinct one—of how the fugitive escaped. They were wild looking fellows, most of them somewhat intoxicated, all profusely liberal with their stock of picturesque profanity. They represented the roughest element of the well-nigh lawless post.
"I'm positive that he's wounded," said one. "Jacques and I shot at him together, so that our pistols sounded just as if only one had been fired—bang! that way—and he leaped sideways for all the world like a bird with a broken leg. I thought he'd fall; but ve! he ran faster'n ever, and all at once he was gone; just disappeared."
"Well, to-morrow we'll get him," said another. "You and I and Jacques, we'll take up his trail, the thief, and follow him till we find him. He can't get off so easy."
"I don't know so well about that," said another; "it's Long-Hair, you must remember, and Long-Hair is no common buck that just anybody can find asleep. You know what Long-Hair is. Nobody's ever got even with 'im yet. That's so, ain't it? Just ask Oncle Jazon, if you don't believe it!"
The next morning Long-Hair was tracked to the edge. He had been wounded, but whether seriously or not could only be conjectured. A sprinkle of blood, here and there quite a dash of it, reddened the grass and clumps of weeds he had run through, and ended close to the water into which it looked as if he had plunged with a view to baffling pursuit. Indeed pursuit was baffled. No further trace could be found, by which to follow the cunning fugitive. Some of the men consoled themselves by saying, without believing, that Long-Hair was probably lying drowned at the bottom of the river.
"Pas du tout," observed Oncle Jazon, his short pipe askew far over in the corner of his mouth, "not a bit of it is that Indian drowned. He's jes' as live as a fat cat this minute, and as drunk as the devil. He'll get some o' yer scalps yet after he's guzzled all that brandy and slep' a week."
It finally transpired that Oncle Jazon was partly right and partly wrong. Long-Hair was alive, even as a fat cat, perhaps; but not drunk, for in trying to swim with the rotund little dame jeanne under his arm he lost hold of it and it went to the bottom of the Wabash, where it may be lying at this moment patiently waiting for some one to fish it out of its bed deep in the sand and mud, and break the ancient wax from its neck!
Rene de Ronville, after the chase of Long-Hair had been given over, went to tell Father Beret what had happened, and finding the priest's hut empty turned into the path leading to the Roussillon place, which was at the head of a narrow street laid out in a direction at right angles to the river's course. He passed two or three diminutive cabins, all as much alike as bee-hives. Each had its squat veranda and thatched or clapboarded roof held in place by weight-poles ranged in roughly parallel rows, and each had the face of the wall under its veranda neatly daubed with a grayish stucco made of mud and lime. You may see such houses today in some remote parts of the creole country of Louisiana.
As Rene passed along he spoke with a gay French freedom to the dames and lasses who chanced to be visible. His air would be regarded as violently brigandish in our day; we might even go so far as to think his whole appearance comical. His jaunty cap with a tail that wagged as he walked, his short trousers and leggins of buckskin, and his loose shirt-like tunic, drawn in at the waist with a broad belt, gave his strong figure just the dash of wildness suited to the armament with which it was weighted. A heavy gun lay in the hollow of his shoulder under which hung an otter-skin bullet-pouch with its clear powder-horn and white bone charger. In his belt were two huge flint-lock pistols and a long case-knife.
"Bon jour, Ma'm'selle Adrienne," he cheerily called, waving his free hand in greeting to a small, dark lass standing on the step of a veranda and indolently swinging a broom. "Comment allez-vous auj ourd'hui?"
"J'm'porte tres bien, merci, Mo'sieu Rene," was the quick response; "et vous?"
"Oh, I'm as lively as a cricket."
"Going a hunting?"
"No, just up here a little way—just on business—up to Mo'sieu Roussillon's for a moment."
"Yes," the girl responded in a tone indicative of something very like spleen, "yes, undoubtedly, Mo'sieu de Ronville; your business there seems quite pressing of late. I have noticed your industrious application to that business."
"Ta-ta, little one," he wheedled, lowering his voice; "you mustn't go to making bug-bears out of nothing."
"Bug-bears!" she retorted, "you go on about your business and I'll attend to mine," and she flirted into the house.
Rene laughed under his breath, standing a moment as if expecting her to come out again; but she did not, and he resumed his walk singing softly—
"Elle a les joues vermeilles, vermeilles, Ma belle, ma belle petite."
