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Alice of Old Vincennes

M >> Maurice Thompson >> Alice of Old Vincennes



This etext was produced by Charles Franks, Robert Rowe and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





PREFACE


To M. PLACIDE VALCOUR
M. D., Ph D., LL. D.

MY DEAR DR. VALCOUR: You gave me the Inspiration which made this
story haunt me until I wrote it. Gaspard Roussillon's letter, a
mildewed relic of the year 1788, which you so kindly permitted me
to copy, as far as it remained legible, was the point from which
my imagination, accompanied by my curiosity, set out upon a long
and delightful quest. You laughed at me when I became enthusiastic
regarding the possible historical importance at that ancient find,
alas! fragmentary epistle; but the old saying about the beatitude
of him whose cachinations are latest comes handy to me just now,
and I must remind you that "I told you so." True enough, it was
history pure and simple that I had in mind while enjoying the
large hospitality of your gulf-side home. Gaspard Roussillon's
letter then appealed to my greed for materials which would help
along the making of my little book "The Story of Louisiana."
Later, however, as my frequent calls upon you for both documents
and suggestions have informed you, I fell to strumming a different
guitar. And now to you I dedicate this historical romance of old
Vincennes, as a very appropriate, however slight, recognition of
your scholarly attainments, your distinguished career in a noble
profession, and your descent from one of the earliest French
families (if not the very earliest) long resident at that strange
little post on the Wabash, now one of the most beautiful cities
between the greet river and the ocean.

Following, with ever tantalized expectancy, the broken and breezy
hints in the Roussillon letter, I pursued a will-o'-the-wisp,
here, there, yonder, until by slowly arriving increments I
gathered up a large amount of valuable facts, which when I came to
compare them with the history of Clark's conquest of the Wabash
Valley, fitted amazingly well into certain spaces heretofore left
open in that important yet sadly imperfect record.

You will find that I was not so wrong in suspecting that Emile
Jazon, mentioned in the Roussillon letter, was a brother of Jean
Jazon and a famous scout in the time of Boone and Clark. He was,
therefore, a kinsman of yours on the maternal side, and I
congratulate you. Another thing may please you, the success which
attended my long and patient research with a view to clearing up
the connection between Alice Roussillon's romantic life, as
brokenly sketched in M. Roussillon's letter, and the capture of
Vincennes by Colonel George Rogers Clark.

Accept, then, this book, which to those who care only for history
will seem but an idle romance, while to the lovers of romance it
may look strangely like the mustiest history. In my mind, and in
yours I hope, it will always be connected with a breezy summer-
house on a headland of the Louisiana gulf coast, the rustling of
palmetto leaves, the fine flash of roses, a tumult of mocking-bird
voices, the soft lilt of Creole patois, and the endless dash and
roar of a fragrant sea over which the gulls and pelicans never
ceased their flight, and beside which you smoked while I dreamed.

MAURICE THOMPSON.
JULY, 1900.





Contents

I. Under the Cherry Tree
II. A Letter from Afar
III. The Rape of the Demijohn
IV. The First Mayor of Vincennes
V. Father Gibault
VI. A Fencing Bout
VII. The Mayor's Party
VIII. The Dilemma of Captain Helm
IX. The Honors of War
X. M. Roussillon Entertains Colonel Hamilton
XI. A Sword and a Horse Pistol
XII. Manon Lescaut, and a Rapier-Thrust
XIII. A Meeting in the Wilderness
XIV. A Prisoner of Love
XV. Virtue in a Locket
XVI. Father Beret's Old Battle
XVII. A March through Cold Water
XVIII. A Duel by Moonlight
XIX. The Attack
XX. Alice's Flag
XXI. Some Transactions in Scalps
XXII. Clark Advises Alice
XXIII. And So It Ended





Alice of Old Vincennes





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.

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