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Lazarre by Mary Hartwell Catherwood

M >> Mary Hartwell Catherwood >> Lazarre




"Did they give her their name?"

"No, the people in La Baye did that. We knew she had another name. But I
think it very likely her title was not used in the settlement where they
lived. Titles are no help in pioneering."

"Did they call her Madeleine?"

"She calls herself Madeleine."

"How long has she been with your family?"

"Nearly a year."

"Did the Jordans tell you when this change came over her?"

"Yes. It was during the attack when her child was taken from her. She
saw other children killed. The Indians were afraid of her. They respect
demented people; not a bit of harm was done to her. They let her alone,
and the Jordans took care of her."

The daughter and adopted daughter of the house came in with a rush of
outdoor air, and seeing Eagle first, ran to kiss her on the cheek one
after the other.

"Madeleine has come down!" said Marie.

"I thought we should coax her in here sometime," said Katarina.

Between them, standing slim and tall, their equal in height, she was yet
like a little sister. Though their faces were unlined, hers held a
divine youth.

To see her stricken with mind-sickness, and the two girls who had done
neither good nor evil, existing like plants in sunshine, healthy and
sound, seemed an iniquitous contrast.

If ever woman was made for living and dying in one ancestral home, she
was that woman. Yet she stood on the border of civilization, without a
foothold to call her own. If ever woman was made for one knightly love
which would set her in high places, she was that woman. Yet here she
stood, her very name lost, no man so humble as to do her reverence.

"Paul has come," Eagle told Katarina and Marie. Holding their hands, she
walked between them toward me, and bade them notice my height. "I am
his Cloud-Mother," she said. "How droll it is that parents grow down
little, while their children grow up big!"

Madame Ursule shook her head pitifully. But the girls really saw the
droll side and laughed with my Cloud-Mother.

Separated from me by an impassable barrier, she touched me more deeply
than when I sued her most. The undulating ripple which was her peculiar
expression of joy was more than I could bear. I left the room and was
flinging myself from the house to walk in the chill wind; but she caught
me.

"I will be good!" pleaded my Cloud-Mother, her face in my breast.

Her son who had grown up big, while she grew down little, went back to
the family room with her.

My Cloud-Mother sat beside me at table, and insisted on cutting up my
food for me. While I tried to eat, she asked Marie and Katarina and
Pierre Grignon and Madame Ursule to notice how well I behaved. The
tender hearted host wiped his eyes.

I understood why she had kept such hold upon me through years of
separateness. A nameless personal charm, which must be a gift of the
spirit, survived all wreck and change. It drew me, and must draw me
forever, whether she knew me again or not. One meets and wakes you to
vivid life in an immortal hour. Thousands could not do it through
eternity.

The river piled hillocks of water in a strong north wind, and no officer
crossed from the stockade. Neither did any neighbor leave his own fire.
It seldom happened that the Grignons were left with inmates alone. Eagle
sat by me and watched the blaze streaming up the chimney.

If she was not a unit in the family group and had no part there, they
were most kind to her.

"Take care!" the grandmother cried with swift forethought when Marie and
Katarina marshaled in a hopping object from the kitchen. "It might
frighten Madeleine."

Pierre Grignon stopped in the middle of a bear hunt. Eagle was not
frightened. She clapped her hands.

"This is a pouched turkey!" Marie announced, leaning against the wall,
while Katarina chased the fowl. It was the little negro, his arms and
feet thrust into the legs of a pair of Pierre Grignon's trousers, and
the capacious open top fastened upon his back. Doubled over, he waddled
and hopped as well as he could. A feather duster was stuck in for a
tail, and his woolly head gave him the uncanny look of a black harpy. To
see him was to shed tears of laughter. The pouched turkey enjoyed being
a pouched turkey. He strutted and gobbled, and ran at the girls; tried
to pick up corn from the floor with his thick lips, tumbling down and
rolling over in the effort; for a pouched turkey has no wings with which
to balance himself. So much hilarity in the family room drew the Pawnee
servants. I saw their small dark eyes in a mere line of open door,
gazing solemnly.

When the turkey was relieved from his pouching and sent to bed, Pierre
Grignon took his violin. The girls answered with jigs that ended a reel,
when couples left the general figure to jig it off.

