dancers, and left the hall, stung in my pride.
We do strangely expand and contract in vital force and reach of vision.
I wanted to put the lake--the world itself--between me and that
glittering company. The edge of a ball-room and the society of men in
silks and satins, and of bewitching women, were not intended for me.
Homesickness like physical pain came over me for my old haunts. They
were newly recognized as beloved. I had raged against them when
comparing myself to Croghan. But now I thought of the evening camp fire,
and hunting-stories, of the very dogs that licked my hand; of St. Regis,
and my loft bed, of snowshoes, and the blue northern river, longing for
them as the young Mohawks said I should long. Tom betwixt two natures,
the white man's and the Indian's, I flung a boat out into the water and
started to go home faster than I had come away. The slowness of a boat's
progress, pushed by the silly motion of oars, which have not the nice
discrimination of a paddle, impressed me as I put the miles behind.
When the camp light shone through trees it must have been close to
midnight, and my people had finished their celebration of the corn
dance. An odor of sweet roasted ears dragged out of hot ashes reached
the poor outsider. Even the dogs were too busy to nose me out. I slunk
as close as I dared and drew myself up a tree, lying stretched with arms
and legs around a limb.
They would have admitted me to the feast, but as a guest. I had no
longer a place of my own, either here or there. It was like coming back
after death, to realize that you were unmissed. The camp was full of
happiness and laughter. Young men chased the young maids, who ran
squealing with merriment. My father, Thomas Williams, and my mother,
Marianne, sat among the elders tranquil and satisfied. They were
ignorant Indians; but I had no other parents. Skenedonk could be seen,
laughing at the young Mohawks.
If there was an oval faced mother in my past, who had read to me from
the missal, I wanted her. If, as Madame Tank said, I outranked De
Chaumont's daughter, I wanted my rank. It was necessary for me to have
something of my own: to have love from somebody!
Collapsed and dejected, I crept down the tree and back to the life that
was now forced upon me whether I wished to continue it or not. Belonging
nowhere, I remembered my refuge in the new world of books.
Lying stretched in the boat with oars shipped, drifting and turning on
the crooked lake, I took exact stock of my position in the world, and
marked out my future.
These things were known:
I was not an Indian.
I had been adopted into the family of Chief Williams.
Money was sent through an agent in New York for my support and
education.
There were scars on my wrists, ankles, arm and eyebrow.
These scars identified me in Madame de Ferrier's mind and Madame Tank's
mind as a person from the other side of the world.
I had formerly been deadened in mind.
I was now keenly alive.
These things were not known:
Who I was.
Who sent money for my support and education.
How I became scarred.
What man had placed me among the Indians.
For the future I bound myself with three laws:
To leave alone the puzzle of my past.
To study with all my might and strength.
When I was grown and educated, to come back to my adopted people, the
Iroquois, draw them to some place where they could thrive, and by
training and education make them an empire, and myself their leader.
The pale-skin's loathing of the red race had not then entered my
imagination. I said in conclusion:
"Indians have taken care of me; they shall be my brothers."
VI
The zigzag track of the boat represented a rift widening between me and
my past. I sat up and took the oars, feeling older and stronger.
It was primitive man, riding between the highlands, uncumbered, free to
grasp what was before him.
De Chaumont did not believe in and was indifferent to the waif whom his
position of great seigneur obliged him to protect. What did I care? I
had been hidden among the Indians by kindred or guardians humane enough
not to leave me destitute. They should not trouble my thoughts, and
neither--I told myself like an Indian--should the imaginings of women.
A boy minds no labor in following his caprices. The long starlit pull I
reckoned as nothing; and slipped to my room when daylight was beginning
to surprise the dancers.
It was so easy to avoid people in the spaciousness of De Chaumont's
manor that I did not again see the young Bonaparte nor any of the guests
except Croghan. They slept all the following day, and the third day
separated. Croghan found my room before leaving with his party, and we
talked as well as we could, and shook hands at parting.
