The Daredevil.
by Maria Thompson Daviess.
CHAPTER I
SPARKLING WAVES OVER HIGH EXPLOSIVES
Was there ever a woman who did not very greatly desire for herself, at long moments, the doublet and hose of a man, perhaps also his sword, as well as his att.i.tude in the viewing of life? I think not. To a very small number of those ladies of great curiosity it has been granted that they climb to those ramparts of the life of a man; but it was needful that they be stout of limb and st.u.r.dy of heart to sustain themselves upon that eminence and not be dashed below upon the rocks of a strange land. I, Roberta, Marquise de Grez and Bye, have obtained glimpses into a far country and this is what I bring on returning, not as a spy, but, shall I say, laden with spices and forbidden fruit?
And for me it has been a very fine dash into the wilds of a land of strangeness, and I do not know that I have yet found myself completely returned unto my estate of a woman.
I first began to realize that I was set out upon a great journey when I stood at the rail of the very large ship and watched it plow its way through the waves which they told us with their splendor hid cruel mines. I felt the future might be like unto those great waves, and it might be that it would break in sparkling crests over high explosives.
I found them!
I had seen a fear of those explosives of life come in my dying father"s eyes, and here I stood at his command out on the ocean in quest of a woman"s fate in a strange country.
"Get back to America, Bob, and go straight to your Uncle Robert at Hayesville in the Harpeth Valley. He cut me loose because he didn"t understand, when I married your mother out of the French opera in Paris. When I named you Roberta for him he returned the letter I sent but with a notice of a thousand dollars in Monroe and Company for you.
I didn"t tell him when your mother died. G.o.d, I"ve been bitter! But these German bullets have cut the life out of me and I see more plainly. Get the money and take Nannette and the kiddie on the first boat. There"s starvation and--maybe worse in Paris for you. Take--the money--and--get--to--brother Robert. G.o.d of America--take--them and--guide--"
And that was all. I held him in my arms for a long time, while old Nannette and small Pierre wept beside me, and then I laid him upon his pillow and straightened the little tricolor that the good Sister of the old gray convent in which he lay had given me to place in his hand when he had begged for it. My mother"s country had meant my mother to him and he had given his life for her and France in the trenches of the Vosges. And thus at his bidding I was on the very high seas of adventure. From this thought of him I was very suddenly recalled by old Nannette who came upon the deck from below.
"_Le bon Dieu_," she sighed, as she settled herself in her steamer chair and took out the lace knitting. "Is it not of a goodness that I have tied in my stocking the necessary francs that we may land in that America, where all is of such a good fortune? And also by my skill we have one hundred and fifty francs above that need which must be almost an hundred of their huge and wasteful dollars. All is well with us." And as she spoke she pulled up the collar of Pierre"s soft blue serge blouse around his pale thin face and eased the cushion behind his crooked small back.
"Is--is that all which remains of the fifteen hundred dollars we found to be in that bank, Nannette?" I asked of her with a great uncertainty. My mother"s fortune, descended from her father, the Marquis de Grez and Bye, and the income of my father from his government post, had made life easy to live in that old house by the Quay, where so many from the Faubourg St. Germaine came to hear her sing after her fortune and children took her from the Opera--and to go for the summers in the gray old Chateau de Grez--but of the investment of francs or dollars and cents I had no knowledge, in spite of my claims to be an American girl of much progress. My mother had laughed and very greatly adored my a.s.sumption of an extreme American manner, copied as nearly as possible after that of my father, and had failed to teach to me even that thrift which is a part of the dot of every French girl from the Faubourg St. Germaine to the Boulevard St.
Michel. But even in my ignorance the information of Nannette as to the smallness of our fortune gave to me an alarm.
"What will you, Mademoiselle? It was necessary that I purchase the raiment needful to the young Marquis de Grez according to his state, and for the Marquise his sister also. It was not to be contemplated that we should travel except in apartments of the very best in the ship. Is not gold enough in America even for sending in great sums for relief of suffering? Have I not seen it given in the streets of Paris?
Is it not there for us? Do you make me reproaches?" And Nannette began to weep into the fine lawn of her nurse"s handkerchief.
"No, no, Nannette; I know it was of a necessity to us to have the clothes, and of course we had to travel in the first cla.s.s. Do not have distress. If we need more money in America I will obtain it." I made that answer with a gesture of soothing upon her old shoulders which I could never remember as not bent in an att.i.tude of hovering over Pierre or me.
"_Eh bien_!" she answered with a perfect satisfaction at my a.s.sumption of all the responsibilities of our three existences.
And as I leaned against the deck rail and looked out into a future as limitless as that water ahead of us into which the great ship was plowing, I made a remark to myself that had in it all the wisdom of those who are ignorant.
