Alice of Old Vincennes

by Maurice Thompson

"Ah, ah; his mind is busy with the newly arrived cargo," thought the old priest, returning the salutation; "his throat aches for the liquor,—the poor man."

Then he read again the letter's superscription and made a faltering move, as if to break the seal. His hands trembled violently, his face looked gray and drawn.

"Come on, you brutes," cried the receding man, jerking the thongs of skin by which he led the goats.

Father Beret rose and turned into his damp little hut, where the light was dim on the crucifix hanging opposite the door against the clay-daubed wall. It was a bare, unsightly, clammy room; a rude bed on one side, a shelf for table and two or three wooden stools constituting the furniture, while the uneven puncheons of the floor wabbled and clattered under the priest's feet.

An unopened letter is always a mysterious thing. We who receive three or four mails every day, scan each little paper square with a speculative eye. Most of us know what sweet uncertainty hangs on the opening of envelopes whose contents may be almost anything except something important, and what a vague yet delicious thrill comes with the snip of the paper knife; but if we be in a foreign land and long years absent from home, then is a letter subtly powerful to move us, even more before it is opened than after it is read.

It had been many years since a letter from home had come to Father Beret. The last, before the one now in his hand, had made him ill of nostalgia, fairly shaking his iron determination never to quit for a moment his life work as a missionary. Ever since that day he had found it harder to meet the many and stern demands of a most difficult and exacting duty. Now the mere touch of the paper in his hand gave him a sense of returning weakness, dissatisfaction, and longing. The home of his boyhood, the rushing of the Rhone, a seat in a shady nook of the garden, Madeline, his sister, prattling beside him, and his mother singing somewhere about the house—it all came back and went over him and through him, making his heart sink strangely, while another voice, the sweetest ever heard—but she was ineffable and her memory a forbidden fragrance.

Father Beret tottered across the forlorn little room and knelt before the crucifix holding his clasped hands high, the letter pressed between them. His lips moved in prayer, but made no sound; his whole frame shook violently.

It would be unpardonable desecration to enter the chamber of Father Beret's soul and look upon his sacred and secret trouble; nor must we even speculate as to its particulars. The good old man writhed and wrestled before the cross for a long time, until at last he seemed to receive the calmness and strength he prayed for so fervently; then he rose, tore the letter into pieces so small that not a word remained whole, and squeezed them so firmly together that they were compressed into a tiny, solid ball, which he let fall through a crack between the floor puncheons. After waiting twenty years for that letter, hungry as his heart was, he did not even open it when at last it arrived. He would never know what message it bore. The link between him and the old sweet days was broken forever. Now with God's help he could do his work to the end.

He went and stood in his doorway, leaning against the side. Was it a mere coincidence that the meadowlark flew up just then from its grass-tuft, and came to the roof's comb overhead, where it lit with a light yet audible stroke of its feet and began fluting its tender, lonesome-sounding strain? If Father Beret heard it he gave no sign of recognition; very likely he was thinking about the cargo of liquor and how he could best counteract its baleful influence. He looked toward the "river house," as the inhabitants had named a large shanty, which stood on a bluff of the Wabash not far from where the road-bridge at present crosses, and saw men gathering there.

Meantime Rene de Ronville had delivered Madame Roussillon's letter with due promptness. Of course such a service demanded pie and claret. What still better pleased him, Alice chose to be more amiable than was usually her custom when he called. They sat together in the main room of the house where M. Roussillon kept his books, his curiosities of Indian manufacture collected here and there, and his surplus firearms, swords, pistols, and knives, ranged not unpleasingly around the walls.