AND SO IT ENDED
Our story must end here, because at this point its current flows away
forever from old Vincennes; and it was only of the post on the Wabash
that we set out to make a record. What befell Alice and Beverley after
they went to Virginia we could go on to tell; but that would be another
story. Suffice it to say, they lived happily ever after, or at least
somewhat beyond three score and ten, and left behind them a good name
and numerous descendants.
How Alice found out her family in Virginia, we are not informed; but
after a lapse of some years from the date of her marriage, there
appears in one of her letters a reference to an estate inherited from
her Tarleton ancestors, and her name appears in old records signed in
full, Alice Tarleton Beverley. A descendant of hers still treasures the
locket, with its broken miniature and battered crest, which won
Beverley's life from Long-Hair, the savage. Beside it, as carefully
guarded, is the Indian charm-stone that stopped Hamilton's bullet over
Alice's heart The rapiers have somehow disappeared, and there is a
tradition in the Tarleton family that they were given by Alice to
Gaspard Roussillon, who, after Madame Roussillon's death in 1790, went
to New Orleans, where he stayed a year or two before embarking for
France, whither he took with him the beautiful pair of colechemardes
and Jean the hunchback.
Oncle Jazon lived in Vincennes many years after the war was over; but
he died at Natchez, Mississippi, when ninety-three years old. He said,
with almost his last breath, that he couldn't shoot very well, even in
his best days; but that he had, upon various occasions, "jes' kind o'
happened to hit a Injun in the lef' eye." They used to tell a story, as
late as General Harrison's stay in Vincennes, about how Oncle Jazon
buried his collection of scalps, with great funeral solemnity, as his
part of the celebration of peace and independence about the year 1784.
Good old Father Beret died suddenly soon after Alice's marriage and
departure for Virginia. He was found lying face downward on the floor
of his cabin. Near him, on a smooth part of a puncheon, were the
mildewed fragments of a letter, which he had been arranging, as if to
read its contents. Doubtless it was the same letter brought to him by
Rene de Ronville, as recorded in an early chapter of our story. The
fragments were gathered up and buried with him. His dust lies under the
present Church of St. Xavier,--the dust of as noble a man and as true a
priest as ever sacrificed himself for the good of humanity.
In after years Simon Kenton visited Beverley and Alice in their
Virginia home. To his dying day he was fond of describing their happy
and hospitable welcome and the luxuries to which they introduced him.
They lived in a stately white mansion on a hill overlooking a vast
tobacco plantation, where hundreds of negro slaves worked and sang by
day and frolicked by night. Their oldest child was named Fitzhugh
Gaspard. Kenton died in 1836.
There remains but one little fact worth recording before we close the
book. In the year 1800, on the fourth of July, a certain leading French
family of Vincennes held a patriotic reunion, during which a little old
flag was produced and its story told. Some one happily proposed that it
be sent to Mrs. Alice Tarleton Beverley with a letter of explanation,
and in profound recognition of the glorious circumstances which made it
the true flag of the great Northwest.
And so it happened that Alice's little banner went to Virginia and is
still preserved in an old mansion not very far from Monticello; but it
seems likely that the Wabash Valley will soon again possess the
precious relic. The marriage engagement of Miss Alice Beverley to a
young Indiana officer, distinguished for his patriotism and military
ardor, has been announced at the old Beverley homestead on the hill,
and the high contracting parties have planned that the wedding ceremony
shall take place under the famous little flag, on the anniversary of
dark's capture of Post Vincennes. When the bride shall be brought to
her new home on the banks of the Wabash, the flag will come with her;
but Oncle Jazon will not be on hand with his falsetto shout: "VIVE LA
BANNIERE D'ALICE ROUSSILLON! VIVE ZHORZZH VASINTON!"
End of Project Gutenberg's Alice of Old Vincennes, by Maurice Thompson