Kitabı oku: «Tales of Trail and Town», sayfa 5

“If the great white medicine man calls to his fighting men, the pale-faced girl and the squaw he calls his sister die! They are here, he understands.”

But Peter had neither struggled nor uttered a cry. At that touch, and with the accents of that tongue in his ears, all his own Indian blood seemed to leap and tingle through his veins. His eyes flashed; pinioned as he was he drew himself erect and answered haughtily in his captor’s own speech:—

“Good! The great white medicine man obeys, for he and his sister have no fear. But if the pale-face girl is not sent back to her people before the sun sets, then the yellow jackets will swarm the woods, and they will follow her trail to the death. My brother is wise; let the girl go. I have spoken.”

“My brother is very cunning too. He would call to his fighting men through the lips of the pale-face girl.”

“He will not. The great white medicine man does not lie to his red brother. He will tell the pale-face girl to say to the chief of the yellow jackets that he and his sister are with his brothers, and all is peace. But the pale-face girl must not see the great white medicine man in these bonds, nor as a captive! I have spoken.”

The two Indians fell back. There was so much of force and dignity in the man, so much of their own stoic calmness, that they at once mechanically loosened the thongs of plaited deer hide with which they had bound him, and side by side led him into the recesses of the wood.

There was some astonishment, although little alarm at the fort, when Lady Elfrida returned accompanied by the orderly who had followed Peter to the wood, but without Peter and his sister. The reason given was perfectly natural and conceivable. Mrs. Lascelles had preceded Lady Elfrida in entering the wood and taken another opening, so that Lady Elfrida had found herself suddenly lost, and surrounded by two or three warriors in dreadful paint. They motioned her to dismount, and said something she did not understand, but she declined, knowing that she had heard Mr. Atherly and the orderly following her, and feeling no fear. And sure enough Mr. Atherly presently came up with a couple of braves, apologized to her for their mistake, but begged her to return to the fort at once and assure the colonel that everything was right, and that he and his sister were safe. He was perfectly cool and collected and like himself; she blushed slightly, as she said she thought that he wished to impress upon her, for some reason she could not understand, that he did not want the colonel to send any assistance. She was positive of that. She told her story unexcitedly; it was evident that she had not been frightened, but Lady Runnybroke noticed that there was a shade of anxious abstraction in her face.

When the officers were alone the colonel took hurried counsel of them. “I think,” said Captain Fleetwood, “that Lady Elfrida’s story quite explains itself. I believe this affair is purely a local one, and has nothing whatever to do with the suspicious appearances we noticed this afternoon, or the presence of so large a body of Indians near Butternut. Had this been a hostile movement they would have scarcely allowed so valuable a capture as Lady Elfrida to escape them.”

“Unless they kept Atherly and his sister as a hostage,” said Captain Joyce.

“But Atherly is one of their friends; indeed he is their mediator and apostle, a non-combatant, and has their confidence,” returned the colonel. “It is much more reasonable to suppose that Atherly has noticed some disaffection among these ‘friendlies,’ and he fears that our sending a party to his assistance might precipitate a collision. Or he may have reason to believe that this stopping of the two women under the very walls of the fort is only a feint to draw our attention from something more serious. Did he know anything of our suspicions of the conduct of those Indians this morning?”

“Not unless he gathered it from what Lord Reginald foolishly told him. We said nothing, of course,” returned Captain Fleetwood, with a soldier’s habitual distrust of the wisdom of the civil arm.

“That will do, gentlemen,” said the colonel, as the officers dispersed; “send Cassidy here.”

The colonel was alone on the veranda as Cassidy came up.

“You followed Mr. Atherly to-day?”

“Yes sorr.”

“And you saw him when he gave the message to the young lady?”

“Yes sorr.”

“Did you form any opinion from anything else you saw, of his object in sending that message?”

“Only from what I saw of HIM.”

“Well, what was that?”

“I saw him look afther the young leddy as she rode away, and then wheel about and go straight back into the wood.”

“And what did you think of that?” said the colonel, with a half smile.

“I thought it was shacrifice, sorr.”

“What do you mean?” said the colonel sharply.

“I mane, sorr,” said Cassidy stoutly, “that he was givin’ up hisself and his sister for that young leddy.”

