For all Jeanne’s brave front, Alaine would sometimes find her sitting on the floor of the inner room, in her eyes the agony of love and longing as she held hugged to her the old leathern jacket Antoine had worn, or pressed to her cheek the dingy fur cap which had dropped from his head that day when they brought him home. Therefore Jeanne did not forget, but made her moan silently. Under the indifferent manner toward matters religious Alaine discovered, too, a conscience as that of a Puritan, an unswerving fidelity to truth, to purity, and righteous dealing. Jacques Bisset spoke the truth when he called his sister a good woman. The men might laugh and joke with her, but only to a certain point, beyond that she was as prim as a Quaker, and they knew the limit. With the Indians she was uniformly frank and considerate, never failing to be generous in her trades with them. Therefore the forest could not hold a better guardian for a wandering maid than Jeanne Crepin.
In her fur cap and jacket, her leathern breeches and short skirt, with her gruff voice and her great height, one could scarce discern that she was not a man, a fact which she rather enjoyed. “Who cares what I am?” she would say. “So long as I know how to make my way and am comfortable so, I do not care.” She had made Alaine a similar costume. “We will travel in this dress,” she told her, “and while they are puzzling over whether we are men or women, it will give us the advantage. We will start before the Iroquois begin their raids. I know the language of some of their tribes, and I think I can manage to get on, yet it is not altogether a pleasure jaunt we will take. At first I thought we would best go alone, but I think we will let Petit Marc go with us, at least part of the way, till we cross into the Dutch country. You know a little of their language?”
“A little, and some English.”
“We shall do, I think. Down the river to the Richelieu, through the lake to the carrying-place, and then down the Hudson. I have studied it all out. Petit Marc has been there to Orange, and he knows. Now, teach me the English words you know, and see if I can remember some of the manners I had when I was a girl. Does one courtesy so? And what does a woman say when a man praises her beauty?”
Alaine laughed at the simper upon Jeanne’s face and the awkward dip of her gaunt figure.
“I shall want to overpower Michelle with my elegance,” Jeanne rattled on. “Michelle the housekeeper, the nurse of the Hervieus, and I the wife of as gay a cavalier as one could find in all Paris, and now——” She stretched out her hands, knotted and browned. “Where is the Jeanne Bisset who could grace a silken robe, and whose hands were as soft as the laces which covered them? She is gone, and Michelle rises, the wife of a man of education and good blood. I am a daughter of the woods, the wife of an outcast. So it goes. Yet I would not have it otherwise; it was for you, Antoine,” she murmured. Then with a twirl of her body she cut such a caper as set Alaine laughing. “How does one dance a figure?” she asked.
“We shall probably find you do not forget the dancing,” the girl returned. “I think we can spare you that lesson, Jeanne.”
“Then be you Michelle and I the grande dame of her remembrance.” Jeanne’s quick fingers fashioned a turban from her kerchief. She spread a fur robe across her knees, picked up the turkey-tail they used for sweeping up the hearth, and assumed a languishing air.
“Madame Herault.” Alaine swept her a courtesy.
“Ah, my good Michelle, I remember you quite well. You used to give me curds and whey in your dairy. Do you still manage a dairy, Michelle?”