The Rose of Old St. Louis Part 41

I had had Gustave tie the boat to the bank before boarding it myself; I now invited the chevalier and his friends to come aboard. Leaving two of their comrades to hold their horses, the three others climbed down the bank and hastened to comply with my invitation. As they did so I saw Caesar dismount, tie his own horse and mine securely to two saplings, and clamber up the bank beside the hors.e.m.e.n. I thought his motive was probably to take advantage of this opportunity to stretch his legs, and perhaps also to indulge his curiosity with a nearer view of the French gentlemen, and I saw no reason to interfere--especially as the two gentlemen, young blades whom I knew by sight, not only offered no objections, but began at once to amuse themselves with his clownish manners and outlandish speech.

Of course the chevalier's quest was futile, as also was his examination of his three witnesses. They all stuck to their text,--the embarkation of Clotilde at four o'clock on the afternoon previous in Paris,--and Clotilde was as stupid as heart could desire, professing absolute ignorance of her mistress's plans, and knowing only that she herself was being sent home to America because she was homesick; and with a negress's love of gratuitous insult when she thinks she is safe in offering it, she added in her creole dialect:

"De Lord knows, I's sick o' white trash anyhow. I's mighty glad to be gittin' back to a country ob ladies and gen'lemen."

The chevalier's two companions laughed, but the chevalier looked perplexed.

"Monsieur," he said, with an air of exaggerated deference, "I have discovered nothing on your boat, either by search or by examination of the witnesses, that can implicate you in any way with the flight of the Comtesse de Baloit. But will you permit me to ask you one important question? How does it happen that you are not riding Fatima, and that you are riding the horse which answers exactly to the description of the one the comtesse was riding when she disappeared?"

and the chevalier could not quite keep the tone of triumph out of his voice as he propounded his question. I had been expecting it, and I was prepared for it. I should have been much disappointed if he had not asked it.

"Monsieur," I answered, "Fatima met with a serious accident just after leaving Paris. I was obliged to leave her in the hands of a veterinary surgeon on the outskirts of St. Denis, who has also a small farm connected with his establishment for the care of sick horses. He promised me to take the best of care of her and to return her to me in America as soon as she was sufficiently recovered. I bought this horse from a dealer to whom the surgeon directed me. I cannot say whether it resembles the horse on which the Comtesse de Baloit left Paris; I did not see the comtesse when she left Paris."

Which was the only truth in my statement; but I did not for a moment consider that I had told a lie, but only that I had employed a ruse, perfectly permissible in war, to throw the enemy off the track. He s.n.a.t.c.hed at the bait.

"Will Monsieur give me the address of that horse-dealer?"

"With pleasure, as nearly as I am able," and thereupon I described minutely a place in St. Denis that never existed. But St. Denis was only four miles this side of Paris, and should the chevalier go all the way back to find out from the mythical horse-dealer where he had procured my horse, much valuable time would be lost and mademoiselle would, I hoped, be beyond all risk of being overtaken.

By one little artifice and another we had already managed to delay them for a good three quarters of an hour, and now, by an apparently happy accident, as long a delay again was promised. A great noise of shouting and trampling of horses' hoofs arose on the bank above us.

We looked up and saw the five horses plunging frantically, with the two Frenchmen uttering excited cries as they tried to hold them, and Caesar doing his share in trying to hold the horses and more than his share in making a noise. As we looked, one of the horses broke away and started up the road toward Paris. The two Frenchmen dashed wildly in pursuit, each man leading a horse with him, and Caesar running on behind gesticulating madly, and bellowing at the top of his lungs.

I had taken advantage of the excitement of the fracas to slip from the post the rope that held us to the bank. We glided gently away down the river, with no one (unless it might have been Gustave, but he said nothing) noticing that we were moving until we were many yards below our mooring-place. The anger of the chevalier and his friends when they discovered it knew no bounds. Gustave was full of apologies for his carelessness, as he called it; I was dignified.

"Gustave," I said severely, "make a mooring as quickly as possible, that Monsieur le Chevalier and his friends may rejoin their horses."

Gustave made all haste apparently, but without doubt he fumbled, and we were some two or three hundred yards farther down the river before we were finally tied to the bank.

"Good-by, Messieurs," I said politely as the three hastened to leap ash.o.r.e. "I trust you will have no difficulty in recovering your horses."

They stayed not upon the order of their going, as Mr. Shakspere says, but scrambled up the bank and on to the hot and stony road, and the sun, now well up in the sky, beating strongly on their backs, they started at a round pace toward Paris, their horses by this time out of sight around a distant bend in the road.

Caesar had given up the pursuit and returned to where he had tied our horses. I signaled to him to bring them down the river, and mounting his and leading mine, he was soon at our mooring-place.

Riding down the soft turf of the shady bridle-path a few minutes later, I heard Caesar chuckling behind me. I turned in my saddle:

"What is it, Caesar?"

"I done it, Marsa!"

"Did what, Caesar?"

"Done mek dat hoss run away. I put a burr un'er his girth. Den when he plunged I cotched de bridle and let him loose. He, he, he! Hi, hi, hi!" and Caesar rolled in his saddle in convulsions of mirth, while the sh.o.r.e echoed to his guffaws.

I looked at him in astonishment for a moment. Then he had planned it all: tying the two horses, clambering up to the road, making himself the jest of the two Frenchmen, and all the time the burr concealed in his hand, no doubt, waiting his chance.

"Caesar, you are a general!" I said. "Yorke could not have done better." And then, his mirth being contagious, I threw back my head and laughed as long and as loud as he.

I turned in my saddle once more and looked up the road. Through the hot sun plodded the three figures: the chevalier with bent head and, I doubted not, with gnashing teeth. I waved my hand toward him and called, though he could neither see nor hear:

"Good-by, Chevalier Le Moyne; this cancels a few debts!"

