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Lazarre by Mary Hartwell Catherwood

M >> Mary Hartwell Catherwood >> Lazarre




Now I knew after the first start that she was a living girl holding a
living baby, and when my father, Thomas Williams, appeared at the door
of the room, it was certain I could not be in heaven. It came over me in
a flash that I myself was changed. In spite of the bandages my head was
as clear as if all its faculties were washed and newly arranged. I could
look back into my life and perceive things that I had only sensed as a
dumb brute. A fish thawed out after being frozen, and reanimated through
every sparkling scale and tremulous fin, could not have felt its
resurrection more keenly. My broken head gave me no trouble at all.

The girl and baby disappeared as soon as I saw my father; which was not
surprising, for he could not be called a prepossessing half-breed. His
lower lip protruded and hung sullenly. He had heavy brows and a shaggy
thatch of hair. Our St. Regis Iroquois kept to the buckskins, though
they often had hunting shirts of fulled flannel; and my father's
buckskins were very dirty.

A little man, that I did not know was in the room, shuffled across the
floor to keep my father from entering. Around the base of his head he
had a thin curtain of hair scarcely reaching his shoulders. His nose
pointed upward. Its tip was the shape of a candle extinguisher. He wore
horn spectacles; and knee breeches, waistcoat and coat of black like the
ink which fades to brown in a drying ink-horn. He put his hands together
and took them apart uncertainly, and shot out his lip and frowned, as if
he had an universal grudge and dared not vent it.

He said something in a language I did not understand, and my father made
no answer. Then he began a kind of Anglo-French, worse than the patois
we used at St. Regis when we did not speak Iroquois. I made out the talk
between the two, understanding each without hesitation.

"Sir, who are you?"

"The chief, Thomas Williams," answered my father.

"Pardon me, sir; but you are unmistakably an Indian."

"Iroquois chief," said my father. "Mohawk."

"That being the case, what authority have you for calling yourself
Thomas Williams?" challenged the little man.

"Thomas Williams is my name."

"Impossible, sir! Skenedonk, the Oneida, does not assume so much. He
lays no claim to William Jones or John Smith, or some other honest
British name."

The chief maintained silent dignity.

"Come, sir, let me have your Indian name! I can hear it if I cannot
repeat it."

Silently contemptuous, my father turned toward me.

"Stop, sir!" the man in the horn spectacles cried. "What do you want?"

"I want my boy."

"Your boy? This lad is white."

"My grandmother was white," condescended the chief. "A white prisoner
from Deerfield. Eunice Williams."

"I see, sir. You get your Williams from the Yankees. And is this lad's
mother white, too?"

"No. Mohawk."

"Why, man, his body is like milk! He is no son of yours."

The chief marched toward me.

"Let him alone! If you try to drag him out of the manor I will appeal to
the authority of Le Ray de Chaumont."

My father spoke to me with sharp authority--

"Lazarre!"

"What do you call him?" the little man inquired, ambling beside the
chief.

"Eleazer Williams is his name. But in the lodges, at St. Regis,
everywhere, it is Lazarre."

"How old is he?"

"About eighteen years."

"Well, Thomas Williams," said my fretful guardian, his antagonism
melting to patronage, "I will tell you who I am, and then you can feel
no anxiety. I am Doctor Chantry, physician to the Count de Chaumont. The
lad cut his head open on a rock, diving in the lake, and has remained
unconscious ever since. This is partly due to an opiate I have
administered to insure complete quiet; and he will not awake for several
hours yet. He received the best surgery as soon as he was brought here
and placed in my hands by the educated Oneida, Skenedonk."

"I was not near the lodge," said my father. "I was down the lake,
fishing."

"I have bled him once, and shall bleed him again; though the rock did
that pretty effectually. But these strapping young creatures need
frequent blood-letting."

The chief gave him no thanks, and I myself resolved to knock the little
doctor down, if he came near me with a knife.

"In the absence of Count de Chaumont, Thomas," he proceeded, "I may
direct you to go and knock on the cook's door, and ask for something to
eat before you go home."

"I stay here," responded my father.

"There is not the slightest need of anybody's watching beside the lad
to-night. I was about to retire when you were permitted to enter. He is
sleeping like an infant."

"He belongs to me," the chief said.

Doctor Chantry jumped at the chief in rage.

"For God's sake, shut up and go about your business!"

