I WAS twenty years old when the change came in my life. I remember the
day was cold and bleak, an early spring day. My father had had an
accident a few days before. In one of his unconscious fits he had fallen
forward--I had left the room but for a moment--and struck his head
sharply against one of the fire-irons. He came to himself quite wild,
and seeing the blood, thought he had killed some one, and cried to us to
take him to prison as a murderer. It took Abby and me a long time to
quiet him. The shock and the pain of it all had shaken me more than I
knew, and I felt sick, and did not know what ailed me; but Abby knew,
and she sent me to see Father L'Homme-Dieu, while she sat with my
father. I was glad enough to go, more glad than my duty allowed, I fear;
yet I knew that Abby was better than I at caring for my father.
As I walked across the brown fields, where the green was beginning to
prick in little points here and there, I began to feel the life strong
in me once more. The dull cloud of depression seemed to drop away, and
instead of seeing always that sad, set face of my poor father's, I could
look up and around, and whistle to the squirrels, and note the
woodpecker running round the tree near me. It has remained a mystery to
me all my life, Melody, that this bird's brains are not constantly
addled in his head, from the violence of his rapping. When I was a
little boy, I tried, I remember, to nod my head as fast as his went
nodding: with the effect that I grew dizzy and sick, and Mother Marie
thought I was going to die, and said the White Paternoster over me five
times.
I looked about me, I say, and felt my spirit waking with the waking of
the year. Yet, though I was glad to feel alive and young once more, I
never thought I was going to anything new or wonderful. The wise, kind
friend would be there; we should talk, and I should come away refreshed
and strengthened, in peace and courage; I thought of nothing more. But
when the widow Sparrow opened the door to me, I heard voices from the
room within; a strange voice of a man, and the priest's answering. I
stopped short on the threshold.
"The Father is busy!" I said. "I will call again, when he is alone."
"Now don't you!" said Mrs. Sparrow, who was always fond of me, and
thought it a terrible walk for me to take, so young, and with the
"growing weakness" not out of me. "Don't ye go a step, Jacques! I expect
you can come in just as well as not. There is a gentleman here, but he's
so pleasant, I should wish to have you see him, if _I_ was the Father."
I was hesitating, all the shyness of a country-bred boy coming over me;
for I had a quick ear, and this strange voice was not like the voices I
was used to hearing; it was like Father L'Homme-Dieu's, fine and
high-bred. But the next instant Father L'Homme-Dieu had stepped to the
door of the study, and saw me.
"Come in, Jacques!" he cried. His eyes were bright, and his air gay, as
I had never seen it. "Come in, my son! I have a friend here, and you are
the very person I want him to meet." I stepped over the threshold
awkwardly enough, and stood before the stranger. He was a young man, a
few years older than myself; tall and slender,--we might have been twins
as far as height and build went, but there the resemblance ceased. He
was fair, with such delicate colouring that he might have looked
womanish but for the dark fiery blue of his eyes, and his little curled
moustache. He looked the way you fancy a prince looking, Melody, when
Auntie Joy tells you a fairy story, though he was simply dressed enough.
"Marquis," said Father L'Homme-Dieu, with a shade of ceremony that I had
never heard before in his tone, "let me present to you M. Jacques
D'Arthenay, my friend! Jacques, this is the Marquis de Ste. Valerie."
He gave my name the French pronunciation. It was kindly meant; at my
present age, I think it was perhaps rightly done; but then, it filled me
with a kind of rage. The angry blood of a false pride, a false humility,
surged to my brain and sang in my ears; and as the young man stepped
forward with outstretched hand, crying, "A compatriot. Welcome,
monsieur!" I drew back, stammering with anger. "My name is Jacques De
Arthenay!"[3] I said. "I am an American, a shoemaker, and the son of a
farmer."
There was a moment of silence, in which I seemed to live a year. I was
conscious of everything, the well-bred surprise of the young nobleman,
the half-amused vexation of the priest, my own clumsy, boyish rage and
confusion. In reality it was only a few seconds before I felt my
friend's hand on my shoulder, with its kind, fatherly touch.
"Sit down, my child!" he said. "Does it matter greatly how a name is
pronounced? It is the same name, and I pronounced it thus, not without a
reason. Sit down, and have peace!"
There was authority as well as kindness in his voice. I sat down, still
trembling and blushing. Father L'Homme-Dieu went on quietly, as if
nothing had happened.
"It was for the marquis's sake that I gave your name its former--and
correct--pronunciation, my son Jacques. If I mistake not, he is of the
same part of France from which your ancestors came. Huguenots of
Blanque, am I not right, marquis?"
I was conscious that the stranger, whom I was inwardly accusing as a
pretentious puppy, a slip of a dead and worthless tree, was looking at
me intently; my eyes seemed drawn to his whether I would or no. So
meeting those blue eyes, there passed as it were a flash from them into
mine, a flash that warmed and lightened, as a smile broke over his face.
"D'Arthenay!" he said, in a tone that seemed to search for some
remembrance. "_D'Arthenay, tenez foi! n'est-ce pas, monsieur?_"
I started. The words were the motto of my father's house. They were
engraved on the stone which marked the grave of my grandfather many
times back, Jacques, Sieur D'Arthenay. Seeing my agitation, the marquis
leaned forward eagerly. He was full of quick, light gestures, that
somehow brought my mother back to me.
