It puzzled me greatly, also, that they should have known the exact moment of my arrival, for although both Dr. Saugrain and Captain Clarke knew of my intended visit, they could hardly have calculated to such a nicety not only the day but the very hour of my entry into town. It must be that pickets had been stationed to descry my approach from a distance and give the signal.
Still puzzling my brains over the wonder of it all, and hardly knowing whether to feel more proud or more frightened at the honor intended me, and wishing with all my heart that I had known of it that I might have arrayed myself in a costume befitting the occasion, I slowly drew near the procession, and the procession drew near me.
Then suddenly I discovered what nothing but my domtiferous vanity had prevented me from discerning from the first: this was a religious procession bearing the banners of the church and singing Aves and Te Deums. I had known such processions before in St. Louis on saints' days, and always headed by the two most beautiful maidens in the town, bearing silver plates, who, as the procession drew up to the church, stood on either side of the door holding the plates to receive alms. I drew Bourbon to one side of the road and waited.
Yes, there were the two beautiful maidens with the silver plates, and I was not surprised to see that one was Mademoiselle Chouteau; and as she drew near she could not resist a saucy look of recognition in her dancing eyes, entirely out of character in the leader of a religious procession. I smiled back at her, my heart already growing warmer and lighter with her friendliness, and then I glanced at the other: a wavy mass of soft, dark hair, little ringlets about white neck and brow, lips like a scarlet pomegranate blossom, and long, black lashes lying on an ivory cheek, where the pale rose was fast turning to crimson under my gaze.
It was Pelagie! Her cheek told the tale that she knew I was looking at her, yet not once did she lift her eyes and look at me. I wonder that my heart did not break through my breast, so great a bound it made when I discovered her, and then all the blood in my body flowed back upon it, and I sat on Bourbon as one carved in marble, while friends and acquaintances passed by and smiled up at me in kindly welcome. Not until Josef Papin left the ranks and came up to me with outstretched hand could I recover myself and begin to feel alive again, with the blood slowly running back in its courses and tingling in my finger-tips.
"Come," he said, when the first greetings were over, "tie your horse to the tree, and we will fall in at the end of the line and go up to the church together. This is no saint's day, as you might think, but we are to have mass for the last time under the old rule. The United States troops come over to-day from Cahokia and take possession."
This was wonderful news to me, and I could not but feel a great sympathy with him, for he spoke with a voice that faltered. What would it not have meant to me if my own city of Philadelphia were being transferred to the rule of France or Spain!
On our way he told me what my soul most longed to hear: how mademoiselle came to be in St. Louis.
Her cousin, the Duc d'Enghien, had begun to feel that his home was no longer a safe place for her, for Bonaparte's spies were watching him, and he felt that though Baden was neutral territory he might at any moment be arrested and thrown into prison. That would leave Pelagie entirely unprotected, and he had begun to consider some other safer retreat for her. When mademoiselle found that she was to be sent away from Ettenheim, she begged that she might return to St. Louis, the only place she had known as home, and to the people she loved, who had been to her kindred and friends. It was only after much pleading that the duke had been persuaded to let her go so far from home again, but mademoiselle's heart was set on it.
"And," said Josef Papin, "as we both know, when she will, she will; I defy any man to gainsay her. She arrived two weeks ago by way of New Orleans, with a Monsieur and Madame Dubois, newly married, I believe, who were coming over to America to settle."