I have never seen him since.

CHAPTER XXIX

UNDER THE OLD FLAG

"And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky."

It was in the early days of March, some eight months later, that the big barge in which I had come down the Ohio, and thus far on the Mississippi, put me ash.o.r.e at New Madrid with my saddle-bags and my horse Bourbon Prince; for so I had promptly named the black beauty for whom I had exchanged my chestnut mare. He could never quite take the place of Fatima in my affections, but I had grown very fond of him: partly for his virtues, for he was a thoroughbred of famous lineage, and partly, I have no doubt, because he had once belonged to mademoiselle.

Of mademoiselle I had not heard for many months. I had arrived at home in the late summer, to find my father a physical and almost a mental wreck from the stroke of paralysis that had laid him low nearly three months before. Yet I had never loved my strong, stern father in the prime of manhood, managing great business enterprises, occupying places of honor and responsibility in the State, as I loved this feeble and broken old man with the face and the manner of a little child. As the weeks went on and he gradually grew able to move about, it was my pride and my joy to walk slowly down Chestnut Street, my father leaning heavily on my arm, and looking up into my face to comment with childish delight upon whatever pleased him in the streets.

I had had to a.s.sume, to the best of my ability, his heavy business responsibilities, and the charge of his great properties, and but that my mother was herself a fine business woman and thoroughly informed on my father's affairs I might have made shipwreck of it all. It was not the life I had chosen for myself, but it lay so directly in the path of duty there was no escaping it, and it kept every moment so fully occupied there was no time left for brooding over private troubles.

I had received a letter from the Prince de Polignac about two weeks after my return home, telling me of the safe arrival in Baden of the Comtesse de Baloit. It was a very courteous letter, thanking me once more for the great services I had rendered them on that eventful night in the Chantilly parks, and inclosing a pleasant message of acknowledgment from the Duc d'Enghien for the kindness shown his cousin the countess. Mademoiselle had added a line in her own writing:

"Fatima is well, and I love her for the sake of dear old St.

Louis.

PELAGIE."

To most people that might seem a very common-place little message; to me those sixteen words were the most wonderful ever written. I twisted and turned them until each one became a volume of tender sentiments, and the little signature "Pelagie" almost too sacred to be looked at, and only to be kissed, shut up in my own room in the dark, or with none but the moon to see.

I had replied to the prince's letter immediately, sending a courteous message to the duke and a special one to Pelagie about Clotilde, whom I had sent under safe escort to St. Louis. But although I had intimated to the prince that it would give me very great pleasure to hear occasionally of the welfare of the countess, I never heard from any of them again.

This, of course, was an especial grief to me on Pelagie's account, but also it touched me a little that the prince should so soon have forgotten me and what he was pleased to term my "great services" to him, for I had been strongly attracted to him by his n.o.ble bearing and chivalrous protection of mademoiselle. Often, in thinking of them,--he a n.o.ble young prince of great manly beauty and endowed by nature with all charming and lovable qualities; she the most exquisite of womankind,--I thought it would be strange indeed if in the intimate companionship of that long ride together they had not become so deeply interested in each other as to forget the existence of a young American gentleman three thousand miles away.

When in the winter there came news of the Cadoudal plots against the life of Napoleon, in which the young Prince de Polignac and his older brother the duke were involved; that both brothers had been arrested, tried, and condemned to death; and, later, that Napoleon had granted them a free pardon, I could easily believe that other interests than love and marriage had so absorbed the prince as to make him forgetful of a distant acquaintance.

On the heels of this appalling news, which shook the world and which yet left me glad and grateful that the chivalrous young prince had been saved from the ignominious death of an a.s.sa.s.sin, there came a letter to me from Captain Clarke, written in St. Louis, inviting me to join the expedition of discovery and exploration which Mr. Meriwether Lewis and he were to conduct up the Missouri River and across the mountains.

Few duties have come to me in life more difficult to perform than the writing of that letter declining the invitation. It was the life I longed for, to be had for the taking, and an expedition of such kind under the leadership of two men like my captain, whom I still adored, and Mr. Meriwether Lewis, whom I greatly admired, was the strongest temptation that could be presented to me.

But I knew well it was not for me. It would, no doubt, be a year or two in the accomplishing, with many hazards to life and limb, and I was now the virtual head of the family, with mother and sisters and invalid father all looking to me for protection and guidance and comfort. No, it was not to be thought of.

Without consulting any one I sent my answer, but I suppose my face was an open book to my dear mother, and in some moment of abstraction I had forgotten to be cheerful and so betrayed that something was troubling me. At any rate, she came to my room one night, and there, in the way that mothers have, she beguiled my secret from me. She agreed with me that it would never do in my father's state of health to join such an expedition, but she was greatly distressed for what she called my disappointment, though I tried to a.s.sure her it was not enough to think about.

Now mothers have a way of finding a salve for every hurt. I suppose it is a talent G.o.d has given them, that this world may be a pleasanter place for living in, and that the rugged path we have to tread through it may be smoother and pleasanter to our feet. (Though I hope no one will think because I have said this that I am one of those long-faced people who think this world a vale of woes to be traversed as quickly as possible, looking neither to the right nor to the left, lest they see something to please their eyes. I have ever found it a pleasant world, and my path through it of exceeding interest, with some sorrows and many difficulties to test one's mettle and add to the zest of living; but also with many wonderful and beautiful things lying all along the path, that G.o.d has placed there that one may stop and enjoy them and rest by the wayside.)

Now the salve my mother found for this hurt was one to my especial liking.

"Though you could not be gone from home two or three years, my son,"

she said, "a matter of two or three months could make no great difference to any one; why not go out to St. Louis, see your friends there, and help the expedition get under way?"