CHAPTER I
UNDER THE CHERRY TREE
Up to the days of Indiana's early statehood, probably as late
as 1825, there stood, in what is now the beautiful little city
of Vincennes on the Wabash, the decaying remnant of an old and
curiously gnarled cherry tree, known as the Roussillon tree, le
cerisier de Monsieur Roussillon, as the French inhabitants called
it, which as long as it lived bore fruit remarkable for richness
of flavor and peculiar dark ruby depth of color. The exact spot
where this noble old seedling from la belle France flourished,
declined, and died cannot be certainly pointed out; for in the
rapid and happy growth of Vincennes many land-marks once notable,
among them le cerisier de Monsieur Roussillon, have been destroyed
and the spots where they stood, once familiar to every eye in
old Vincennes, are now lost in the pleasant confusion of the new
town.
The security of certain land titles may have largely depended
upon the disappearance of old, fixed objects here and there. Early
records were loosely kept, indeed, scarcely kept at all; many
were destroyed by designing land speculators, while those most
carefully preserved often failed to give even a shadowy trace
of the actual boundaries of the estates held thereby; so that
the position of a house or tree not infrequently settled an important
question of property rights left open by a primitive deed. At
all events the Roussillon cherry tree disappeared long ago, nobody
living knows how, and with it also vanished, quite as mysteriously,
all traces of the once important Roussillon estate. Not a record
of the name even can be found, it is said, in church or county
books.
The old, twisted, gum-embossed cherry tree survived every other
distinguishing feature of what was once the most picturesque and
romantic place in Vincennes. Just north of it stood, in the early
French days, a low, rambling cabin surrounded by rude verandas
overgrown with grapevines. This was the Roussillon place, the
most pretentious home in all the Wabash country. Its owner was
Gaspard Roussillon, a successful trader with the Indians. He was
rich, for the time and the place, influential to a degree, a man
of some education, who had brought with him to the wilderness
a bundle of books and a taste for reading.
From faded letters and dimly remembered talk of those who once
clung fondly to the legends and traditions of old Vincennes, it
is drawn that the Roussillon cherry tree stood not very far away
from the present site of the Catholic church, on a slight swell
of ground overlooking a wide marshy flat and the silver current
of the Wabash. If the tree grew there, then there too stood the
Roussillon house with its cosy log rooms, its clay-daubed chimneys
and its grapevine-mantled verandas, while some distance away and
nearer the river the rude fort with its huddled officers' quarters
seemed to fling out over the wild landscape, through its squinting
and lopsided port-holes, a gaze of stubborn defiance.
Not far off was the little log church, where one good Father Beret,
or as named by the Indians, who all loved him, Father Blackrobe,
performed the services of his sacred calling; and scattered all
around were the cabins of traders, soldiers and woodsmen forming
a queer little town, the like of which cannot now be seen anywhere
on the earth.
It is not known just when Vincennes was first founded; but most
historians make the probable date very early in the eighteenth
century, somewhere between 1710 and 1730. In 1810 the Roussillon
cherry tree was thought by a distinguished botanical letter- writer
to be at least fifty years old, which would make the date of its
planting about 1760. Certainly as shown by the time-stained family
records upon which this story of ours is based, it was a flourishing
and wide-topped tree in early summer of 1778, its branches loaded
to drooping with luscious fruit. So low did the dark red clusters
hang at one point that a tall young girl standing on the ground
easily reached the best ones and made her lips purple with their
juice while she ate them.
That was long ago, measured by what has come to pass on the gentle
swell of rich country from which Vincennes overlooks the Wabash.
The new town flourishes notably and its appearance marks the latest
limit of progress. Electric cars in its streets, electric lights
in its beautiful homes, the roar of railway trains coming and
going in all directions, bicycles whirling hither and thither,
the most fashionable styles of equipages, from brougham to pony-
phaeton, make the days of flint-lock guns and buckskin trousers
seem ages down the past; and yet we are looking back over but
a little more than a hundred and twenty years to see Alice Roussillon
standing under the cherry tree and holding high a tempting cluster
of fruit, while a very short, hump-backed youth looks up with
longing eyes and vainly reaches for it. The tableau is not merely
rustic, it is primitive. "Jump!" the girl is saying
in French, "jump, Jean; jump high!"