The impressions of that first year stay in my mind as I have heard the
impressions of childhood remain. It was perhaps a kind of brief
childhood, swift in its changes, and running parallel with the
development of youth.
My measure being sent to New York by De Chaumont, I had a complete new
outfit in clothes; coat, waistcoat, and small-clothes, neckwear,
ruffles, and shirts, buckle shoes, stockings of mild yarn for cold
weather, and thread stockings. Like most of the things for which we
yearn, when I got them I did not like them as well as the Indian
garments they obliged me to shed.
Skenedonk came to see me nearly every day, and sat still as long as he
could while I toiled at books. I did not tell him how nearly I had
disgraced us both by running secretly away to camp. So I was able to go
back and pay visits with dignity and be taken seriously, instead of
encountering the ridicule that falls upon retreat.
My father was neither pleased nor displeased. He paid my accounts
exactly, before the camp broke up for the winter, making Skenedonk his
agent. My mother Marianne offered me food as she would have offered it
to Count de Chaumont; and I ate it, sitting on a mat as a guest. Our
children, particularly the elder ones, looked me over with gravity, and
refrained from saying anything about my clothes.
Our Iroquois went north before snow flew, and the cabins stood empty,
leaves drifting through fire-holes in the bark thatch.
There have been students greedy of knowledge. I seemed hollow with the
fasting of a lifetime. My master at first tried to bind me to times; he
had never encountered so boundless an appetite. As soon as I woke in the
morning I reached for a book, and as days became darker, for tinder to
light a candle. I studied incessantly, dashing out at intervals to lake
or woods, and returning after wild activity, with increased zest to the
printed world. My mind appeared to resume a faculty it had suspended,
and to resume with incredible power. Magnetized by books, I cared for
nothing else. That first winter I gained hold on English and Latin, on
French reading, mathematics, geography, and history. My master was an
Oxford man, and when roused from dawdling, a scholar. He grew foolishly
proud and fond of what he called my prodigious advance.
De Chaumont's library was a luscious field, and Doctor Chantry was
permitted to turn me loose in it, so that the books were almost like my
own. I carried them around hid in my breast; my coat-skirts were
weighted with books. There were Plutarch's Lives in the old French of
Amyot, over which I labored; a French translation of Homer; Corneille's
tragedies; Rochefoucauld; Montaigne's essays, in ten volumes; Thomson's
poems, and Chesterfield's letters, in English; the life of Petrarch;
three volumes of Montesquieu's works; and a Bible; which I found greatly
to my taste. It was a wide and catholic taste.
De Chaumont spent nearly all that autumn and winter in Castorland,
where he was building his new manor and founding his settlement called
Le Rayville. As soon as I became a member of his household his
patriarchal kindness was extended to me, though he regarded me simply as
an ambitious half-breed.
The strong place which he had built for his first holding in the
wilderness thus grew into a cloistered school for me. It has vanished
from the spot where it stood, but I shall forever see it between lake
and forest.
Annabel de Chaumont openly hated the isolation of the place, and was
happy only when she could fill it with guests. But Madame de Ferrier
evidently loved it, remaining there with Paul and Ernestine. Sometimes I
did not see her for days together. But Mademoiselle de Chaumont, before
her departure to her Baltimore convent for the winter, amused herself
with my education. She brought me an old book of etiquette in which
young gentlemen were admonished not to lick their fingers or crack bones
with their teeth at table. Nobody else being at hand she befooled with
Doctor Chantry and me, and I saw for the first time, with surprise, an
old man's infatuation with a poppet.
It was this foolishness of her brother's which Miss Chantry could not
forgive De Chaumont's daughter. She was incessant in her condemnation,
yet unmistakably fond in her English way of the creature she condemned.
Annabel loved to drag my poor master in flowery chains before his
relative. She would make wreaths of crimson leaves for his bald head,
and exhibit him grinning like a weak-eyed Bacchus. Once he sat doting
beside her at twilight on a bench of the wide gallery while his sister,
near by, kept guard over their talk. I passed them, coming back from my
tramp, with a glowing branch in my hand. For having set my teeth in the
scarlet tart udder of a sumach, all frosted with delicate fretwork, I
could not resist bringing away some of its color.
