Alice of Old Vincennes Part 10

Lieutenant Beverley found much to interest him in the quaint town; but the piece de resistance was Oncle Jazon, who proved to be both fascinating and unmanageable; a hard nut to crack, yet possessing a kernel absolutely original in flavor. Beverley visited him one evening in his hut--it might better be called den--a curiously built thing, with walls of vertical poles set in a quadrangular trench dug in the ground, and roofed with gra.s.s. Inside and out it was plastered with clay, and the floor of dried mud was as smooth and hard as concrete paving. In one end there was a wide fireplace grimy with soot, in the other a mere peep-hole for a window: a wooden bench, a bed of skins and two or three stools were barely visible in the gloom. In the doorway Oncle Jazon sat whittling a slender billet of hickory into a ramrod for his long flint-lock American rifle.

"Maybe ye know Simon Kenton," said the old man, after he and Beverley had 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," said Beverley with quick interest, for it surprised him that Oncle Jazon should know anything about Kenton. "Do you know him, Monsieur Jazon?"

Oncle Jazon winked conceitedly and sighted along his rudimentary ramrod to see if it was straight; then puckering his lips, as if on the point of whistling, made an affirmative noise quite impossible to spell.

"Well, I'm glad you are acquainted with Kenton," said Beverley. "Where did 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 on the wall?" He pointed at a dry wisp dangling under a peg in a log barely 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 Kenton can 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' and trotted 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 poorly paraphrases his odd turns of expression. His grimaces and grunts cannot even be hinted.

It was a long story, as Beverley received it, told sc.r.a.ppily, but with certain rude art. In the end Oncle Jazon said with unctuous self-satisfaction:

"Accidents will happen. I got my chance at that d.a.m.ned Indian who skinned my head, and I jes took a bead on 'im with my old rifle. I can't shoot much, never could, but I happened to hit 'im square in the lef' 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 the belt, and then I had both scalps, he! he! he! You ask Simon Kenton when ye see 'im. He was along at the same time, and they made 'im run the ga'ntlet and pretty nigh beat the life out o' 'im. Ventrebleu!"

Beverley now recollected hearing Kenton tell the same grim story by a camp-fire in the hills of Kentucky. Somehow it had caught a new spirit in the French rendering, which linked it with the old tales of adventure that he had read in his boyhood, and it suddenly endeared Oncle Jazon to him. The rough old sc.r.a.p of a man and the powerful youth chatted together until sundown, smoking their pipes, each feeling for what was best in the other, half aware that in the future they would be tested together in the fire of wild adventure. Every man is more or less a prophet at certain points in his life.

Twilight and moonlight were blending softly when Beverley, on his way back to the fort, departing from a direct course, went along the river's side southward to have a few moments of reflective strolling within reach of the water's pleasant murmur and the town's indefinite evening stir. Rich sweetness, the gift of early autumn, was on the air blowing softly out of a lilac west and singing in the willow fringe that hung here and there over the bank.

On the farther side of the river's wide flow, swollen by recent heavy rains, Beverley saw a pirogue, in one end of which a dark figure swayed to the strokes of a paddle. The slender and shallow little craft was bobbing on the choppy waves and taking a zig-zag course among floating logs and ma.s.ses of lighter driftwood, while making slow but certain headway 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 his somewhat dangerous voyage diagonally against the rolling current. It was a s.h.i.+fting, hide-and-seek scene, its features appearing and disappearing with the action of the waves and the doubtful light reflected from fading clouds and sky. Now and again the man stood up in his skittish pirogue, balancing himself with care, to use a short pole in shoving driftwood out of his way; and more than once he looked to Beverley as if he had plunged head-long into the dark water.

The spot, as nearly as it can be fixed, was about two hundred yards below where the public road-bridge at present spans the Wabash. The bluff 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 bank and easily leap into the deep water. At a point near the middle of the river a great ma.s.s of drift-logs and sand had long ago formed a barrier which split the stream so that one current came heavily sh.o.r.eward on the side next the town and swashed with its muddy foam, making a swirl and eddy just below where Beverley stood.

The pirogue rounded the upper angle of this obstruction, not without difficulty to its crew of one, and swung into the rapid sh.o.r.eward rush, as was evidently planned for by the steersman, who now paddled against the tide with all his might to keep from being borne too far down stream for a safe landing place.

Beverley stood at ease idly and half dreamily looking on, when suddenly something caused a catastrophe, which for a moment he did not comprehend. In fact the man in the pirogue came to grief, as a man in a pirogue is very apt to do, and fairly somersaulted overboard into the water. Nothing serious would have threatened (for the man could swim like an otter) had not a floating, half submerged log thrust up some short, stiff stumps of boughs, upon the points of which the man struck heavily and was not only hurt, but had his clothes impaled securely by one of the ugly spears, so that he hung in a helpless position, while the water's motion alternately lifted and submerged him, his arms beating about wildly.

When Beverley heard a strangling cry for help, he pulled himself promptly together, flung off his coat, as if by a single motion, and leaped down the bank into the water. He was a swimmer whose strokes counted for all that prodigious strength and excellent training could afford; he rushed through the water with long sweeps, making a semicircle, rounding against the current, so as to swing down upon the drowning man.

Less than a half-hour later a rumor by some means spread throughout the town that Father Beret and Lieutenant Beverley were drowned in the Wabash. But when a crowd gathered to verify the terrible news it turned out to be untrue. Gaspard Roussillon had once more distinguished himself 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 Beverley under one arm and Father Beret under the other, both men apparently dead.