Yes, that was very long ago, in the days when women lightly braved
what the strongest men would shrink from now.
Alice Roussillon was tall, lithe, strongly knit, with an almost
perfect figure, judging by what the master sculptors carved for
the form of Venus, and her face was comely and winning, if not
absolutely beautiful; but the time and the place were vigorously
indicated by her dress, which was of coarse stuff and simply designed.
Plainly she was a child of the American wilderness, a daughter
of old Vincennes on the Wabash in the time that tried men's souls.
"Jump, Jean!" she cried, her face laughing with a show
of cheek- dimples, an arching of finely sketched brows and the
twinkling of large blue-gray eyes.
"Jump high and get them!"
While she waved her sun-browned hand holding the cherries aloft,
the breeze blowing fresh from the southwest tossed her hair so
that some loose strands shone like rimpled flames. The sturdy
little hunchback did leap with surprising activity; but the treacherous
brown hand went higher, so high that the combined altitude of
his jump and the reach of his unnaturally long arms was overcome.
Again and again he sprang vainly into the air comically, like
a long-legged, squat-bodied frog.
"And you brag of your agility and strength, Jean," she
laughingly remarked; "but you can't take cherries when they
are offered to you. What a clumsy bungler you are."
"I can climb and get some," he said with a hideously
happy grin, and immediately embraced the bole of the tree, up
which he began scrambling almost as fast as a squirrel.
When he had mounted high enough to be extending a hand for a hold
on a crotch, Alice grasped his leg near the foot and pulled him
down, despite his clinging and struggling, until his hands clawed
in the soft earth at the tree's root, while she held his captive
leg almost vertically erect.
It was a show of great strength; but Alice looked quite unconscious
of it, laughing merrily, the dimples deepening in her plump cheeks,
her forearm, now bared to the elbow, gleaming white and shapely
while its muscles rippled on account of the jerking and kicking
of Jean.
All the time she was holding the cherries high in her other hand,
shaking them by the twig to which their slender stems attached
them, and saying in a sweetly tantalizing tone:
"What makes you climb downward after cherries. Jean? What
a foolish fellow you are, indeed, trying to grabble cherries out
of the ground, as you do potatoes! I'm sure I didn't suppose that
you knew so little as that."
Her French was colloquial, but quite good, showing here and there
what we often notice in the speech of those who have been educated
in isolated places far from that babel of polite energies which
we call the world; something that may be described as a bookish
cast appearing oddly in the midst of phrasing distinctly rustic
and local,--a peculiarity not easy to transfer from one language
to another.
Jean the hunchback was a muscular little deformity and a wonder
of good nature. His head looked unnaturally large, nestling grotesquely
between the points of his lifted and distorted shoulders, like
a shaggy black animal in the fork of a broken tree. He was bellicose
in his amiable way and never knew just when to acknowledge defeat.
How long he might have kept up the hopeless struggle with the
girl's invincible grip would be hard to guess. His release was
caused by the approach of a third person, who wore the robe of
a Catholic priest and the countenance of a man who had lived and
suffered a long time without much loss of physical strength and
endurance.
This was Pere Beret, grizzly, short, compact, his face deeply
lined, his mouth decidedly aslant on account of some lost teeth,
and his eyes set deep under gray, shaggy brows. Looking at him
when his features were in repose a first impression might not
have been favorable; but seeing him smile or hearing him speak
changed everything. His voice was sweetness itself and his smile
won you on the instant. Something like a pervading sorrow always
seemed to be close behind his eyes and under his speech; yet he
was a genial, sometimes almost jolly, man, very prone to join
in the lighter amusements of his people.
"Children, children, my children," he called out as
he approached along a little pathway leading up from the direction
of the church, "what are you doing now? Bah there, Alice,
will you pull Jean's leg off?"
At first they did not hear him, they were so nearly deafened by
their own vocal discords.