"But, we are neighbours!" he cried. "We must be friends, M. D'Arthenay.
Your tower--it is a noble ruin--stands not a league from my chateau in
Blanque. The Ste. Valeries and the D'Arthenays were always friends,
since Adam was, and till the Grand Monarque separated them with his
accursed Revocation. Monsieur, that I am enchanted at this rencounter!
_La bonne aventure, oh gai! n'est-ce pas, mon pere?_"
There was no resisting his eager gaiety. And when he quoted the nursery
song that my mother used to sing, my stubborn resentment--at what? who
can say?--broke and melted away, and I was smiling back into the bright,
merry eyes. Once more he held out his hand, and this time I took it
gladly. Father L'Homme-Dieu looked on in delight; it was a good moment.
After that the talk flowed freely. I found that the young marquis,
having come on a pleasure tour to the United States, had travelled thus
far out of the general route to look up the graves of some of his
mother's people, who had come out with Baron Castine, but had left him,
as my ancestor had done, on account of his marriage with the Indian
princess. They were the Belleforts of Blanque.
"Bellefort!" I cried. "That name is on several stones in our old
burying-ground. The Belforts of our village are their descendants,
Father L'Homme-Dieu."
"Not Ham?" cried the father, bursting into a great laugh. "Not Ham
Belfort, Jacques?"
I laughed back, nodding. "Just Ham, father!"
I never saw Father L'Homme-Dieu so amused. He struck his hands together,
and leaned back in his chair, repeating over and over, "Ham Belfort!
Cousin of the Marquis de Ste. Valerie! Ham Belfort! Is it possible?"
The young nobleman looked from one to the other of us curiously.
"But what?" he asked. "Ham! _c'est-a-dire, jambon, n'est-ce pas?_"
"It is also a Biblical name, marquis!" said Father L'Homme-Dieu. "I must
ask who taught you your catechism!"
"True! true!" said the marquis, slightly confused. "_Sem, Ham, et
Japhet_, perfectly! and--I have a cousin, it appears, named Jam--I
should say, Ham? Will you lead me to him, M. D'Arthenay, that I embrace
him?"
"You shall see him!" I said. "I don't think Ham is used to being
embraced, but I will leave that to you. I will take you to see him, and
to see the graves in the burying-ground, whenever you say."
"But now, at the present time, this instant!" cried Ste. Valerie,
springing from his chair. "Here is Father L'Homme-Dieu dying of me, in
despair at his morning broken up, his studies destroyed by chatter. Take
me with you, D'Arthenay, and show me all things; Ham, also his brothers,
and Noe and the Ark, if they find themselves also here. Amazing country!
astonishing people!"
So off we went together, he promising Mrs. Sparrow to return in time for
dinner, and informing her that she was a sylphide, which caused her to
say, "Go along!" in high delight. He had brought a letter to the priest,
from an old friend, and was to stay at the house.
Back across the brown fields we went. I was no longer alone; the world
was full of new light, new interest. I felt that it was good to be
alive; and when my companion began to sing in very lightness of heart, I
joined in, and sang with right good will.
"La bonne aventure, oh gai!
La bonne aventure!"
He told me that his mother always sang him this song when he had been a
good boy; I replied that mine had done the same. How many French
mothers have sung the merry little lilt, I wonder? We sang one snatch
and another, and I could not see that the marquise had had the advantage
of the little peasant girl, if it came to songs.
The marquis--but why should I keep to the empty title, which I was never
to use after that first hour? Nothing would do but that we should be
friends on the instant, and for life,--Jacques and Yvon. "Thus it was
two centuries ago," my companion declared, "thus shall it be now!" and
I, in my dream of wonderment and delight, was only too glad to have it
so.
We talked of a thousand things; or, to be precise, he talked, and I
listened. What had I to say that could interest him? But he was full of
the wonders of travel, the strangeness of the new world and the new
people. Niagara had shaken him to the soul, he told me; on the wings of
its thunder he had soared to the empyrean. How his fanciful turns of
expression come back to me as I write of him! He was proud of his
English, which was in general surprisingly good.
New York he did not like,--a savage in a Paris gown, with painted face;
but on Boston he looked with the eyes of a lover. What dignity! what
Puritan, what maiden grace of withdrawal! An American city, where one
feels oneself not a figure of chess, but a human being; where no street
resembles the one before it, and one can wander and be lost in
delicious windings! Ah! in Boston he could live, the life of a poet, of
a scholar.
"And then,--what, my friend? I come, I leave those joys, I come away
here, to--to the locality of jump-off, as you say,--and what do I find?
First, a pearl, a saint; for nobleness, a prince, for holiness, an
anchorite of Arabia,--Le Pere L'Homme-Dieu! Next, the ancient friend of
my house, who becomes on the instant mine also, the brother for whom I
have yearned. With these, the graves of my venerable ancestors, heroes
of constancy, who lived for war and died for faith; graves where I go
even now, where I kneel to pay my duty of respect, to drop the filial
tear!"
"Don't forget your living relations!" I said, with some malice. "Here is
your cousin, coming to meet us."
FOOTNOTE:
[3] Pronounced Jakes Dee Arthenay.