"Did you get that for me?" called Annabel. I mounted the steps to give
it to her, and she said, "Thank you, Lazarre Williams. Every day you
learn some pretty new trick. Doctor Chantry has not brought me anything
from the woods in a long while."
Doctor Chantry stirred his gouty feet and looked hopelessly out at the
landscape.
"Sit here by your dearest Annabel," said Mademoiselle de Chaumont.
Her governess breathed the usual sigh of disgust.
I sat by my dearest Annabel, anxious to light my candle and open my
books. She shook the frizzes around her cheeks and buried her hands
under the scarlet branch in her lap.
"Do you know, Lazarre Williams, I have to leave you?"
I said I was sorry to hear it.
"Yes, I have to go back to my convent, and drag poor Miss Chantry with
me, though she is a heretic and bates the forms of our religion. But she
has to submit, and so do I, because my father will have nobody but an
English governess."
"Mademoiselle," spoke Miss Chantry, "I would suggest that you sit on a
chair by yourself."
"What, on one of those little crowded chairs?" said Annabel.
She reached out her sly hand for mine and drew it under cover of the
sumach branch.
"I have been thinking about your rank a great deal, Lazarre Williams,
and wondering what it is."
"If you thought more about your own it would be better," said Miss
Chantry.
"We are Americans here," said Annabel. "All are equal, and some are
free. I am only equal. Must your dearest Annabel obey you about the
chair, Miss Chantry?"
"I said I would suggest that you sit on a chair by yourself."
"I will, dear. You know I always follow your suggestions."
I felt the hand that held mine tighten its grip in a despairing squeeze.
Annabel suddenly raised the branch high above her head with both arms,
and displayed Doctor Chantry's hand and mine clasped tenderly in her
lap. She laughed until even Miss Chantry was infected, and the doctor
tittered and wiped his eyes.
"Watch your brother, Miss Chantry--don't watch me! You thought he was
squeezing my hand--and he thought so too! Lazarre Williams is just out
of the woods and doesn't know any better. But Doctor Chantry--he is
older than my father!"
"We wished to oblige you, mademoiselle," I said. But the poor English
gentleman tittered on in helpless admiration. He told me privately--"I
never saw another girl like her. So full of spirits, and so frank!"
Doctor Chantry did not wear his disfiguring horn spectacles when Annabel
was near. He wrote a great deal of poetry while the blow of parting from
her was hanging over him, and read it to me of mornings, deprecating my
voiceless contempt. I would hear him quarreling with a servant in the
hall; for the slightest variation in his comfort engendered rages in him
that were laughable. Then he entered, red-nosed, red-eyed, and
bloodlessly shivering, with a piece of paper covered by innumerable
small characters.
"Good morning, my lad," he would say.
"Good morning, Doctor Chantry," I answered.
"Here are a few little stanzas which I have just set down. If you have
no objection I will read them."
I must have listened like a trapped bear, sitting up and longing to get
at him, for he usually finished humbly, folding his paper and putting it
away in his breast. There was reason to believe that he spent valuable
hours copying all these verses for Annabel de Chaumont. But there is no
evidence that she carried them with her when she and her governess
departed in a great coach all gilt and padding. Servants and a wagon
load of baggage and supplies accompanied De Chaumont's daughter on the
long journey to her Baltimore convent.
Shaking in every nerve and pale as a sheet, my poor master watched her
out of sight. He said he should not see his sister again until spring;
and added that he was a fool, but when a creature of light came across
his path he could not choose but worship. His affections had been
blighted by a disappointment in youth, but he had thought he might at
least bask in passing sunshine, though fated to unhappiness. I was
ashamed to look at him, or to give any sign of overhearing his weakness,
and exulted mightily in my youth, despising the enchantments of a woman.
Madame de Ferrier watched the departure from another side of the
gallery, and did not witness my poor master's breakdown. She came and
talked to him, and took more notice of him than I had ever seen her take
before.