But ten to one he was not thinking of Madamoiselle Adrienne Bourcier. His mind, however, must have been absorbingly occupied; for in the straight, open way he met Father Beret and did not see him until he came near bumping against the old man, who stepped aside with astonishing agility and said—
"Dieu vous benisse, mon fils; but what is your great hurry—where can you be going in such happy haste?" Rene did not stop to parley with the priest. He flung some phrase of pleasant greeting back over his shoulder as he trudged on, his heart beginning a tattoo against his ribs when the Roussillon place came in sight, and he took hold of his mustache to pull it, as some men must do in moments of nervousness and bashfulness. If sounds ever have color, the humming in his ears was of a rosy hue; if thoughts ever exhale fragrance, his brain overflowed with the sweets of violet and heliotrope.
He had in mind what he was going to say when Alice and he should be alone together. It was a pretty speech, he thought; indeed a very thrilling little speech, by the way it stirred his own nerve-centers as he conned it over.
Madame Roussillon met him at the door in not a very good humor.
"Is Mademoiselle Alice here?" he ventured to demand.
"Alice? no, she's not here; she's never here just when I want her most. V'la le picbois et la grive—see the woodpecker and the robin—eating the cherries, eating every one of them, and that girl running off somewhere instead of staying here and picking them," she railed in answer to the young man's polite inquiry. "I haven't seen her these four hours, neither her nor that rascally hunchback, Jean. They're up to some mischief, I'll be bound!"
Madame Roussillon puffed audibly between phrases; but she suddenly became very mild when relieved of her tirade.
"Mais entrez," she added in a pleasant tone, "come in and tell me the news."
Rene's disappointment rushed into his face, but he managed to laugh it aside.
"Father Beret has just been telling me," said Madame Roussillon, "that our friend Long-Hair made some trouble last night. How about it?"
Rene told her what he knew and added that Long-Hair would probably never be seen again.
"He was shot, no doubt of it," he went on, "and is now being nibbled by fish and turtles. We tracked him by his blood to where he jumped into the Wabash. He never came out."
Strangely enough it happened that, at the very time of this chat between Madame Roussillon and Rene Alice was bandaging Long-Hair's wounded leg with strips of her apron. It was under some willows which overhung the bank of a narrow and shallow lagoon or slough, which in those days extended a mile or two back into the country on the farther side of the river. Alice and Jean went over in a pirogue to see if the water lilies, haunting a pond there, were yet beginning to bloom. They landed at a convenient spot some distance up the little lagoon, made the boat fast by dragging its prow high ashore, and were on the point of setting out across a neck of wet, grassy land to the pond, when a deep grunt, not unlike that of a self-satisfied pig, attracted them to the willows, where they discovered Long-Hair, badly wounded, weltering in some black mud.
His hiding-place was cunningly chosen, save that the mire troubled him, letting him down by slow degrees, and threatening to engulf him bodily; and he was now too weak to extricate himself. He lifted his head and glared. His face was grimy, his hair matted with mud. Alice, although brave enough and quite accustomed to startling experiences, uttered a cry when she saw those snaky eyes glistening so savagely amid the shadows. But Jean was quick to recognize Long-Hair; he had often seen him about town, a figure not to be forgotten.
"They've been hunting him everywhere," he said in a half whisper to Alice, clutching the skirt of her dress. "It's Long-Hair, the Indian who stole the brandy; I know him."
Alice recoiled a pace or two.
"Let's go back and tell 'em," Jean added, still whispering, "they want to kill him; Oncle Jazon said so. Come on!"
He gave her dress a jerk; but she did not move any farther back; she was looking at the blood oozing from a wound in the Indian's leg.
"He is shot, he is hurt, Jean, we must help him," she presently said, recovering her self-control, yet still pale. "We must get him out of that bad place."
Jean caught Alice's merciful spirit with sympathetic readiness, and showed immediate willingness to aid her.
It was a difficult thing to do; but there was a will and of course a way. They had knives with which they cut willows to make a standing place on the mud. While they were doing this they spoke friendly words to Long-Hair, who understood French a little, and at last they got hold of his arms, tugged, rested, tugged again, and finally managed to help him to a dry place, still under the willows, where he could lie more at ease. Jean carried water in his cap with which they washed the wound and the stolid savage face. Then Alice tore up her cotton apron, in which she had hoped to bear home a load of lilies, and with the strips bound the wound very neatly. It took a long time, during which the Indian remained silent and apparently quite indifferent.
Long-Hair was a man of superior physique, tall, straight, with the muscles of a Vulcan; and while he lay stretched on the ground half clad and motionless, he would have been a grand model for an heroic figure in bronze. Yet from every lineament there came a strange repelling influence, like that from a snake. Alice felt almost unbearable disgust while doing her merciful task; but she bravely persevered until it was finished.
