CHAPTER VI
A FENCING BOUT
A few days after Helm's arrival, M. Roussillon returned to Vincennes, and if he was sorely touched in his amour propre by seeing his suddenly acquired military rank and title drop away, he did not let it be known to his fellow citizens. He promptly called upon the new commander and made acquaintance with Lieutenant Fitzhugh Beverley, who just then was superintending the work of cleaning up an old cannon in the fort and mending some breaks in the stockade.
Helm formed a great liking for the big Frenchman, whose breezy freedom of manner and expansive good humor struck him favorably from the beginning. M. Roussillon's ability to speak English with considerable ease helped the friendship along, no doubt; at all events their first interview ended with a hearty show of good fellowship, and as time passed they became almost inseparable companions during M. Roussillon's periods of rest from his trading excursions among the Indians. They played cards and brewed hot drinks over which they told marvelous stories, the latest one invariably surpassing all its predecessors.
Helm had an eye to business, and turned M. Roussillon's knowledge of the Indians to valuable account, so that he soon had very pleasant relations with most of the tribes within reach of his agents. This gave a feeling of great security to the people of Vincennes. They pursued their narrow agricultural activities with excellent results and redoubled those social gayeties which, even in hut and cabin under all the adverse conditions of extreme frontier life, were dear to the volatile and genial French temperament.
Lieutenant Beverley found much to interest him in the quaint town; but the piece de resistance was Oncle Jazon, who proved to be both fascinating and unmanageable; a hard nut to crack, yet possessing a kernel absolutely original in flavor. Beverley visited him one evening in his hut--it might better be called den--a curiously built thing, with walls of vertical poles set in a quadrangular trench dug in the ground, and roofed with grass. Inside and out it was plastered with clay, and the floor of dried mud was as smooth and hard as concrete paving. In one end there was a wide fireplace grimy with soot, in the other a mere peep-hole for a window: a wooden bench, a bed of skins and two or three stools were barely visible in the gloom. In the doorway Oncle Jazon sat whittling a slender billet of hickory into a ramrod for his long flint-lock American rifle.
"Maybe ye know Simon Kenton," said the old man, after he and Beverley had conversed for a while, "seeing that you are from Kentucky--eh?"
"Yes, I do know him well; he's a warm personal friend of mine," said Beverley with quick interest, for it surprised him that Oncle Jazon should know anything about Kenton. "Do you know him, Monsieur Jazon?"
Oncle Jazon winked conceitedly and sighted along his rudimentary ramrod to see if it was straight; then puckering his lips, as if on the point of whistling, made an affirmative noise quite impossible to spell.
"Well, I'm glad you are acquainted with Kenton," said Beverley. "Where did you and he come together?"
Oncle Jazon chuckled reminiscently and scratched the skinless, cicatrized spot where his scalp had once flourished.
"Oh, several places," he answered. "Ye see thet hair a hangin' there on the wall?" He pointed at a dry wisp dangling under a peg in a log barely visible by the bad light. "Well, thet's my scalp, he! he! he!" He snickered as if the fact were a most enjoyable joke. "Simon Kenton can tell ye about thet little affair! The Indians thought I was dead, and they took my hair; but I wasn't dead; I was just a givin' 'em a 'possum act. When they was gone I got up from where I was a layin' and trotted off. My head was sore and ventrebleu! but I was mad, he! he! he!"
All this time he spoke in French, and the English but poorly paraphrases his odd turns of expression. His grimaces and grunts cannot even be hinted.
It was a long story, as Beverley received it, told scrappily, but with certain rude art. In the end Oncle Jazon said with unctuous self-satisfaction:
"Accidents will happen. I got my chance at that damned Indian who skinned my head, and I jes took a bead on 'im with my old rifle. I can't shoot much, never could, but I happened to hit 'im square in the lef' eye, what I shot at, and it was a hundred yards. Down he tumbles, and I runs to 'im and finds my same old scalp a hangin' to his belt. Well, I lifted off his hair with my knife, and untied mine from the belt, and then I had both scalps, he! he! he! You ask Simon Kenton when ye see 'im. He was along at the same time, and they made 'im run the ga'ntlet and pretty nigh beat the life out o' 'im. Ventrebleu!"
