Castle Nowhere Part 12

'Prescott? O, he's too high and mighty to notice anybody, much less a half-breed girl. I never saw such a stiff, silent fellow; he looks as if he had swallowed all his straightlaced Puritan ancestors. I wish he'd exchange.'

'Gently, Archie--'

'O, yes, without doubt; certainly, and amen! I know you like him, Aunt Sarah,' said my handsome boy-soldier, laughing.

The lessons went on. We often saw the surgeon during study hours as the stairway leading to his room opened out of the little parlor.

Sometimes he would stop awhile and listen as Jeannette slowly read, 'The good boy likes his red top'; 'The good girl can sew a seam', or watched her awkward attempts to write her name, or add a one and a two. It was slow work, but I persevered, if from no other motive than obstinacy. Had they not all prophesied a failure? When wearied with the dull routine, I gave an oral lesson in poetry. If the rhymes were of the chiming, rhythmic kind, Jeannette learned rapidly, catching the verses as one catches a tune, and repeating them with a spirit and dramatic gesture all her own. Her favorite was Macaulay's 'Ivry.'

Beautiful she looked, as, standing in the centre of the room, she rolled out the sonorous lines, her French accent giving a charming foreign coloring to the well-known verses:--

'Now by the lips of those ye love, fair gentlemen of France, Charge for the golden lilies,--upon them with the lance!

A thousand spears are striking deep, a thousand spears in rest, A thousand knights are pressing close behind the snow-white crest; And in they burst, and on they rushed, while, like a guiding star, Amidst the thickest carnage blazed the helmet of Navarre.'

And yet, after all my explanations, she only half understood it; the 'knights' were always 'nights' in her mind, and the 'thickest carnage'

was always the 'thickest carriage.'

One March day she came at the appointed hour, soon after our noon dinner. The usual clear winter sky was clouded, and a wind blew the snow from the trees where it had lain quietly month after month.

'Spring is coming,' said the old sergeant that morning, as he hoisted the storm-flag; it's getting wildlike.'

Jeannette and I went through the lessons, but towards three o'clock a north-wind came sweeping over the Straits and enveloped the island in a whirling snow-storm, partly eddies of white splinters torn from the ice-bound forest, and partly a new, fall of round snow pellets careering along on the gale, quite unlike the soft, feathery flakes of early winter. 'You cannot go home now, Jeannette,' I said, looking out through the little west window; our cottage stood back on the hill, and from this side window we could see the Straits, going down toward far Waugoschance; the steep fort-hill outside the wall; the long meadow, once an Indian burial-place, below; and beyond on the beach the row of cabins inhabited by the French fishermen, one of them the home of my pupil. The girl seldom went round the point into the village; its one street and a half seemed distasteful to her. She climbed the stone-wall on the ridge behind her cabin, took an Indian trail through the gra.s.s in summer, or struck across on the snow-crust in winter, ran up the steep side of the fort-hill like a wild chamois, and came into the garrison enclosure with a careless nod to the admiring sentinel, as she pa.s.sed under the rear entrance. These French, half-breeds, like the gypsies, were not without a pride of their own. They held themselves aloof from the Irish of Shantytown, the floating sailor population of the summer, and the common soldiers of the garrison. They intermarried among themselves, and held their own revels in their beach-cabins during the winter, with music from their old violins, dancing and, songs, French ballads with a chorus after every two lines, quaint chansons handed down from voyageur ancestors. Small respect had they for the little Roman Catholic church beyond the old Agency garden; its German priest they refused to honor; but, when stately old Father Piret came over to the island from his hermitage in the Chenaux, they ran to meet him, young and old, and paid him reverence with affectionate respect. Father Piret was a Parisian, and a gentleman; nothing less would suit these far-away sheep in the wilderness!

Jeannette Leblanc had all the pride of her cla.s.s; the Irish saloon-keeper with his shining tall hat, the loud-talking mate of the lake schooner, the trim sentinel pacing the fort walls, were nothing to her, and this somewhat incongruous hauteur gave her the air of a little princess.

On this stormy afternoon the captain's wife was in my parlor preparing to return to her own quarters with some coffee she had borrowed.

Hearing my remark she said, 'O, the snow won't hurt the child, Mrs.

Corlyne; she must be storm-proof, living down there on the beach!

Duncan can take her home.'

Duncan was the orderly, a factotum in the garrison.

'Non,' said Jeannette, tossing her head proudly, as the door closed behind the lady, 'I wish not of Duncan; I go alone.'

It happened that Archie, my nephew, had gone over to the cottage of the commanding officer to decorate the parlor for the military sociable; I knew he would not return, and the evening stretched out before me in all its long loneliness. 'Stay, Jeannette,' I said. 'We will have tea together here, and when the wind goes down, old Antoine shall go back with you.' Antoine was a French wood-cutter, whose cabin clung half-way down the fort-hill like a swallow's nest.