It was now late in the afternoon, and the sun would be setting before they could reach home.
"We must hurry back, Jean," Alice said, turning to depart. "It will be all we can do to reach the other side in daylight. I'm thinking that they'll be out hunting for us too, if we don't move right lively. Come."
She gave the Indian another glance when she had taken but a step. He grunted and held up something in his hand—something that shone with a dull yellow light. It was a small, oval, gold locket which she had always worn in her bosom. She sprang and snatched it from his palm.
"Thank you," she exclaimed, smiling gratefully. "I am so glad you found it."
The chain by which the locket had hung was broken, doubtless by some movement while dragging Long-Hair out of the mud, and the lid had sprung open, exposing a miniature portrait of Alice, painted when she was a little child, probably not two years old. It was a sweet baby face, archly bright, almost surrounded with a fluff of golden hair. The neck and the upper line of the plump shoulders, with a trace of richly delicate lace and a string of pearls, gave somehow a suggestion of patrician daintiness.
Long-Hair looked keenly into Alice's eyes, when she stooped to take the locket from his hand, but said nothing.
She and Jean now hurried away, and, so vigorously did they paddle the pirogue, that the sky was yet red in the west when they reached home and duly received their expected scolding from Madame Roussillon.
Alice sealed Jean's lips as to their adventure; for she had made up her mind to save Long-Hair if possible, and she felt sure that the only way to do it would be to trust no one but Father Beret.
It turned out that Long-Hair's wound was neither a broken bone nor a cut artery. The flesh of his leg, midway between the hip and the knee, was pierced; the bullet had bored a neat hole clean through. Father Beret took the case in hand, and with no little surgical skill proceeded to set the big Indian upon his feet again. The affair had to be cleverly managed. Food, medicines and clothing were surreptitiously borne across the river; a bed of grass was kept fresh under Long-Hair's back; his wound was regularly dressed; and finally his weapons—a tomahawk, a knife, a strong bow and a quiver of arrows—which he had hidden on the night of his bold theft, were brought to him.
"Now go and sin no more," said good Father Beret; but he well knew that his words were mere puffs of articulate wind in the ear of the grim and silent savage, who limped away with an air of stately dignity into the wilderness.
A load fell from Alice's mind when Father Beret informed her of Long-Hair's recovery and departure. Day and night the dread lest some of the men should find out his hiding-place and kill him had depressed and worried her. And now, when it was all over, there still hovered like an elusive shadow in her consciousness a vague haunting impression of the incident's immense significance as an influence in her life. To feel that she had saved a man from death was a new sensation of itself; but the man and the circumstances were picturesque; they invited imagination; they furnished an atmosphere of romance dear to all young and healthy natures, and somehow stirred her soul with a strange appeal.
Long-Hair's imperturbable calmness, his stolid, immobile countenance, the mysterious reptilian gleam of his shifty black eyes, and the soulless expression always lurking in them, kept a fascinating hold on the girl's memory. They blended curiously with the impressions left by the romances she had read in M. Roussillon's mildewed books.
Long-Hair was not a young man; but it would have been impossible to guess near his age. His form and face simply showed long experience and immeasurable vigor. Alice remembered with a shuddering sensation the look he gave her when she took the locket from his hand. It was of but a second's duration, yet it seemed to search every nook of her being with its subtle power.
Romancers have made much of their Indian heroes, picturing them as models of manly beauty and nobility; but all fiction must be taken with liberal pinches of salt. The plain truth is that dark savages of the pure blood often do possess the magnetism of perfect physical development and unfathomable mental strangeness; but real beauty they never have. Their innate repulsiveness is so great that, like the snake's charm, it may fascinate; yet an indescribable, haunting disgust goes with it. And, after all, if Alice had been asked to tell just how she felt toward the Indian she had labored so hard to save, she would promptly have said:
"I loathe him as I do a toad!"
Nor would Father Beret, put to the same test, have made a substantially different confession. His work, to do which his life went as fuel to fire, was training the souls of Indians for the reception of divine grace; but experience had not changed his first impression of savage character. When he traveled in the wilderness he carried the Word and the Cross; but he was also armed with a gun and two good pistols, not to mention a dangerous knife. The rumor prevailed that Father Beret could drive a nail at sixty yards with his rifle, and at twenty snuff a candle with either one of his pistols.