Beverley now recollected hearing Kenton tell the same grim story by a camp-fire in the hills of Kentucky. Somehow it had caught a new spirit in the French rendering, which linked it with the old tales of adventure that he had read in his boyhood, and it suddenly endeared Oncle Jazon to him. The rough old scrap of a man and the powerful youth chatted together until sundown, smoking their pipes, each feeling for what was best in the other, half aware that in the future they would be tested together in the fire of wild adventure. Every man is more or less a prophet at certain points in his life.
Twilight and moonlight were blending softly when Beverley, on his way back to the fort, departing from a direct course, went along the river's side southward to have a few moments of reflective strolling within reach of the water's pleasant murmur and the town's indefinite evening stir. Rich sweetness, the gift of early autumn, was on the air blowing softly out of a lilac west and singing in the willow fringe that hung here and there over the bank.
On the farther side of the river's wide flow, swollen by recent heavy rains, Beverley saw a pirogue, in one end of which a dark figure swayed to the strokes of a paddle. The slender and shallow little craft was bobbing on the choppy waves and taking a zig-zag course among floating logs and masses of lighter driftwood, while making slow but certain headway toward the hither bank.
Beverley took a bit of punk and a flint and steel from his pocket, relit his pipe and stood watching the skilful boatman conduct his somewhat dangerous voyage diagonally against the rolling current. It was a shifting, hide-and-seek scene, its features appearing and disappearing with the action of the waves and the doubtful light reflected from fading clouds and sky. Now and again the man stood up in his skittish pirogue, balancing himself with care, to use a short pole in shoving driftwood out of his way; and more than once he looked to Beverley as if he had plunged head-long into the dark water.
The spot, as nearly as it can be fixed, was about two hundred yards below where the public road-bridge at present spans the Wabash. The bluff was then far different from what it is now, steeper and higher, with less silt and sand between it and the water's edge. Indeed, swollen as the current was, a man could stand on the top of the bank and easily leap into the deep water. At a point near the middle of the river a great mass of drift-logs and sand had long ago formed a barrier which split the stream so that one current came heavily shoreward on the side next the town and swashed with its muddy foam, making a swirl and eddy just below where Beverley stood.
The pirogue rounded the upper angle of this obstruction, not without difficulty to its crew of one, and swung into the rapid shoreward rush, as was evidently planned for by the steersman, who now paddled against the tide with all his might to keep from being borne too far down stream for a safe landing place.
Beverley stood at ease idly and half dreamily looking on, when suddenly something caused a catastrophe, which for a moment he did not comprehend. In fact the man in the pirogue came to grief, as a man in a pirogue is very apt to do, and fairly somersaulted overboard into the water. Nothing serious would have threatened (for the man could swim like an otter) had not a floating, half submerged log thrust up some short, stiff stumps of boughs, upon the points of which the man struck heavily and was not only hurt, but had his clothes impaled securely by one of the ugly spears, so that he hung in a helpless position, while the water's motion alternately lifted and submerged him, his arms beating about wildly.
When Beverley heard a strangling cry for help, he pulled himself promptly together, flung off his coat, as if by a single motion, and leaped down the bank into the water. He was a swimmer whose strokes counted for all that prodigious strength and excellent training could afford; he rushed through the water with long sweeps, making a semicircle, rounding against the current, so as to swing down upon the drowning man.
Less than a half-hour later a rumor by some means spread throughout the town that Father Beret and Lieutenant Beverley were drowned in the Wabash. But when a crowd gathered to verify the terrible news it turned out to be untrue. Gaspard Roussillon had once more distinguished himself by an exhibition of heroic nerve and muscle.
"Ventrebleu! Quel homme!" exclaimed Oncle Jazon, when told that M. Roussillon had come up the bank of the Wabash with Lieutenant Beverley under one arm and Father Beret under the other, both men apparently dead.
"Bring them to my house immediately," M. Roussillon ordered, as soon as they were restored to consciousness; and he shook himself, as a big wet animal sometimes does, covering everybody near him with muddy water. Then he led the way with melodramatic strides.
In justice to historical accuracy there must be a trifling reform of what appeared on the face of things to be grandly true. Gaspard Roussillon actually dragged Father Beret and Lieutenant Beverley one at a time out of the eddy water and up the steep river bank. That was truly a great feat; but the hero never explained. When men arrived he was standing between the collapsed forms, panting and dripping. Doubtless he looked just as if he had dropped them from under his arms, and why shouldn't he have the benefit of a great implication?
"I've saved them both," he roared; from which, of course, the ready creole imagination inferred the extreme of possible heroic performance.
"Bring them to my house immediately," and it was accordingly done.