In a day or two he was quite himself, plodding at the lessons, suddenly
furious at the servants, and giving me fretful histories of his wrongs
when brandy and water were not put by his bedside at night, or a
warming-pan was not passed between his sheets.
About this time I began to know without being taught and without
expressing it in words, that there is a natural law of environment which
makes us grow like the company we keep. During the first six months of
my stay in De Chaumont's house Doctor Chantry was my sole companion. I
looked anxiously into the glass on my dressing-table, dreading to see a
reflection of his pettiness. I saw a face with large features, eager in
expression. The eyes were hazel, and bluish around the iris rims, the
nose aquiline, the chin full, the head high, and round templed. The hair
was sunny and wavy, not dark and tight fitting like that of my Indian
father and mother. There would be always a scar across my eyebrow. I
noticed that the lobe of my ear was not deeply divided from my head, but
fashioned close to it in triangular snugness, though I could not have
said so. Regular life and abundant food, and the drive of purpose, were
developing all my parts. I took childish pleasure in watching my Indian
boyhood go, and vital force mounting every hour.
Time passed without marking until January. The New England Thanksgiving
we had not then heard of; and Christmas was a holy day of the church. On
a January afternoon Madame de Ferrier sent Ernestine to say that she
wished to see Doctor Chantry and me.
My master was asleep by the fire in an armchair. I looked at his
disabled feet, and told Ernestine I would go with her alone. She led me
to a wing of the house.
Even an Indian boy could see through Annabel de Chaumont. But who might
fathom Madame de Ferrier? Every time I saw her, and that was seldom,
some change made her another Madame de Ferrier, as if she were a
thousand women in one. I saw her first a white clad spirit, who stood by
my head when I awoke; next, a lady who rose up and bowed to me; then a
beauty among dancers; afterwards, a little girl running across the turf,
or a kind woman speaking to my master. Often she was a distant figure,
coming and going with Paul and Ernestine in De Chaumont's woods. If we
encountered, she always said, "Good day, monsieur," and I answered "Good
day, madame."
I had my meals alone with Doctor Chantry, and never questioned this
custom, from the day I entered the house. De Chaumont's chief, who was
over the other servants, and had come with him from his chateau near
Blois, waited upon me, while Doctor Chantry was served by another man
named Jean. My master fretted at Jean. The older servant paid no
attention to that.
Madame de Ferrier and I had lived six months under the same roof as
strangers. Consciousness plowed such a direct furrow in front of me that
I saw little on either side of it. She was a name, that I found written
in the front of the missal, and copied over and over down foolscap paper
in my practice of script:
"Eagle Madeleine Marie de Ferrier."
"Eagle Madeleine Marie de Ferrier."
She stood in her sitting room, which looked upon the lake, and before a
word passed between us I saw she was unlike any of her former selves.
Her features were sharpened and whitened. She looked beyond me with gray
colored eyes, and held her lips apart.
"I have news. The Indian brought me this letter from Albany."
I could not help glancing curiously at the sheet in her hand, spotted on
the back with broken red wafers. It was the first letter I had ever
seen. Doctor Chantry told me he received but one during the winter from
his sister, and paid two Spanish reals in postage for it, besides a fee
and some food and whisky to the Indian who made the journey to deliver
such parcels. It was a trying and an important experience to receive a
letter. I was surprised that Madame Tank had recommended my sending one
into the Wisconsin country.
"Count de Chaumont is gone; and I must have advice."
"Madame," I said, "Doctor Chantry was asleep, but I will wake him and
bring him here."
"No. I will tell you. Monsieur, my Cousin Philippe is dead."
It might have shocked me more if I had known she had a Cousin Philippe.
I said stupidly:
"Is he?"
"Cousin Philippe was my husband, you understand."
"Madame, are you married?"
"Of course!" she exclaimed. And I confessed to myself that in no other
way could Paul be accounted for.
"But you are here alone?"
Two large tears ran down her face.
"You should understand the De Ferriers are poor, monsieur, unless
something can be saved from our estates that the Bonapartes have given
away. Cousin Philippe went to see if we could recover any part of them.