Governor Abbott probably never so much as heard of the dame jeanne of French brandy sent to him by his creole friend in New Orleans. He had been gone from Vincennes several months when the batteau arrived, having been recalled to Detroit by the British authorities; and he never returned. Meantime the little post with its quaint cabins and its dilapidated block-house, called Fort Sackville, lay sunning drowsily by the river in a blissful state of helplessness from the military point of view. There was no garrison; the two or three pieces of artillery, abandoned and exposed, gathered rust and cobwebs, while the pickets of the stockade, decaying and loosened in the ground by winter freezes and summer rains, leaned in all directions, a picture of decay and inefficiency.
The inhabitants of the town, numbering about six hundred, lived very much as pleased them, without any regular municipal government, each family its own tribe, each man a law unto himself; yet for mutual protection, they all kept in touch and had certain common rights which were religiously respected and defended faithfully. A large pasturing ground was fenced in where the goats and little black cows of the villagers browsed as one herd, while the patches of wheat, corn and vegetables were not inclosed at all. A few of the thriftier and more important citizens, however, had separate estates of some magnitude, surrounding their residences, kept up with care and, if the time and place be taken into account, with considerable show of taste.
Monsieur Gaspard Roussillon was looked upon as the aristocrat par excellence of Vincennes, notwithstanding the fact that his name bore no suggestion of noble or titled ancestry. He was rich and in a measure educated; moreover the successful man's patent of leadership, a commanding figure and a suave manner, came always to his assistance when a crisis presented itself. He traded shrewdly, much to his own profit, but invariably with the excellent result that the man, white or Indian, with whom he did business felt himself especially favored in the transaction. By the exercise of firmness, prudence, vast assumption, florid eloquence and a kindly liberality he had greatly endeared himself to the people; so that in the absence of a military commander he came naturally to be regarded as the chief of the town, Mo'sieu' le maire.
He returned from his extended trading expedition about the middle of July, bringing, as was his invariable rule, a gift for Alice. This time it was a small, thin disc of white flint, with a hole in the center through which a beaded cord of sinew was looped. The edge of the disc was beautifully notched and the whole surface polished so that it shone like glass, while the beads, made of very small segments of porcupine quills, were variously dyed, making a curiously gaudy show of bright colors.
"There now, ma cherie, is something worth fifty times its weight in gold," said M. Roussillon when he presented the necklace to his foster daughter with pardonable self-satisfaction. "It is a sacred charm-string given me by an old heathen who would sell his soul for a pint of cheap rum. He solemnly informed me that whoever wore it could not by any possibility be killed by an enemy."
Alice kissed M. Roussillon.
"It's so curious and beautiful," she said, holding it up and drawing the variegated string through her fingers. Then, with her mischievous laugh, she added; "and I'm glad it is so powerful against one's enemy; I'll wear it whenever I go where Adrienne Bourcier is, see if I don't!"
"Is she your enemy? What's up between you and la petite Adrienne, eh?" M. Roussillon lightly demanded. "You were always the best of good friends, I thought. What's happened?"
"Oh, we are good friends," said Alice, quickly, "very good friends, indeed; I was but chaffing."
"Good friends, but enemies; that's how it is with women. Who's the young man that's caused the coolness? I could guess, maybe!" He laughed and winked knowingly. "May I be so bold as to name him at a venture?"
"Yes, if you'll be sure to mention Monsieur Rene de Ronville," she gayly answered. "Who but he could work Adrienne up into a perfect green mist of jealousy?"
"He would need an accomplice, I should imagine; a young lady of some beauty and a good deal of heartlessness."
"Like whom, for example?" and she tossed her bright head. "Not me, I am sure."
"Poh! like every pretty maiden in the whole world, ma petite coquette; they're all alike as peas, cruel as blue jays and as sweet as apple-blossoms." He stroked her hair clumsily with his large hand, as a heavy and roughly fond man is apt to do, adding in an almost serious tone:
"But my little girl is better than most of them, not a foolish mischief-maker, I hope."
Alice was putting her head through the string of beads and letting the translucent white disc fall into her bosom.
"It's time to change the subject," she said; "tell me what you have seen while away. I wish I could go far off and see things. Have you been to Detroit, Quebec, Montreal?"
"Yes, I've been to all, a long, hard journey, but reasonably profitable. You shall have a goodly dot when you get married, my child."