It was like one of the little dogs in our camp snapping at the patriarch
of them all, and recoiling from a growl. My father's hand was on his
hunting knife; but he grunted and said nothing. Doctor Chantry himself
withdrew from the room and left the Indian in possession. Weak as I was
I felt my insides quake with laughter. My very first observation of the
whimsical being tickled me with a kind of foreknowledge of all his weak
fretfulness.

My father sat down on the floor at the foot of my couch, where the wax
light threw his shadow, exaggerating its unmoving profile. I noticed one
of the chairs he disdained as useless; though when eating or drinking
with white men he sat at table with them. The chair I saw was one that I
faintly recognized, as furniture of some previous experience, slim
legged, gracefully curved, and brocaded. Brocaded was the word. I
studied it until I fell asleep.

The sun, shining through the protected windows, instead of glaring into
our lodge door, showed my father sitting in the same position when I
woke, and Skenedonk at my side. I liked the educated Iroquois. He was
about ten years my senior. He had been taken to France when a stripling,
and was much bound to the whites, though living with his own tribe.
Skenedonk had the mildest brown eyes I ever saw outside a deer's head.
He was a bald Indian with one small scalp lock. But the just and perfect
dome to which his close lying ears were attached needed no hair to adorn
it. You felt glad that nothing shaded the benevolence of his all-over
forehead. By contrast he emphasized the sullenness of my father; yet
when occasion had pressed there never was a readier hand than
Skenedonk's to kill.

I tossed the cover back to spring out of bed with a whoop. But a woman
in a high cap with ribbons hanging down to her heels, and a dress short
enough to show her shoes, stepped into the room and made a courtesy. Her
face fell easily into creases when she talked, and gave you the feeling
that it was too soft of flesh. Indeed, her eyes were cushioned all
around. She spoke and Skenedonk answered her in French. The meaning of
every word broke through my mind as fire breaks through paper.

"Madame de Ferrier sent me to inquire how the young gentleman is."

Skenedonk lessened the rims around his eyes. My father grunted.

"Did Madame de Ferrier say 'the young gentleman?'" Skenedonk inquired.

"I was told to inquire. I am her servant Ernestine," said the woman, her
face creased with the anxiety of responding to questions.

"Tell Madame de Ferrier that the young gentleman is much better, and
will go home to the lodges to-day."

"She said I was to wait upon him, and give him his breakfast under the
doctor's direction."

"Say with thanks to Madame de Ferrier that I wait upon him."

Ernestine again courtesied, and made way for Doctor Chantry. He came in
quite good natured, and greeted all of us, his inferiors, with a
humility I then thought touching, but learned afterwards to distrust.
My head already felt the healing blood, and I was ravenous for food. He
bound it with fresh bandages, and opened a box full of glittering
knives, taking out a small sheath. From this he made a point of steel
spring like lightning.

"We will bring the wholesome lancet again into play, my lad," said
Doctor Chantry. I waited in uncertainty with my feet on the floor and my
hands on the side of the couch, while he carefully removed coat and
waistcoat and turned up his sleeves.

"Ernestine, bring the basin," he commanded.

My father may have thought the doctor was about to inflict a vicarious
puncture on himself. Skenedonk, with respect for civilized surgery,
waited. I did not wait. The operator bared me to the elbow and showed a
piece of plaster already sticking on my arm. The conviction of being
outraged in my person came upon me mightily, and snatching the wholesome
lancet I turned its spring upon the doctor. He yelled. I leaped through
the door like a deer, and ran barefooted, the loose robe curdling above
my knees. I had the fleetest foot among the Indian racers, and was going
to throw the garment away for the pure joy of feeling the air slide past
my naked body, when I saw the girl and poppet baby who had looked at me
during my first consciousness. They were sitting on a blanket under the
trees of De Chaumont's park, which deepened into wilderness.

The baby put up a lip, and the girl surrounded it with her arm,
dividing her sympathy with me. I must have been a charming object.
Though ravenous for food and broken-headed, I forgot my state, and
turned off the road of escape to stare at her like a tame deer.

She lowered her eyes wisely, and I got near enough without taking fright
to see a book spread open on the blanket, showing two illuminated pages.
Something parted in me. I saw my mother, as I had seen her in some past
life:--not Marianne the Mohawk, wife of Thomas Williams, but a fair
oval-faced mother with arched brows. I saw even her pointed waist and
puffed skirts, and the lace around her open neck. She held the book in
her hands and read to me from it.