The colonel looked at the sergeant. “Ask Mr. Forsyth to come to me privately, and return here with him.”

As darkness fell, some half a dozen dismounted troopers, headed by Forsyth and Cassidy, passed quietly out of the lower gate and entered the wood. An hour later the colonel was summoned from the dinner table, and the guests heard the quick rattle of a wagon turning out of the road gate—but the colonel did not return. An indefinable uneasiness crept over the little party, which reached its climax in the summoning of the other officers, and the sudden flashing out of news. The reconnoitring party had found the dead bodies of Peter Atherly and his sister on the plains at the edge of the empty wood.

The women were gathered in the commandant’s quarters, and for the moment seemed to have been forgotten. The officers’ wives talked with professional sympathy and disciplined quiet; the English ladies were equally sympathetic, but collected. Lady Elfrida, rather white, but patient, asked a few questions in a voice whose contralto was rather deepened. One and all wished to “do something”—anything “to help”—and one and all rebelled that the colonel had begged them to remain within doors. There was an occasional quick step on the veranda, or the clatter of a hoof on the parade, a continued but subdued murmur from the whitewashed barracks, but everywhere a sense of keen restraint.

When they emerged on the veranda again, the whole aspect of the garrison seemed to have changed in that brief time. In the faint moonlight they could see motionless files of troopers filling the parade, the officers in belted tunics and slouched hats,—but apparently not the same men; the half lounging ease and lazy dandyism gone, a grim tension in all their faces, a set abstraction in all their acts. Then there was the rolling of heavy wheels in the road, and the two horses of the ambulance appeared. The sentries presented arms; the colonel took off his hat; the officers uncovered; the wagon wheeled into the parade; the surgeon stepped out. He exchanged a single word with the colonel, and lifted the curtain of the ambulance.

As the colonel glanced within, a deep but embarrassed voice fell upon his ear. He turned quickly. It was Lord Reginald, flushed and sympathetic.

“He was a friend,—a relation of ours, you know,” he stammered. “My sister would like—to look at him again.”

“Not now,” said the colonel in a low voice. The surgeon added something in a voice still lower, which scarcely reached the veranda.

Lord Reginald turned away with a white face.

“Fall back there!” Captain Fleetwood rode up.

“All ready, sir.”

“One moment, captain,” said the colonel quietly. “File your first half company before that ambulance, and bid the men look in.”

The singular order was obeyed. The men filed slowly forward, each in turn halting before the motionless wagon and its immobile freight. They were men inured to frontier bloodshed and savage warfare; some halted and hurried on; others lingered, others turned to look again. One man burst into a short laugh, but when the others turned indignantly upon him, they saw that in his face that held them in awe. What they saw in the ambulance did not transpire; what they felt was not known. Strangely enough, however, what they repressed themselves was mysteriously communicated to their horses, who snorted and quivered with eagerness and impatience as they rode back again. The horse of the trooper who had laughed almost leaped into the air. Only Sergeant Cassidy was communicative; he took a larger circuit in returning to his place, and managed to lean over and whisper hoarsely in the ear of a camp follower spectator, “Tell the young leddy that the torturin’ divvils couldn’t take the smile off him!”

The little column filed out of the gateway into the road. As Captain Fleetwood passed Colonel Carter the two men’s eyes met. The colonel said quietly, “Good night, captain. Let us have a good report from you.”

The captain replied only with his gauntleted hand against the brim of his slouched hat, but the next moment his voice was heard strong and clear enough in the road. The little column trotted away as evenly as on parade. But those who climbed the roof of the barracks a quarter of an hour later saw, in the moonlight, a white cloud drifting rapidly across the plain towards the west. It was a small cloud in that bare, menacing, cruel, and illimitable waste; but in its breast was crammed a thunderbolt.

It fell thirty miles away, blasting and scattering a thousand warriors and their camp, giving and taking no quarter, vengeful, exterminating, and complete. Later there were different opinions about it and the horrible crime that had provoked it: the opposers of Peter’s policy jubilant over the irony of the assassination of the Apostle of Peace, Peter’s disciples as actively deploring the merciless and indiscriminating vengeance of the military; and so the problem that Peter had vainly attempted to solve was left an open question. There were those, too, who believed that Peter had never sacrificed himself and his sister for the sake of another, but had provoked and incensed the savages by the blind arrogance of a reformer. There were wild stories by scouts and interpreters how he had challenged his fate by an Indian bravado; how himself and his sister had met torture with an Indian stoicism, and how the Indian braves themselves at last in a turmoil of revulsion had dipped their arrows and lances in the heroic heart’s blood of their victims, and worshiped their still palpitating flesh.