When Eagle had watched them awhile she started up, spread her skirts in
a sweeping courtesy, and began to dance a gavotte. The fiddler changed
his tune, and the girls rested and watched her. Alternately swift and
languid, with the changes of the movement, she saluted backward to the
floor, or spun on the tips of rapid feet. I had seen her dance many
times, but never with such abandon of joy.

Our singular relationship was established in the house, where
hospitality made room and apology for all human weakness.

Nobody of that region, except the infirm, stayed indoors to shiver by a
fire. Eagle and the girls in their warm capotes breasted with me the
coldest winter days. She was as happy as they were; her cheeks tingled
as pink as theirs. Sometimes I thought her eyes must answer me with her
old self-command; their bright grayness was so natural.

I believed if her delusions were humored, they would unwind from her
like the cloud which she felt them to be. The family had long fallen
into the habit of treating her as a child, playing some imaginary
character. She seemed less demented than walking in a dream, her
faculties asleep. It was somnambulism rather than madness. She had not
the expression of insane people, the shifty eyes, the cunning and
perverseness, the animal and torpid presence.

If I called her Madame de Ferrier instead of my Cloud-Mother, a strained
and puzzled look replaced her usual satisfaction. I did not often use
the name, nor did I try to make her repeat my own. It was my daily
effort to fall in with her happiness, for if she saw any anxiety she was
quick to plead:

"Don't you like me any more, Paul? Are you tired of me, because I am a
Cloud-Mother?"

"No," I would answer. "Lazarre will never be tired of you."

"Do you think I am growing smaller? Will you love me if I shrink to a
baby?"

"I will love you."

"I used to love you when you were so tiny, Paul, before you knew how to
love me back. If I forget how"--she clutched the lapels of my
coat--"will you leave me then?"

"Eagle, say this: 'Lazarre cannot leave me.'"

"Lazarre cannot leave me."

I heard her repeating this at her sewing. She boasted to Marie
Grignon--"Lazarre cannot leave me!--Paul taught me that."

My Cloud-Mother asked me to tell her the stories she used to tell me.
She had forgotten them.

"I am the child now," she would say. "Tell me the stories."

I repeated mythical tribe legends, gathered from Skenedonk on our long
rides, making them as eloquent as I could. She listened, holding her
breath, or sighing with contentment.

If any one in the household smiled when she led me about by the hand,
there was a tear behind the smile.

She kept herself in perfection, bestowing unceasing care upon her dress,
which was always gray.

"I have to wear gray; I am in a cloud," she had said to the family.

"We have used fine gray stuff brought from Holland, and wools that
Mother Ursule got from Montreal," Katarina told me. "The Pawnees dye
with vegetable colors. But they cannot make the pale gray she loves."

Eagle watched me with maternal care. If a hair dropped on my collar she
brushed it away, and smoothed and settled my cravat. The touch of my
Cloud-Mother, familiar and tender, like the touch of a wife, charged
through me with torture, because she was herself so unconscious of it.

Before I had been in the house a week she made a little pair of trousers
a span long, and gave them to me. Marie and Katarina turned their faces
to laugh. My Cloud-Mother held the garment up for their inspection, and
was not at all sensitive to the giggles it provoked.

"I made over an old pair of his father's," she said.

The discarded breeches used by the pouched turkey had been devoted to
her whim. Every stitch was neatly set. I praised her beautiful
needlework, and she said she would make me a coat.

Skenedonk was not often in the house. He took to the winter hunting and
snow-shoeing with vigor. Whenever he came indoors I used to see him
watching Madame de Ferrier with saturnine wistfulness. She paid no
attention to him. He would stand gazing at her while she sewed; being
privileged as an educated Indian and my attendant, to enter the family
room where the Pawnees came only to serve. They had the ample kitchen
and its log fire to themselves. I wondered what was working in
Skenedonk's mind, and if he repented calling one so buffeted, a
sorceress.

Kindly ridicule excited by the incongruous things she did, passed over
without touching her. She was enveloped in a cloud, a thick case
guarding overtaxed mind and body, and shutting them in its pellucid
chrysalis. The Almighty arms were resting her on a mountain of vision.
She had forgot how to weep. She was remembering how to laugh.

The more I thought about it the less endurable it became to have her
dependent upon the Grignons. My business affairs with Pierre Grignon
made it possible to transfer her obligations to my account. The
hospitable man and his wife objected, but when they saw how I took it to
heart, gave me my way. I told them I wished her to be regarded as my
wife, for I should never have another; and while it might remain
impossible for her to marry me, on my part I was bound to her.

