Alice of Old Vincennes
CHAPTER VI
A FENCING BOUT
A few days after Helm's arrival, M. Roussillon returned to Vincennes,and if he was sorely touched in his amour propre by seeing his suddenlyacquired military rank and title drop away, he did not let it be knownto his fellow citizens. He promptly called upon the new commander andmade acquaintance with Lieutenant Fitzhugh Beverley, who just then wassuperintending the work of cleaning up an old cannon in the fort andmending some breaks in the stockade.
Helm formed a great liking for the big Frenchman, whose breezy freedomof manner and expansive good humor struck him favorably from thebeginning. M. Roussillon's ability to speak English with considerableease helped the friendship along, no doubt; at all events their firstinterview ended with a hearty show of good fellowship, and as timepassed they became almost inseparable companions during M. Roussillon'speriods of rest from his trading excursions among the Indians. Theyplayed cards and brewed hot drinks over which they told marvelousstories, the latest one invariably surpassing all its predecessors.
Helm had an eye to business, and turned M. Roussillon's knowledge ofthe Indians to valuable account, so that he soon had very pleasantrelations with most of the tribes within reach of his agents. This gavea feeling of great security to the people of Vincennes. They pursuedtheir narrow agricultural activities with excellent results andredoubled those social gayeties which, even in hut and cabin under allthe adverse conditions of extreme frontier life, were dear to thevolatile and genial French temperament.
Lieutenant Beverley found much to interest him in the quaint town; butthe piece de resistance was Oncle Jazon, who proved to be bothfascinating and unmanageable; a hard nut to crack, yet possessing akernel absolutely original in flavor. Beverley visited him one eveningin his hut--it might better be called den--a curiously built thing,with walls of vertical poles set in a quadrangular trench dug in theground, and roofed with grass. Inside and out it was plastered withclay, and the floor of dried mud was as smooth and hard as concretepaving. In one end there was a wide fireplace grimy with soot, in theother a mere peep-hole for a window: a wooden bench, a bed of skins andtwo or three stools were barely visible in the gloom. In the doorwayOncle Jazon sat whittling a slender billet of hickory into a ramrod forhis long flint-lock American rifle.
"Maybe ye know Simon Kenton," said the old man, after he and Beverleyhad conversed for a while, "seeing that you are from Kentucky--eh?"
"Yes, I do know him well; he's a warm personal friend of mine," saidBeverley with quick interest, for it surprised him that Oncle Jazonshould know anything about Kenton. "Do you know him, Monsieur Jazon?"
Oncle Jazon winked conceitedly and sighted along his rudimentary ramrodto see if it was straight; then puckering his lips, as if on the pointof whistling, made an affirmative noise quite impossible to spell.
"Well, I'm glad you are acquainted with Kenton," said Beverley. "Wheredid you and he come together?"
Oncle Jazon chuckled reminiscently and scratched the skinless,cicatrized spot where his scalp had once flourished.
"Oh, several places," he answered. "Ye see thet hair a hangin' there onthe wall?" He pointed at a dry wisp dangling under a peg in a logbarely visible by the bad light. "Well, thet's my scalp, he! he! he!"He snickered as if the fact were a most enjoyable joke. "Simon Kentoncan tell ye about thet little affair! The Indians thought I was dead,and they took my hair; but I wasn't dead; I was just a givin' 'em a'possum act. When they was gone I got up from where I was a layin' andtrotted off. My head was sore and ventrebleu! but I was mad, he! he!he!"
All this time he spoke in French, and the English but poorlyparaphrases his odd turns of expression. His grimaces and grunts cannoteven be hinted.
It was a long story, as Beverley received it, told scrappily, but withcertain rude art. In the end Oncle Jazon said with unctuousself-satisfaction:
"Accidents will happen. I got my chance at that damned Indian whoskinned my head, and I jes took a bead on 'im with my old rifle. Ican't shoot much, never could, but I happened to hit 'im square in thelef' eye, what I shot at, and it was a hundred yards. Down he tumbles,and I runs to 'im and finds my same old scalp a hangin' to his belt.Well, I lifted off his hair with my knife, and untied mine from thebelt, and then I had both scalps, he! he! he! You ask Simon Kenton whenye see 'im. He was along at the same time, and they made 'im run thega'ntlet and pretty nigh beat the life out o' 'im. Ventrebleu!"