The procession, headed by M. Roussillon, moved noisily, for the French tongue must shake off what comes to it on the thrill of every exciting moment. The only silent Frenchman is the dead one.
Father Beret was not only well-nigh drowned, but seriously hurt. He lay for a week on a bed in M. Roussillon's house before he could sit up. Alice hung over him night and day, scarcely sleeping or eating until he was past all danger. As for Beverley, he shook off all the effects of his struggle in a little while. Next day he was out, as well and strong as ever, busy with the affairs of his office. Nor was he less happy on account of what the little adventure had cast into his experience. It is good to feel that one has done an unselfish deed, and no young man's heart repels the freshness of what comes to him when a beautiful girl first enters his life. Naturally enough Alice had some thoughts of Beverley while she was so attentively caring for Father Beret. She had never before seen a man like him, nor had she read of one. Compared with Rene de Ronville, the best youth of her acquaintance, he was in every way superior; this was too evident for analysis; but referred to the romantic standard taken out of the novels she had read, he somehow failed; and yet he loomed bravely in her vision, not exactly a knight of the class she had most admired, still unquestionably a hero of large proportions.
Beverley stepped in for a few minutes every day to see Father Beret, involuntarily lengthening his visit by a sliding ratio as he became better acquainted. He began to enjoy the priest's conversation, with its sly worldly wisdom cropping up through fervid religious sentiments and quaint humor. Alice must have interested him more than he was fully aware of; for his eyes followed her, as she came and went, with a curious criticism of her half-savage costume and her springy, Dryad-like suppleness, which reminded him of the shyest and gracefulest wild birds; and yet a touch of refinement, the subtlest and best, showed in all her ways. He studied her, as he would have studied a strange, showy and originally fragrant flower, or a bird of oddly attractive plumage. While she said little to him or to anyone else in his presence, he became aware of the willfulness and joyous lightness which played on her nature's changeable surface. He wondered at her influence over Father Beret, whom she controlled apparently without effort. But in due time he began to feel a deeper character, a broader intelligence, behind her superficial sauvagerie; and he found that she really had no mean smattering of books in the lighter vein.
A little thing happened which further opened his eyes and increased the interest that her beauty and elementary charm of style aroused in him gradually, apace with their advancing acquaintanceship.
Father Beret had got well and returned to his hut and his round of spiritual duties; but Beverley came to Roussillon place every day all the same. For a wonder Madame Roussillon liked him, and at most times held the scolding side of her tongue when he was present. Jean, too, made friendly advances whenever opportunity afforded. Of course Alice gave him just the frank cordiality of hospitable welcome demanded by frontier conditions. She scarcely knew whether she liked him or not; but he had a treasury of information from which he was enriching her with liberal carelessness day by day. The hungriest part of her mind was being sumptuously banqueted at his expense. Mere intellectual greediness drew her to him.
Naturally they soon threw off such troubling formalities as at first rose between them, and began to disclose to each other their true characteristics. Alice found in Beverley a large target for the missiles of her clever and tantalizing perversity. He in turn practiced a native dignity and an acquired superiority of manner to excellent effect. It was a meeting of Greek with Greek in a new Arcadia. To him here was Diana, strong, strange, simple, even crude almost to naturalness, yet admirably pure in spirit and imbued with highest womanly aspirations. To her Beverley represented the great outside area of life. He came to her from wonderland, beyond the wide circle of houseless woods and prairies. He represented gorgeous cities, teeming parks of fashion, boulevards, salons, halls of social splendor, the theater, the world of woman's dreams.
Now, there is an antagonism, vague yet powerful, generated between natures thus cast together from the opposite poles of experience and education: an antagonism practically equivalent to the most vigorous attraction. What one knows the other is but half aware of; neither knowledge nor ignorance being mutual, there is a scintillation of exchange, from opposing vantage grounds, followed by harmless snaps of thunder. Culture and refinement take on airs-- it is the deepest artificial instinct of enlightenment to pose-- in the presence of naturalness; and there is a certain style of ignorance which attitudinizes before the gate of knowledge. The return to nature has always been the dream of the conventionalized soul, while the simple Arcadian is forever longing for the maddening honey of sophistication.
Innate jealousies strike together like flint and steel dashing off sparks by which nearly everything that life can warm its core withal is kindled and kept burning. What I envy in my friend I store for my best use. I thrust and parry, not to kill, but to learn my adversary's superior feints and guards. And this hint of sword play leads back to what so greatly surprised and puzzled Beverley one day when he chanced to be examining the pair of colechemardes on the wall.