"You are young, M's'r Williams," said Madame Ursule. "You have a long
life before you. A man wants comfort in his house. And if he makes
wealth, he needs a hand that knows how to distribute and how to save.
She could never go to your home as she is."

"I know it, madame."

"You will change your mind about a wife."

"Madame, I have not changed my mind since I first wanted her. It is not
a mind that changes."

"Well, that's unusual. Young men are often fickle. You never made
proposals for her?"

"I did, madame, after her husband died."

"But she was still a wife--the wife of an old man--in the Pigeon Roost
settlement."

"Her father married her to a cousin nearly as old as himself, when she
was a child. Her husband was reported dead while he was in hiding. She
herself thought, and so did her friends, that he was dead."

"I see. Eh! these girls married to old men! Madame Jordan told me
Madeleine's husband was very fretful. He kept himself like silk, and
scarcely let the wind blow upon him for fear of injuring his health.
When other men were out toiling at the clearings, he sat in his house to
avoid getting chills and fever in the sun. It was well for her that she
had a faithful servant. Madeleine and the servant kept the family with
their garden and corn field. They never tasted wild meat unless the
other settlers brought them venison. Madame Jordan said they always
returned a present of herbs and vegetables from their garden. It grew
for them better than any other garden in the settlement. Once the old
man did go out with a hunting party, and got lost. The men searched for
him three days, and found him curled up in a hollow tree, waiting to be
brought in. They carried him home on a litter and he popped his head
into the door and said: 'Here I am, child! You can't kill me!'"

"What did Madame de Ferrier say?"

"Nothing. She made a child of him, as if he were her son. He was in his
second childhood, no doubt. And Madame Jordan said she appeared to hold
herself accountable for the losses and crosses that made him so fretful.
The children of the emigration were brought up to hardship, and accepted
everything as their elders could not do."

"I thought the Marquis de Ferrier a courteous gentleman."

"Did you ever see him?"

"Twice only."

"He used to tell his wife he intended to live a hundred years. And I
suppose he would have done it, if he had not been tomahawked and
scalped. 'You'll never get De Chaumont,' he used to say to her. 'I'll
see that he never gets you!' I remember the name very well, because it
was the name of that pretty creature who danced for us in the cabin on
Lake George."

"De Chaumont was her father," I said. "He would have married Madame de
Ferrier, and restored her estate, if she had accepted him, and the
marquis had not come back."

"Saints have pity!" said Madame Ursule. "And the poor old man must make
everybody and himself so uncomfortable!"

"But how could he help living?"

"True enough. God's times are not ours. But see what he has made of
her!"

I thought of my Cloud-Mother walking enclosed from the world upon a
height of changeless youth. She could not feel another shock. She was
past both ambition and poverty. If she had ever felt the sweet anguish
of love--Oh! she must have understood when she kissed me and said: "I
will come to you sometime!"--the anguish--the hoping, waiting,
expecting, receiving nothing, all were gone by. Even mother cares no
longer touched her. Paul was grown. She could not be made anything that
was base. Unseen forces had worked with her and would work with her
still.

"You told me," I said to Madame Ursule, "the Indians were afraid of her
when they burned the settlement. Was the change so sudden?"

"Madame Jordan's story was like this: It happened in broad daylight. Two
men went into the woods hunting bee trees. The Indians caught and killed
them within two miles of the clearing--some of those very Winnebagoes
you treated with for your land. It was a sunshiny day in September. You
could hear the poultry crowing, and the children playing in the
dooryards. Madeleine's little Paul was never far away from her. The
Indians rushed in with yells and finished the settlement in a few
minutes. Madame Jordan and her family were protected, but she saw
children dashed against trees, and her neighbors struck down and scalped
before she could plead for them. And little good pleading would have
done. An Indian seized Paul. His father and the old servant lay dead
across the doorstep. His mother would not let him go. The Indian dragged
her on her knees and struck her on the head. Madame Jordan ran out at
the risk of being scalped herself, and got the poor girl into her cabin.
The Indian came back for Madeleine's scalp. Madeleine did not see him.
She never seemed to notice anybody again. She stood up quivering the
whole length of her body, and laughed in his face. It was dreadful to
hear her above the cries of the children. The Indian went away like a
scared hound. And none of the others would touch her."

