CHAPTER VIII
THE DILEMMA OF CAPTAIN HELM
Oncle Jazon, feeling like a fish returned to the water after a long and torturing captivity in the open air, plunged into the forest with anticipations of lively adventure and made his way toward the Wea plains. It was his purpose to get a boat at the village of Ouiatenon and pull thence up the Wabash until he could find out what the English were doing. He chose for his companions on this dangerous expedition two expert coureurs de bois, Dutremble and Jacques Bailoup. Fifty miles up the river they fell in with some friendly Indians, well known to them all, who were returning from the portage.
The savages informed them that there were no signs of an English advance in that quarter. Some of them had been as far as the St. Joseph river and to within a short distance of Detroit without seeing a white man or hearing of any suspicious movements on the part of Hamilton. So back came Oncle Jazon with his pleasing report, much disappointed that he had not been able to stir up some sort of trouble.
It was Helm's turn to laugh.
"What did I tell you?" he cried, in a jolly mood, slapping Beverley on the shoulder. "I knew mighty well that it was all a big story with nothing in it. What on earth would the English be thinking about to march an army away off down here only to capture a rotten stockade and a lot of gabbling parly-voos?"
Beverley, while he did not feel quite as confident as his chief, was not sorry that things looked a little brighter than he had feared they would turn out to be. Secretly, and without acknowledging it to himself, he was delighted with the life he was living. The Arcadian atmosphere of Vincennes clothed him in its mists and dreams. No matter what way the weather blew its breath, cold or warm, cloudy or fair, rain or snow, the peace in his soul changed not. His nature seemed to hold all of its sterner and fiercer traits in abeyance while he domiciled himself absolutely within his narrow and monotonous environment. Since the dance at the river house a new content, like a soft and diffused sweetness, had crept through his blood with a vague, tingling sense of joy.
He began to like walking about rather aimlessly in the town's narrow streets, with the mud-daubed cabins on either hand. This simple life under low, thatched roofs had a charm. When a door was opened he could see a fire of logs on the ample hearth shooting its yellow tongues up the sooty chimney-throat. Soft creole voices murmured and sang, or jangled their petty domestic discords. Women in scant petticoats, leggings and moccasins swept snow from the squat verandas, or fed the pigs in little sties behind the cabins. Everybody cried cheerily: "Bon jour, Monsieur, comment allez- vous?" as he went by, always accompanying the verbal salute with a graceful wave of the hand.
When he walked early in the morning a waft of broiling game and browning corn scones was abroad. Pots and kettles occupied the hearths with glowing coals heaped around and under. Shaggy dogs whined at the doors until the mensal remnants were tossed out to them in the front yard.
But it was always a glimpse of Alice that must count for everything in Beverley's reckonings, albeit he would have strenuously denied it. True he went to Roussillon place almost every day, it being a fixed part of his well ordered habit, and had a talk with her. Sometimes, when Dame Roussillon was very busy and so quite off her guard, they read together in a novel, or in certain parts of the odd volume of Montaigne. This was done more for the sweetness of disobedience than to enjoy the already familiar pages.
Now and again they repeated their fencing bout; but never with the result which followed the first. Beverley soon mastered Alice's tricks and showed her that, after all, masculine muscle is not to be discounted at its own game by even the most wonderful womanly strength and suppleness. She struggled bravely to hold her vantage ground once gained so easily, but the inevitable was not to be avoided. At last, one howling winter day, he disarmed her by the very trick that she had shown him. That ended the play and they ran shivering into the house.
"Ah," she cried, "it isn't fair. You are so much bigger than I; you have so much longer arms; so much more weight and power. It all counts against me! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" She was rosy with the exhilarating exercise and the biting of the frosty breeze. Her beauty gave forth a new ray.
Deep in her heart she was pleased to have him master her so superbly; but as the days passed she never said so, never gave over trying to make him feel the touch of her foil. She did not know that her eyes were getting through his guard, that her dimples were stabbing his heart to its middle.
"You have other advantages," he replied, "which far overbalance my greater stature and stronger muscles." Then after a pause he added: "After all a girl must be a girl."