He took one down, and handling it with the indescribable facility possible to none save a practical swordsman, remarked:
"There's a world of fascination in these things; I like nothing better than a bout at fencing. Does your father practice the art?"
"I have no father, no mother," she quickly said; "but good Papa Roussillon does like a little exercise with the colechemarde."
"Well, I'm glad to hear it, I shall ask to teach him a trick or two," Beverley responded in the lightest mood. "When will he return from the woods?"
"I can't tell you; he's very irregular in such matters," she said. Then, with a smile half banter and half challenge, she added; "if you are really dying for some exercise, you shall not have to wait for him to come home, I assure you, Monsieur Beverley."
"Oh, it's Monsieur de Ronville, perhaps, that you will offer up as a victim to my skill and address," he slyly returned; for he was suspecting that a love affair in some stage of progress lay between her and Rene.
She blushed violently, but quickly overcoming a combined rush of surprise and anger, added with an emphasis as charming as it was unexpected.
"I myself am, perhaps, swordsman enough to satisfy the impudence and vanity of Monsieur Beverley, Lieutenant in the American army."
"Pardon me, Mademoiselle; forgive me, I beg of you," he exclaimed, earnestly modulating his voice to sincerest beseechment; "I really did not mean to be impudent, nor--"
Her vivacity cleared with a merry laugh.
"No apologies, I command you," she interposed. "We will have them after I have taught you a fencing lesson."
From a shelf she drew down a pair of foils and presenting the hilts, bade him take his choice.
"There isn't any difference between them that I know of," she said, and then added archly; "but you will feel better at last, when all is over and the sting of defeat tingles through you, if you are conscious of having used every sensible precaution."
He looked straight into her eyes, trying to catch what was in her mind, but there was a bewildering glamour playing across those gray, opal-tinted wells of mystery, from which he could draw only a mischievous smile-glint, direct, daring, irresistible.
"Well," he said, taking one of the foils, "what do you really mean? Is it a challenge without room for honorable retreat?"
"The time for parley is past," she replied, "follow me to the battle-ground."
She led the way to a pleasant little court in the rear of the cabin's yard, a space between two wings and a vine-covered trellis, beyond which lay a well kept vineyard and vegetable garden. Here she turned about and faced him, poising her foil with a fine grace.
"Are you ready?" she inquired.
He tried again to force a way into the depths of her eyes with his; but he might as well have attacked the sun; so he stood in a confusion of not very well defined feelings, undecided, hesitating, half expecting that there would be some laughable turn to end the affair.
"Are you afraid, Monsieur Beverley?" she demanded after a short waiting in silence.
He laughed now and whipped the air with his foil.
"You certainly are not in earnest?" he said interrogatively. "Do you really mean that you want to fence with me?"
"If you think because I'm only a girl you can easily beat me, try it," she tauntingly replied making a level thrust toward his breast.
Quick as a flash he parried, and then a merry clinking and twinkling of steel blades kept time to their swift movements. Instantly, by the sure sense which is half sight, half feeling-- the sense that guides the expert fencer's hand and wrist--Beverley knew that he had probably more than his match, and in ten seconds his attack was met by a time thrust in opposition which touched him sharply.
Alice sprang far back, lowered her point and laughed.
"Je vous salue, Monsieur Beverley!" she cried, with childlike show of delight. "Did you feel the button?"
"Yes, I felt it," he said with frank acknowledgment in his voice, "it was cleverly done. Now give me a chance to redeem myself."
He began more carefully and found that she, too, was on her best mettle; but it was a short bout, as before. Alice seemed to give him an easy opening and he accepted it with a thrust; then something happened that he did not understand. The point of his foil was somehow caught under his opponent's hilt-guard while her blade seemed to twist around his; at the same time there was a wring and a jerk, the like of which he had never before felt, and he was disarmed, his wrist and fingers aching with the wrench they had received.
Of course the thing was not new; he had been disarmed before; but her trick of doing it was quite a mystery to him, altogether different from any that he had ever seen.
"Vous me pardonnerez, Monsieur" she mockingly exclaimed, picking up his weapon and offering the hilt to him. "Here is your sword!"
"Keep it," he said, folding his arms and trying to look unconcerned, "you have captured it fairly. I am at your mercy; be kind to me."
