THE DAREDEVIL
By
MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS
Author of "The Melting of Molly," "Miss Selina Lue," "Over Paradise
Ridge, etc."
1916
[Illustration]
Frontispiece from Painting by E. Sophonisba Hergesheimer
To
Jessie Morson Grahame
Who expects "the best" of me
CONTENTS
I SPARKLING WAVES OVER HIGH EXPLOSIVES
II VIVE LA FRANCE!
III THAT MR. G. SLADE OF DETROIT
IV THE IMPOSSIBLE UNCLE ROBERT
V "HERE'S MY BOY, GOVERNOR"
VI "WE BOTH NEED YOU"
VII THE GIRL BUNCH
VIII IN THE DRESS OF MAGNIFICENCE
IX "O'ER THE LAND OF THE FREE--"
X VITRIOL AND THE HOODOO
XI BUSINESS AND PIE
XII THE BEAUTIFUL MADAM WHITWORTH
XIII BROTHERS BY BLOODSHED
XIV TO BEAR MEN AND TO SAVE THEM
XV "BEHOLD, I AM A SPY!"
XVI "IMMEDIATELY I COME TO YOU!"
XVII THE TALL TIMBERS OF OLD HARPETH
XVIII THE CAMP HEAVEN
XIX ALL IS LOST
XX "YOU ARE--MYSELF!"
CHAPTER I
SPARKLING WAVES OVER HIGH EXPLOSIVES
Was there ever a woman who did not very greatly desire for herself, at
long moments, the doublet and hose of a man, perhaps also his sword,
as well as his attitude in the viewing of life? I think not. To a very
small number of those ladies of great curiosity it has been granted
that they climb to those ramparts of the life of a man; but it was
needful that they be stout of limb and sturdy of heart to sustain
themselves upon that eminence and not be dashed below upon the rocks
of a strange land. I, Roberta, Marquise de Grez and Bye, have obtained
glimpses into a far country and this is what I bring on returning, not
as a spy, but, shall I say, laden with spices and forbidden fruit?
And for me it has been a very fine dash into the wilds of a land of
strangeness, and I do not know that I have yet found myself completely
returned unto my estate of a woman.
I first began to realize that I was set out upon a great journey when
I stood at the rail of the very large ship and watched it plow its way
through the waves which they told us with their splendor hid cruel
mines. I felt the future might be like unto those great waves, and it
might be that it would break in sparkling crests over high explosives.
I found them!
I had seen a fear of those explosives of life come in my dying
father's eyes, and here I stood at his command out on the ocean in
quest of a woman's fate in a strange country.
"Get back to America, Bob, and go straight to your Uncle Robert at
Hayesville in the Harpeth Valley. He cut me loose because he didn't
understand, when I married your mother out of the French opera in
Paris. When I named you Roberta for him he returned the letter I sent
but with a notice of a thousand dollars in Monroe and Company for you.
I didn't tell him when your mother died. God, I've been bitter! But
these German bullets have cut the life out of me and I see more
plainly. Get the money and take Nannette and the kiddie on the first
boat. There's starvation and--maybe worse in Paris for you. Take--the
money--and--get--to--brother Robert. God of America--take--them
and--guide--"
And that was all. I held him in my arms for a long time, while old
Nannette and small Pierre wept beside me, and then I laid him upon his
pillow and straightened the little tricolor that the good Sister of
the old gray convent in which he lay had given me to place in his hand
when he had begged for it. My mother's country had meant my mother to
him and he had given his life for her and France in the trenches of
the Vosges. And thus at his bidding I was on the very high seas of
adventure. From this thought of him I was very suddenly recalled by
old Nannette who came upon the deck from below.
"_Le bon Dieu_," she sighed, as she settled herself in her
steamer chair and took out the lace knitting. "Is it not of a goodness
that I have tied in my stocking the necessary francs that we may land
in that America, where all is of such a good fortune? And also by my
skill we have one hundred and fifty francs above that need which must
be almost an hundred of their huge and wasteful dollars. All is well
with us." And as she spoke she pulled up the collar of Pierre's soft
blue serge blouse around his pale thin face and eased the cushion
behind his crooked small back.
"Is--is that all which remains of the fifteen hundred dollars we found
to be in that bank, Nannette?" I asked of her with a great
uncertainty. My mother's fortune, descended from her father, the
Marquis de Grez and Bye, and the income of my father from his
government post, had made life easy to live in that old house by the
Quay, where so many from the Faubourg St. Germaine came to hear her
sing after her fortune and children took her from the Opera--and to go
for the summers in the gray old Chateau de Grez--but of the investment
of francs or dollars and cents I had no knowledge, in spite of my
claims to be an American girl of much progress. My mother had laughed
and very greatly adored my assumption of an extreme American manner,
copied as nearly as possible after that of my father, and had failed
to teach to me even that thrift which is a part of the dot of every
French girl from the Faubourg St. Germaine to the Boulevard St.