I dropped on my knees and stretched my arms above my head, crying aloud
as women cry with gasps and chokings in sudden bereavement. Nebulous
memories twisted all around me and I could grasp nothing. I raged for
what had been mine--for some high estate out of which I had fallen into
degradation. I clawed the ground in what must have seemed convulsions to
the girl. Her poppet cried and she hushed it.

"Give me my mother's book!" I strangled out of the depths of my throat;
and repeated, as if torn by a devil--"Give me my mother's book!"

She blanched so white that her lips looked seared, and instead of
disputing my claim, or inquiring about my mother, or telling me to
begone, she was up on her feet. Taking her dress in her finger tips and
settling back almost to the ground in the most beautiful obeisance I
ever saw, she said--

"Sire!"

Neither in Iroquois nor in Iroquois-French had such a name been given to
me before. I had a long title signifying Tree-Cutter, which belonged to
every chief of our family. But that word---"Sire!"--and her deep
reverence seemed to atone in some way for what I had lost. I sat up,
quieting myself, still moved as water heaves. She put the missal on the
lap of my single garment, and drew back a step, formally standing. My
scarred ankles, at which the Indian children used to point, were exposed
to her gaze, for I never would sit on them after the manner of the
tribe. There was no restraining the tears that ran down my face. She
might have mocked me, but she remained white and quiet; while I sat as
dumb as a dog, and as full of unuttered speech. Looking back now I can
see what passionate necessity shook me with throbs to be the equal of
her who had received me as a superior.

De Chaumont's manor house, facing a winding avenue, could be seen from
where we were. It was of stone, built to enclose a court on three sides,
in the form that I afterwards recognized as that of French palaces.
There were a great many flowers in the court, and vines covered the ends
of the wings. All those misty half remembered hunting seasons that I had
spent on Lake George were not without some knowledge. The chimneys and
roofs of Le Ray de Chaumont's manor often looked at me through trees as
I steered my boat among the islands. He was a great land owner, having
more than three hundred thousand acres of wilderness. And he was
friendly with both Indians and Americans. His figure did not mean much
to me when I saw it, being merely a type of wealth, and wealth extends
little power into the wilderness.

The poppet of a child climbed up and held to the girl's dress. She
stooped over and kissed it, saying, "Sit down, Paul." The toy human
being seemed full of intelligence, and after the first protest examined
me fearlessly, with enchanting smiles about the mouth and eyes. I
noticed even then an upward curling of the mouth corners and a kind of
magic in the liquid blue gaze, of which Paul might never be conscious,
but which would work on every beholder.

That a child should be the appendage of such a very young creature as
the girl, surprised me no more than if it had been a fawn or a dog. In
the vivid moments of my first rousing to life I had seen her with Paul
in her arms; and he remained part of her.

We heard a rush of horses up the avenue, and out of the woods came Le
Ray de Chaumont and his groom, the wealthy land owner equipped in
gentleman's riding dress from his spurs to his hat. He made a fine show,
whip hand on his hip and back erect as a pine tree. He was a man in
middle life, but he reined up and dismounted with the swift agility of
a youth, and sent his horse away with the groom, as soon as he saw the
girl run across the grass to meet him. Taking her hand he bowed over it
and kissed it with pleasing ceremony, of which I approved. An Iroquois
chief in full council had not better manners than Le Ray de Chaumont.

Paul and I waited to see what was going to happen, for the two came
toward us, the girl talking rapidly to the man. I saw my father and
Skenedonk and the doctor also coming from the house, and they readily
spied me sitting tame as a rabbit near the baby.

You never can perceive yourself what figure you are making in the world:
for when you think you are the admired of all eyes you may be displaying
a fool; and when life seems prostrated in you it may be that you show as
a monument on the heights. But I could not be mistaken in De Chaumont's
opinion of me. He pointed his whip handle at me, exclaiming--

"What!--that scarecrow, madame?"




II


"But look at him," she urged.

"I recognize first," said De Chaumont as he sauntered, "an old robe of
my own."

"His mother was reduced to coarse serge, I have been told."

"You speak of an august lady, my dear Eagle. But this is Chief Williams'
boy. He has been at the hunting lodges every summer since I came into
the wilderness. There you see his father, the half-breed Mohawk."

"I saw the dauphin in London, count. I was a little child, but his
scarred ankles and wrists and forehead are not easily forgotten."