"And did you attend any parties and balls?" she inquired quickly, ignoring his concluding remark. "Tell me about them. How do the fine ladies dress, and do they wear their hair high with great big combs? Do they have long skirts and—"
"Hold up, you double-tongued chatterbox!" he interrupted; "I can't answer forty questions at once. Yes, I danced till my legs ached with women old and girls young; but how could I remember how they were dressed and what their style of coiffure was? I know that silk rustled and there was a perfume of eau de Cologne and mignonette and my heart expanded and blazed while I whirled like a top with a sweet lady in my arms."
"Yes, you must have cut a ravishing figure!" interpolated Madame Roussillon with emphatic disapproval, her eyes snapping. "A bull in a lace shop. How delighted the ladies must have been!"
"Never saw such blushing faces and burning glances—such fluttering breasts, such—"
"Big braggart," Madame Roussillon broke in contemptuously, "it's a piastre to a sou that you stood gawping in through a window while gentlemen and ladies did the dancing. I can imagine how you looked—I can!" and with this she took her prodigious bulk at a waddling gait out of the room. "I remember how you danced even when you were not clumsy as a pig on ice!" she shrieked back over her shoulder.
"Parbleu! true enough, my dear," he called after her, "I should think you could—you mind how we used trip it together. You were the prettiest dancer them all, and the young fellows all went to the swords about you!"
"But tell me more," Alice insisted; "I want to know about what you saw in the great towns—in the fine houses—how the ladies looked, how they acted—what they said—the dresses they wore—how—"
"Ciel! you will split my ears, child; can't you fill my pipe and bring it to me with a coal on it? Then I'll try to tell you what I can," he cried, assuming a humorously resigned air. "Perhaps if I smoke I can remember everything."
Alice gladly ran to do what he asked. Meantime Jean was out on the gallery blowing a flute that M. Roussillon had brought him from Quebec.
The pipe well filled and lighted apparently did have the effect to steady and encourage M. Roussillon's memory; or if not his memory, then his imagination, which was of that fervid and liberal sort common to natives of the Midi, and which has been exquisitely depicted by the late Alphonse Daudet in Tartarin and Bompard. He leaned far back in a strong chair, with his massive legs stretched at full length, and gazed at the roof-poles while he talked.
He sympathized fully, in his crude way, with Alice's lively curiosity, and his affection for her made him anxious to appease her longing after news from the great outside world. If the sheer truth must come out, however, he knew precious little about that world, especially the polite part of it in which thrived those femininities so dear to the heart of an isolated and imaginative girl. Still, as he, too, lived in Arcadia, there was no great effort involved when he undertook to blow a dreamer's flute.
In the first place he had not been in Quebec or Montreal during his absence from home. Most of the time he had spent disposing of pelts and furs at Detroit and in extending his trading relations with other posts; but what mattered a trifling want of facts when his meridional fancy once began to warm up? A smattering of social knowledge gained at first hand in his youthful days in France while he was a student whose parents fondly expected him to conquer the world, came to his aid, and besides he had saturated himself all his life with poetry and romance. Scudery, Scarron, Prevost, Madame La Fayette and Calprenede were the chief sources of his information touching the life and manners, morals and gayeties of people who, as he supposed, stirred the surface of that resplendent and far-off ocean called society. Nothing suited him better than to smoke a pipe and talk about what he had seen and done; and the less he had really seen and done the more he had to tell.
His broad, almost over-virile, kindly and contented face beamed with the warmth of wholly imaginary recollections while he recounted with minute circumstantiality to the delighted Alice his gallant adventures in the crowded and brilliant ball-rooms of the French-Canadian towns. The rolling burr of his bass voice, deep and resonant, gave force to the improvised descriptions.
Madame Roussillon heard the heavy booming and presently came softly back into the door from the kitchen to listen. She leaned against the facing in an attitude of ponderous attention, a hand, on her bulging hip. She could not suppress her unbounded admiration of her liege lord's manly physique, and jealous to fierceness as she was of his experiences so eloquently and picturesquely related, her woman's nature took fire with enjoyment of the scenes described.
This is the mission of the poet and the romancer—to sponge out of existence, for a time, the stiff, refractory, and unlovely realities and give in their place a scene of ideal mobility and charm. The two women reveled in Gaspard Roussillon's revelations. They saw the brilliant companies, the luxurious surroundings, heard the rustle of brocade and the fine flutter of laces, the hum of sweet voices, breathed in the wafts of costly perfumeries, looked on while the dancers whirled and flickered in the confusion of lights; and over all and through all poured and vibrated such ravishing music as only the southern imagination could have conjured up out of nothing.
