Old Kaskaskia Part 2

"One ought to be grave good company enough for himself," retorted Peggy, looking at Rice Jones with jealous aggressiveness. She was a lean, sandy girl, at whom he seldom glanced, and her acrid girlhood fought him. Rice Jones was called the handsomest man in Kaskaskia, but his personal beauty was nothing to the ambitious force of his presence.

The parted hair fitted his broad, high head like a glove. His straight nose extended its tip below the nostrils and shadowed the long upper lip. He had a long chin, beautifully shaped and shaven clean as marble, a mouth like a scarlet line, and a very round, smooth throat, shown by his flaring collar. His complexion kept a cool whiteness which no exposure tanned, and this made striking the blackness of his eyes and hair.

"Please will you all go back into the drawing-room?" begged Maria. "My brother will bring me a shawl, and then I shall need nothing else."

"But may I sit by you, mademoiselle?"

It was Angelique Saucier leaning down to make this request, but Peggy Morrison laughed.

"I warn you against Angelique, Miss Jones. She is the man-slayer of Kaskaskia. They all catch her like measles. If she stays out here, they will sit in a row along the gallery edge, and there will be no more dancing."

"Do not observe what Peggy says, mademoiselle. We are relations, and so we take liberties."

"But no one must give up dancing," urged Maria.

They arranged for her in spite of protest, however. Rice m.u.f.fled her in a shawl, Mademoiselle Saucier sat down at her right side and Peggy Morrison at her left, and the next dance began.

Maria Jones had repressed and nestling habits. She curled herself into a very small compa.s.s in the easy gallery chair, and looked off into the humid mysteries of the June night. Colonel Menard's substantial slave cabins of logs and stone were in sight, and up the bluff near the house was a sort of donjon of stone, having only one door letting into its base.

"That's where Colonel Menard puts his bad Indians," said Peggy Morrison, following Maria's glance.

"It is simply a little fortress for times of danger," said Mademoiselle Saucier, laughing. "It is also the colonel's bureau for valuable papers, and the dairy is underneath."

"Well, you French understand one another's housekeeping better than we English do; and may be the colonel has been explaining these things to you."

"But are there any savage men about here now?"

"Oh, plenty of them," declared Peggy. "We have some Pottawatomies and Kickapoos and Kaskaskias always with us,--like the poor. n.o.body is afraid of them, though. Colonel Menard has them all under his thumb, and if n.o.body else could manage them he could. My father says they will give their furs to him for nothing rather than sell them to other people. You must see that Colonel Menard is very fascinating, but I don't think he charms Angelique as he does the Indians."

Mademoiselle Saucier's smile excused anything Peggy might say. Maria thought this French girl the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. The waist of her clinging white gown ended under the curve of her girlish b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and face, neck, and arms blossomed out with the polish of flower-petals. Around her throat she wore gold beads suspending a cross.

Her dark hair, which had an elusive bluish mist, like grapes, was pinned high with a gold comb. Her oval face was full of a mature sympathy unusual in girls. Maria had thought at first she would rather be alone on the gallery, but this reposeful and tender French girl at once became a necessity to her.

"Peggy," said Angelique, "I hear Jules Vigo inquiring for you in the hall."

"Then I shall take to the roof," responded Peggy.

"Have some regard for Jules."

"You may have, but I shan't. I will not dance with a kangaroo."

"Do you not promise dances ahead?" inquired Maria.

"No, our mothers do not permit that," answered Angelique. "It is sometimes best to sit still and look on."

"That means, Miss Jones," explained Peggy, "that she has set a fas.h.i.+on to give the rest of the girls a chance. I wouldn't be so mealy-mouthed about cutting them out. But Angelique has been ruined by waiting so much on her tante-gra'mere. When you bear an old woman's temper from dawn till dusk, you soon forget you're a girl in your teens."

"Don't abuse the little tante-gra'mere."

"She gets praise enough at our house. Mother says she's a discipline that keeps Angelique from growing vain. Thank Heaven, we don't need such discipline in our family."

"It is my father's grand-aunt," explained Angelique to Maria, "and when you see her, mademoiselle, you will be surprised to find how well she bears her hundred years, though she has not been out of her bed since I can remember. Mademoiselle, I hope I never shall be very old."

Maria gave Angelique the piercing stare which unconsciously belongs to large black eyes set in a hectic, nervous face.

"Would you die now?"

"I feel always," said the French girl, "that we stand facing the mystery every minute, and sometimes I should like to know it."

"Now hear that," said Peggy. "I'm no Catholic, but I will say for the mother superior that she never put that in your head at the convent. It is wicked to say you want to die."

"But I did not say it. The mystery of being without any body,--that is what I want to know. It is good to meditate on death."

"It isn't comfortable," said Peggy. "It makes me have chills down my back."

She glanced behind her through the many-paned open window into the dining-room. Three little girls and a boy were standing there, so close to the sill that their breath had touched Peggy's neck. They were Colonel Menard's motherless children. A black maid was with them, holding the youngest by the hand. They were whispering in French under cover of the music. French was the second mother tongue of every Kaskaskia girl, and Peggy heard what they said by merely taking her attention from her companions.

"I will get Jean Lozier to beat Monsieur Reece Zhone. Jean Lozier is such an obliging creature he will do anything I ask him."

"But, Odile," argued the boy, with some sense of equity, "she is not yet engaged to our family."

"And how shall we get her engaged to us if Monsieur Reece Zhone must hang around her? Papa says he is the most promising young man in the Territory. If I were a boy, Pierre Menard, I would do something with him."

"What would you do?"

"I would shoot him. He has duels."

"But my father might punish me for that."

"Very well, chicken-heart. Let Mademoiselle Saucier go, then. But I will tell you this: there is no one else in Kaskaskia that I will have for a second mother."

"Yes, we have all chosen her," owned Pierre, "but it seems to me papa ought to make the marriage."

"But she would not know we children were willing to have her. If you did something to stop Monsieur Zhone's courts.h.i.+p, she would then know."

"Why do you not go out on the gallery now and tell her we want her?"

exclaimed Pierre. "The colonel says it is best to be straightforward in any matter of business."

"Pierre, it is plain to be seen that you do not know how to deal with young ladies. They like best to be fought over. It is not proper to _tell_ her we are willing to have her. The way to do is to drive off the other suitors."

"But there are so many. Tante Isidore says all the young men in Kaskaskia and the officers left at Fort Chartres are her suitors.

Monsieur Reece Zhone is the worst one, though. I might ask him to go out to papa's office with me to-night, but we shall be sent to bed directly after supper. Besides, here sits his sister who was carried out fainting."

"While he is in our house we are obliged to be polite to him," said Odile. "But if I were a boy, I would, some time, get on my pony and ride into Kaskaskia"--The conspiring went on in whispers. The children's heads bobbed nearer each other, so Peggy overheard no more.

It was the very next evening, the evening of St. John's Day, that young Pierre rode into Kaskaskia beside his father to see the yearly bonfire lighted. Though many of the old French customs had perished in a mixing of nationalities, St. John's Day was yet observed; the Latin race drawing the Saxon out to partic.i.p.ate in the festival, as so often happens wherever they dwell.

The bonfire stood in the middle of the street fronting the church. It was an octagonal pyramid, seven or eight feet high, built of dry oak and pecan limbs and logs, with straw at all the corners.

The earth yet held a red horizon rim around its dusky surface. Some half-distinct swallows were swarming into the church belfry, as silent as bats; but people swarming on the ground below made a cheerful noise, like a fair. The St. John bonfire was not a religious ceremony, but its character lifted it above the ordinary burning of brushwood at night.