Something in his face, something in her heart, startled her so that she made a quick little move like that of a restless bird.
"You are beautiful and that makes my eyes and my hand uncertain," he went on. "Were I fencing with a man there would be no glamour."
He spoke in English, which he did not often do in conversation with her. It was a sign that he was somewhat wrought upon. She followed his rapid words with difficulty; but she caught from them a new note of feeling. He saw a little pale flare shoot across her face and thought she was angry.
"You should not use your dimples to distract my vision," he quickly added, with a light laugh. "It would be no worse for me to throw my hat in your face!"
His attempt at levity was obviously weak; she looked straight into his eyes, with the steady gaze of a simple, earnest nature shocked by a current quite strange to it. She did not understand him, and she did. Her fine intuition gathered swiftly together a hundred shreds of impression received from him during their recent growing intimacy. He was a patrician, as she vaguely made him out, a man of wealth, whose family was great. He belonged among people of gentle birth and high attainments. She magnified him so that he was diffused in her imagination, as difficult to comprehend as a mist in the morning air--and as beautiful.
"You make fun of me," she said, very deliberately, letting her eyes droop; then she looked up again suddenly and continued, with a certain naive expression of disappointment gathering in her face. "I have been too free with you. Father Beret told me not to forget my dignity when in your company. He told me you might misunderstand me. I don't care; I shall not fence with you again." She laughed, but there was no joyous freedom in the sound.
"Why, Alice--my dear Miss Roussillon, you do me a wrong; I beg a thousand pardons if I've hurt you," he cried, stepping nearer to her, "and I can never forgive myself. You have somehow misunderstood me, I know you have!"
On his part it was exaggerating a mere contact of mutual feelings into a dangerous collision. He was as much self-deceived as was she, and he made more noise about it.
"It is you who have misunderstood me," she replied, smiling brightly now, but with just a faint, pitiful touch of regret, or self-blame lingering in her voice. "Father Beret said you would. I did not believe him; but--"
"And you shall not believe him," said Beverley. "I have not misunderstood you. There has been nothing. You have treated me kindly and with beautiful friendliness. You have not done or said a thing that Father Beret or anybody else could criticise. And if I have said or done the least thing to trouble you I repudiate it-- I did not mean it. Now you believe me, don't you, Miss Roussillon?"
He seemed to be falling into the habit of speaking to her in English. She understood it somewhat imperfectly, especially when in an earnest moment he rushed his words together as if they had been soldiers he was leading at the charge-step against an enemy. His manner convinced her, even though his diction fell short.
"Then we'll talk about something else," she said, laughing naturally now, and retreating to a chair by the hearthside. "I want you to tell me all about yourself and your family, your home and everything."
She seated herself with an air of conscious aplomb and motioned him to take a distant stool.
There was a great heap of dry logs in the fireplace, with pointed flames shooting out of its crevices and leaping into the gloomy, cave-like throat of the flue. Outside a wind passed heavily across the roof and bellowed in the chimney-top.
Beverley drew the stool near Alice, who, with a charred stick, used as a poker, was thrusting at the glowing crevices and sending showers of sparks aloft.
"Why, there wouldn't be much to tell," he said, glad to feel secure again. "Our home is a big old mansion named Beverley Hall on a hill among trees, and half surrounded with slave cabins. It overlooks the plantation in the valley where a little river goes wandering on its way." He was speaking French and she followed him easily now, her eyes beginning to fling out again their natural sunny beams of interest. "I was born there twenty-six years ago and haven't done much of anything since. You see before you, Mademoiselle, a very undistinguished young man, who has signally failed to accomplish the dream of his boyhood, which was to be a great artist like Raphael or Angelo. Instead of being famous I am but a poor Lieutenant in the forces of Virginia."
"You have a mother, father, brothers and sisters?" she interrogated. She did not understand his allusion to the great artists of whom she knew nothing. She had never before heard of them. She leaned the poker against the chimney jamb and turned her face toward him.
