Old Kaskaskia Part 4

"Girls, if you won't be still, somebody will come."

"Clarice Vigo, why don't you stop your noise?"

"Why do you not stop yours, mademoiselle?"

"I haven't spoken a word but sh! I have been trying my best to quiet them all."

"So have I."

"Ellen Bond fell over me. She was scared to death by a screech-owl!"

"It was you fell over me, Miss Betsey."

"If we are going to try the charm," announced Peggy Morrison, "we must begin. You had better all get in a line behind me and do just as I do.

You can't see me very well, but you can scatter the hempseed and say what I say. And it must be done soberly, or Satan may come mowing at our heels."

From a distant perch to which he had removed himself, the screech-owl again remonstrated. Silence settled like the slow fluttering downward of feathers on every throbbing figure. The stir of a slipper on the pavement, or the catching of a breath, became the only tokens of human presence in the old college. These postulants of fortune in their half-visible state once more bore some resemblance to the young ladies who had stood in decorum answering compliments between the figures of the dance the night before.

On cautious shoe leather the march began. One voice, two voices, and finally a low chorus intoned and repeated,--

"Hempseed, I sow thee,--hempseed, I sow thee; let him who is to marry me come after me and mow thee."

Peggy led her followers out of the east door towards the river; wheeling when she reached a little wind-row of rotted timbers. This chaos had once stood up in order, forming makeshift bastions for the fort, and supporting cannon. Such boards and posts as the negroes had not carried off lay now along the river brink, and the Okaw was steadily undermining that brink as it had already undermined and carried away the Jesuits'

s.p.a.cious landing.

Glancing over their shoulders with secret laughter for that fearful gleam of scythes which was to come, the girls marched back; and their leader's abrupt halt jarred the entire line. A man stood in the opposite entrance. They could not see him in outline, but his unmistakable hat showed against a low-lying sky.

"Who's there?" demanded Peggy Morrison.

The intruder made no answer.

They could not see a scythe about him, but to every girl he took a different form. He was Billy Edgar, or Jules Vigo, or Rice Jones, or any other gallant of Kaskaskia, according to the varying faith which beating hearts sent to the eyes that saw him.

The spell of silence did not last. A populous roost invaded by a fox never resounded with more squalling than did the old Jesuit College. The girls swished around corners and tumbled over the vegetable beds.

Angelique groped for Maria, not daring to call her name, and caught and ran with some one until they neared the light, when she found it was the dumpy little figure of her cousin Clarice.

As soon as the girls were gone, the man who had broken up their hempseed sowing advanced a few steps on the pavement. He listened, and that darker shadow in the angle of the walls was perceptible to him.

"Are you here?"

"I am here," answered Maria.

Rice Jones's sister could not sit many minutes in the damp old building without being missed by the girls and her family. His voice trembled.

She could hear his heart beating with large strokes. His presence surrounded her like an atmosphere, and in the darkness she clutched her own breast to keep the rapture from physically hurting her.

"Maria, did you know that my wife was dead?"

"Oh, James, no!"

Her whisper was more than a caress. It was surrender and peace and forgiveness. It was the snapping of a tension which had held her two years.

"Oh, James, when I saw you to-night I did not know what to do. I have not been well. You have borne it so much better than I have."

"I thought," said Dr. Dunlap, "it would be best for us to talk matters over."

She caught her breath. What was the matter with this man? Once he had lain at her feet and kissed the hem of her garment. He was hers. She had never relinquished her ownership of him even when her honor had constrained her to live apart from him. Whose could he be but hers?

Dr. Dunlap had thought twenty-four hours on what he would say at this unavoidable meeting, and he acknowledged in a business-like tone,--

"I did not treat you right, Maria. My wretched entanglement when I was a boy ruined everything. But when I persuaded you into a secret marriage with me, I meant to make it right when the other one died. And you found it out and left me. If I treated you badly, you treated me badly, too."

He knew the long chin of the Joneses. He could imagine Maria lifting her slim chin. She did not speak.

"I came over here to begin life again. When you ran off to your friends, what was there for me to do but take to the navy again or sail for America? Kaskaskia was the largest post in the West; so I came here. And here I found your family, that I thought were in another Territory. And from the first your brother has been my enemy."

His sulky complaint brought no response in words; but a strangling sob broke all restraint in the angle of the wall.

"Maria," exclaimed the startled doctor, "don't do that. You excite yourself."

In her paroxysm she rolled down on the stone floor, and he stooped in consternation and picked her up. He rested his foot on the ledge where she had sat, and held her upon his knee. She struggled for breath until he thought she would die, and the sweat of terror stood on his forehead.

When he had watched her by the bonfire, his medical knowledge gave her barely two months of life; and within those two months, he had also told himself bitterly then, Rice Jones could marry Angelique Saucier; but to have her die alone with him in this old building was what he could not contemplate.

Scarcely conscious of his own action, the doctor held her in positions which helped her, and finally had the relief of hearing her draw a free breath as she lapsed against his shoulder. Even a counterfeit tie of marriage has its power. He had lived with this woman, she believing herself his lawful wife. Their half-year together had been the loftiest period of his life. The old feeling, smothered as it was under resentment and a new pa.s.sion, stirred in him. He strained her to his breast and called her the pet names he used to call her. The diminutive being upon his knee heard them without response. When she could speak she whispered,--

"Set me down."

Dr. Dunlap moved his foot and placed her again on the stone ledge. She leaned against the wall. There was a ringing in her ears. The unpardonable sin in man is not his ceasing to love you. That may be a mortal pain, but it has dignity. It is the fearful judgment of seeing in a flash that you have wasted your life on what was not worth the waste.

"Now if you are composed, Maria," said Dr. Dunlap hurriedly, "I will say what I followed you here to say. The best thing for us to do, now that I am free to do it, is to have the marriage ceremony repeated over us and made valid. I am ready and willing. The only drawback is the prejudice of your family against me."

A magnanimous tone in his voice betrayed eagerness to put the Joneses under obligations to him.

"Dr. Dunlap,"--when Maria had spoken his name she panted awhile,--"when I found out I was not your wife, and left you, I began then to cough.

But now--we can never be married."

"Why, Maria?"

She began those formidable sounds again, and he held his breath.

Somebody in the distance began playing a violin. Its music mingled with the sounds which river-inclosed lands and the adjacent dwellings of men send up in a summer night.

"You know," said Maria when she could speak, "how we deceived my people in Wales and in London. None of my family here know anything about that marriage."

Another voice outside the walls, keen with anxiety, shouted her name.

Dr. Dunlap hurried a few yards from her, then stopped and held his ground. A man rushed into the old building regardless of the broken floor.

"Maria, are you here?"