Beverley now recollected hearing Kenton tell the same grim story by acamp-fire in the hills of Kentucky. Somehow it had caught a new spiritin the French rendering, which linked it with the old tales ofadventure that he had read in his boyhood, and it suddenly endearedOncle Jazon to him. The rough old scrap of a man and the powerful youthchatted together until sundown, smoking their pipes, each feeling forwhat was best in the other, half aware that in the future they would betested together in the fire of wild adventure. Every man is more orless a prophet at certain points in his life.
Twilight and moonlight were blending softly when Beverley, on his wayback to the fort, departing from a direct course, went along theriver's side southward to have a few moments of reflective strollingwithin reach of the water's pleasant murmur and the town's indefiniteevening stir. Rich sweetness, the gift of early autumn, was on the airblowing softly out of a lilac west and singing in the willow fringethat hung here and there over the bank.
On the farther side of the river's wide flow, swollen by recent heavyrains, Beverley saw a pirogue, in one end of which a dark figure swayedto the strokes of a paddle. The slender and shallow little craft wasbobbing on the choppy waves and taking a zig-zag course among floatinglogs and masses of lighter driftwood, while making slow but certainheadway toward the hither bank.
Beverley took a bit of punk and a flint and steel from his pocket,relit his pipe and stood watching the skilful boatman conduct hissomewhat dangerous voyage diagonally against the rolling current. Itwas a shifting, hide-and-seek scene, its features appearing anddisappearing with the action of the waves and the doubtful lightreflected from fading clouds and sky. Now and again the man stood up inhis skittish pirogue, balancing himself with care, to use a short polein shoving driftwood out of his way; and more than once he looked toBeverley as if he had plunged head-long into the dark water.
The spot, as nearly as it can be fixed, was about two hundred yardsbelow where the public road-bridge at present spans the Wabash. Thebluff was then far different from what it is now, steeper and higher,with less silt and sand between it and the water's edge. Indeed,swollen as the current was, a man could stand on the top of the bankand easily leap into the deep water. At a point near the middle of theriver a great mass of drift-logs and sand had long ago formed a barrierwhich split the stream so that one current came heavily shoreward onthe side next the town and swashed with its muddy foam, making a swirland eddy just below where Beverley stood.
The pirogue rounded the upper angle of this obstruction, not withoutdifficulty to its crew of one, and swung into the rapid shoreward rush,as was evidently planned for by the steersman, who now paddled againstthe tide with all his might to keep from being borne too far downstream for a safe landing place.
Beverley stood at ease idly and half dreamily looking on, when suddenlysomething caused a catastrophe, which for a moment he did notcomprehend. In fact the man in the pirogue came to grief, as a man in apirogue is very apt to do, and fairly somersaulted overboard into thewater. Nothing serious would have threatened (for the man could swimlike an otter) had not a floating, half submerged log thrust up someshort, stiff stumps of boughs, upon the points of which the man struckheavily and was not only hurt, but had his clothes impaled securely byone of the ugly spears, so that he hung in a helpless position, whilethe water's motion alternately lifted and submerged him, his armsbeating about wildly.
When Beverley heard a strangling cry for help, he pulled himselfpromptly together, flung off his coat, as if by a single motion, andleaped down the bank into the water. He was a swimmer whose strokescounted
for all that prodigious strength and excellent training couldafford; he rushed through the water with long sweeps, making asemicircle, rounding against the current, so as to swing down upon thedrowning man.
Less than a half-hour later a rumor by some means spread throughout thetown that Father Beret and Lieutenant Beverley were drowned in theWabash. But when a crowd gathered to verify the terrible news it turnedout to be untrue. Gaspard Roussillon had once more distinguishedhimself by an exhibition of heroic nerve and muscle.
"Ventrebleu! Quel homme!" exclaimed Oncle Jazon, when told that M.Roussillon had come up the bank of the Wabash with Lieutenant Beverleyunder one arm and Father Beret under the other, both men apparentlydead.
"Bring them to my house immediately," M. Roussillon ordered, as soon asthey were restored to consciousness; and he shook himself, as a big wetanimal sometimes does, covering everybody near him with muddy water.Then he led the way with melodramatic strides.
In justice to historical accuracy there must be a trifling reform ofwhat appeared on the face of things to be grandly true. GaspardRoussillon actually dragged Father Beret and Lieutenant Beverley one ata time out of the eddy water and up the steep river bank. That wastruly a great feat; but the hero never explained. When men arrived hewas standing between the collapsed forms, panting and dripping.Doubtless he looked just as if he had dropped them from under his arms,and why shouldn't he have the benefit of a great implication?
"I've saved them both," he roared; from which, of course, the readycreole imagination inferred the extreme of possible heroic performance.
"Bring them to my house immediately," and it was accordingly done.