"Bring them to my house immediately," M. Roussillon ordered, as soon as they were restored to consciousness; and he shook himself, as a big wet animal 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 of what appeared on the face of things to be grandly true. Gaspard Roussillon actually dragged Father Beret and Lieutenant Beverley one at a time out of the eddy water and up the steep river bank. That was truly a great feat; but the hero never explained. When men arrived he was 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 ready creole 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 French tongue must shake off what comes to it on the thrill of every exciting moment. The only silent Frenchman is the dead one.

Father Beret was not only well-nigh drowned, but seriously hurt. He lay for 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 he was past all danger. As for Beverley, he shook off all the effects of his struggle in a little while. Next day he was out, as well and strong as ever, busy with the affairs of his office. Nor was he less happy on account of what the little adventure had cast into his experience. It is good to feel that one has done an unselfish deed, and no young man's heart repels the freshness of what comes to him when a beautiful girl first enters his life.

Naturally enough Alice had some thoughts of Beverley while she was so attentively caring for Father Beret. She had never before seen a man like him, nor had she read of one. Compared with Rene de Ronville, the best youth of her acquaintance, he was in every way superior; this was too evident for a.n.a.lysis; but referred to the romantic standard taken out of the novels she had read, he somehow failed; and yet he loomed bravely in her vision, not exactly a knight of the cla.s.s she had most admired, 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 became better acquainted. He began to enjoy the priest's conversation, with its sly worldly wisdom cropping up through fervid religious sentiments and quaint humor. Alice must have interested him more than he was fully aware of; for his eyes followed her, as she came and went, with a curious criticism of her half-savage costume and her springy, Dryad-like suppleness, which reminded him of the shyest and gracefulest wild birds; and yet a touch of refinement, the subtlest and best, showed in all her ways. He studied her, as he would have studied a strange, showy and originally fragrant flower, or a bird of oddly attractive plumage. While she said little to him or to anyone else in his presence, he became aware of the willfulness and joyous lightness which played on her nature's changeable surface. He wondered at her influence over Father Beret, whom she controlled apparently without effort. But in due time he began to feel a deeper character, a broader intelligence, behind her superficial sauvagerie; and he found that she really had no mean smattering of books in the lighter vein.

A little thing happened which further opened his eyes and increased the interest that her beauty and elementary charm of style aroused in him gradually, apace with their advancing acquaintances.h.i.+p.

Father Beret had got well and returned to his hut and his round of spiritual duties; but Beverley came to Roussillon place every day all the same. For a wonder Madame Roussillon liked him, and at most times held the scolding side of her tongue when he was present. Jean, too, made friendly advances whenever opportunity afforded. Of course Alice gave him just the frank cordiality of hospitable welcome demanded by frontier conditions. She scarcely knew whether she liked him or not; but he had a treasury of information from which he was enriching her with liberal carelessness day by day. The hungriest part of her mind was being sumptuously banqueted at his expense. Mere intellectual greediness drew her to him.

Naturally they soon threw off such troubling formalities as at first rose between them, and began to disclose to each other their true characteristics. Alice found in Beverley a large target for the missiles of her clever and tantalizing perversity. He in turn practiced a native dignity and an acquired superiority of manner to excellent effect. It was a meeting of Greek with Greek in a new Arcadia. To him here was Diana, strong, strange, simple, even crude almost to naturalness, yet admirably pure in spirit and imbued with highest womanly aspirations. To her Beverley represented the great outside area of life. He came to her from wonderland, beyond the wide circle of houseless woods and prairies. He represented gorgeous cities, teeming parks of fas.h.i.+on, boulevards, salons, halls of social splendor, the theater, the world of woman's dreams.

Now, there is an antagonism, vague yet powerful, generated between natures thus cast together from the opposite poles of experience and education: an antagonism practically equivalent to the most vigorous attraction. What one knows the other is but half aware of; neither knowledge nor ignorance being mutual, there is a scintillation of exchange, from opposing vantage grounds, followed by harmless snaps of thunder. Culture and refinement take on airs--it is the deepest artificial instinct of enlightenment to pose--in the presence of naturalness; and there is a certain style of ignorance which att.i.tudinizes before the gate of knowledge. The return to nature has always been the dream of the conventionalized soul, while the simple Arcadian is forever longing for the maddening honey of sophistication.

Innate jealousies strike together like flint and steel das.h.i.+ng off sparks by which nearly everything that life can warm its core withal is kindled and kept burning. What I envy in my friend I store for my best use. I thrust and parry, not to kill, but to learn my adversary's superior feints and guards. And this hint of sword play leads back to what so greatly surprised and puzzled Beverley one day when he chanced to be examining the pair of colechemardes on the wall.

He took one down, and handling it with the indescribable facility possible to none save a practical swordsman, remarked:

"There's a world of fascination in these things; I like nothing better than a bout at fencing. Does your father practice the art?"

"I have no father, no mother," she quickly said; "but good Papa Roussillon 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 the woods?"

"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 you are really dying for some exercise, you shall not have to wait for him to come home, I a.s.sure you, Monsieur Beverley."

"Oh, it's Monsieur de Ronville, perhaps, that you will offer up as a victim to my skill and address," he slyly returned; for he was suspecting that a love affair in some stage of progress lay between her and Rene.

She blushed violently, but quickly overcoming a combined rush of surprise and anger, added with an emphasis as charming as it was unexpected.

"I myself am, perhaps, swordsman enough to satisfy the impudence and vanity of Monsieur Beverley, Lieutenant in the American army."

"Pardon me, Mademoiselle; forgive me, I beg of you," he exclaimed, earnestly modulating his voice to sincerest beseechment; "I really did not mean to be impudent, nor--"

Her vivacity cleared with a merry laugh.

"No apologies, I command you," she interposed. "We will have them after I 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.