Michel. But even in my ignorance the information of Nannette as to the
smallness of our fortune gave to me an alarm.
"What will you, Mademoiselle? It was necessary that I purchase the
raiment needful to the young Marquis de Grez according to his state,
and for the Marquise his sister also. It was not to be contemplated
that we should travel except in apartments of the very best in the
ship. Is not gold enough in America even for sending in great sums for
relief of suffering? Have I not seen it given in the streets of Paris?
Is it not there for us? Do you make me reproaches?" And Nannette began
to weep into the fine lawn of her nurse's handkerchief.
"No, no, Nannette; I know it was of a necessity to us to have the
clothes, and of course we had to travel in the first class. Do not
have distress. If we need more money in America I will obtain it." I
made that answer with a gesture of soothing upon her old shoulders
which I could never remember as not bent in an attitude of hovering
over Pierre or me.
"_Eh bien_!" she answered with a perfect satisfaction at my
assumption of all the responsibilities of our three existences.
And as I leaned against the deck rail and looked out into a future as
limitless as that water ahead of us into which the great ship was
plowing, I made a remark to myself that had in it all the wisdom of
those who are ignorant.
"The best of life is not to know what will happen next."
"Ah, that was so extraordinary coming from a woman that you must
pardon me for listening and making exclamation," came an answer in a
nice voice near at my elbow. The words were spoken in as perfect
English as I had learned from my father, but in them I observed to be
an intonation that my French ear detected as Parisian. "Also,
Mademoiselle, are you young women of the new era to be without that
very delightful but often danger-creating quality of curiosity?" As I
turned I looked with startled eyes into the grave face of a man less
than forty years, whose sad eyes were for the moment lighting with a
great tenderness which I did not understand.
"I believe the quality which will be most required of the women of the
era which is mine, is--is courage and then more courage, Monsieur," I
made answer to him as if I had been discussing some question with him
in my father's smoking room at the Chateau de Grez, as I often came in
to do with my father and his friends after the death of my mother when
the evenings seemed too long alone. They had liked that I so came at
times, and the old Count de Breaux once had remarked that feminine
sympathy was the flux with which men made solid their minds into a
unanimous purpose. He had been speaking of that war a few weeks after
Louvaine and I had risen and had stood very tall and very haughty
before him and my father.
"The women of France are to come after this carnage to mold a nation
from what remains to them, Monsieur," I had said to him as I looked
straight into his face. "Is not the courage of women a war supply upon
which to rely?"
"God! what are the young women--such women as she--going to do in the
years that come after the deluge, Henri of America?" he had made a
muttering question to my father as his old eyes smouldered over me in
the fire-light.
From the memory of the smoking room at the Chateau de Grez my mind
suddenly returned to the rail of the ship and the Frenchman beside me,
who was looking into my face with the same kindly question as to my
future that had been in the eyes of my old godfather and which had
stirred my father's heart to its American depths and made him send me
back to his own country.
"Ah, yes, that courage is a good weapon with which to adventure in
this America of the Grizzled Bear, Mademoiselle," I found the strange
man saying to me with a nice amusement as well as interest.
"My father had shot seven grizzlies before his twenty-first birthday.
We have the skins, four of them, in the great hall of the Chateau de
Grez--or--or we did have them before--before--" My voice faltered and
I could not continue speaking for the tears that rose in my throat and
eyes.
Quickly the man at my side turned his broad shoulders so that he
should shield me from the laughing and exclaiming groups of people
upon the deck near us.
"Before Ypres, Mademoiselle?" he asked with tears also in the depths
of his voice.
"Yes," I answered. "And I am now going into the great America with my
crippled brother and his nurse--alone. It is the land of my father and
I have his courage--I _must_ have also that of a French woman. I
have it, Monsieur," and as I spoke I drew myself to my full,
broad-shouldered height, which was almost equal to that of the man
beside me.
"Mademoiselle, I salute the courage born of an American who fought
before the guns of the Marne and of a French woman who sent him
there!" And as he spoke thus he removed from his head his silk deck
cap and held it at his shoulder in a way that I knew was a salute from
a French officer to the memory of a brother. "And also may I be
permitted to present myself, as it is a sad necessity that you travel
without one from whom I might request the introduction?" he asked of
me with a beautiful reverence.
After a search in his pocket for a few seconds he at last discovered a
case of leather and presented to me a card. As he handed it to me his
color rose up under his black eyes and grave trouble looked from
between their long black lashes. I glanced down at the card and read:
Capitaine, le Count Armond de Lasselles,
Paris,
France.