The procession, headed by M. Roussillon, moved noisily, for the Frenchtongue must shake off what comes to it on the thrill of every excitingmoment. The only silent Frenchman is the dead one.
Father Beret was not only well-nigh drowned, but seriously hurt. He layfor a week on a bed in M. Roussillon's house before he could sit up.Alice hung over him night and day, scarcely sleeping or eating until hewas past all danger. As for Beverley, he shook off all the effects ofhis struggle in a little while. Next day he was out, as well and strongas ever, busy with the affairs of his office. Nor was he less happy onaccount of what the little adventure had cast into his experience. Itis good to feel that one has done an unselfish deed, and no young man'sheart repels the freshness of what comes to him when a beautiful girlfirst enters his life.
Naturally enough Alice had some thoughts of Beverley while she was soattentively caring for Father Beret. She had never before seen a manlike him, nor had she read of one. Compared with Rene de Ronville, thebest youth of her acquaintance, he was in every way superior; this wastoo evident for analysis; but referred to the romantic standard takenout of the novels she had read, he somehow failed; and yet he loomedbravely in her vision, not exactly a knight of the class she had mostadmired, still unquestionably a hero of large proportions.
Beverley stepped in for a few minutes every day to see Father Beret,involuntarily lengthening his visit by a sliding ratio as he becamebetter acquainted. He began to enjoy the priest's conversation, withits sly worldly wisdom cropping up through fervid religious sentimentsand quaint humor. Alice must have interested him more than he was fullyaware of; for his eyes followed her, as she came and went, with acurious criticism of her half-savage costume and her springy,Dryad-like suppleness, which reminded him of the shyest and gracefulestwild birds; and yet a touch of refinement, the subtlest and best,showed in all her ways. He studied her, as he would have studied astrange, showy and originally fragrant flower, or a bird of oddlyattractive plumage. While she said little to him or to anyone else inhis presence, he became aware of the willfulness and joyous lightnesswhich played on her nature's changeable surface. He wondered at herinfluence over Father Beret, whom she controlled apparently withouteffort. But in due time he began to feel a deeper character, a broaderintelligence, behind her superficial sauvagerie; and he found that shereally had no mean smattering of books in the lighter vein.
A little thing happened which further opened his eyes and increased theinterest that her beauty and elementary charm of style aroused in himgradually, apace with their advancing acquaintanceship.
Father Beret had got well and returned to his hut and his round ofspiritual duties; but Beverley came to Roussillon place every day allthe same. For a wonder Madame Roussillon liked him, and at most timesheld the scolding side of her tongue when he was present. Jean, too,made friendly advances whenever opportunity afforded. Of course Alicegave him just the frank cordiality of hospitable welcome demanded byfrontier conditions. She scarcely knew whether she liked him or not;but he had a treasury of information from which he was enriching herwith liberal carelessness day by day. The hungriest part of her mindwas being sumptuously banqueted at his expense. Mere intellectualgreediness drew her to him.
Naturally they soon threw off such troubling formalities as at firstrose between them, and began to disclose to each other their truecharacteristics. Alice found in Beverley a large target for themissiles of her clever and tantalizing perversity. He in turn practiceda native dignity and an acquired superiority of manner to excellenteffect. It was a meeting of Greek with Greek in a new Arcadia. To himhere was Diana, strong, strange, simple, even crude almost tonaturalness, yet admirably pure in spirit and imbued with highestwomanly aspirations. To her Beverley represented the great outside areaof life. He came to her from wonderland, beyond the wide circle ofhouseless woods and prairies. He represented gorgeous cities, teemingparks of fashion, boulevards, salons, halls of social splendor, thetheater, the world of woman's dreams.
Now, there is an antagonism, vague yet powerful, generated betweennatures thus cast together from the opposite poles of experience andeducation: an antagonism practically equivalent to the most vigorousattraction. What one knows the other is but half aware of; neitherknowledge nor ignorance being mutual, there is a scintillation ofexchange, from opposing vantage grounds, followed by harmless snaps ofthunder. Culture and refinement take on airs--it is the deepestartificial instinct of enlightenment to pose--in the presence ofnaturalness; and there is a certain style of ignorance whichattitudinizes before the gate of knowledge. The return to nature hasalways been the dream of the conventionalized soul, while the simpleArcadian is forever longing for the maddening honey of sophistication.
Innate jealousies strike together like flint and steel dashing offsparks by which nearly everything that life can warm its core withal iskindled and kept burning. What I envy in my friend I store for my bestuse. I thrust and parry, not to kill, but to learn my adversary'ssuperior feints and guards. And this hint of sword play leads back towhat so greatly surprised and puzzled Beverley one day when he chancedto be examining the pair of colechemardes on the wall.