Alice was absolutely charmed. She sat on a low wooden stool and gazed into Gaspard Roussillon's face with dilating eyes in which burned that rich and radiant something we call a passionate soul. She drank in his flamboyant stream of words with a thirst which nothing but experience could ever quench. He felt her silent applause and the admiring involuntary absorption that possessed his wife; the consciousness of his elementary magnetism augmented the flow of his fine descriptions, and he went on and on, until the arrival of Father Beret put an end to it all.
The priest, hearing of M. Roussillon's return, had come to inquire about some friends living at Detroit. He took luncheon with the family, enjoying the downright refreshing collation of broiled birds, onions, meal-cakes and claret, ending with a dish of blackberries and cream.
M. Roussillon seized the first opportunity to resume his successful romancing, and presently in the midst of the meal began to tell Father Beret about what he had seen in Quebec.
"By the way," he said, with expansive casualness in his voice, "I called upon your old-time friend and co-adjutor, Father Sebastien, while up there. A noble old man. He sent you a thousand good messages. Was mightily delighted when I told him how happy and hale you have always been here. Ah, you should have seen his dear old eyes full of loving tears. He would walk a hundred miles to see you, he said, but never expected to in this world. Blessings, blessings upon dear Father Beret, was what he murmured in my ear when we were parting. He says that he will never leave Quebec until he goes to his home above—ah!"
The way in which M. Roussillon closed his little speech, his large eyes upturned, his huge hands clasped in front of him, was very effective.
"I am under many obligations, my son," said Father Beret, "for what you tell me. It was good of you to remember my dear old friend and go to him for his loving messages to me. I am very, very thankful. Help me to another drop of wine, please."
Now the extraordinary feature of the situation was that Father Beret had known positively for nearly five years that Father Sebastien was dead and buried.
"Ah, yes," M. Roussillon continued, pouring the claret with one hand and making a pious gesture with the other; "the dear old man loves you and prays for you; his voice quavers whenever he speaks of you."
"Doubtless he made his old joke to you about the birth-mark on my shoulder," said Father Beret after a moment of apparently thoughtful silence. "He may have said something about it in a playful way, eh?"
"True, true, why yes, he surely mentioned the same," assented M. Roussillon, his face assuming an expression of confused memory; "it was something sly and humorous, I mind; but it just escapes my recollection. A right jolly old boy is Father Sebastien; indeed very amusing at times."
"At times, yes," said Father Beret, who had no birth-mark on his shoulder, and had never had one there, or on any other part of his person.
"How strange!" Alice remarked, "I, too, have a mark on my shoulder—a pink spot, just like a small, five-petaled flower. We must be of kin to each other, Father Beret."
The priest laughed.
"If our marks are alike, that would be some evidence of kinship," he said.
"But what shape is yours, Father?"
"I've never seen it," he responded.
"Never seen it! Why?"
"Well, it's absolutely invisible," and he chuckled heartily, meantime glancing shrewdly at M. Roussillon out of the tail of his eye.
"It's on the back part of his shoulder," quickly spoke up M. Roussillon, "and you know priests never use looking-glasses. The mark is quite invisible therefore, so far as Father Beret is concerned!"
"You never told me of your birth-mark before, my daughter," said Father Beret, turning to Alice with sudden interest. "It may some day be good fortune to you."
"Why so, Father?"
"If your family name is really Tarleton, as you suppose from the inscription on your locket, the birth-mark, being of such singular shape, would probably identify you. It is said that these marks run regularly in families. With the miniature and the distinguishing birth-mark you have enough to make a strong case should you once find the right Tarleton family."
"You talk as they write in novels," said Alice. "I've read about just such things in them. Wouldn't it be grand if I should turn out to be some great personage in disguise!"
The mention of novels reminded Father Beret of that terrible book, Manon Lescaut, which he last saw in Alice's possession, and he could not refrain from mentioning it in a voice that shuddered.
"Rest easy, Father Beret," said Alice; "that is one novel I have found wholly distasteful to me. I tried to read it, but could not do it, I flung it aside in utter disgust. You and mother Roussillon are welcome to hide it deep as a well, for all I care. I don't enjoy reading about low, vile people and hopeless unfortunates; I like sweet and lovely heroines and strong, high-souled, brave heroes."
"Read about the blessed saints, then, my daughter; you will find in them the true heroes and heroines of this world," said Father Beret.