"Mother, father, and one sister," he said, "no brothers. We were a happy little group. But my sister married and lives in Baltimore. I am here. Father and mother are alone in the old house. Sometimes I am terribly homesick." He was silent a moment, then added: "But you are selfish, you make me do all the telling. Now I want you to give me a little of your story, Mademoiselle, beginning as I did, at the first."
"But I can't," she replied with childlike frankness, "for I don't know where I was born, nor my parents' names, nor who I am. You see how different it is with me. I am called Alice Roussillon, but I suppose that my name is Alice Tarleton; it is not certain, however. There is very little to help out the theory. Here is all the proof there is. I don't know that it is worth anything."
She took off her locket and handed it to him.
He handled it rather indifferently, for he was just then studying the fine lines of her face. But in a moment he was interested.
"Tarleton, Tarleton," he repeated. Then he turned the little disc of gold over and saw the enameled drawing on the back,--a crest clearly outlined.
He started. The crest was quite familiar.
"Where did you get this?" he demanded in English, and with such blunt suddenness that she was startled. "Where did it come from?"
"I have always had it."
"Always? It's the Tarleton crest. Do you belong to that family?"
"Indeed I do not know. Papa Roussillon says he thinks I do."
"Well, this is strange and interesting," said Beverley, rather to himself than addressing her. He looked from the miniature to the crest and back to the miniature again, then at Alice. "I tell you this is strange," he repeated with emphasis. "It is exceedingly strange."
Her cheeks flushed quickly under their soft brown and her eyes flashed with excitement.
"Yes, I know." Her voice fluttered; her hands were clasped in her lap. She leaned toward him eagerly. "It is strange. I've thought about it a great deal."
"Alice Tarleton; that is right; Alice is a name of the family. Lady Alice Tarleton was the mother of the first Sir Garnett Tarleton who came over in the time of Yardley. It's a great family. One of the oldest and best in Virginia." He looked at her now with a gaze of concentrated interest, under which her eyes fell. "Why, this is romantic!" he exclaimed, "absolutely romantic. And you don't know how you came by this locket? You don't know who was your father, your mother?"
"I do not know anything."
"And what does Monsieur Roussillon know?"
"Just as little."
"But how came he to be taking you and caring for you? He must know how he got you, where he got you, of whom he got you? Surely he knows--"
"Oh, I know all that. I was twelve years old when Papa Roussillon took me, eight years ago. I had been having a hard life, and but for him I must have died. I was a captive among the Indians. He took me and has cared for me and taught me. He has been very, very good to me. I love him dearly."
"And don't you remember anything at all about when, where, how the Indians got you?"
"No." She shook her head and seemed to be trying to recollect something. "No, I just can't remember; and yet there has always been something like a dream in my mind, which I could not quite get hold of. I know that I am not a Catholic. I vaguely remember a sweet woman who taught me to pray like this: 'Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.'"
And Alice went on through the beautiful and perfect prayer, which she repeated in English with infinite sweetness and solemnity, her eyes uplifted, her hands clasped before her. Beverley could have sworn that she was a shining saint, and that he saw an aureole.
"I know," she continued, "that sometime, somewhere, to a very dear person I promised that I never, never, never would pray any prayer but that. And I remember almost nothing else about that other life, which is far off back yonder in the past, I don't know where,--sweet, peaceful, shadowy; a dream that I have all but lost from my mind."
Beverley's sympathy was deeply moved. He sat for some minutes looking at her without speaking. She, too, was pensive and silent, while the fire sputtered and sang, the great logs slowly melting, the flames tossing wisps of smoke into the chimney still booming to the wind.
"I know, too, that I am not French," she presently resumed, "but I don't know just how I know it. My first words must have been English, for I have always dreamed of talking in that language, and my dimmest half recollections of the old days are of a large, white house, and a soft-voiced black woman, who sang to me in that language the very sweetest songs in the world."
It must be borne in mind that all this was told by Alice in her creole French, half bookish, half patois, of which no translation can give any fair impression.
