"The black woman was your nurse, your mammy," he said. "I know by that and by your prayer in English, as well as by your locket, that you are of a good old family."
Like most Southerners, he had strong faith in genealogy, and he held at his tongue's tip the names of all the old families. The Carters, the Blairs, the Fitzhughs, the Hansons, the Randolphs, the Lees, the Ludwells, the Joneses, the Beverleys, the Tarletons—a whole catalogue of them stretched back in his memory. He knew the coat of arms displayed by each house. He could repeat their legends.
"I wish you could tell me more," he went on. "Can't you recollect anything further about your early childhood, your first impressions—the house, the woman who taught you to pray, the old black mammy? Any little thing might be of priceless value as evidence."
Alice shrugged her shoulders after the creole fashion with something of her habitual levity of manner, and laughed. His earnestness seemed disproportioned to the subject, as she fancied he must view it, although to her it had always been something to dream over. It was impossible for her to realize, as he did, the importance of details in solving a problem like that involved in her past history. Nor could she feel the pathos and almost tragic fascination with which her story had touched him.
"There is absolutely nothing more to tell," she said. "All my life I have tried to remember more, but it's impossible; I can't get any further back or call up another thing. There's no use trying. It's all like a dream—probably it is one. I do have such dreams. In my sleep I can lift myself into the air, just as easy, and fly back to the same big white house that I seem to remember. When you told me about your home it was like something that I had often seen before. I shall be dreaming about it next!"
Beverley cross-questioned her from every possible point of view; he was fascinated with the mystery; but she gave him nothing out of which the least further light could be drawn. A half-breed woman, it seemed, had been her Indian foster-mother; a silent, grave, watchful guardian from whom not a hint of disclosure ever fell. She was, moreover, a Christian woman, had received her conversion from an English-speaking Protestant missionary. She prayed with Alice, thus keeping in the child's mind a perfect memory of the Lord's prayer.
"Well," said Beverley at last, "you are more of a mystery to me, the longer I know you."
"Then I must grow every day more distasteful to you."
"No, I love mystery."
He went away feeling a new web of interest binding him to this inscrutable maiden whose life seemed to him at once so full of idyllic happiness and so enshrouded in tantalizing doubt. At the first opportunity he frankly questioned M. Roussillon, with no helpful result. The big Frenchman told the same meager story. The woman was dying in the time of a great epidemic, which killed most of her tribe. She gave Alice to M. Roussillon, but told him not a word about her ancestry or previous life. That was all.