Alice of Old Vincennes Part 14

"What did I tell you?" he cried, in a jolly mood, slapping Beverley on the shoulder. "I knew mighty well that it was all a big story with nothing in it. What on earth would the English be thinking about to march an army away off down here only to capture a rotten stockade and a lot of gabbling parly-voos?"

Beverley, while he did not feel quite as confident as his chief, was not sorry that things looked a little brighter than he had feared they would turn out to be. Secretly, and without acknowledging it to himself, he was delighted with the life he was living. The Arcadian atmosphere of Vincennes clothed him in its mists and dreams. No matter what way the weather blew its breath, cold or warm, cloudy or fair, rain or snow, the peace in his soul changed not. His nature seemed to hold all of its sterner and fiercer traits in abeyance while he domiciled himself absolutely within his narrow and monotonous environment. Since the dance at the river house a new content, like a soft and diffused sweetness, had crept through his blood with a vague, tingling sense of joy.

He began to like walking about rather aimlessly in the town's narrow streets, with the mud-daubed cabins on either hand. This simple life under low, thatched roofs had a charm. When a door was opened he could see a fire of logs on the ample hearth shooting its yellow tongues up the sooty chimney-throat. Soft creole voices murmured and sang, or jangled their petty domestic discords. Women in scant petticoats, leggings and moccasins swept snow from the squat verandas, or fed the pigs in little sties behind the cabins. Everybody cried cheerily: "Bon jour, Monsieur, comment allez-vous?" as he went by, always accompanying the verbal salute with a graceful wave of the hand.

When he walked early in the morning a waft of broiling game and browning corn scones was abroad. Pots and kettles occupied the hearths with glowing coals heaped around and under. s.h.a.ggy dogs whined at the doors until the mensal remnants were tossed out to them in the front yard.

But it was always a glimpse of Alice that must count for everything in Beverley's reckonings, albeit he would have strenuously denied it. True he went to Roussillon place almost every day, it being a fixed part of his well ordered habit, and had a talk with her. Sometimes, when Dame Roussillon was very busy and so quite off her guard, they read together in a novel, or in certain parts of the odd volume of Montaigne. This was done more for the sweetness of disobedience than to enjoy the already familiar pages.

Now and again they repeated their fencing bout; but never with the result which followed the first. Beverley soon mastered Alice's tricks and showed her that, after all, masculine muscle is not to be discounted at its own game by even the most wonderful womanly strength and suppleness. She struggled bravely to hold her vantage ground once gained so easily, but the inevitable was not to be avoided. At last, one howling winter day, he disarmed her by the very trick that she had shown him. That ended the play and they ran shivering into the house.

"Ah," she cried, "it isn't fair. You are so much bigger than I; you have so much longer arms; so much more weight and power. It all counts against me! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" She was rosy with the exhilarating exercise and the biting of the frosty breeze. Her beauty gave forth a new ray.

Deep in her heart she was pleased to have him master her so superbly; but as the days pa.s.sed she never said so, never gave over trying to make him feel the touch of her foil. She did not know that her eyes were getting through his guard, that her dimples were stabbing his heart to its middle.

"You have other advantages," he replied, "which far overbalance my greater stature and stronger muscles." Then after a pause he added: "After all a girl must be a girl."

Something in his face, something in her heart, startled her so that she made a quick little move like that of a restless bird.

"You are beautiful and that makes my eyes and my hand uncertain," he went on. "Were I fencing with a man there would be no glamour."

He spoke in English, which he did not often do in conversation with her. It was a sign that he was somewhat wrought upon. She followed his rapid words with difficulty; but she caught from them a new note of feeling. He saw a little pale flare shoot across her face and thought she was angry.

"You should not use your dimples to distract my vision," he quickly added, with a light laugh. "It would be no worse for me to throw my hat in your face!"

His attempt at levity was obviously weak; she looked straight into his eyes, with the steady gaze of a simple, earnest nature shocked by a current quite strange to it. She did not understand him, and she did.

Her fine intuition gathered swiftly together a hundred shreds of impression received from him during their recent growing intimacy. He was a patrician, as she vaguely made him out, a man of wealth, whose family was great. He belonged among people of gentle birth and high attainments. She magnified him so that he was diffused in her imagination, as difficult to comprehend as a mist in the morning air--and as beautiful.

"You make fun of me," she said, very deliberately, letting her eyes droop; then she looked up again suddenly and continued, with a certain naive expression of disappointment gathering in her face. "I have been too free with you. Father Beret told me not to forget my dignity when in your company. He told me you might misunderstand me. I don't care; I shall not fence with you again." She laughed, but there was no joyous freedom in the sound.

"Why, Alice--my dear Miss Roussillon, you do me a wrong; I beg a thousand pardons if I've hurt you," he cried, stepping nearer to her, "and I can never forgive myself. You have somehow misunderstood me, I know you have!"

On his part it was exaggerating a mere contact of mutual feelings into a dangerous collision. He was as much self-deceived as was she, and he made more noise about it.