He took one down, and handling it with the indescribable facilitypossible to none save a practical swordsman, remarked:
"There's a world of fascination in these things; I like nothing betterthan a bout at fencing. Does your father practice the art?"
"I have no father, no mother," she quickly said; "but good PapaRoussillon does like a little exercise with the colechemarde."
"Well, I'm glad to hear it, I shall ask to teach him a trick or two,"Beverley responded in the lightest mood. "When will he return from thewoods?"
"I can't tell you; he's very irregular in such matters," she said.Then, with a smile half banter and half challenge, she added; "if youare really dying for some exercise, you shall not have to wait for himto come home, I assure you, Monsieur Beverley."
"Oh, it's Monsieur de Ronville, perhaps, that you will offer up as avictim to my skill and address," he slyly returned; for he wassuspecting that a love affair in some stage of progress lay between herand Rene.
She blushed violently, but quickly overcoming a combined rush ofsurprise and anger, added with an emphasis as charming as it wasunexpected.
"I myself am, perhaps, swordsman enough to satisfy the impudence andvanity of Monsieur Beverley, Lie
utenant in the American army."
"Pardon me, Mademoiselle; forgive me, I beg of you," he exclaimed,earnestly modulating his voice to sincerest beseechment; "I really didnot mean to be impudent, nor--"
Her vivacity cleared with a merry laugh.
"No apologies, I command you," she interposed. "We will have them afterI have taught you a fencing lesson."
From a shelf she drew down a pair of foils and presenting the hilts,bade him take his choice.
"There isn't any difference between them that I know of," she said, andthen added archly; "but you will feel better at last, when all is overand the sting of defeat tingles through you, if you are conscious ofhaving used every sensible precaution."
He looked straight into her eyes, trying to catch what was in her mind,but there was a bewildering glamour playing across those gray,opal-tinted wells of mystery, from which he could draw only amischievous smile-glint, direct, daring, irresistible.
"Well," he said, taking one of the foils, "what do you really mean? Isit a challenge without room for honorable retreat?"
"The time for parley is past," she replied, "follow me to thebattle-ground."
She led the way to a pleasant little court in the rear of the cabin'syard, a space between two wings and a vine-covered trellis, beyondwhich lay a well kept vineyard and vegetable garden. Here she turnedabout and faced him, poising her foil with a fine grace.
"Are you ready?" she inquired.
He tried again to force a way into the depths of her eyes with his; buthe might as well have attacked the sun; so he stood in a confusion ofnot very well defined feelings, undecided, hesitating, half expectingthat there would be some laughable turn to end the affair.
"Are you afraid, Monsieur Beverley?" she demanded after a short waitingin silence.
He laughed now and whipped the air with his foil.
"You certainly are not in earnest?" he said interrogatively. "Do youreally mean that you want to fence with me?"
"If you think because I'm only a girl you can easily beat me, try it,"she tauntingly replied making a level thrust toward his breast.
Quick as a flash he parried, and then a merry clinking and twinkling ofsteel blades kept time to their swift movements. Instantly, by the suresense which is half sight, half feeling--the sense that guides theexpert fencer's hand and wrist--Beverley knew that he had probably morethan his match, and in ten seconds his attack was met by a time thrustin opposition which touched him sharply.
Alice sprang far back, lowered her point and laughed.
"Je vous salue, Monsieur Beverley!" she cried, with childlike show ofdelight. "Did you feel the button?"
"Yes, I felt it," he said with frank acknowledgment in his voice, "itwas cleverly done. Now give me a chance to redeem myself."
He began more carefully and found that she, too, was on her bestmettle; but it was a short bout, as before. Alice seemed to give him aneasy opening and he accepted it with a thrust; then something happenedthat he did not understand. The point of his foil was somehow caughtunder his opponent's hilt-guard while her blade seemed to twist aroundhis; at the same time there was a wring and a jerk, the like of whichhe had never before felt, and he was disarmed, his wrist and fingersaching with the wrench they had received.
Of course the thing was not new; he had been disarmed before; but hertrick of doing it was quite a mystery to him, altogether different fromany that he had ever seen.
"Vous me pardonnerez, Monsieur," she mockingly exclaimed, picking uphis weapon and offering the hilt to him. "Here is your sword!"
"Keep it," he said, folding his arms and trying to look unconcerned,"you have captured it fairly. I am at your mercy; be kind to me."