"The dauphin died in the Temple, Eagle."

"My father and Philippe never believed that."

"Your father and Philippe were very mad royalists."

"And you have gone over to Bonaparte. They said that boy had all the
traits of the Bourbons, even to the shaping of his ear."

"A Bourbon ear hears nothing but Bonaparte in these days," said De
Chaumont. "How do you know this is the same boy you saw in London?"

"Last night while he was lying unconscious, after Doctor Chantry had
bandaged his head and bled him, I went in to see if I might be of use.
He was like some one I had seen. But I did not know him until a moment
ago. He ran out of the house like a wild Indian. Then he saw us sitting
here, and came and fell down on his knees at sight of that missal. I saw
his scars. He claimed the book as his mother's--and you know, count, it
was his mother's!"

"My dear child, whenever an Indian wants a present he dreams that you
give it to him, or he claims it. Chief Williams' boy wanted your
valuable illuminated book. I only wonder he had the taste. The rings on
your hands are more to an Indian's liking."

"But he is not an Indian, count. He is as white as we are."

"That signifies nothing. Plenty of white children have been brought up
among the tribes. Chief Williams' grandmother, I have heard, was a
Yankee woman."

Not one word of their rapid talk escaped an ear trained to faintest
noises in the woods. I felt like a tree, well set up and sound, but
rooted and voiceless in my ignorant helplessness before the two so
frankly considering me.

My father stopped when he saw Madame de Ferrier, and called to me in
Iroquois. It was plain that he and Doctor Chantry disagreed. Skenedonk,
put out of countenance by my behavior, and the stubbornness of the
chief, looked ready to lay his hand upon his mouth in sign of being
confounded before white men; for his learning had altered none of his
inherited instincts.

But as for me, I was as De Chaumont had said, Chief Williams' boy, faint
from blood letting and twenty-four hours' fasting; and the father's
command reminded me of the mother's dinner pot. I stood up erect and
drew the flowered silk robe around me. It would have been easier to walk
on burning coals, but I felt obliged to return the book to Madame de
Ferrier. She would not take it. I closed her grasp upon it, and
stooping, saluted her hand with courtesy as De Chaumont had done. If he
had roared I must have done this devoir. But all he did was to widen his
eyes and strike his leg with his riding whip.

My father and I seldom talked. An Indian boy who lives in water and
forest all summer and on snowshoes all winter, finds talk enough in the
natural world without falling back upon his family. Dignified manners
were not lacking among my elders, but speech had seemed of little
account to me before this day.

The chief paddled and I sat naked in our canoe;--for we left the
flowered robe with a horse-boy at the stables;--the sun warm upon my
skin, the lake's blue glamour affecting me like enchantment.

Neither love nor aversion was associated with my father. I took my head
between my hands and tried to remember a face that was associated with
aversion.

"Father," I inquired, "was anybody ever very cruel to me?"

He looked startled, but spoke harshly.

"What have you got in your head? These white people have been making a
fool of you."

"I remember better to-day than I ever remembered before. I am different.
I was a child: but to-day manhood has come. Father, what is a dauphin?"

The chief made no answer.

"What is a temple? Is it a church, like ours at St. Regis?"

"Ask the priest."

"Do you know what Bourbon is, father,--particularly a Bourbon ear?"

"Nothing that concerns you."

"But how could I have a Bourbon ear if it didn't concern me?"

"Who said you had such an ear?"

"Madame de Ferrier."

The chief grunted.

"At least she told De Chaumont," I repeated exactly, "I was the boy she
saw in London, that her father said had all the traits of the Bourbons.
Where is London?"

The chief paddled without replying. Finding him so ignorant on all
points of the conversation, or so determined to put me down, I gazed
awhile at our shadow gliding in the water, and then began again.

"Father, do you happen to know who Bonaparte is?"

This time he answered.

"Bonaparte is a great soldier."

"Is he a white man or an Indian?"

"He is a Frenchman."

I meditated on the Frenchmen I dimly remembered about St. Regis. They
were undersized fellows, very apt to weep when their emotions were
stirred. I could whip them all.

"Did he ever come to St. Regis?"

The chief again grunted.

"Does France come to St. Regis?" he retorted with an impatient question.

"What is France, father?"

"A country."

"Shall we ever go there to hunt?"

"Shall we ever go the other side of the sunrise to hunt? France is the
other side of the sunrise. Talk to the squaws."