Count de Chaumont thought it a favorable time. But he was too old for
such a journey; and the disappointments at the end of it."
"Old! Was he old, madame?"
"Almost as old as my father."
"But you are very young."
"I was only thirteen when my father on his deathbed married me to Cousin
Philippe. We were the last of our family. Now Cousin Philippe is dead
and Paul and I are orphans!"
She felt her loss as Paul might have felt his. He was gurgling at
Ernestine's knee in the next room.
"I want advice," she said; and I stood ready to give it, as a man always
is; the more positively because I knew nothing of the world.
"Cousin Philippe said I must go to France, for Paul's sake, and appeal
myself to the empress, who has great influence over the emperor. His
command was to go at once."
"Madame, you cannot go in midwinter."
"Must I go at all?" she cried out passionately. "Why don't you tell me a
De Ferrier shall not crawl the earth before a Bonaparte! You--of all
men! We are poor and exiles because we were royalists--are royalists--we
always shall be royalists! I would rather make a wood-chopper of Paul
than a serf to this Napoleon!"
She checked herself, and motioned to a chair.
"Sit down, monsieur. Pardon me that I have kept you standing."
I placed the chair for her, but she declined it, and we continued to
face each other.
"Madame," I said, "you seem to blame me for something. What have I
done?"
"Nothing, monsieur."
"I will now ask your advice. What do you want me to do that I have not
done?"
"Monsieur, you are doing exactly what I want you to do."
"Then you are not displeased with me?"
"I am more pleased with you every time I see you. Your advice is good. I
cannot go in midwinter."
"Are you sure your cousin wanted you to make this journey?"
"The notary says so in this letter. Philippe died in the farm-house of
one of our peasants, and the new masters could not refuse him burial in
the church where De Ferriers have lain for hundreds of years. He was
more fortunate than my father."
This interview with Madame de Ferrier in which I cut so poor a figure,
singularly influenced me. It made me restless, as if something had
entered my blood. In January the real spring begins, for then sap
starts, and the lichens seem to quicken. I felt I was young, and rose up
against lessons all day long and part of the night. I rushed in haste to
the woods or the frozen lake, and wanted to do mighty deeds without
knowing what to undertake. More than anything else I wanted friends of
my own age. To see Doctor Chantry dozing and hear him grumbling, no
longer remained endurable; for he reminded me that my glad days were due
and I was not receiving them. Worse than that, instead of proving
grateful for all his services, I became intolerant of his opinion.
"De Chaumont will marry her," he said when he heard of Madame de
Ferrier's widowhood. "She will never be obliged to sue to the
Bonapartes. The count is as fond of her as he is of his daughter."
"Must a woman marry a succession of fathers?"--I wanted to know.
My master pointed out that the count was a very well favored and
youthful looking man. His marriage to Madame de Ferrier became even more
distasteful. She and her poppet were complete by themselves. Wedding her
to any one was casting indignity upon her.
Annabel de Chaumont was a countess and Madame de Ferrier was a marquise.
These names, I understood, meant that they were ladies to be served and
protected. De Chaumont's daughter was served and protected, and as far
as he was allowed to do so, he served and protected the daughter of his
fellow countryman.
"But the pride of emigrés," Doctor Chantry said, "was an old story in
the De Chaumont household. There were some Saint-Michels who lived in a
cabin, strictly on their own means, refusing the count's help, yet they
had followed him to Le Rayville in Castorland. Madame de Ferrier lived
where her husband had placed her, in a wing of De Chaumont's house,
refusing to be waited on by anybody but Ernestine, paying what her
keeping cost; when she was a welcome guest."
My master hobbled to see her. And I began to think about her day and
night, as I had thought about my books; an isolated little girl in her
early teens, mother and widow, facing a future like a dead wall, with
daily narrowing fortunes. The seclusion in which she lived made her
sacred like a religious person. I did not know what love was, and I
never intended to dote, like my poor master. Before the end of January,
however, such a change worked in me that I was as fierce for the vital
world as I had been for the world of books.
