Old Kaskaskia Part 15

Angelique bent to watch Maria's stupor. Rice had put the skeleton hand under a coverlet which was drawn to the sick girl's chin. He sat beside her on one of the brocaded drawing-room chairs, his head resting against the high back and his crossed feet stretched toward the window, in an att.i.tude of his own which expressed quiescent power. Peggy went directly behind the screens, determined to pounce upon the woman who prolonged their stay in a flooded house, and deal with her as there would not be opportunity to do later. Tante-gra'mere was asleep.

Angelique sat down with Peggy on the floor, a little way from the pile of feather beds. They were very weary. The tonic of excitement, and even of Rice Jones's presence, failed in their effect on Peggy. It was past midnight. The girls heard c.o.c.ks crowing along the bluffs. Angelique took the red head upon her shoulder, saying,--

"It would be better if we slept until they call, since there is nothing else to do."

"You might coquette over Maria Jones. I won't tell."

"What a thorn you are, Peggy! If I did not know the rose that goes with it"--Angelique did not state her alternative.

"A red rose," scoffed Peggy; and she felt herself drowsing in the mother arms.

Rice was keenly awake, and when the girls went into the privacy of the screens he sat looking out of the window at the oblong of darkly blue night sky which it shaped for him. His temples throbbed. Though the strange conditions around him were not able to vary his usual habits of thought, something exhilarated him; and he wondered at that, when Peggy had told him Angelique's decision against him. He felt at peace with the world, and for the first time even with Dr. Dunlap.

"We are here such a little time," thought Rice, "and are all such poor wretches. What does it matter, the damage we do one another in our groping about? G.o.d forgive me! I would have killed that man, and maybe added another pang to the suffering of this dying girl."

Maria stirred. The snoring of the sleeping negroes penetrated the dividing wall. He thought he heard a rasping on the s.h.i.+ngles outside which could not be accounted for by wind or water, and rose to his feet, that instant facing Dr. Dunlap in the window.

Dr. Dunlap had one leg across the low sill. The two men stood breathless. Maria saw the intruder. She sat up, articulating his name.

At that piteous sound, betraying him to her brother, the cowardly impulse of many days' growth carried Dr. Dunlap's hand like a flash to his pocket. He fired his pistol directly into Rice's breast, and dropped back through the window to the boat he had taken from the priest.

The screams of women and the terrified outcry of slaves filled the attic. Rice threw his arms above his head, and sunk downward. In the midst of the smoke Peggy knelt by him, and lifted his head and shoulders. The night wind blew upon them, and she could discern his dilated eyes and piteous amazement.

"Dr. Dunlap has shot me," he said to her. "I don't know why he did it."

And his face fell against her bosom as he died.

PART FOURTH.

THE FLOOD.

The moonlight shone in through both windows and the lantern glimmered.

The choking smell of gunpowder spread from room to room. Two of the slave men sprung across the sill to pursue Dr. Dunlap, but they could do nothing. They could see him paddling away from the house, and giving himself up to the current; a desperate man, whose fate was from that hour unknown. Night and the paralysis which the flood laid upon human action favored him. Did a still pitying soul bend above his wild-eyed and reckless plunging through whirls of water, comprehending that he had been startled into a.s.sa.s.sination; that the deed was, like the result of his marriage, a tragedy he did not foresee? Some men are made for strong domestic ties, yet run with brutal precipitation into the loneliness of evil.

A desire to get out of the flood-bound tavern, an unreasonable impulse to see Angelique Saucier and perhaps be of use to her, a mistakenly silent entering of the house which he hardly knew how to approach,--these were the conditions which put him in the way of his crime. The old journey of Cain was already begun while Angelique was robbing her great-grand-aunt's bed of pillows to put under Rice Jones.

The aged woman had gone into her sh.e.l.l of sleep, and the m.u.f.fled shot, the confusion and wailing, did not wake her. Wachique and another slave lifted the body and laid it on the quickly spread couch of pillows.

n.o.body thought of Maria. She lay quite still, and made no sound in that flurry of terror.

"He is badly hurt," said Angelique. "Lizette, bring linen, the first your hand touches; and you, Achille, open his vest and find the wound quickly."

"But it's no use, ma'amselle," whispered Wachique, lifting her eyes.

"Do not be afraid, poor Achille. I will show you how myself. We cannot wait for any one to help us. What would my father and Colonel Menard say, if they found Monsieur Reece Zhone killed in our house?"

In her panic Angelique tore the vest wide, and found the great stain over the place where the heart should be. She was kneeling, and she turned back to Peggy, who stood behind her.

Death is great or it is a piteous change, like the slaughter of brutes, according as we bear ourselves in its presence. How mighty an experience it is to wait where world overlaps the edge of world, and feel the vastness of eternity around us! A moment ago--or was it many ages?--he spoke. Now he is gone, leaving a strange visible image lying there to awe us. The dead take sudden majesty. They become as G.o.ds. We think they hear us when we speak of them, and their good becomes sacred. A dead face has all human faults wiped from it; and that Shape, that Presence, whose pa.s.siveness seems infinite, how it fills the house, the town, the whole world, while it stays!