"It is you who have misunderstood me," she replied, smiling brightly now, but with just a faint, pitiful touch of regret, or self-blame lingering in her voice. "Father Beret said you would. I did not believe him; but--"

"And you shall not believe him," said Beverley. "I have not misunderstood you. There has been nothing. You have treated me kindly and with beautiful friendliness. You have not done or said a thing that Father Beret or anybody else could criticise. And if I have said or done the least thing to trouble you I repudiate it--I did not mean it.

Now you believe me, don't you, Miss Roussillon?"

He seemed to be falling into the habit of speaking to her in English.

She understood it somewhat imperfectly, especially when in an earnest moment he rushed his words together as if they had been soldiers he was leading at the charge-step against an enemy. His manner convinced her, even though his diction fell short.

"Then we'll talk about something else," she said, laughing naturally now, and retreating to a chair by the hearthside. "I want you to tell me all about yourself and your family, your home and everything."

She seated herself with an air of conscious aplomb and motioned him to take a distant stool.

There was a great heap of dry logs in the fireplace, with pointed flames shooting out of its crevices and leaping into the gloomy, cave-like throat of the flue. Outside a wind pa.s.sed heavily across the roof and bellowed in the chimney-top.

Beverley drew the stool near Alice, who, with a charred stick, used as a poker, was thrusting at the glowing crevices and sending showers of sparks aloft.

"Why, there wouldn't be much to tell," he said, glad to feel secure again. "Our home is a big old mansion named Beverley Hall on a hill among trees, and half surrounded with slave cabins. It overlooks the plantation in the valley where a little river goes wandering on its way." He was speaking French and she followed him easily now, her eyes beginning to fling out again their natural sunny beams of interest. "I was born there twenty-six years ago and haven't done much of anything since. You see before you, Mademoiselle, a very undistinguished young man, who has signally failed to accomplish the dream of his boyhood, which was to be a great artist like Raphael or Angelo. Instead of being famous I am but a poor Lieutenant in the forces of Virginia."

"You have a mother, father, brothers and sisters?" she interrogated.

She did not understand his allusion to the great artists of whom she knew nothing. She had never before heard of them. She leaned the poker against the chimney jamb and turned her face toward him.

"Mother, father, and one sister," he said, "no brothers. We were a happy little group. But my sister married and lives in Baltimore. I am here. Father and mother are alone in the old house. Sometimes I am terribly homesick." He was silent a moment, then added: "But you are selfish, you make me do all the telling. Now I want you to give me a little of your story, Mademoiselle, beginning as I did, at the first."

"But I can't," she replied with childlike frankness, "for I don't know where I was born, nor my parents' names, nor who I am. You see how different it is with me. I am called Alice Roussillon, but I suppose that my name is Alice Tarleton; it is not certain, however. There is very little to help out the theory. Here is all the proof there is. I don't know that it is worth anything."

She took off her locket and handed it to him.

He handled it rather indifferently, for he was just then studying the fine lines of her face. But in a moment he was interested.

"Tarleton, Tarleton," he repeated. Then he turned the little disc of gold over and saw the enameled drawing on the back,--a crest clearly outlined.

He started. The crest was quite familiar.

"Where did you get this?" he demanded in English, and with such blunt suddenness that she was startled. "Where did it come from?"

"I have always had it."

"Always? It's the Tarleton crest. Do you belong to that family?"

"Indeed I do not know. Papa Roussillon says he thinks I do."

"Well, this is strange and interesting," said Beverley, rather to himself than addressing her. He looked from the miniature to the crest and back to the miniature again, then at Alice. "I tell you this is strange," he repeated with emphasis. "It is exceedingly strange."

Her cheeks flushed quickly under their soft brown and her eyes flashed with excitement.

"Yes, I know." Her voice fluttered; her hands were clasped in her lap.

She leaned toward him eagerly. "It is strange. I've thought about it a great deal."

"Alice Tarleton; that is right; Alice is a name of the family. Lady Alice Tarleton was the mother of the first Sir Garnett Tarleton who came over in the time of Yardley. It's a great family. One of the oldest and best in Virginia." He looked at her now with a gaze of concentrated interest, under which her eyes fell. "Why, this is romantic!" he exclaimed, "absolutely romantic. And you don't know how you came by this locket? You don't know who was your father, your mother?"

"I do not know anything."

"And what does Monsieur Roussillon know?"

"Just as little."

"But how came he to be taking you and caring for you? He must know how he got you, where he got you, of whom he got you? Surely he knows--"

"Oh, I know all that. I was twelve years old when Papa Roussillon took me, eight years ago. I had been having a hard life, and but for him I must have died. I was a captive among the Indians. He took me and has cared for me and taught me. He has been very, very good to me. I love him dearly."

"And don't you remember anything at all about when, where, how the Indians got you?"

"No." She shook her head and seemed to be trying to recollect something. "No, I just can't remember; and yet there has always been something like a dream in my mind, which I could not quite get hold of.

I know that I am not a Catholic. I vaguely remember a sweet woman who taught me to pray like this: 'Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.'"