VII
A trick of the eyes, a sweet turning of the mouth corners, the very
color of the hair--some irresistible physical trait, may compel a
preference in us that we cannot control; especially when we first notice
these traits in a woman. My crying need grew to be the presence of
Madame de Ferrier. It was youth calling to youth in that gorgeous winter
desert.
Her windows were hoar-frost furred without and curtained within. Though
I knew where they were I got nothing by tramping past and glancing up. I
used to saunter through the corridor that led to her rooms, startled yet
pleased if Ernestine came out on an errand. Then I would close my book
and nod, and she would courtesy.
"Oh, by the way," I would turn to remark, "I was passing, and thought I
would knock and ask how Madame de Ferrier is to-day. But you can tell
me."
When assured of Madame de Ferrier's health I would continue:
"And Paul--how is Paul?"
Paul carried himself marvelously. He was learning to walk. Ernestine
believed the lie about knocking, and I felt bolder every time I told it.
The Indian part of me thought of going hunting and laying slaughtered
game at their door. But it was a doubtful way of pleasing, and the bears
hibernated, and the deer were perhaps a day's journey in the white
wastes.
I used to sing in the clear sharp air when I took to the frozen lake and
saw those heights around me. I look back upon that winter, across what
befell me afterwards, as a time of perfect peace; before virgin snows
melted, when the world was a white expanse of innocence.
Our weather-besieged manor was the center of it. Vaguely I knew there
was life on the other side of great seas, and that New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, Baltimore and New Orleans were cities in which men moved
and had their being. My country, the United States, had bought from
Napoleon Bonaparte a large western tract called Louisiana, which
belonged to France. A new state named Ohio was the last added to the
roll of commonwealths. Newspapers, which the Indian runner once or twice
brought us from Albany, chronicled the doings of Aaron Burr,
Vice-President of the United States, who had recently drawn much
condemnation on himself by a brutal duel.
"Aaron Burr was here once," said my master.
"What is he like?" I inquired.
"A lady-killer."
"But he is next in dignity to the President."
Doctor Chantry sniffed.
"What is even the President of a federation like this, certain to fall
to pieces some fine day!"
I felt offended; for my instinct was to weld people together and hold
them so welded.
"If I were a president or a king," I told him, "and men conspired to
break the state, instead of parleying I would hang them up like dogs."
"Would you?"
Despising the country in which he found himself, my master took no
trouble to learn its politics. But since history had rubbed against us
in the person of Jerome Bonaparte, I wanted to know what the world was
doing.
"Colonel Burr had a pleasant gentleman with him at the manor," Doctor
Chantry added. "His name was Harmon Blennerhassett; a man of good
English stock, though having a wild Irish strain, which is deplorable."
The best days of that swift winter were Sundays, when my master left off
snapping, and stood up reverently in our dining-room to read his church
service. Madame de Ferrier and Paul and Ernestine came from their
apartment to join in the Protestant ritual; and I sat beside them so
constantly that the Catholic priest who arrived at Easter to dress up
the souls of the household, found me in a state of heresy.
I have always thought a woman needs a dark capping of hair, whatever her
complexion, to emphasize her beauty. For light locks seem to fray out to
nothing, and waste to air instead of fitly binding a lovely countenance.
Madame de Ferrier's hair was of exactly the right color. Her eyebrows
were distinct dark lines, and the lashes were so dense that you noticed
the curling rim they made around her gray eyes. Whether the gift of
looking to your core is beauty or not, I can only say she had it. And I
could not be sworn what her features were; such life and expression
played over and changed them every moment.
As to her figure, it was just in its roundness and suppleness, and had a
lightness of carriage that I have never seen equaled. There was charm in
looking at without approaching her that might have satisfied me
indefinitely, if De Chaumont had not come home.
Ernestine herself made the first breach in that sacred reserve. The old
woman met me in the hall, courtesied, and passed as usual. I turned
behind the broad ribbons which hung down her back from cap to heels, and
said:
"Oh, by the way, Ernestine, how is Madame de Ferrier? I was going to
knock--"
And Ernestine courtesied again, and opened the door, standing aside for
me to enter.