Madame Roussillon and Jean, the hunchback, hearing the racket of the foils had come out to see and were standing agape.
"You ought to be ashamed, Alice," said the dame in scolding approval of what she had done; "girls do not fence with gentlemen."
"This girl does," said Alice.
"And with extreme disaster to this gentleman," said Beverley, laughing in a tone of discomfiture and resignation.
"Ah, Mo'sieu', there's nothing but disaster where she goes," complained Madame Roussillon, "she is a destroyer of everything. Only yesterday she dropped my pink bowl and broke it, the only one I had."
"And just to think," said Beverley, "what would have been the condition of my heart had we been using rapiers instead of leather-buttoned foils! She would have spitted it through the very center."
"Like enough," replied the dame indifferently. "She wouldn't wince, either,--not she."
Alice ran into the house with the foils and Beverley followed.
"We must try it over again some day soon," he said; "I find that you can show me a few points. Where did you learn to fence so admirably? Is Monsieur Roussillon your master?"
"Indeed he isn't," she quickly replied, "he is but a bungling swordsman. My master--but I am not at liberty to tell you who has taught me the little I know."
"Well, whoever he is I should be glad to have lessons from him."
"But you'll never get them."
"Why?"
"Because."
"A woman's ultimatum."
"As good as a man's!" she bridled prettily; "and sometimes better-- at the foils for example. Vous--comprenez, n'est ce pas?"
He laughed heartily.
"Yes, your point reaches me," he said, "but sperat et in saeva victus gladiatur arena, as the old Latin poet wisely remarks." The quotation was meant to tease her.
"Yes, Montaigne translated that or something in his book," she commented with prompt erudition. "I understand it."
Beverley looked amazed.
"What do you know about Montaigne?" he demanded with a blunt brevity amounting to something like gruffness.
"Sh', Monsieur, not too loud," she softly protested, looking around to see that neither Madame Roussillon nor Jean had followed them into the main room. "It is not permitted that I read that old book; but they do not hide it from me, because they think I can't make out its dreadful spelling."
She smiled so that her cheeks drew their dimples deep into the delicately tinted pink-and-brown, where wind and sun and wholesome exercise had set the seal of absolute health, and took from a niche in the logs of the wall a stained and dog-eared volume. He looked, and it was, indeed, the old saint and sinner, Montaigne.
Involuntarily he ran his eyes over the girl from head to foot, comparing her show of knowledge with the outward badges of abject rusticity, and even wildness, with which she was covered.
"Well," he said, "you are a mystery."
"You think it surprising that I can read a book! Frankly I can't understand half of this one. I read it because--well just because they want me to read about nothing but sickly old saints and woe- begone penitents. I like something lively. What do I care for all that uninteresting religious stuff?"
"Montaigne IS decidedly lively in spots," Beverley remarked. "I shouldn't think a girl--I shouldn't think you'd particularly enjoy his humors."
"I don't care for the book at all," she said, flushing quickly, "only I seem to learn about the world from it. Sometimes it seems as if it lifted me up high above all this wild, lonely and tiresome country, so that I can see far off where things are different and beautiful. It is the same with the novels; and they don't permit me to read them either; but all the same I do."
When Beverley, taking his leave, passed through the gate at Roussillon place, he met Rene de Ronville going in. It was a notable coincidence that each young man felt something troublesome rise in his throat as he looked into the other's eyes.
A week of dreamy autumn weather came on, during which Beverley managed to be with Alice a great deal, mostly sitting on the Roussillon gallery, where the fading vine leaves made fairy whispering, and where the tempered breeze blew deliciously cool from over the distant multi-colored woods. The men of Vincennes were gathering their Indian corn early to dry it on the cob for grating into winter meal. Many women made wine from the native grapes and from the sweeter and richer fruit of imported vines. Madame Roussillon and Alice stained their hands a deep purple during the pressing season, and Beverley found himself engaged in helping them handle the juicy crop, while around the overflowing earthen pots the wild bees, wasps and hornets hummed with an incessant, jarring monotony.
Jean, the hunchback, gathered ample stores of hickory nuts, walnuts, hazel-nuts and pin-oak acorns. Indeed, the whole population of the village made a great spurt of industry just before the falling of winter; and presently, when every preparation had been completed for the dreaded cold season, M. Roussillon carried out his long-cherished plan, and gave a great party at the river house. After the most successful trading experience of all his life he felt irrepressibly liberal.
"Let's have one more roaring good time," he said, "that's what life is for."