M. Roussillon changed the subject, for he always somehow dreaded to have the good priest fall into the strain of argument he was about to begin. A stray sheep, no matter how refractory, feels a touch of longing when it hears the shepherd's voice. M. Roussillon was a Catholic, but a straying one, who avoided the confessional and often forgot mass. Still, with all his reckless independence, and with all his outward show of large and breezy self-sufficiency, he was not altogether free from the hold that the church had laid upon him in childhood and youth. Moreover, he was fond of Father Beret and had done a great deal for the little church of St. Xavier and the mission it represented; but he distinctly desired to be let alone while he pursued his own course; and he had promised the dying woman who gave Alice to him that the child should be left as she was, a Protestant, without undue influence to change her from the faith of her parents. This promise he had kept with stubborn persistence and he meant to keep it as long as he lived. Perhaps the very fact that his innermost conscience smote him with vague yet telling blows at times for this departure from the strict religion of his fathers, may have intensified his resistance of the influence constantly exerted upon Alice by Father Beret and Madame Roussillon, to bring her gently but surely to the church. Perverseness is a force to be reckoned with in all original characters.
A few weeks had passed after M. Roussillon's return, when that big-hearted man took it into his head to celebrate his successful trading ventures with a moonlight dance given without reserve to all the inhabitants of Vincennes. It was certainly a democratic function that he contemplated, and motley to a most picturesque extent.
Rene de Ronville called upon Alice a day or two previous to the occasion and duly engaged her as his partenaire; but she insisted upon having the engagement guarded in her behalf by a condition so obviously fanciful that he accepted it without argument.
"If my wandering knight should arrive during the dance, you promise to stand aside and give place to him," she stipulated. "You promise that? You see I'm expecting him all the time. I dreamed last night that he came on a great bay horse and, stooping, whirled me up behind the saddle, and away we went!"
There was a childish, half bantering air in her look; but her voice sounded earnest and serious, notwithstanding its delicious timbre of suppressed playfulness.
"You promise me?" she insisted.
"Oh, I promise to slink away into a corner and chew my thumb, the moment he comes," Rene eagerly assented. "Of course I'm taking a great risk, I know; for lords and barons and knights are very apt to appear Suddenly in a place like this."
"You may banter and make light if you want to," she said, pouting admirably. "I don't care. All the same the laugh will jump to the other corner of your mouth, see if it doesn't. They say that what a person dreams about and wishes for and waits for and believes in, will come true sooner or later."
"If that's so," said Rene, "you and I will get married; for I've dreamed it every night of the year, wished for it, waited for it and believed in it, and—"
It was a madly sudden rush. He made it on an impulse quite irresistible, as hypnotized persons are said to do in response to the suggestion of the hypnotist, and his heart was choking his throat before he could end his speech. Alice interrupted him with a hearty burst of laughter.
"A very pretty twist you give to my words, I must declare," she said; "but not new by any means. Little Adrienne Bourcier could tell you that. She says that you have vowed to her over and over that you dream about her, and wish for her, and wait for her, precisely as you have just said to me."
Rene's brown face flushed to the temples, partly with anger, partly with the shock of mingled surprise and fear. He was guilty, and the guilt showed in his eyes and paralyzed his tongue, so that he sat there before Alice with his under jaw sagging ludicrously.
"Don't you rather think, Monsieur Rene de Ronville," she presently added in a calmly advisory tone, "that you had better quit trying to say such foolish things to me, and just be my very good friend? If you don't, I do, which comes to the same thing. What's more, I won't be your partenaire at the dance unless you promise me on your word of honor that you will dance two dances with Adrienne to every one that you have with me. Do you promise?"
He dared not oppose her outwardly, although in his heart resistance amounted to furious revolt and riot.
"I promise anything you ask me to," he said resignedly, almost sullenly; "anything for you."
"Well, I ask nothing whatever on my own account," Alice quickly replied; "but I do tell you firmly that you shall not maltreat little Adrienne Bourcier and remain a friend of mine. She loves you, Rene de Ronville, and you have told her that you love her. If you are a man worthy of respect you will not desert her. Don't you think I am right?"
Like a singed and crippled moth vainly trying to rise once again to the alluring yet deadly flame, Rene de Ronville essayed to break out of his embarrassment and resume equal footing with the girl so suddenly become his commanding superior; but the effort disclosed to him as well as to her that he had fallen to rise no more. In his abject defeat he accepted the terms dictated by Alice and was glad when she adroitly changed her manner and tone in going on to discuss the approaching dance.
"Now let me make one request of you," he demanded after a while. "It's a small favor; may I ask it?"
"Yes, but I don't grant it in advance."
"I want you to wear, for my sake, the buff gown which they say was your grandmother's."
"No, I won't wear it."