"Why are you standing on your head with your feet so high
in air, Jean?" he added. "It's not a polite attitude
in the presence of a young lady. Are you a pig, that you poke
your nose in the dirt?"
Alice now turned her bright head and gave Pere Beret a look of
frank welcome, which at the same time shot a beam of willful self-
assertion.
"My daughter, are you trying to help Jean up the tree feet
foremost?" the priest added, standing where he had halted
just outside of the straggling yard fence.
He had his hands on his hips and was quietly chuckling at the
scene before him, as one who, although old, sympathized with the
natural and harmless sportiveness of young people and would as
lief as not join in a prank or two.
"You see what I'm doing, Father Beret," said Alice,
"I am preventing a great damage to you. You will maybe lose
a good many cherry pies and dumplings if I let Jean go. He was
climbing the tree to pilfer the fruit; so I pulled him down, you
understand."
"Ta, ta!" exclaimed the good man, shaking his gray head;
"we must reason with the child. Let go his leg, daughter,
I will vouch for him; eh, Jean?"
Alice released the hunchback, then laughed gayly and tossed the
cluster of cherries into his hand, whereupon he began munching
them voraciously and talking at the same time.
"I knew I could get them," he boasted; "and see,
I have them now." He hopped around, looking like a species
of ill-formed monkey.
Pere Beret came and leaned on the low fence close to Alice. She
was almost as tall as he.
"The sun scorches to-day," he said, beginning to mop
his furrowed face with a red-flowered cotton handkerchief; "and
from the look of the sky yonder," pointing southward, "it
is going to bring on a storm. How is Madame Roussillon to-day?"
"She is complaining as she usually does when she feels extremely
well," said Alice; "that's why I had to take her place
at the oven and bake pies. I got hot and came out to catch a bit
of this breeze. Oh, but you needn't smile and look greedy, Pere
Beret, the pies are not for your teeth!"
"My daughter, I am not a glutton, I hope; I had meat not
two hours since--some broiled young squirrels with cress, sent
me by Rene de Ronville. He never forgets his old father."
"Oh, I never forget you either, mon pere; I thought of you
to-day every time I spread a crust and filled it with cherries;
and when I took out a pie all brown and hot, the red juice bubbling
out of it so good smelling and tempting, do you know what I said
to myself?"
"How could I know, my child?"
"Well, I thought this: 'Not a single bite of that pie does
Father Beret get.'"
"Why so, daughter?"
"Because you said it was bad of me to read novels and told
Mother Roussillon to hide them from me. I've had any amount of
trouble about it."
"Ta, ta! read the good books that I gave you. They will soon
kill the taste for these silly romances."
"I tried," said Alice; "I tried very hard, and
it's no use; your books are dull and stupidly heavy. What do I
care about something that a queer lot of saints did hundreds of
years ago in times of plague and famine? Saints must have been
poky people, and it is poky people who care to read about them,
I think. I like reading about brave, heroic men and beautiful
women, and war and love."
Pere Beret looked away with a curious expression in his face,
his eyes half closed.
"And I'll tell you now, Father Beret," Alice went on
after a pause, "no more claret and pies do you get until
I can have my own sort of books back again to read as I please."
She stamped her moccasin-shod foot with decided energy.
The good priest broke into a hearty laugh, and taking off his
cap of grass-straw mechanically scratched his bald head. He looked
at the tall, strong girl before him for a moment or two, and it
would have been hard for the best physiognomist to decide just
how much of approval and how much of disapproval that look really
signified.
Although, as Father Beret had said, the sun's heat was violent,
causing that gentle soul to pass his bundled handkerchief with
a wiping circular motion over his bald and bedewed pate, the wind
was momently freshening, while up from behind the trees on the
horizon beyond the river, a cloud was rising blue-black, tumbled,
and grim against the sky.
"Well," said the priest, evidently trying hard to exchange
his laugh for a look of regretful resignation, "you will
have your own way, my child, and--"
"Then you will have pies galore and no end of claret!"
she interrupted, at the same time stepping to the withe-tied and
peg- latched gate of the yard and opening it. "Come in, you
dear, good Father, before the rain shall begin, and sit with me
on the gallery" (the creole word for veranda) "till
the storm is over."