Beverley listened, as one who hears a clever reader intoning a strange and captivating poem. He was charmed. His imagination welcomed the story and furnished it with all that it lacked of picturesque completeness. In those days it was no uncommon thing for a white child to be found among the Indians with not a trace left by which to restore it to its people. He had often heard of such a case. But here was Alice right before him, the most beautiful girl that he had ever seen, telling him the strangest story of all. To his mind it was clear that she belonged to the Tarleton family of Virginia. Youth always concludes a matter at once. He knew some of the Tarletons; but it was a widely scattered family, its members living in almost every colony in America. The crest he recognized at a glance by the dragon on the helmet with three stars. It was not for a woman to bear; but doubtless it had been enameled on the locket merely as a family mark, as was often done in America.
"The black woman was your nurse, your mammy," he said. "I know by that and by your prayer in English, as well as by your locket, that you are of a good old family."
Like most Southerners, he had strong faith in genealogy, and he held at his tongue's tip the names of all the old families. The Carters, the Blairs, the Fitzhughs, the Hansons, the Randolphs, the Lees, the Ludwells, the Joneses, the Beverleys, the Tarletons-- a whole catalogue of them stretched back in his memory. He knew the coat of arms displayed by each house. He could repeat their legends.
"I wish you could tell me more," he went on. "Can't you recollect anything further about your early childhood, your first impressions--the house, the woman who taught you to pray, the old black mammy? Any little thing might be of priceless value as evidence."
Alice shrugged her shoulders after the creole fashion with something of her habitual levity of manner, and laughed. His earnestness seemed disproportioned to the subject, as she fancied he must view it, although to her it had always been something to dream over. It was impossible for her to realize, as he did, the importance of details in solving a problem like that involved in her past history. Nor could she feel the pathos and almost tragic fascination with which her story had touched him.
"There is absolutely nothing more to tell," she said. "All my life I have tried to remember more, but it's impossible; I can't get any further back or call up another thing. There's no use trying. It's all like a dream--probably it is one. I do have such dreams. In my sleep I can lift myself into the air, just as easy, and fly back to the same big white house that I seem to remember. When you told me about your home it was like something that I had often seen before. I shall be dreaming about it next!"
Beverley cross-questioned her from every possible point of view; he was fascinated with the mystery; but she gave him nothing out of which the least further light could be drawn. A half-breed woman, it seemed, had been her Indian foster-mother; a silent, grave, watchful guardian from whom not a hint of disclosure ever fell. She was, moreover, a Christian woman, had received her conversion from an English-speaking Protestant missionary. She prayed with Alice, thus keeping in the child's mind a perfect memory of the Lord's prayer.
"Well," said Beverley at last, "you are more of a mystery to me, the longer I know you."
"Then I must grow every day more distasteful to you."
"No, I love mystery."
He went away feeling a new web of interest binding him to this inscrutable maiden whose life seemed to him at once so full of idyllic happiness and so enshrouded in tantalizing doubt. At the first opportunity he frankly questioned M. Roussillon, with no helpful result. The big Frenchman told the same meager story. The woman was dying in the time of a great epidemic, which killed most of her tribe. She gave Alice to M. Roussillon, but told him not a word about her ancestry or previous life. That was all.
A wise old man, when he finds himself in a blind alley, no sooner touches the terminal wall than he faces about and goes back the way he came. Under like circumstances a young man must needs try to batter the wall down with his head. Beverley endeavored to break through the web of mystery by sheer force. It seemed to him that a vigorous attempt could not fail to succeed; but, like the fly in the spider's lines, he became more hopelessly bound at every move he made. Moreover against his will he was realizing that he could no longer deceive himself about Alice. He loved her, and the love was mastering him body and soul. Such a confession carries with it into an honest masculine heart a sense of contending responsibilities. In Beverley's case the clash was profoundly disturbing. And now he clutched the thought that Alice was not a mere child of the woods, but a daughter of an old family of cavaliers!
With coat buttoned close against the driving wind, he strode toward the fort in one of those melodramatic moods to which youth in all climes and times is subject. It was like a slap in the face when Captain Helm met him at the stockade gate and said:
"Well, sir, you are good at hiding."
"Hiding! what do you mean, Captain Helm?" he demanded, not in the mildest tone.