After I heard this story I was thankful every day that Eagle could not
remember; that natural happiness had its way with her elastic body.

Madame Ursule told me the family learned to give her liberty. She rowed
alone upon the river, and went where she pleased. The men in La Baye
would step aside for her. Strangers disturbed her by bringing the
consciousness of something unusual.

Once I surprised Marie and Katarina sitting close to the fire at
twilight, talking about lovers. Eagle was near them on a stool.

"That girl," exclaimed Katarina, speaking of the absent with strong
disapproval, "is one of the kind that will let another girl take her
sweetheart and then sit around and look injured! Now if she could get
him from me she might have him! But she'd have to get him first!"

Eagle listened in the attitude of a young sister, giving me to
understand by a look that wisdom flowed, and she was learning.

We rose one morning to find the world buried in snow. The river was
frozen and its channel padded thick. As for the bay, stretches of snow
fields, with dark pools and broken gray ridges met ice at the end of the
world.

It was so cold that paper stuck to the fingers like feathers, and the
nails tingled with frost. The white earth creaked under foot, and when a
sled went by the snow cried out in shrill long resistance, a spirit
complaining of being trampled. Explosions came from the river, and elm
limbs and timbers of the house startled us. White fur clothed the inner
key holes. Tree trunks were black as ink against a background of snow.
The oaks alone kept their dried foliage, which rattled like many
skeletons, instead of rustling in its faded redness, because there was
no life in it.

But the colder it grew the higher Grignon's log fires mounted. And when
channels were cut in the snow both along the ridge above Green Bay, and
across country in every direction, French trains moved out with jangling
bells, and maids and men uttered voice sounds which spread as by miracle
on the diffusing air from horizon to horizon. You could hear the
officers speaking across the river; and dogs were like to shake the sky
down with their barking. Echoes from the smallest noises were born in
that magnified, glaring world.

The whole festive winter spun past. Marie and Katarina brought young men
to the peaks of hope in the "twosing" seat, and plunged them down to
despair, quite in the American fashion. Christmas and New Year's days
were great festivals, when the settlement ate and drank at Pierre
Grignon's expense, and made him glad as if he fathered the whole post.
Madame Grignon spun and looked to the house. And a thousand changes
passed over the landscape. But in all that time no one could see any
change in my Cloud-Mother. She sewed like a child. She laughed, and
danced gavottes. She trod the snow, or muffled in robes, with Madame
Ursule and the girls, flew over it in a French train; a sliding box with
two or three horses hitched tandem. Every evening I sat by her side at
the fire, while she made little coats and trousers for me. But
remembrance never came into her eyes. The cloud stood round about her as
it did when I first tried to penetrate it.

My own dim days were often in mind. I tried to recall sensations. But I
had lived a purely physical life. Her blunders of judgment and delusion
of bodily shrinking were no part of my experience. The thinking self in
me had been paralyzed. While the thinking self in her was alive, in a
cloud. Both of us were memoryless, excepting her recollection of Paul.

After March sent the ice out of river and bay, spring came with a rush
as it comes in the north. Perhaps many days it was silently rising from
tree roots. In February we used to say:--"This air is like spring." But
after such bold speech the arctic region descended upon us again, and we
were snowed in to the ears. Yet when the end of March unlocked us, it
seemed we must wait for the month of Mary to give us soft air and blue
water. Then suddenly it was spring, and every living soul knew it. Life
revived with passion. Longings which you had forgotten came and took you
by the throat, saying, "You shall no longer be satisfied with negative
peace. Rouse, and live!" Then flitting, exquisite, purple flaws struck
across milk-opal water in the bay. Fishing boats lifted themselves in
mirage, sailing lightly above the water; and islands sat high, with a
cushion of air under them.

The girls manifested increasing interest in what they called the Pigeon
Roost settlement affair. Madame Ursule had no doubt told them what I
said. They pitied my Cloud-Mother and me with the condescending pity of
the very young, and unguardedly talked where they could be heard.

"Oh, she'll come to her senses some time, and he'll marry her of
course," was the conclusion they invariably reached; for the thing must
turn out well to meet their approval. How could they foresee what was to
happen to people whose lives held such contrasts?