Father Beret seemed not loath to enter, albeit he offered a weak
protest against delaying some task he had in hand. Alice reached
forth and pulled him in, then reclosed the queer little gate and
pegged it. She caressingly passed her arm through his and looked
into his weather-stained old face with childlike affection.
There was not a photographer's camera to be had in those days;
but what if a tourist with one in hand could have been there to
take a snapshot at the priest and the maiden as they walked arm
in arm to that squat little veranda! The picture to-day would
be worth its weight in a first-water diamond. It would include
the cabin, the cherry-tree, a glimpse of the raw, wild background
and a sharp portrait-group of Pere Beret, Alice, and Jean the
hunchback. To compare it with a photograph of the same spot now
would give a perfect impression of the historic atmosphere, color
and conditions which cannot be set in words. But we must not belittle
the power of verbal description. What if a thoroughly trained
newspaper reporter had been given the freedom of old Vincennes
on the Wabash during the first week of June, 1778, and we now
had his printed story! What a supplement to the photographer's
pictures! Well, we have neither photographs nor graphic report;
yet there they are before us, the gowned and straw-capped priest,
the fresh- faced, coarsely-clad and vigorous girl, the grotesque
little hunchback, all just as real as life itself. Each of us
can see them, even with closed eyes. Led by that wonderful guide,
Imagination, we step back a century and more to look over a scene
at once strangely attractive and unspeakably forlorn.
What was it that drew people away from the old countries, from
the cities, the villages and the vineyards of beautiful France,
for example, to dwell in the wilderness, amid wild beasts and
wilder savage Indians, with a rude cabin for a home and the exposures
and hardships of pioneer life for their daily experience?
Men like Gaspard Roussillon are of a distinct stamp. Take him
as he was. Born in France, on the banks of the Rhone near Avignon,
he came as a youth to Canada, whence he drifted on the tide of
adventure this way and that, until at last he found himself, with
a wife, at Post Vincennes, that lonely picket of religion and
trade, which was to become the center of civilizing energy for
the great Northwestern Territory. M. Roussillon had no children
of his own; so his kind heart opened freely to two fatherless
and motherless waifs. These were Alice, now called Alice Roussillon,
and the hunchback, Jean. The former was twelve years old, when
he adopted her, a child of Protestant parents, while Jean had
been taken, when a mere babe, after his parents had been killed
and scalped by Indians. Madame Roussillon, a professed invalid,
whose appetite never failed and whose motherly kindness expressed
itself most often through strains of monotonous falsetto scolding,
was a woman of little education and no refinement; while her husband
clung tenaciously to his love of books, especially to the romances
most in vogue when he took leave of France.
M. Roussillon had been, in a way, Alice's teacher, though not
greatly inclined to abet Father Beret in his kindly efforts to
make a Catholic of the girl, and most treacherously disposed toward
the good priest in the matter of his well-meant attempts to prevent
her from reading and re-reading the aforesaid romances. But for
many weeks past Gaspard Roussillon had been absent from home,
looking after his trading schemes with the Indians; and Pere Beret
acting on the suggestion of the proverb about the absent cat and
the playing mouse, had formed an alliance offensive and defensive
with Madame Roussillon, in which it was strictly stipulated that
all novels and romances were to be forcibly taken and securely
hidden away from Mademoiselle Alice; which, to the best of Madame
Roussillon's ability, had accordingly been done.
Now, while the wind strengthened and the softly booming summer
shower came on apace, the heavy cloud lifting as it advanced and
showing under it the dark gray sheet of the rain, Pere Beret and
Alice sat under the clapboard roof behind the vines of the veranda
and discussed, what was generally uppermost in the priest's mind
upon such occasions, the good of Alice's immortal soul,--a subject
not absorbingly interesting to her at any time.