"But why, Alice?"
"None of the other girls have anything like such a dress; it would not be right for me to put it on and make them all feel that I had taken the advantage of them, just because I could; that's why."
"But then none of them is beautiful and educated like you," he said; "you'll outshine them anyway."
"Save your compliments for poor pretty little Adrienne," she firmly responded, "I positively do not wish to hear them. I have agreed to be your partenaire at this dance of Papa Roussillon's, but it is understood between us that Adrienne is your sweet-heart. I am not, and I'm not going to be, either. So for your sake and Adrienne's, as well as out of consideration for the rest of the girls who have no fine dresses, I am not going to wear the buff brocade gown that belonged to Papa Roussillon's mother long ago. I shall dress just as the rest do."
It is safe to say that Rene de Ronville went home with a troublesome bee in his bonnet. He was not a bad-hearted fellow. Many a right good young man, before him and since, has loved an Adrienne and been dazzled by an Alice. A violet is sweet, but a rose is the garden's queen. The poor youthful frontiersman ought to have been stronger; but he was not, and what have we to say?
As for Alice, since having a confidential talk with Adrienne Bourcier recently, she had come to realize what M. Roussillon meant when he said; "But my little girl is better than most of them, not a foolish mischief-maker, I hope." She saw through the situation with a quick understanding of what Adrienne might suffer should Rene prove permanently fickle. The thought of it aroused all her natural honesty and serious nobleness of character, which lay deep under the almost hoydenish levity usually observable in her manner. Crude as her sense of life's larger significance was, and meager as had been her experience in the things which count for most in the sum of a young girl's existence under fair circumstances, she grasped intuitively the gist of it all.
The dance did not come off; it had to be postponed indefinitely on account of a grave change in the political relations of the little post. A day or two before the time set for that function a rumor ran through the town that something of importance was about to happen. Father Gibault, at the head of a small party, had arrived from Kaskaskia, far away on the Mississippi, with the news that France and the American Colonies had made common cause against the English in the great war of which the people of Vincennes neither knew the cause nor cared a straw about the outcome.
It was Oncle Jazon who came to the Roussillon place to tell M. Roussillon that he was wanted at the river house. Alice met him at the door.
"Come in, Oncle Jazon," she cheerily said, "you are getting to be a stranger at our house lately. Come in; what news do you bring? Take off your cap and rest your hair, Oncle Jazon."
The scalpless old fighter chuckled raucously and bowed to the best of his ability. He not only took off his queer cap, but looked into it with a startled gaze, as if he expected something infinitely dangerous to jump out and seize his nose.
"A thousand thanks, Ma'm'selle," he presently said, "will ye please tell Mo'sieu' Roussillon that I would wish to see 'im?"
"Yes, Oncle Jazon; but first be seated, and let me offer you just a drop of eau de vie; some that Papa Roussillon brought back with him from Quebec. He says it's old and fine."
She poured him a full glass, then setting the bottle on a little stand, went to find M. Roussillon. While she was absent Oncle Jazon improved his opportunity to the fullest extent. At least three additional glasses of the brandy went the way of the first. He grinned atrociously and smacked his corrugated lips; but when Gaspard Roussillon came in, the old man was sitting at some distance from the bottle and glass gazing indifferently out across the veranda. He told his story curtly. Father Gibault, he said, had sent him to ask M. Roussillon to come to the river house, as he had news of great importance to communicate.
"Ah, well, Oncle Jazon, we'll have a nip of brandy together before we go," said the host.
"Why, yes, jes' one agin' the broilin' weather," assented Oncle Jazon; "I don't mind jes' one."
"A very rich friend of mine in Quebec gave me this brandy, Oncle Jazon," said M. Roussillon, pouring the liquor with a grand flourish; "and I thought of you as soon as I got it. Now, says I to myself, if any man knows good brandy when he tastes it, it's Oncle Jazon, and I'll give him a good chance at this bottle just the first of all my friends."
"It surely is delicious," said Oncle Jazon, "very delicious." He spoke French with a curious accent, having spent long years with English-speaking frontiersmen in the Carolinas and Kentucky, so that their lingo had become his own.
As they walked side by side down the way to the river house they looked like typical extremes of rough, sun-burned and weather-tanned manhood; Oncle Jazon a wizened, diminutive scrap, wrinkled and odd in every respect; Gaspard Roussillon towering six feet two, wide shouldered, massive, lumbering, muscular, a giant with long curling hair and a superb beard. They did not know that they were going down to help dedicate the great Northwest to freedom.