But there was one honest loyal little heart that carried back—three thousand miles—to England the man as it had known and loved him. Lady Elfrida Runnybroke never married; neither did she go into retirement, but lived her life and fulfilled her duties in her usual clear-eyed fashion. She was particularly kind to all Americans,—barring, I fear, a few pretty-faced, finely-frocked title-hunters,—told stories of the Far West, and had theories of a people of which they knew little, cared less, and believed to be vulgar. But I think she found a new pleasure in the old church at Ashley Grange, and loved to linger over the effigy of the old Crusader,—her kinsman, the swashbuckler De Bracy,—with a vague but pretty belief that devotion and love do not die with brave men, but live and flourish even in lands beyond the seas.

TWO AMERICANS

Perhaps if there was anything important in the migration of the Maynard family to Europe it rested solely upon the singular fact that Mr. Maynard did not go there in the expectation of marrying his daughter to a nobleman. A Charleston merchant, whose house represented two honorable generations, had, thirty years ago, a certain self-respect which did not require extraneous aid and foreign support, and it is exceedingly probable that his intention of spending a few years abroad had no ulterior motive than pleasure seeking and the observation of many things—principally of the past—which his own country did not possess. His future and that of his family lay in his own land, yet with practical common sense he adjusted himself temporarily to his new surroundings. In doing so, he had much to learn of others, and others had something to learn of him; he found that the best people had a high simplicity equal to his own; he corrected their impressions that a Southerner had more or less negro blood in his veins, and that, although a slave owner, he did not necessarily represent an aristocracy. With a distinguishing dialect of which he was not ashamed, a frank familiarity of approach joined to an invincible courtesy of manner, which made even his republican “Sir” equal to the ordinary address to royalty, he was always respected and seldom misunderstood. When he was—it was unfortunate for those who misunderstood him. His type was as distinctive and original as his cousin’s, the Englishman, whom it was not the fashion then to imitate. So that, whether in the hotel of a capital, the Kursaal of a Spa, or the humbler pension of a Swiss village, he was always characteristic. Less so was his wife, who, with the chameleon quality of her transplanted countrywomen, was already Parisian in dress; still less so his daughter, who had by this time absorbed the peculiarities of her French, German, and Italian governesses. Yet neither had yet learned to evade their nationality—or apologize for it.

Mr. Maynard and his family remained for three years in Europe, his stay having been prolonged by political excitement in his own State of South Carolina. Commerce is apt to knock the insularity out of people; distance from one’s own distinctive locality gives a wider range to the vision, and the retired merchant foresaw ruin in his State’s politics, and from the viewpoint of all Europe beheld instead of the usual collection of individual States—his whole country. But the excitement increasing, he was finally impelled to return in a faint hope of doing something to allay it, taking his wife with him, but leaving his daughter at school in Paris. At about this time, however, a single cannon shot fired at the national flag on Fort Sumter shook the whole country, reverberated even in Europe, sending some earnest hearts back to do battle for State or country, sending others less earnest into inglorious exile, but, saddest of all! knocking over the school bench of a girl at the Paris pensionnat. For that shot had also sunk Maynard’s ships at the Charleston wharves, scattered his piled Cotton bales awaiting shipment at the quays, and drove him, a ruined man, into the “Home Guard” against his better judgment. Helen Maynard, like a good girl, had implored her father to let her return and share his risks. But the answer was “to wait” until this nine days’ madness of an uprising was over. That madness lasted six years, outlived Maynard, whose gray, misdoubting head bit the dust at Ball’s Bluff; outlived his colorless widow, and left Kelly a penniless orphan.

