Alice of Old Vincennes Part 25

Hamilton bit his lip and was silent. Helm was exasperatingly good tempered, and his jocularity was irresistible. While he was yet speaking a guard came up followed by Jean, the hunchback, and saluting said to Hamilton:

"The lad wants to see the young lady, sir."

Hamilton gazed quizzically at Jean, who planted himself in his habitual att.i.tude before him and stared up into his face with the grotesque expression which seems to be characteristic of hunchbacks and unfledged birds--the look of an embodied and hideous joke.

"Well, sir, what will you have?" the Governor demanded.

"I want to see Alice, if you please."

"What for?"

"I want to give her a book to read."

"Ah, indeed. Where is it? Let me see it."

Jean took from the breast of his loose jerkin a small volume, dog-eared and mildewed, and handed it to Hamilton. Meantime he stood first on one foot, then the other, gnawing his thumb-nail and blinking rapidly.

"Well, Helm, just look here!"

"What?"

"Manon Lescaut."

"And what's that?"

"Haven't you ever read it?"

"Read what?"

"This novel--Manon Lescaut."

"Never read a novel in my life. Never expect to."

Hamilton laughed freely at Helm's expense, then turned to Jean and gave him back the book.

It would have been quite military, had he taken the precaution to examine between the pages for something hidden there, but he did not.

"Go, give it to her," he said, "and tell her I send my compliments, with great admiration of her taste in literature." He motioned the soldier to show Jean to Alice. "It's a beastly French story," he added, addressing Helm; "immoral enough to make a pirate blush. That's the sort of girl Mademoiselle Roussillon is!"

"I don't care what kind of a book she reads," blurted Helm, "she's a fine, pure, good girl. Everybody likes her. She's the good angel of this miserable frog-hole of a town. You'd like her yourself, if you'd straighten up and quit burning tow in your brain all the time. You're always so furious about something that you never have a chance to be just to yourself, or pleasant to anybody else."

Hamilton turned fiercely on Helm, but a glimpse of the Captain's broad good-humored face heartily smiling, dispelled his anger. There was no ground upon which to maintain a quarrel with a person so persistently genial and so absurdly frank. And in fact Hamilton was not half so bad as his choleric manifestations seemed to make him out. Besides, Helm knew just how far to go, just when to stop.

"If I had got furious at you every time there was overwhelming provocation for it," Hamilton said, "you'd have been long since hanged or shot. I fancy that I have shown angelic forbearance. I've given you somewhat more than a prisoner's freedom."

"So you have, so you have," a.s.sented Helm. "I've often been surprised at your generous partiality in my case. Let's have some hot water with something else in it, what do you say? I won't give you any more advice for five minutes by your watch."

"But I want some advice at once."

"What about?"

"That girl."

"Turn her loose. That's easy and reputable."

"I'll have to, I presume; but she ought to be punished."

"If you'll think less about punishment, revenge and getting even with everybody and everything, you'll soon begin to prosper."

Hamilton winced, but smiled as one quite sure of himself.

Jean followed the soldier to a rickety log pen on the farther side of the stockade, where he found the prisoner restlessly moving about like a bird in a rustic cage. It had no comforts, that gloomy little room.

There was no fireplace, the roof leaked, and the only furniture consisted of a bench to sit on and a pile of skins for bed. Alice looked charmingly forlorn peeping out of the wraps in which she was bundled against the cold, her hair fluffed and rimpled in s.h.i.+ning disorder around her face.

The guard let Jean in and closed the door, himself staying outside.

Alice was as glad to see the poor lad as if they had been parted for a year. She hugged him and kissed his drawn little face.

"You dear, good Jean!" she murmured, "you did not forget me."

"I brought you something," he whispered, producing the book.

Alice s.n.a.t.c.hed it, looked at it, and then at Jean.

"Why, what did you bring this for? you silly Jean! I didn't want this.

I don't like this book at all. It's hateful. I despise it. Take it back."

"There's something in it for you, a paper with writing on it; Lieutenant Beverley wrote it on there. It's shut up between the leaves about the middle."

"Sh-s-s.h.!.+ not so loud, the guard'll hear you," Alice breathlessly whispered, her whole manner changing instantly. She was trembling, and the color had been whisked from her face, as the flame from a candle in a sudden draught.

She found the note and read it a dozen times without a pause, her eyes leaping along the lines back and forth with pathetic eagerness and concentration. Presently she sat down on the bench and covered her face with her hands. A tremor first, then a convulsive sobbing, shook her collapsed form. Jean regarded her with a drolly sympathetic grimace, elevating his long chin and letting his head settle back between his shoulders.

"Oh, Jean, Jean!" she cried at last, looking up and reaching out her arms; "O Jean, he is gone, gone, gone!"

Jean stepped closer to her while she sobbed again like a little child.

She pulled him to her and held him tightly against her breast while she once more read the note through blinding tears. The words were few, but to her they bore the message of desolation and despair. A great, haunting, hollow voice in her heart repeated them until they echoed from vague distance to distance.

It was written with a bit of lead on the half of a mildewed fly-leaf torn from the book:

"Dear Alice:

"I am going away. When you read this, think of me as hurrying through the wilderness to reach our army and bring it here. Be brave, as you always have been; be good, as you cannot help being; wait and watch for me; love me, as I love you. I will come. Do not doubt it, I will come, and I will crush Hamilton and his command. Courage, Alice dear; courage, and wait for me.

"Faithfully ever, "Beverley."