Madame Roussillon and Jean, the hunchback, hearing the racket of thefoils had come out to see and were standing agape.
"You ought to be ashamed, Alice," said the dame in scolding approval ofwhat she had done; "girls do not fence with gentlemen."
"This girl does," said Alice.
"And with extreme disaster to this gentleman," said Beverley, laughingin a tone of discomfiture and resignation.
"Ah, Mo'sieu', there's nothing but disaster where she goes," complainedMadame Roussillon, "she is a destroyer of everything. Only yesterdayshe dropped my pink bowl and broke it, the only one I had."
"And just to think," said Beverley, "what would have been the conditionof my heart had we been using rapiers instead of leather-buttonedfoils! She would have spitted it through the very center."
"Like enough," replied the dame indifferently. "She wouldn't wince,either,--not she."
Alice ran into the house with the foils and Beverley followed.
"We must try it over again some day soon," he said; "I find that youcan show me a few points. Where did you learn to fence so admirably? IsMonsieur Roussillon your master?"
"Indeed he isn't," she quickly replied, "he is but a bunglingswordsman. My master--but I am not at liberty to tell you who hastaught me the little I know."
"Well, whoever he is I should be glad to have lessons from him."
"But you'll never get them."
"Why?"
"Because."
"A woman's ultimatum."
"As good as a man's!" she bridled prettily; "and sometimes better--atthe foils for example. Vous--comprenez, n'est ce pas?"
He laughed heartily.
"Yes, your point reaches me," he said, "but sperat et in saeva victusgladiatur arena, as the old Latin poet wisely remarks." The quotationwas meant to tease her.
"Yes, Montaigne translated that or something in his book," shecommented with prompt erudition. "I understand it."
Beverley looked amazed.
"What do you know about Montaigne?" he demanded with a blunt brevityamounting to something like gruffness.
"Sh', Monsieur, not too loud," she softly protested, looking around tosee that neither Madame Roussillon nor Jean had followed them into themain room. "It is not permitted that I read that old book; but they donot hide it from me, because they think I can't make out its dreadfulspelling."
She smiled so that her cheeks drew their dimples deep into thedelicately tinted pink-and-brown, where wind and sun and wholesomeexercise had set the seal of absolute health, and took from a niche inthe logs of the wall a stained and dog-eared volume. He looked, and itwas, indeed, the old saint and sinner, Montaigne.
Involuntarily he ran his eyes over the girl from head to foot,comparing her show of knowledge with the outward badges of abjectrusticity, and even wildness, with which she was covered.
"Well," he said, "you are a mystery."
"You think it surprising that I can read a book! Frankly I can'tunderstand half of this one. I read it because--well just because theywant me to read about nothing but sickly old saints and woe-begonepenitents. I like something lively. What do I care for all thatuninteresting religious stuff?"
"Montaigne IS decidedly lively in spots," Beverley remarked. "Ishouldn't think a girl--I shouldn't think you'd particularly enjoy hishumors."
"I don't care for the book at all," she said, flushing quickly, "only Iseem to learn about the world from it. Sometimes it seems as if itlifted me up high above all this wild, lonely and tiresome country, sothat I can see far off where things are different and beautiful. It isthe same with the novels; and they don't permit me to read them either;but all the same I do."
When Beverley, taking his leave, passed through the gate at Roussillonplace, he met Rene de Ronville going in. It was a notable coincidencethat each young man felt something troublesome rise in his throat as helooked into the other's eyes.
A week of dreamy autumn weather came on, during which Beverley managedto be with Alice a great deal, mostly sitting on the Roussillongallery, where the fading vine leaves made fairy whispering, and wherethe tempered breeze blew deliciously cool from over the distantmulti-colored woods. The men of Vincennes were gathering their Indiancorn early to dry it on the cob for grating into winter meal. Manywomen made wine from the native grapes and from the swe
eter and richerfruit of imported vines. Madame Roussillon and Alice stained theirhands a deep purple during the pressing season, and Beverley foundhimself engaged in helping them handle the juicy crop, while around theoverflowing earthen pots the wild bees, wasps and hornets hummed withan incessant, jarring monotony.
Jean, the hunchback, gathered ample stores of hickory nuts, walnuts,hazel-nuts and pin-oak acorns. Indeed, the whole population of thevillage made a great spurt of industry just before the falling ofwinter; and presently, when every preparation had been completed forthe dreaded cold season, M. Roussillon carried out his long-cherishedplan, and gave a great party at the river house. After the mostsuccessful trading experience of all his life he felt irrepressiblyliberal.
"Let's have one more roaring good time," he said, "that's what life isfor."