"Father Pierre says he's nearly twenty-eight; I call him an old
bachelor," declared Katarina; "and she was a married woman. They are
really very old to be in love."

"You don't know what you'll do when you are old," said Marie.

"Ah, I dread it," groaned Katarina.

"So do I."

"But there is grandmother. She doesn't mind it. And beaux never trouble
her now."

"No," sighed the other. "Beaux never trouble her now."

Those spring days I was wild with restlessness. Life revived to dare
things. We heard afterwards that about that time the meteor rushed once
more across France. Napoleon landed at a Mediterranean port, gathering
force as he marched, swept Louis XVIII away like a cobweb in his path,
and moved on to Waterloo. The greatest Frenchman that ever lived fell
ultimately as low as St. Helena, and the Bourbons sat again upon the
throne. But the changes of which I knew nothing affected me in the
Illinois Territory.

Sometimes I waked at night and sat up in bed, hot with indignation at
the injustice done me, which I could never prove, which I did not care
to combat, yet which unreasonably waked the fighting spirit in me. Our
natures toss and change, expand or contract, influenced by invisible
powers we know not why.

One April night I sat up in the veiled light made by a clouded moon.
Rain points multiplied themselves on the window glass; I heard their
sting. The impulse to go out and ride the wind, or pick the river up and
empty it all at once into the bay, or tear Eagle out of the cloud, or go
to France and proclaim myself with myself for follower; and other feats
of like nature, being particularly strong in me, I struck the pillow
beside me with my fist. Something bounced from it on the floor with a
clack like wood. I stretched downward from one of Madame Ursule's thick
feather beds, and picked up what brought me to my feet. Without letting
go of it I lighted my candle. It was the padlocked book which Skenedonk
said he had burned.

And there the scoundrel lay at the other side of the room, wrapped in
his blanket from head to foot, mummied by sleep. I wanted to take him by
the scalp lock and drag him around on the floor.

He had carried it with him, or secreted it somewhere, month after month.
I could imagine how the state of the writer worked on his Indian mind.
He repented, and was not able to face me, but felt obliged to restore
what he had withheld. So waiting until I slept, he brought forth the
padlocked book and laid it on the pillow beside my head; thus beseeching
pardon, and intimating that the subject was closed between us.

I got my key, and then a fit of shivering seized me. I put the candle
stand beside the pillow and lay wrapped in bedding, clenching the small
chilly padlock and sharp-cornered boards. Remembering the change which
had come upon the life recorded in it, I hesitated. Remembering how it
had eluded me before, I opened it.

The few entries were made without date. The first pages were torn out,
crumpled, and smoothed and pasted to place again. Rose petals and
violets and some bright poppy leaves, crushed inside its lids, slid down
upon the bedcover.




VIII


The padlocked book--In this book I am going to write you, Louis, a
letter which will never be delivered; because I shall burn it when it is
finished. Yet that will not prevent my tantalizing you about it. To the
padlocked book I can say what I want to say. To you I must say what is
expedient.

That is a foolish woman who does violence to love by inordinate loving.
Yet first I will tell you that I sink to sleep saying, "He loves me!"
and rise to the surface saying, "He loves me!" and sink again saying,
"He loves me!" all night long.

The days when I see you are real days, finished and perfect, and this is
the best of them all. God forever bless in paradise your mother for
bearing you. If you never had come to the world I should not have waked
to life myself. And why this is I cannot tell. The first time I ever saw
your tawny head and tawny eyes, though you did not notice me, I said,
"Whether he is the king or not would make no difference." Because I knew
you were more than the king to me.

Sire, you told me once you could not understand why people took kindly
to you. There is in you a gentle dignity and manhood, most royal. As you
come into a room you cast your eyes about unfearing. Your head and
shoulders are erect. You are like a lion in suppleness and tawny color,
which influences me against my will. You inspire Confidence. Even girls
like Annabel, who feel merely at their finger ends, and are as well
satisfied with one husband as another, know you to be solid man, not the
mere image of a man. Besides these traits there is a power going out
from you that takes hold of people invisibly. My father told me there
was a man at the court of your father who could put others to sleep by a
waving of his hands. I am not comparing you to this charlatan; yet when
you touch my hand a strange current runs through me.

When we were in Paris I used to dress myself every morning like a
priestess going to serve in a temple. And what was it for? To worship
one dear head for half an hour perhaps.

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