Yet enough of her country was left in her to make her courageous and independent of her past. They say that when she got the news she cried a little, and then laid the letter and what was left of her last monthly allowance in Madame Ablas’ lap. Madame was devastated. “But you, impoverished and desolated angel, what of you?” “I shall get some of it back,” said the desolated angel with ingenuous candor, “for I speak better French and English than the other girls, and I shall teach THEM until I can get into the Conservatoire, for I have a voice. You yourself have told papa so.” From such angelic directness there was no appeal. Madame Ablas had a heart,—more, she had a French manageress’s discriminating instinct. The American schoolgirl was installed in a teacher’s desk; her bosom friends and fellow students became her pupils. To some of the richest, and they were mainly of her own country, she sold her smartest, latest dresses, jewels, and trinkets at a very good figure, and put the money away against the Conservatoire in the future. She worked hard, she endured patiently everything but commiseration. “I’d have you know, Miss,” she said to Miss de Laine, daughter of the famous house of Musslin, de Laine & Co., of New York, “that whatever my position HERE may be, it is not one to be patronized by a tapeseller’s daughter. My case is not such a very ‘sad one,’ thank you, and I prefer not to be spoken of as having seen ‘better days’ by people who haven’t. There! Don’t rap your desk with your pencil when you speak to me, or I shall call out ‘Cash!’ before the whole class.” So regrettable an exhibition of temper naturally alienated certain of her compatriots who were unduly sensitive of their origin, and as they formed a considerable colony who were then reveling in the dregs of the Empire and the last orgies of a tottering court, eventually cost her her place. A republican so aristocratic was not to be tolerated by the true-born Americans who paid court to De Morny for the phosphorescent splendors of St. Cloud and the Tuileries, and Miss Helen lost their favor. But she had already saved enough money for the Conservatoire and a little attic in a very tall house in a narrow street that trickled into the ceaseless flow of the Rue Lafayette. Here for four years she trotted backwards and forwards regularly to work with the freshness of youth and the inflexible set purpose of maturity. Here, rain or shine, summer or winter, in the mellow season when the large cafes expanded under the white sunshine into an overflow of little tables on the pavement, or when the red glow of the Brasserie shone through frosty panes on the turned-up collars of pinched Parisians who hurried by, she was always to be seen.

Half Paris had looked into her clear, gray eyes and passed on; a smaller and not very youthful portion of Paris had turned and followed her with small advantage to itself and happily no fear to her. For even in her young womanhood she kept her child’s loving knowledge of that great city; she even had an innocent camaraderie with street sweepers, kiosk keepers, and lemonade venders, and the sternness of conciergedom melted before her. In this wholesome, practical child’s experience she naturally avoided or overlooked what would not have interested a child, and so kept her freshness and a certain national shrewd simplicity invincible. There is a story told of her girlhood that, one day playing in the Tuileries gardens, she was approached by a gentleman with a waxed mustache and a still more waxen cheek beneath his heavy-lidded eyes. There was an exchange of polite amenities.

“And your name, ma petite?”

“Helen,” responded the young girl naively. “What’s yours?”

“Ah,” said the kind gentleman, gallantly pulling at his mustache, “if you are Helen I am Paris.”

The young girl raised her clear eyes to his and said gravely, “I reckon your majesty is FRANCE!”

She retained this childish fearlessness as the poor student of the Conservatoire; went alone all over Paris with her maiden skirts untarnished by the gilded dust of the boulevards or the filth of by-ways; knew all the best shops for her friends, and the cheapest for her own scant purchases; discovered breakfasts for a few sous with pale sempstresses, whose sadness she understood, and reckless chorus girls, whose gayety she didn’t; she knew where the earliest chestnut buds were to be found in the Bois, when the slopes of the Buttes Chaumont were green, and which was the old woman who sold the cheapest flowers before the Madeleine. Alone and independent, she earned the affection of Madame Bibelot, the concierge, and, what was more, her confidence. Her outgoings and incomings were never questioned. The little American could take care of herself. Ah, if her son Jacques were only as reasonable! Miss Maynard might have made more friends had she cared; she might have joined hands with the innocent and light-hearted poverty of the coterie of her own artistic compatriots, but something in her blood made her distrust Bohemianism; her poverty was something to her too sacred for jest or companionship; her own artistic aim was too long and earnest for mere temporary enthusiasms. She might have found friends in her own profession. Her professor opened the sacred doors of his family circle to the young American girl. She appreciated the delicacy, refinement, and cheerful equal responsibilities of that household, so widely different from the accepted Anglo-Saxon belief, but there were certain restrictions that rightly or wrongly galled her American habits of girlish freedom, and she resolutely tripped past the first etage four or five flights higher to her attic, the free sky, and independence! Here she sometimes met another kind of independence in Monsieur Alphonse, aged twenty two, and she who ought to have been Madame Alphonse, aged seventeen, and they often exchanged greetings on the landing with great respect towards each other, and, oddly enough, no confusion or distrait. Later they even borrowed each other’s matches without fear and without reproach, until one day Monsieur Alphonse’s parents took him away, and the desolated soi-disant Madame Alphonse, in a cheerful burst of confidence, gave Helen her private opinion of monsieur, and from her seventeen years’ experience warned the American infant of twenty against possible similar complications.