44th Chasseurs de le Republique Francaise.
"Monsieur le Count, I know, I know why it is that you go to America!"
I made exclamation as I clasped to my breast my hands and my eyes
shone with excitement. "I have read it in _Le Matin_ just the day
before yesterday. You go to buy grain against the winter of starvation
in the Republique. No man is so great a financier as you and so brave
a soldier, with your wound not healed from the trenches in the Vosges.
Monsieur, I salute you!" and I bent my head and held out my hand to
him.
"We're to expect nimble wits as well as courage of you young--shall I
say _American_ women?" he laughed as he bent over my hand. "Now
shall I not be led for introduction to the small brother and the old
nurse?" he asked with much friendly interest in his kind eyes.
It was a very wonderful thing to observe the wee Pierre listen to the
narration of Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles, concerning the actions
of a small boy who had run out of a night of shot and shell into the
heart of his regiment and who had now lived five months in the
trenches with them. Pierre's small face is all of France and in his
heart under his bent chest burns a soul all of France. It is as if in
her death, at his birth, my beautiful mother had stamped her race upon
him with the greater emphasis.
"Is it that the small Gaston is a daredevil like is my Bob?" he
questioned as we all made a laughter at the story of the Count de
Lasselles concerning the sortie of the small idol from the trenches in
the dead of one peaceful night to return with a very wide thick
flannel shirt of one of the _Boches_, which he had caught hanging
upon a temporary laundry line back of the German trenches.
At that English "daredevil" word I was in my mind again back in the
old Chateau de Grez and into my own childhood.
"You young daredevil, you, hold tight to that vine until I get a grip
on your wrist, or you'll dash us both on the rocks below," was the
exact sentence with which my father bestowed my title upon me as he
hung by his heels out of a window of the old vine-covered Chateau de
Grez.
"It is one large mistake that my _jeune fille_ is born what you
call a boy in heart. _Helas_!" sobbed my beautiful young French
mother as she regarded us from the garden below.
"If you were a boy I'd thrash you within an inch of your life, but as
you are a girl I suppose it is permissible for me to admire your
pluck, Mademoiselle Roberta," said my father as he landed me in the
music room by his side while an exchange of excited sentences went on
between my mother and old Nannette in the garden below. "What were you
doing out on that ledge, anyway? It is more than a hundred feet to the
ground and the rocks."
"I was making the hunt through Yellowstone Park that you have related
to me, father, and I prefer that you give me a boy's punishment. If I
have a boy's what you call 'pluck,' I should have a boy's what you
call 'thrashing.' Monsieur, I make that demand. I am the Marquise de
Grez and Bye, and it may be that as you are an American you do not
understand fully the honor of the house of Grez." I can remember that
as I spoke I drew my ten-year old body up to its full height, which
must have been over that of twelve years, and looked my father
straight in the face with a glance of extreme hauteur as near as was
possible to that of the portrait of the old Marquis de Grez, who died
fighting on the field of Flanders.
"_Eh, la la_, what is it I have produced for you, Henri of
America? It is not a proper _jeune fille_, nor do I know what
punishment to impose upon her; but with you I must laugh," with which
my beautiful mother from the doorway threw herself into the arms of
her young American husband and her laughter of silver mingled with his
deep laugh of a great joy.
"Don't worry, Celeste; Bob is just a clear throw-back to her
great-grandmother, Nancy Donaldson, who shot two Indians and a bear in
defense of her kiddies one afternoon while my maternal grandsire was
in the stockades presiding over the council in which was laid down the
first broad draft for the formation of the Commonwealth of Harpeth.
I'm sorry, dear, that she is so vigorously American that she has to
climb the Rocky Mountains even here in the garden spot of France. Just
now she is French enough to be dealing with me in the terms of that
jolly old boy of Flanders fame in the hall downstairs; but cheer up,
sweetheart, she's a wild, daredevil American and I'm going to send her
back to the plains as soon as she speaks her native tongue with less
French accent. Then the rest of us can be happily French forever
after."
"I will speak as you do, my father, from this moment forth," I
answered him with something that was wild and fierce and free rising
in my child's heart. "I will not be a _grande dame_ of France. I
am a woman of America. I speak only United States." And I clung to my
father's arm as he drew me to him and embraced both my laughing mother
and me, before I was delivered to old Nannette who, with affectionate
French grumblings, led me away to the nursery for repairs.