It was a standing grief to the good old priest, this strange perversity
of the girl in the matter of religious duty, as he saw it. True
she had a faithful guardian in Gaspard Roussillon; but, much as
he had done to aid the church's work in general, for he was always
vigorous and liberal, he could not be looked upon as a very good
Catholic; and of course his influence was not effective in the
right direction. But then Pere Beret saw no reason why, in due
time and with patient work, aided by Madame Roussillon and notwithstanding
Gaspard's treachery, he might not safely lead Alice, whom he loved
as a dear child, into the arms of the Holy Church, to serve which
faithfully, at all hazards and in all places, was his highest
aim.
"Ah, my child," he was saying, "you are a sweet,
good girl, after all, much better than you make yourself out to
be. Your duty will control you; you do it nobly at last, my child."
"True enough, Father Beret, true enough!" she responded,
laughing, "your perception is most excellent, which I will
prove to you immediately."
She rose while speaking and went into the house.
"I'll return in a minute or two," she called back from
a region which Pere Beret well knew was that of the pantry; "don't
get impatient and go away!"
Pere Beret laughed softly at the preposterous suggestion that
he would even dream of going out in the rain, which was now roaring
heavily on the loose board roof, and miss a cut of cherry pie--a
cherry pie of Alice's making! And the Roussillon claret, too,
was always excellent. "Ah, child," he thought, "your
old Father is not going away."
She presently returned, bearing on a wooden tray a ruby-stained
pie and a short, stout bottle flanked by two glasses.
"Of course I'm better than I sometimes appear to be,"
she said, almost humbly, but with mischief still in her voice
and eyes, "and I shall get to be very good when I have grown
old. The sweetness of my present nature is in this pie."
She set the tray on a three-legged stool which she pushed close
to him.
"There now," she said, "let the rain come, you'll
be happy, rain or shine, while the pie and wine last, I'll be
bound."
Pere Beret fell to eating right heartily, meantime handing Jean
a liberal piece of the luscious pie.
"It is good, my daughter, very good, indeed," the priest
remarked with his mouth full. "Madame Roussillon has not
neglected your culinary education." Alice filled a glass
for him. It was Bordeaux and very fragrant. The bouquet reminded
him of his sunny boyhood in France, of his journey up to Paris
and of his careless, joy- brimmed youth in the gay city. How far
away, how misty, yet how thrillingly sweet it all was! He sat
with half closed eyes awhile, sipping and dreaming.
The rain lasted nearly two hours; but the sun was out again when
Pere Beret took leave of his young friend. They had been having
another good-natured quarrel over the novels, and Madame Roussillon
had come out on the veranda to join in.
"I've hidden every book of them," said Madame, a stout
and swarthy woman whose pearl-white teeth were her only mark of
beauty. Her voice indicated great stubbornness.
"Good, good, you have done your very duty, Madame,"
said Pere Beret, with immense approval in his charming voice.
"But, Father, you said awhile ago that I should have my own
way about this," Alice spoke up with spirit; "and on
the strength of that remark of yours I gave you the pie and wine.
You've eaten my pie and swigged the wine, and now--"
Pere Beret put on his straw cap, adjusting it carefully over the
shining dome out of which had come so many thoughts of wisdom,
kindness and human sympathy. This done, he gently laid a hand
on Alice's bright crown of hair and said:
"Bless you, my child. I will pray to the Prince of Peace
for you as long as I live, and I will never cease to beg the Holy
Virgin to intercede for you and lead you to the Holy Church."
He turned and went away; but when he was no farther than the gate,
Alice called out:
"O Father Beret, I forgot to show you something!"
She ran forth to him and added in a low tone:
"You know that Madame Roussillon has hidden all the novels
from me."
She was fumbling to get something out of the loose front of her
dress.
"Well, just take a glance at this, will you?" and she
showed him a little leather bound volume, much cracked along the
hinges of the back.
It was Manon Lescaut, that dreadful romance by the famous Abbe
Prevost.
Pere Beret frowned and went his way shaking his head; but before
he reached his little hut near the church he was laughing in spite
of himself.
"She's not so bad, not so bad," he thought aloud, "it's
only her young, independent spirit taking the bit for a wild run.
In her sweet soul she is as good as she is pure."