"The best of life is not to know what will happen next."
"Ah, that was so extraordinary coming from a woman that you must pardon me for listening and making exclamation," came an answer in a nice voice near at my elbow. The words were spoken in as perfect English as I had learned from my father, but in them I observed to be an intonation that my French ear detected as Parisian. "Also, Mademoiselle, are you young women of the new era to be without that very delightful but often danger-creating quality of curiosity?" As I turned I looked with startled eyes into the grave face of a man less than forty years, whose sad eyes were for the moment lighting with a great tenderness which I did not understand.
"I believe the quality which will be most required of the women of the era which is mine, is--is courage and then more courage, Monsieur," I made answer to him as if I had been discussing some question with him in my father"s smoking room at the Chateau de Grez, as I often came in to do with my father and his friends after the death of my mother when the evenings seemed too long alone. They had liked that I so came at times, and the old Count de Breaux once had remarked that feminine sympathy was the flux with which men made solid their minds into a unanimous purpose. He had been speaking of that war a few weeks after Louvaine and I had risen and had stood very tall and very haughty before him and my father.
"The women of France are to come after this carnage to mold a nation from what remains to them, Monsieur," I had said to him as I looked straight into his face. "Is not the courage of women a war supply upon which to rely?"
"G.o.d! what are the young women--such women as she--going to do in the years that come after the deluge, Henri of America?" he had made a muttering question to my father as his old eyes smouldered over me in the fire-light.
From the memory of the smoking room at the Chateau de Grez my mind suddenly returned to the rail of the ship and the Frenchman beside me, who was looking into my face with the same kindly question as to my future that had been in the eyes of my old G.o.dfather and which had stirred my father"s heart to its American depths and made him send me back to his own country.
"Ah, yes, that courage is a good weapon with which to adventure in this America of the Grizzled Bear, Mademoiselle," I found the strange man saying to me with a nice amus.e.m.e.nt as well as interest.
"My father had shot seven grizzlies before his twenty-first birthday.
We have the skins, four of them, in the great hall of the Chateau de Grez--or--or we did have them before--before--" My voice faltered and I could not continue speaking for the tears that rose in my throat and eyes.
Quickly the man at my side turned his broad shoulders so that he should shield me from the laughing and exclaiming groups of people upon the deck near us.
"Before Ypres, Mademoiselle?" he asked with tears also in the depths of his voice.
"Yes," I answered. "And I am now going into the great America with my crippled brother and his nurse--alone. It is the land of my father and I have his courage--I _must_ have also that of a French woman. I have it, Monsieur," and as I spoke I drew myself to my full, broad-shouldered height, which was almost equal to that of the man beside me.
"Mademoiselle, I salute the courage born of an American who fought before the guns of the Marne and of a French woman who sent him there!" And as he spoke thus he removed from his head his silk deck cap and held it at his shoulder in a way that I knew was a salute from a French officer to the memory of a brother. "And also may I be permitted to present myself, as it is a sad necessity that you travel without one from whom I might request the introduction?" he asked of me with a beautiful reverence.
After a search in his pocket for a few seconds he at last discovered a case of leather and presented to me a card. As he handed it to me his color rose up under his black eyes and grave trouble looked from between their long black lashes. I glanced down at the card and read:
Capitaine, le Count Armond de La.s.selles, Paris, France.
44th Cha.s.seurs de le Republique Francaise.
"Monsieur le Count, I know, I know why it is that you go to America!"
I made exclamation as I clasped to my breast my hands and my eyes shone with excitement. "I have read it in _Le Matin_ just the day before yesterday. You go to buy grain against the winter of starvation in the Republique. No man is so great a financier as you and so brave a soldier, with your wound not healed from the trenches in the Vosges.
Monsieur, I salute you!" and I bent my head and held out my hand to him.
"We"re to expect nimble wits as well as courage of you young--shall I say _American_ women?" he laughed as he bent over my hand. "Now shall I not be led for introduction to the small brother and the old nurse?" he asked with much friendly interest in his kind eyes.
It was a very wonderful thing to observe the wee Pierre listen to the narration of Capitaine, the Count de La.s.selles, concerning the actions of a small boy who had run out of a night of shot and sh.e.l.l into the heart of his regiment and who had now lived five months in the trenches with them. Pierre"s small face is all of France and in his heart under his bent chest burns a soul all of France. It is as if in her death, at his birth, my beautiful mother had stamped her race upon him with the greater emphasis.
"Is it that the small Gaston is a daredevil like is my Bob?" he questioned as we all made a laughter at the story of the Count de La.s.selles concerning the sortie of the small idol from the trenches in the dead of one peaceful night to return with a very wide thick flannel shirt of one of the _Boches_, which he had caught hanging upon a temporary laundry line back of the German trenches.