"I mean, sir, that I've been hunting you for an hour and more, over the whole of this damned town. The English and Indians are upon us, and there's no time for fooling. Where are all the men?"
Beverley comprehended the situation in a second. Helm's face was congested with excitement. Some scouts had come in with the news that Governor Hamilton, at the head of five or six hundred soldiers and Indians, was only three or four miles up the river.
"Where are all the men?" Helm repeated.
"Buffalo hunting, most of them," said Beverley.
"What in hell are they off hunting buffaloes for?" raged the excited captain.
"You might go to hell and see," Beverley suggested, and they both laughed in sheer masculine contempt of a predicament too grave for anything but grim mirth.
What could they do? Even Oncle Jazon and Rene de Ronville were off with the hunters. Helm sent for M. Roussillon in the desperate hope that he could suggest something; but he lost his head and hustled off to hide his money and valuables. Indeed the French people all felt that, so far as they were concerned, the chief thing was to save what they had. They well knew that it mattered little which of the two masters held over them--they must shift for themselves. In their hearts they were true to France and America; but France and America could not now protect them against Hamilton; therefore it would be like suicide to magnify patriotism or any other sentiment objectionable to the English. So they acted upon M. Roussillon's advice and offered no resistance when the new army approached.
"My poor people are not disloyal to your flag and your cause," said good Father Beret next morning to Captain Helm, "but they are powerless. Winter is upon us. What would you have us do? This rickety fort is not available for defense; the men are nearly all far away on the plains. Isn't it the part of prudence and common sense to make the best of a desperate situation? Should we resist, the British and their savage allies would destroy the town and commit outrages too horrible to think about. In this case diplomacy promises much more than a hopeless fight against an overwhelming force."
"I'll fight 'em," Helm ground out between his teeth, "if I have to do it single-handed and alone! I'll fight 'em till hell freezes over!"
Father Beret smiled grimly, as if he, too, would enjoy a lively skirmish on the ice of Tophet, and said:
"I admire your courage, my son. Fighting is perfectly proper upon fair occasion. But think of the poor women and children. These old eyes of mine have seen some terrible things done by enraged savages. Men can die fighting; but their poor wives and daughters-- ah, I have seen, I have seen!"
Beverley felt a pang of terror shoot through his heart as Father Beret's simple words made him think of Alice in connection with an Indian massacre.
"Of course, of course it's horrible to think of," said Helm; "but my duty is clear, and that flag," he pointed to where la banniere d'Alice Roussillon was almost blowing away in the cold wind, "that flag shall not come down save in full honor."
His speech sounded preposterously boastful and hollow; but he was manfully in earnest; every word came from his brave heart.
Father Beret's grim smile returned, lighting up his strongly marked face with the strangest expression imaginable.
"We will get all the women inside the fort," Helm began to say.
"Where the Indians will find them ready penned up and at their mercy," quickly interpolated the priest "That will not do."
"Well, then, what can be done?" Beverley demanded, turning with a fierce stare upon Father Beret. "Don't stand there objecting to everything, with not a suggestion of your own to offer."
"I know what is best for my people," the old man replied softly, still smiling, "I have advised them to stay inside their houses and take no part in the military event. It is the only hope of averting an indiscriminate massacre, and things worse."
The curt phrase, "things worse," went like a bullet-stroke through Beverley's heart. It flashed an awful picture upon his vision. Father Beret saw his face whiten and his lips set themselves to resist a great emotion.
"Do not be angry with me, my son," he said, laying a hand on the young man's arm. "I may be wrong, but I act upon long and convincing experience."
"Experience or no experience," Helm exclaimed with an oath, "this fort must be manned and defended. I am commanding here!"
"Yes, I recognize your authority," responded the priest in a firm yet deferential tone, "and I heartily wish you had a garrison; but where is your command, Captain Helm?" Then it was that the doughty Captain let loose the accumulated profanity with which he had been for some time well-nigh bursting. He tiptoed in order to curse with extremest violence. His gestures were threatening. He shook his fists at Father Beret, without really meaning offence.