One day—it was near the examination for prizes, and her funds were running low—she was obliged to seek one of those humbler restaurants she knew of for her frugal breakfast. But she was not hungry, and after a few mouthfuls left her meal unfinished as a young man entered and half abstractedly took a seat at her table. She had already moved towards the comptoir to pay her few sous, when, chancing to look up in a mirror which hung above the counter, reflecting the interior of the cafe, she saw the stranger, after casting a hurried glance around him, remove from her plate the broken roll and even the crumbs she had left, and as hurriedly sweep them into his pocket-handkerchief. There was nothing very strange in this; she had seen something like it before in these humbler cafes,—it was a crib for the birds in the Tuileries Gardens, or the poor artist’s substitute for rubber in correcting his crayon drawing! But there was a singular flushing of his handsome face in the act that stirred her with a strange pity, made her own cheek hot with sympathy, and compelled her to look at him more attentively. The back that was turned towards her was broad-shouldered and symmetrical, and showed a frame that seemed to require stronger nourishment than the simple coffee and roll he had ordered and was devouring slowly. His clothes, well made though worn, fitted him in a smart, soldier-like way, and accentuated his decided military bearing. The singular use of his left hand in lifting his cup made her uneasy, until a slight movement revealed the fact that his right sleeve was empty and pinned to his coat. He was one-armed. She turned her compassionate eyes aside, yet lingered to make a few purchases at the counter, as he paid his bill and walked away. But she was surprised to see that he tendered the waiter the unexampled gratuity of a sou. Perhaps he was some eccentric Englishman; he certainly did not look like a Frenchman.

She had quite forgotten the incident, and in the afternoon had strolled with a few fellow pupils into the galleries of the Louvre. It was “copying-day,” and as her friends loitered around the easels of the different students with the easy consciousness of being themselves “artists,” she strolled on somewhat abstractedly before them. Her own art was too serious to permit her much sympathy with another, and in the chatter of her companions with the young painters a certain levity disturbed her. Suddenly she stopped. She had reached a less frequented room; there was a single easel at one side, but the stool before it was empty, and its late occupant was standing in a recess by the window, with his back towards her. He had drawn a silk handkerchief from his pocket. She recognized his square shoulders, she recognized the handkerchief, and as he unrolled it she recognized the fragments of her morning’s breakfast as he began to eat them. It was the one-armed man.

She remained so motionless and breathless that he finished his scant meal without noticing her, and even resumed his place before the easel without being aware of her presence. The noise of approaching feet gave a fresh impulse to her own, and she moved towards him. But he was evidently accustomed to these interruptions, and worked on steadily without turning his head. As the other footsteps passed her she was emboldened to take a position behind him and glance at his work. It was an architectural study of one of Canaletto’s palaces. Even her inexperienced eyes were struck with its vigor and fidelity. But she was also conscious of a sense of disappointment. Why was he not—like the others—copying one of the masterpieces? Becoming at last aware of a motionless woman behind him, he rose, and with a slight gesture of courtesy and a half-hesitating “Vous verrez mieux la, mademoiselle,” moved to one side.

“Thank you,” said Miss Maynard in English, “but I did not want to disturb you.”

He glanced quickly at her face for the first time. “Ah, you are English!” he said.

“No. I am American.”

His face lightened. “So am I.”

“I thought so,” she said.

“From my bad French?”

“No. Because you did not look up to see if the woman you were polite to was old or young.”

He smiled. “And you, mademoiselle,—you did not murmur a compliment to the copy over the artist’s back.”

She smiled, too, yet with a little pang over the bread. But she was relieved to see that he evidently had not recognized her. “You are modest,” she said; “you do not attempt masterpieces.”