Though rebuked, I determined to do it if any information could be got
out of them. The desire to know things was consuming. I had the belated
feeling of one who waked to consciousness late in life and found the
world had run away from him. The camp seemed strange, as if I had been
gone many years, but every object was so wonderfully distinct.

My mother Marianne fed me, and when I lay down dizzy in the bunk,
covered me. The family must have thought it was natural sleep. But it
was a fainting collapse, which took me more than once afterwards as
suddenly as a blow on the head, when my faculties were most needed.
Whether this was caused by the plunge upon the rock or the dim life from
which I had emerged, I do not know. One moment I saw the children, and
mothers from the neighboring lodges, more interested than my own
mother: our smoky rafters, and the fire pit in the center of unfloored
ground: my clothes hanging over the bunk, and even a dog with his nose
in the kettle. And then, as it had been the night before, I waked after
many hours.

By that time the family breathing sawed the air within the walls, and a
fine starlight showed through the open door, for we had no window.
Outside the oak trees were pattering their leaves like rain, reminding
me of our cool spring in the woods. My bandaged head was very hot, in
that dark lair of animals where the log bunks stretched and deepened
shadow.

If Skenedonk had been there I would have asked him to bring me water,
with confidence in his natural service. The chief's family was a large
one, but not one of my brothers and sisters seemed as near to me as
Skenedonk. The apathy of fraternal attachment never caused me any pain.
The whole tribe was held dear.

I stripped off Doctor Chantry's unendurable bandages, and put on my
clothes, for there were brambles along the path. The lodges and the dogs
were still, and I crept like a hunter after game, to avoid waking them.
Our village was an irregular camp, each house standing where its owner
had pleased to build it on the lake shore. Behind it the blackness of
wooded wilderness seemed to stretch to the end of the world.

The spring made a distinct tinkle in the rush of low sound through the
forest. A rank night sweetness of mints and other lush plants mixed its
spirit with the body of leaf earth. I felt happy in being a part of all
this, and the woods were to me as safe as the bed-chamber of a mother.
It was fine to wallow, damming the span of escaping water with my
fevered head. Physical relief and delicious shuddering coolness ran
through me.

From that wet pillow I looked up and thought again of what had happened
that day, and particularly of the girl whom De Chaumont had called
Madame de Ferrier and Eagle. Every word that she had spoken passed again
before my mind. Possibilities that I had never imagined rayed out from
my recumbent body as from the hub of a vast wheel. I was white. I was
not an Indian. I had a Bourbon ear. She believed I was a dauphin. What
was a dauphin, that she should make such a deep obeisance to it? My
father the chief, recommending me to the squaws, had appeared to know
nothing about it.

All that she believed De Chaumont denied. The rich book which stirred
such torment in me--"you know it was his mother's!" she said--De
Chaumont thought I merely coveted. I can see now that the crude
half-savage boy wallowing in the spring stream, set that woman as high
as the highest star above his head, and made her the hope and symbol of
his possible best.

A woman's long cry, like the appeal of that one on whom he meditated,
echoed through the woods and startled him out of his wallow.




III


I sat up with the water trickling down my back. The cry was repeated,
out of the west.

I knew the woods, but night alters the most familiar places. It was so
dark in vaults and tunnels of trees and thickets that I might have
burrowed through the ground almost as easily as thresh a path. The
million scarcely audible noises that fill a forest surrounded me, and
twigs not broken by me cracked or shook. Still I made directly toward
the woman's voice which guided me more plainly; but left off running as
my ear detected that she was only in perplexity. She called at
intervals, imperatively but not in continuous screams. She was a white
woman; for no squaw would publish her discomfort. A squaw if lost would
camp sensibly on a bed of leaves, and find her way back to the village
in the morning. The wilderness was full of dangers, but when you are
elder brother to the bear and the wildcat you learn their habits, and
avoid or outwit them.

Climbing over rocks and windfalls I came against a solid log wall and
heard the woman talking in a very pretty chatter the other side of it.
She only left off talking to call for help, and left off calling for
help to scold and laugh again. There was a man imprisoned with her, and
they were speaking English, a language I did not then understand. But
what had happened to them was very plain. They had wandered into a pen
built by hunters to trap bears, and could not find the bush-masked and
winding opening, but were traveling around the walls. It was lucky for
them that a bear had not arrived first, though in that case their horses
must have smelled him. I heard the beasts shaking their bridles.

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