Alice of Old Vincennes. Maurice Thompson
hunchback did leap with surprising activity; but the treacherous brown hand went higher, so high that the combined altitude of his jump and the reach of his unnaturally long arms was overcome. Again and again he sprang vainly into the air comically, like a long-legged, squat-bodied frog.
"And you brag of your agility and strength, Jean," she laughingly remarked; "but you can't take cherries when they are offered to you. What a clumsy bungler you are."
"I can climb and get some," he said with a hideously happy grin, and immediately embraced the bole of the tree, up which he began scrambling almost as fast as a squirrel.
When he had mounted high enough to be extending a hand for a hold on a crotch, Alice grasped his leg near the foot and pulled him down, despite his clinging and struggling, until his hands clawed in the soft earth at the tree's root, while she held his captive leg almost vertically erect.
It was a show of great strength; but Alice looked quite unconscious of it, laughing merrily, the dimples deepening in her plump cheeks, her forearm, now bared to the elbow, gleaming white and shapely while its muscles rippled on account of the jerking and kicking of Jean.
All the time she was holding the cherries high in her other hand, shaking them by the twig to which their slender stems attached them, and saying in a sweetly tantalizing tone:
"What makes you climb downward after cherries. Jean? What a foolish fellow you are, indeed, trying to grabble cherries out of the ground, as you do potatoes! I'm sure I didn't suppose that you knew so little as that."
Her French was colloquial, but quite good, showing here and there what we often notice in the speech of those who have been educated in isolated places far from that babel of polite energies which we call the world; something that may be described as a bookish cast appearing oddly in the midst of phrasing distinctly rustic and local—a peculiarity not easy to transfer from one language to another.
Jean the hunchback was a muscular little deformity and a wonder of good nature. His head looked unnaturally large, nestling grotesquely between the points of his lifted and distorted shoulders, like a shaggy black animal in the fork of a broken tree. He was bellicose in his amiable way and never knew just when to acknowledge defeat. How long he might have kept up the hopeless struggle with the girl's invincible grip would be hard to guess. His release was caused by the approach of a third person, who wore the robe of a Catholic priest and the countenance of a man who had lived and suffered a long time without much loss of physical strength and endurance.
This was Pere Beret, grizzly, short, compact, his face deeply lined, his mouth decidedly aslant on account of some lost teeth, and his eyes set deep under gray, shaggy brows. Looking at him when his features were in repose a first impression might not have been favorable; but seeing him smile or hearing him speak changed everything. His voice was sweetness itself and his smile won you on the instant. Something like a pervading sorrow always seemed to be close behind his eyes and under his speech; yet he was a genial, sometimes almost jolly, man, very prone to join in the lighter amusements of his people.
"Children, children, my children," he called out as he approached along a little pathway leading up from the direction of the church, "what are you doing now? Bah there, Alice, will you pull Jean's leg off?"
At first they did not hear him, they were so nearly deafened by their own vocal discords.
"Why are you standing on your head with your feet so high in air, Jean?" he added. "It's not a polite attitude in the presence of a young lady. Are you a pig, that you poke your nose in the dirt?"
Alice now turned her bright head and gave Pere Beret a look of frank welcome, which at the same time shot a beam of willful self-assertion.
"My daughter, are you trying to help Jean up the tree feet foremost?" the priest added, standing where he had halted just outside of the straggling yard fence.
He had his hands on his hips and was quietly chuckling at the scene before him, as one who, although old, sympathized with the natural and harmless sportiveness of young people and would as lief as not join in a prank or two.
"You see what I'm doing, Father Beret," said Alice, "I am preventing a great damage to you. You will maybe lose a good many cherry pies and dumplings if I let Jean go. He was climbing the tree to pilfer the fruit; so I pulled him down, you understand."
"Ta, ta!" exclaimed the good man, shaking his gray head; "we must reason with the child. Let go his leg, daughter, I will vouch for him; eh, Jean?"
Alice released the hunchback, then laughed gayly and tossed the cluster of cherries into his hand, whereupon he began munching them voraciously and talking at the same time.
"I knew I could get them," he boasted; "and see, I have them now." He hopped around, looking like a species of ill-formed monkey.
Pere Beret came and leaned on the low fence close to Alice. She was almost as tall as he.
"The sun scorches to-day," he said, beginning to mop his furrowed face with a red-flowered cotton handkerchief; "and from the look of the sky yonder," pointing southward, "it is going to bring on a storm. How is Madame Roussillon to-day?"
"She is complaining as she usually does when she feels extremely well," said Alice; "that's why I had to take her place at the oven and bake pies. I got hot and came out to catch a bit of this breeze. Oh, but you needn't smile and look greedy, Pere Beret, the pies are not for your teeth!"
"My daughter, I am not a glutton, I hope; I had meat not two hours since—some broiled young squirrels with cress, sent me by Rene de Ronville. He never forgets his old father."
"Oh, I never forget you either, mon pere; I thought of you to-day every time I spread a crust and filled it with cherries; and when I took out a pie all brown and hot, the red juice bubbling out of it so good smelling and tempting, do you know what I said to myself?"
"How could I know, my child?"
"Well, I thought this: 'Not a single bite of that pie does Father Beret get.'"
"Why so, daughter?"
"Because you said it was bad of me to read novels and told Mother Roussillon to hide them from me. I've had any amount of trouble about it."
"Ta, ta! read the good books that I gave you. They will soon kill the taste for these silly romances."
"I tried," said Alice; "I tried very hard, and it's no use; your books are dull and stupidly heavy. What do I care about something that a queer lot of saints did hundreds of years ago in times of plague and famine? Saints must have been poky people, and it is poky people who care to read about them, I think. I like reading about brave, heroic men and beautiful women, and war and love."
Pere Beret looked away with a curious expression in his face, his eyes half closed.
"And I'll tell you now, Father Beret," Alice went on after a pause, "no more claret and pies do you get until I can have my own sort of books back again to read as I please." She stamped her moccasin-shod foot with decided energy.
The good priest broke into a hearty laugh, and taking off his cap of grass-straw mechanically scratched his bald head. He looked at the tall, strong girl before him for a moment or two, and it would have been hard for the best physiognomist to decide just how much of approval and how much of disapproval that look really signified.
Although, as Father Beret had said, the sun's heat was violent, causing that gentle soul to pass his bundled handkerchief with a wiping circular motion over his bald and bedewed pate, the wind was momently freshening, while up from behind the trees on the horizon beyond the river, a cloud was rising blue-black, tumbled, and grim against the sky.
"Well," said the priest, evidently trying hard to exchange his laugh for a look of regretful resignation, "you will have your own way, my child, and—"
"Then you will have pies galore and no end of claret!" she interrupted, at the same time stepping to the withe-tied and peg-latched gate of the yard and opening it. "Come in, you dear, good Father, before the rain shall begin, and sit with me on the gallery" (the