“Oh, no! The giants like Titian and Corregio must be served with both hands. I have only one,” he said half lightly, half sadly.

“But you have been a soldier,” she said with quick intuition.

“Not much. Only during our war,—until I was compelled to handle nothing larger than a palette knife. Then I came home to New York, and, as I was no use there, I came here to study.”

“I am from South Carolina,” she said quietly, with a rising color.

He put his palette down, and glanced at her black dress. “Yes,” she went on doggedly, “my father lost all his property, and was killed in battle with the Northerners. I am an orphan,—a pupil of the Conservatoire.” It was never her custom to allude to her family or her lost fortunes; she knew not why she did it now, but something impelled her to rid her mind of it to him at once. Yet she was pained at his grave and pitying face.

“I am very sorry,” he said simply. Then, after a pause, he added, with a gentle smile, “At all events you and I will not quarrel here under the wings of the French eagles that shelter us both.”

“I only wanted to explain why I was alone in Paris,” she said, a little less aggressively.

He replied by unhooking his palette, which was ingeniously fastened by a strap over his shoulder under the missing arm, and opened a portfolio of sketches at his side. “Perhaps they may interest you more than the copy, which I have attempted only to get at this man’s method. They are sketches I have done here.”

There was a buttress of Notre Dame, a black arch of the Pont Neuf, part of an old courtyard in the Faubourg St. Germain,—all very fresh and striking. Yet, with the recollection of his poverty in her mind, she could not help saying, “But if you copied one of those masterpieces, you know you could sell it. There is always a demand for that work.”

“Yes,” he replied, “but these help me in my line, which is architectural study. It is, perhaps, not very ambitious,” he added thoughtfully, “but,” brightening up again, “I sell these sketches, too. They are quite marketable, I assure you.”

Helen’s heart sank again. She remembered now to have seen such sketches—she doubted not they were his—in the cheap shops in the Rue Poissoniere, ticketed at a few francs each. She was silent as he patiently turned them over. Suddenly she uttered a little cry.

He had just uncovered a little sketch of what seemed at first sight only a confused cluster of roof tops, dormer windows, and chimneys, level with the sky-line. But it was bathed in the white sunshine of Paris, against the blue sky she knew so well. There, too, were the gritty crystals and rust of the tiles, the red, brown, and greenish mosses of the gutters, and lower down the more vivid colors of geraniums and pansies in flower-pots under the white dimity curtains which hid the small panes of garret windows; yet every sordid detail touched and transfigured with the poetry and romance of youth and genius.

“You have seen this?” she said.

“Yes; it is a study from my window. One must go high for such effects. You would be surprised if you could see how different the air and sunshine”—

“No,” she interrupted gently, “I HAVE seen it.”

“You?” he repeated, gazing at her curiously.

Helen ran the point of her slim finger along the sketch until it reached a tiny dormer window in the left-hand corner, half-hidden by an irregular chimney-stack. The curtains were closely drawn. Keeping her finger upon the spot, she said, interrogatively, “And you saw THAT window?”

“Yes, quite plainly. I remember it was always open, and the room seemed empty from early morning to evening, when the curtains were drawn.”

“It is my room,” she said simply.

Their eyes met with this sudden confession of their equal poverty. “And mine,” he said gayly, “from which this view was taken, is in the rear and still higher up on the other street.”

They both laughed as if some singular restraint had been removed; Helen even forgot the incident of the bread in her relief. Then they compared notes of their experiences, of their different concierges, of their housekeeping, of the cheap stores and the cheaper restaurants of Paris,—except one. She told him her name, and learned that his was Philip, or, if she pleased, Major Ostrander. Suddenly glancing at her companions, who were ostentatiously lingering at a little distance, she became conscious for the first time that she was talking quite confidentially to a very handsome man, and for a brief moment wished, she knew not why, that he had been plainer. This momentary restraint was accented by the entrance of a lady and gentleman, rather distingue in dress and bearing, who had stopped before them, and were eying equally the artist, his work, and his companion with somewhat insolent curiosity. Helen felt herself stiffening; her companion drew himself up with soldierly rigidity. For a moment it seemed as if, under that banal influence, they would part with ceremonious continental politeness, but suddenly their hands met in a national handshake, and with a frank smile they separated.