Rosin the Beau

by Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards

I WAS twenty years old when the change came in my life. I remember the day was cold and bleak, an early spring day. My father had had an accident a few days before. In one of his unconscious fits he had fallen forward—I had left the room but for a moment—and struck his head sharply against one of the fire-irons. He came to himself quite wild, and seeing the blood, thought he had killed some one, and cried to us to take him to prison as a murderer. It took Abby and me a long time to quiet him. The shock and the pain of it all had shaken me more than I knew, and I felt sick, and did not know what ailed me; but Abby knew, and she sent me to see Father L'Homme-Dieu, while she sat with my father. I was glad enough to go, more glad than my duty allowed, I fear; yet I knew that Abby was better than I at caring for my father.

As I walked across the brown fields, where the green was beginning to prick in little points here and there, I began to feel the life strong in me once more. The dull cloud of depression seemed to drop away, and instead of seeing always that sad, set face of my poor father's, I could look up and around, and whistle to the squirrels, and note the woodpecker running round the tree near me. It has remained a mystery to me all my life, Melody, that this bird's brains are not constantly addled in his head, from the violence of his rapping. When I was a little boy, I tried, I remember, to nod my head as fast as his went nodding: with the effect that I grew dizzy and sick, and Mother Marie thought I was going to die, and said the White Paternoster over me five times.

I looked about me, I say, and felt my spirit waking with the waking of the year. Yet, though I was glad to feel alive and young once more, I never thought I was going to anything new or wonderful. The wise, kind friend would be there; we should talk, and I should come away refreshed and strengthened, in peace and courage; I thought of nothing more. But when the widow Sparrow opened the door to me, I heard voices from the room within; a strange voice of a man, and the priest's answering. I stopped short on the threshold.

"The Father is busy!" I said. "I will call again, when he is alone."

"Now don't you!" said Mrs. Sparrow, who was always fond of me, and thought it a terrible walk for me to take, so young, and with the "growing weakness" not out of me. "Don't ye go a step, Jacques! I expect you can come in just as well as not. There is a gentleman here, but he's so pleasant, I should wish to have you see him, if I was the Father."

I was hesitating, all the shyness of a country-bred boy coming over me; for I had a quick ear, and this strange voice was not like the voices I was used to hearing; it was like Father L'Homme-Dieu's, fine and high-bred. But the next instant Father L'Homme-Dieu had stepped to the door of the study, and saw me.

"Come in, Jacques!" he cried. His eyes were bright, and his air gay, as I had never seen it. "Come in, my son! I have a friend here, and you are the very person I want him to meet." I stepped over the threshold awkwardly enough, and stood before the stranger. He was a young man, a few years older than myself; tall and slender,—we might have been twins as far as height and build went, but there the resemblance ceased. He was fair, with such delicate colouring that he might have looked womanish but for the dark fiery blue of his eyes, and his little curled moustache. He looked the way you fancy a prince looking, Melody, when Auntie Joy tells you a fairy story, though he was simply dressed enough.

"Marquis," said Father L'Homme-Dieu, with a shade of ceremony that I had never heard before in his tone, "let me present to you M. Jacques D'Arthenay, my friend! Jacques, this is the Marquis de Ste. Valerie."

He gave my name the French pronunciation. It was kindly meant; at my present age, I think it was perhaps rightly done; but then, it filled me with a kind of rage. The angry blood of a false pride, a false humility, surged to my brain and sang in my ears; and as the young man stepped forward with outstretched hand, crying, "A compatriot. Welcome, monsieur!" I drew back, stammering with anger. "My name is Jacques De Arthenay!"[3] I said. "I am an American, a shoemaker, and the son of a farmer."

There was a moment of silence, in which I seemed to live a year. I was conscious of everything, the well-bred surprise of the young nobleman, the half-amused vexation of the priest, my own clumsy, boyish rage and confusion. In reality it was only a few seconds before I felt my friend's hand on my shoulder, with its kind, fatherly touch.