The scene had become fixed in my memory, for from it had sprung a
friendship of a great closeness with my wonderful American father whom
love had chained in France. When he rode the great hunter that had
come across to him from a friend in Kentucky I demanded to cling
behind him or to sit the saddle in front of him, even at times running
at his side as long as my breath held out, to rise on his stirrup,
like the great terrifying Scotchmen do in battles, and cling as
Kentuck made flight over wall or fence. My very slim and strong hands
could not be kept from the steering wheel of his long blue racing car,
and I could bring down a hare out of the field with any gun he
possessed as unerringly as could he. I lived his life with him hour by
hour, learned to think as he thought, to speak his easy transatlantic
speech, and did equal trencher duty with him at all times, so that
muscle and brawn were packed on my tall, broad woman's body with the
same compactness as it was packed upon his, by the time I had reached
my twenty-first birthday. By that time he and I had been alone
together for eight long years, for my mother had left us with tiny,
misshapen Pierre as a heart burden but with only each other to be
companions.
The efforts of some of my mother's distant relatives and friends to
make me into the traditional young French Marquise had resulted in
giving to me a very beautiful _grande dame_ manner to use when I
stood in need of it, which I took a care was not too often. Because I
had been born to a woman's estate I considered I must manage well
beautiful skirts and lacy fans, but no oftener than was necessary, I
decided. I went for the most of my days habited in English
knickerbockers under short corduroy skirts, worn with a many-pocketed
hunting blouse. On the night of my presentation at the salon of my
distant relative, the old Countess de Rochampierre, I had to apologize
to a young Russian attaché for searching with desperation for the bit
of lace called a handkerchief, among the laces and ruffles of my
evening gown in the regions where I had been accustomed to find
sensible pockets.
"And is it possible that Mademoiselle Americaine hunts as well as she
makes the dance?" was his delighted answer to my explanation, which
led into a half-hour description of a raw morning in the field just
three days before in England, where my father and I had gone over for
a week's hunting with Lord Gordon Leigh at Leigholm.
"And then some," I returned answer with delight at his sympathy in my
narration of the sport. I liked very well the American slang that my
father's friends were always glad to teach to me, and that gave to him
both amusement and delight when I used it in his presence.
Also I liked well that young Russian and he came many times to the
Chateau de Grez and Bye before he left to join his regiment of Russian
Cossacks in the Carpathians.
And this time it was from the Carpathians that I returned to the ship
deck to find wee Pierre laughing again over the very small dog that
brought into the French trenches a very large and stupid sheep from
the flock back of the German trenches.
"And your medal of honor, Monsieur le Capitaine; is it permitted that
I lay for a little moment just one finger upon it?" Pierre asked of
him as the great soldier stood tall above the steamer chair and gave
to the little Frenchman the salute of an officer.
Nannette sobbed into her lace and I turned my head away as the tall
man bent and laid the frail little hand against his decoration which
he wore almost entirely hidden under the pocket of his tweed Norfolk
of English manufacture. Only French eyes like wee Pierre's could have
seen it pinned there hidden over his heart. I think he wore it to give
him a large courage for his mission that meant bread or starvation to
so many of his people.
"Ah, Monsieur le Capitaine," I said to him with a softness of tears in
my throat, "I would that there was some little thing that I might do
to serve France. I do so long to go into those awful trenches with
that red cross on my arm, as it is not permitted to me to carry a gun,
which I can use much better than many men now handling them with
bullets against the enemy; but it is necessary that I obey the
commands of my soldier father and take to a safety the small Pierre."
And as we spoke he walked beside me to the prow of the large ship so
that to us was a view of the heavens of blue beyond which lay our
America.
"My child, there is a great service which you can render France," he
answered me as we stopped to watch the great white waves flung aside
from the ship. "France needs friends in America, great powerful
friends who will help her in contracting for food and all other
munitions. A beautiful woman can do much in winning those friends. You
go to your uncle, who is one of those in power in a State in that
fruitful valley of the Mississippi from which I hope that my
lieutenant, Count de Bourdon, whom I sent on that mission, will get
many mules to carry food to the hungry boys in the trenches when mud
is too deep for gasoline. Make of him and everyone your friend and
through you the friend of our struggling country. Tell them of France,
laugh with them for the joy to come when France, all France, with
Alsace and beautiful Lorraine, is free; and make them weep with you
for her struggles. Who knows but that through you may come some
wonderful strength added to your old country from the new, whose blood
runs in your veins as well?"
"All of that I will do, _mon Capitaine_. I so enlist myself." And
as I spoke I drew myself up unto the greatest height possible to me.
"I will be of the army that feeds, rather than of that which kills."
"_Mon Dieu_, child, what is possible to you to do has no limit.
Also, I say to you, watch and be on your guard for aught that may harm
France. In America are spies. I have been warned. Also there are those
who practice deceptions in contracts. It is for the purpose to so
guard that I come to America."
"I also will so guard," I made answer to my Capitaine, the Count de
Lasselles, as we again came in our walk to the side of wee Pierre and
old Nannette.