At that English "daredevil" word I was in my mind again back in the old Chateau de Grez and into my own childhood.
"You young daredevil, you, hold tight to that vine until I get a grip on your wrist, or you"ll dash us both on the rocks below," was the exact sentence with which my father bestowed my t.i.tle upon me as he hung by his heels out of a window of the old vine-covered Chateau de Grez.
"It is one large mistake that my _jeune fille_ is born what you call a boy in heart. _Helas_!" sobbed my beautiful young French mother as she regarded us from the garden below.
"If you were a boy I"d thrash you within an inch of your life, but as you are a girl I suppose it is permissible for me to admire your pluck, Mademoiselle Roberta," said my father as he landed me in the music room by his side while an exchange of excited sentences went on between my mother and old Nannette in the garden below. "What were you doing out on that ledge, anyway? It is more than a hundred feet to the ground and the rocks."
"I was making the hunt through Yellowstone Park that you have related to me, father, and I prefer that you give me a boy"s punishment. If I have a boy"s what you call "pluck," I should have a boy"s what you call "thrashing." Monsieur, I make that demand. I am the Marquise de Grez and Bye, and it may be that as you are an American you do not understand fully the honor of the house of Grez." I can remember that as I spoke I drew my ten-year old body up to its full height, which must have been over that of twelve years, and looked my father straight in the face with a glance of extreme hauteur as near as was possible to that of the portrait of the old Marquis de Grez, who died fighting on the field of Flanders.
"_Eh, la la_, what is it I have produced for you, Henri of America? It is not a proper _jeune fille_, nor do I know what punishment to impose upon her; but with you I must laugh," with which my beautiful mother from the doorway threw herself into the arms of her young American husband and her laughter of silver mingled with his deep laugh of a great joy.
"Don"t worry, Celeste; Bob is just a clear throw-back to her great-grandmother, Nancy Donaldson, who shot two Indians and a bear in defense of her kiddies one afternoon while my maternal grandsire was in the stockades presiding over the council in which was laid down the first broad draft for the formation of the Commonwealth of Harpeth.
I"m sorry, dear, that she is so vigorously American that she has to climb the Rocky Mountains even here in the garden spot of France. Just now she is French enough to be dealing with me in the terms of that jolly old boy of Flanders fame in the hall downstairs; but cheer up, sweetheart, she"s a wild, daredevil American and I"m going to send her back to the plains as soon as she speaks her native tongue with less French accent. Then the rest of us can be happily French forever after."
"I will speak as you do, my father, from this moment forth," I answered him with something that was wild and fierce and free rising in my child"s heart. "I will not be a _grande dame_ of France. I am a woman of America. I speak only United States." And I clung to my father"s arm as he drew me to him and embraced both my laughing mother and me, before I was delivered to old Nannette who, with affectionate French grumblings, led me away to the nursery for repairs.
The scene had become fixed in my memory, for from it had sprung a friendship of a great closeness with my wonderful American father whom love had chained in France. When he rode the great hunter that had come across to him from a friend in Kentucky I demanded to cling behind him or to sit the saddle in front of him, even at times running at his side as long as my breath held out, to rise on his stirrup, like the great terrifying Scotchmen do in battles, and cling as Kentuck made flight over wall or fence. My very slim and strong hands could not be kept from the steering wheel of his long blue racing car, and I could bring down a hare out of the field with any gun he possessed as unerringly as could he. I lived his life with him hour by hour, learned to think as he thought, to speak his easy transatlantic speech, and did equal trencher duty with him at all times, so that muscle and brawn were packed on my tall, broad woman"s body with the same compactness as it was packed upon his, by the time I had reached my twenty-first birthday. By that time he and I had been alone together for eight long years, for my mother had left us with tiny, misshapen Pierre as a heart burden but with only each other to be companions.
The efforts of some of my mother"s distant relatives and friends to make me into the traditional young French Marquise had resulted in giving to me a very beautiful _grande dame_ manner to use when I stood in need of it, which I took a care was not too often. Because I had been born to a woman"s estate I considered I must manage well beautiful skirts and lacy fans, but no oftener than was necessary, I decided. I went for the most of my days habited in English knickerbockers under short corduroy skirts, worn with a many-pocketed hunting blouse. On the night of my presentation at the salon of my distant relative, the old Countess de Rochampierre, I had to apologize to a young Russian attache for searching with desperation for the bit of lace called a handkerchief, among the laces and ruffles of my evening gown in the regions where I had been accustomed to find sensible pockets.
"And is it possible that Mademoiselle Americaine hunts as well as she makes the dance?" was his delighted answer to my explanation, which led into a half-hour description of a raw morning in the field just three days before in England, where my father and I had gone over for a week"s hunting with Lord Gordon Leigh at Leigholm.