Jeannette's eyes sparkled; I had never invited her before; in an instant she had turned the day into a high festival. 'Braid hair?'

she asked, glancing toward the mirror, 'faut que je m' fa.s.se belle.' And the long hair came out of its close braids enveloping her in its glossy dark waves, while she carefully smoothed out the bits of red ribbon that served as fastenings. At this moment the door opened, and the surgeon, the wind, and a puff of snow came in together.

Jeannette looked up, smiling and blushing; the falling hair gave a new softness to her face, and her eyes were as shy as the eyes of a wild fawn.

Only the previous day I had noticed that Rodney Prescott listened with marked attention to the captain's cousin, a Virginia lady, as she advanced a theory that Jeannette had negro blood in her veins. 'Those quadroon girls often have a certain kind of plebeian beauty like this pet of yours, Mrs. Corlyne,' she said, with a slight sniff of her high-bred, pointed nose. In vain I exclaimed, in vain I argued; the garrison ladies were all against me, and, in their presence, not a man dared come to my aid; and the surgeon even added, 'I wish I could be sure of it.'

'Sure of the negro blood?' I said indignantly.

'Yes.'

'But Jeannette does not look in the least like a quadroon.'

'Some of the quadroon girls are very handsome, Mrs. Corlyne,' answered the surgeon, coldly.

'O yes!' said the high-bred Virginia lady. 'My brother has a number of them about his place, but we do not teach them to read, I a.s.sure you.

It spoils them.'

As I looked at Jeannette's beautiful face, her delicate eagle profile, her fair skin and light blue eyes, I recalled this conversation with vivid indignation. The surgeon, at least, should be convinced of his mistake. Jeannette had never looked more brilliant; probably the man had never really scanned her features,--he was such a cold, unseeing creature; but to-night he should have a fair opportunity, so I invited him to join our storm-bound tea-party. He hesitated.

'Ah, do, Monsieur Rodenai,' said Jeannette, springing forward. 'I sing for you, I dance; but, no, you not like that. Bien, I tell your fortune then.' The young girl loved company. A party of three, no matter who the third, was to her infinitely better than two.

The surgeon stayed.

A merry evening we had before the hearth-fire. The wind howled around the block-house and rattled the flag-staff, and the snow pellets sounded on the window-panes, giving that sense of warm comfort within that comes only with the storm. Our servant had been drafted into service for the military sociable, and I was to prepare the evening meal myself.

'Not tea,' said Jeannette, with a wry face; 'tea,--c'est medecine!' She had arranged her hair in fanciful braids, and now followed me to the kitchen, enjoying the novelty like a child.

'Cafe?' she said. 'O, please, madame! I make it.'

The little shed kitchen was cold and dreary, each plank of its thin walls rattling in the gale with a dismal creak; the wind blew the smoke down the chimney, and finally it ended on our bringing everything into the cosey parlor, and using the hearth fire, where Jeannette made coffee and baked little cakes over the coals.

The meal over, Jeannette sang her songs, sitting on the rug before the fire,--Le Beau Voyageur, Les Neiges de la Cloche, ballads in Canadian patois sung to minor airs brought over from France two hundred years before.

The surgeon sat in the shade of the chimney-piece, his face shaded by his hand, and I could not discover whether he saw anything to admire in my protegee, until, standing in the centre of the room, she gave as 'Ivry' in glorious style. Beautiful she looked as she rolled out the lines,--

'And if my standard-bearer fall, as fall full well he may,-- For never saw I promise yet of such a b.l.o.o.d.y fray,-- Press where ye see my white plume shine amidst the ranks of war, And be your oriflamme to-day the helmet of Navarre.'

Rodney sat in the full light now, and I secretly triumphed in his rapt attention.

'Something else, Jeannette,' I said in the pride of my heart. Instead of repeating anything I had taught her, she began in French:--

'"Marie, enfant, quitte l'ouvrage, Voici l'etoille du berger."

--"Ma mere, un enfant du village Languit captif chez l'etranger; Pris sur mer, loin de sa patrie, Il c'est rendu,--mais le dernier."

File, file, pauvre Marie, Pour secourir le prisonnier; File, file, pauvre Marie, File, file, pour le prisonnier.

'"Pour lui je filerais moi-meme Mon enfant,--mais--j'ai tant vieilli!"

--"Envoyez a celui que j'aime Tout le gain par moi recueilli.

Rose a sa noce en vain me prie;-- Dieu! j'entends le menetrier!"

File, file, pauvre Marie, Pour secourir le prisonnier; File, file, pauvre Marie, File, file, pour le prisonnier.

'"Plus pres du feu file, ma cherie; La nuit vient de refroidir le temps"

--"Adrien, m'a-t-on dit, ma mere, Gemit dans des cachots flottants.

On repousse la main fletrie Qu'il etend vers an pain grossier."

File, file, pauvre Marie, Pour secourir le prisonnier; File, file, pauvre Marie, File, file pour le prisonnier.'

[Footnote: 'Le Prisonnier de Guerre,' Beranger.]

Jeannette repeated these lines with a pathos so real that I felt a moisture rising in my eyes.

'Where did you learn that, child?' I asked.

'Father Piret, madame.'

'What is it?'

'Je n'sais.'