"Where is my garrison, you ask! Yes, and I can tell you. It's where you might expect a gang of dad blasted jabbering French good-for-nothings to be, off high-gannicking around shooting buffaloes instead of staying here and defending their wives, children, homes and country, damn their everlasting souls! The few I have in the fort will sneak off, I suppose."
"The French gave you this post on easy terms, Captain," blandly retorted Father Beret.
"Yes, and they'll hand it over to Hamilton, you think, on the same basis," cried Helm, "but I'll show you! I'll show you, Mr. Priest!"
"Pardon me, Captain, the French are loyal to you and to the flag yonder. They have sworn it. Time will prove it. But in the present desperate dilemma we must choose the safer horn."
Saying this Father Beret turned about and went his way. He was chuckling heartily as he passed out of the gate.
"He is right," said Beverley after a few moments of reflection, during which he was wholly occupied with Alice, whose terrified face in his anticipation appealed to him from the midst of howling savages, smoking cabins and mangled victims of lust and massacre. His imagination painted the scene with a merciless realism that chilled his blood. All the sweet romance fell away from Vincennes.
"Well, sir, right or wrong, your, duty is to obey orders," said Helm with brutal severity.
"We had better not quarrel, Captain," Beverley replied. "I have not signified any unwillingness to obey your commands. Give them, and you will have no cause to grumble."
"Forgive me, old fellow," cried the impulsive commander. "I know you are true as steel. I s'pose I'm wound up too tight to be polite. But the time is come to do something. Here we are with but five or six men--"
He was interrupted by the arrival of two more half-breed scouts.
Only three miles away was a large flotilla of boats and canoes with cannon, a force of Indians on land and the British flag flying,--that was the report.
"They are moving rapidly," said the spokesman, "and will be here very soon. They are at least six hundred strong, all well armed."
"Push that gun to the gate, and load it to the muzzle, Lieutenant Beverley," Helm ordered with admirable firmness, the purple flush in his face giving way to a grayish pallor. "We are going to die right here, or have the honors of war."
Beverley obeyed without a word. He even loaded two guns instead of one--charging each so heavily that the last wad looked as if ready to leap from the grimy mouth.
Helm had already begun, on receiving the first report, a hasty letter to Colonel Clark at Kaskaskia. He now added a few words and at the last moment sent it out by a trusted man, who was promptly captured by Hamilton's advance guard. The missive, evidently written in installments during the slow approach of the British, is still in the Canadian archives, and runs thus:
"Dear Sir--At this time there is an army within three miles of this place; I heard of their coming several days beforehand. I sent spies to find the certainty--the spies being taken prisoner I never got intelligence till they got within three miles of town. As I had called the militia and had all assurances of their integrity I ordered at the firing of a cannon every man to appear, but I saw but few. Captain Buseron behaved much to his honor and credit, but I doubt the conduct of a certain gent. Excuse haste, as the army is in sight. My determination is to defend the garrison, (sic) though I have but twenty-one men but what has left me. I refer you to Mr. Wmes (sic) for the rest. The army is within three hundred yards of the village. You must think how I feel; not four men that I really depend upon; but am determined to act brave--think of my condition. I know it is out of my power to defend the town, as not one of the militia will take arms, though before sight of the army no braver men. There is a flag at a small distance, I must conclude.
"Your humble servant,
"Leo'd Helm. Must stop."
"To Colonel Clark."
Having completed this task, the letter shows under what a nervous strain, Helm turned to his lieutenant and said:
"Fire a swivel with a blank charge. We'll give these weak-kneed parly-voos one more call to duty. Of course not a frog-eater of them all will come. But I said that a gun should be the signal. Possibly they didn't hear the first one, the damned, deaf, cowardly hounds!"
Beverley wheeled forth the swivel and rammed a charge of powder home. But when he fired it, the effect was far from what it should have been. Instead of calling in a fresh body of militia, it actually drove out the few who up to that moment had remained as a garrison; so that Captain Helm and his Lieutenant found themselves quite alone in the fort, while out before the gate, deployed in fine open order, a strong line of British soldiers approached with sturdy steps, led by a tall, erect, ruddy-faced young officer.