The hardest problem we have to face here is the waste of our best things,--of hopes, of patience, of love, of days, of agonizing labor, of lives which promise most. Rice's astonishment at the brutal waste of himself had already pa.s.sed off his countenance. The open eyes saw nothing, but the lips were closed in sublime peace.

"And his sister," wept Angelique. "Look at Mademoiselle Zhone, also."

The dozen negroes, old and young, led by Achille, began to sob in music one of those sweet undertone chants for the dead which no race but theirs can master. They sung the power of the man and the tenderness of the young sister whose soul followed her brother's, and they called from that ark on the waters for saints and angels to come down and bless the beds of the two. The bells intoned with them, and a sinking wind carried a lighter ripple against the house.

"Send them out," spoke Peggy Morrison, with an imperious sweep of the arm; and the half-breed authoritatively hurried the other slaves back to their doorway. The submissive race understood and obeyed, anxiously watching Peggy as she wavered in her erectness and groped with the fingers of both hands.

"Put camphor under Ma'amselle Peggy's nose, Wachique," whispered Achille.

Peggy found Rice's chair, and sat down; but as soon as she returned to a consciousness of the bottle under her nose and an arm around her, she said,--

"Go away. A Morrison never faints."

Angelique was kneeling like a nun. She felt the push of a foot.

"Stop that crying," said Peggy fiercely. "I hate to hear it. What right have you to cry?"

"No right at all. But the whole Territory will weep over this."

"What right has the Territory in him now? The Territory will soon find another brilliant man."

"And this poor tiny girl, Peggy, so near her death, what had she done to deserve that it should come in this form? Are men gone mad in this flood, that Dr. Dunlap, for a mere political feud, should seek out Monsieur Reece Zhone in my father's house, and shoot him down before our eyes? I am dazed. It is like a nightmare."

Peggy set her mouth and looked abroad into the brightening night.

Angelique dropped her face in her hands and shook with sobbing. The three girlish figures, one rigid on the bed, another rigid in the chair, and the third bending in vicarious suffering between them, were made suddenly clear by an illumination of the moon as it began to find the western window. Wachique had busied herself seeking among piles of furniture for candles, which she considered a necessity for the dead.

The house supply of wax tapers was in the submerged cellar. So she took the lantern from its nail and set it on the floor at the head of the two pallets, and it threw scattered spots of l.u.s.tre on Rice's white forehead and Maria's hair. This humble shrouded torch, impertinent as it looked when the lily-white moonlight lay across it, yet reminded beholders of a stable, and a Child born in a stable who had taught the race to turn every sorrow into glory.

The night sent its quiet through the attic, though the bells which had clamored so over the destruction of verdure and homes appeared now to clamor louder over the destruction of youth.

"Do you understand this, Peggy? They died heretic and unblessed, yet I want to know what they now know until it seems to me I cannot wait. When I have been playing the harp to tante-gra'mere, and thinking so much, long, long afternoons, such a strange homesickness has grown in me. I could not make anybody believe it if I told it. These two have found out what is beyond. They have found out the great secret. Oh, Peggy, I do want to know it, also. There will be an awful mourning over them; and when they go into their little earthen cellars, people will pity that, and say, 'Poor things.' But they know the mystery of the ages now, and we know nothing. Do you think they are yet very far away? Monsieur Reece? Mademoiselle?"

Angelique's low interrogating call, made while she keenly listened with lifted face, had its only response in a mutter from Wachique, who feared any invocation of spirits. Peggy sat looking straight ahead of her without a word. She could not wash her face soft with tears, and she felt no reaching out towards disembodiment. What she wanted was love in this world, and pride in her love; long years of glad living on the verdure of earth in the light of the sun. One presence could make the common old world celestial enough for her. She had missed her desire.

But Rice had turned his face to her as he died.

Two boats moved to the eaves and rested there, shaken only by a ripple of the quieting water. The overflowed rivers would lie calm when the wind allowed it, excepting where a boiling current drove. The dazed girls yet seemed to dream through the strong indignation and the inquiry and fruitless plans of arriving men. It was a dream when Captain Saucier sat down and stared haggardly at the two who had perished under his roof, and Colonel Menard stood with his hat over his face. It was a dream when the brother and sister were lowered and placed on one pallet in a boat. The hollow of the rafters, the walls on which one might mark with his nail, the waiting black faces, the figures toiling down the roof with those loads,--were any of these sights real?

"Wrap yourselves," said Captain Saucier to Peggy and Angelique. "The other boat is quite ready for you."

"But, papa, are Monsieur Reece and his sister going alone with the rowers?"

"I am myself going with them."

"Papa," urged Angelique, "Mademoiselle Zhone was a young girl. If I were in her place, would you not like to have some young girl sit by my head?"