Madame de Ferrier sat on a bearskin before the hearth with Paul, who
climbed over her and gave her juicy kisses. There was a deep wood fire,
upheld by very tall andirons having cups in their tops, which afterwards
I learned were called posset cups. She was laughing so that her white
teeth showed, and she made me welcome like a playmate; remaining on the
rug, and bidding Ernestine set a chair for me near the fire.
"It is very kind of you to spare me some time, monsieur," said Madame de
Ferrier. She admonished Paul--"Don't choke your little mother."
I told her boldly that nothing but the dread of disturbing her kept me
from knocking every day. We had always walked into the lodges without
knocking, and I dwelt on this as one of my new accomplishments.
"I am not studying night and day," she answered. "Sophie Saint-Michel
and her mother were my teachers, and they are gone now, one to heaven
and the other to Castorland."
Remembering what Annabel de Chaumont said about holy Sophie I inquired
if she had been religious.
"The Saint-Michels were better than religious; both mother and daughter
were eternally patient with the poor count, whose troubles unsettled his
reason. They had no dear old Ernestine, and were reduced to the hardest
labor. I was a little child when we came to America, yet even then the
spirit of the Saint-Michels seemed to me divine."
"I wish I could remember when I was a little child."
"Can you not recall anything?"
"I have a dim knowledge of objects."
"What objects?"
"St. Regis church, and my taking first communion; and the hunting, the
woods and water, boats, snowshoes, the kind of food I liked; Skenedonk
and all my friends--but I scarcely knew them as persons until I awoke."
"What is your first distinct recollection?"
"Your face."
"Mine?"
"Yes, yours, madame. I saw it above me when you came into the room at
night."
She looked past me and said:
"You have fortunately missed some of the most terrible events that ever
happened in the world, monsieur. My mother and father, my two brothers,
Cousin Philippe and I, were in prison together. My mother and brothers
were taken, and we were left."
I understood that she spoke of the Terror, about which I was eager to
know every then unwritten detail. Doctor Chantry had told me many
things. It fascinated me far more than ancient history, which my master
was inclined to press upon me.
"How can you go back to France, madame?"
"That's what I ask myself every day. That life was like a strange
nightmare. Yet there was our chateau, Mont-Louis, two or three days'
journey east from Paris. The park was so beautiful. I think of it, and
of Paul."
"And what about this country, madame? Is there nothing beautiful here?"
"The fact has been impressed on me, monsieur, that it does not belong to
me. I am an emigré. In city or country my father and Cousin Philippe
kept me with them. I have seen nothing of young people, except at balls.
We had no intimate friends. We were always going back. I am still
waiting to go back, monsieur--and refusing to go if I must."
It was plain that her life had been as restricted as mine, though the
bonds were different. She was herded with old people, made a wife and
mother while yet a child, nursed in shadow instead of in the hot
sunshine which produced Annabel de Chaumont.
After that we met each other as comrades meet, and both of us changed
like the face of nature, when the snow went and warm winds came.
This looking at her without really approaching was going on innocently
when one day Count de Chaumont rode up to the manor, his horse and his
attendant servants and horses covered with mud, filling the place with a
rush of life.
He always carried himself as if he felt extremely welcome in this world.
And though a man ought to be welcome in his own house, especially when
he has made it a comfortable refuge for outsiders, I met him with the
secret resentment we bear an interloper.
He looked me over from head to foot with more interest than he had ever
before shown.
"We are getting on, we are getting on! Is it Doctor Chantry, or the
little madame, or the winter housing? Our white blood is very much in
evidence. When Chief Williams comes back to the summer hunting he will
not know his boy."
"The savage is inside yet, monsieur," I told him. "Scratch me and see."
"Not I," he laughed.
"It is late for thanks, but I will now thank you for taking me into your
house."
"He has learned gratitude for little favors! That is Madame de Ferrier's
work."
"I hope I may be able to do something that will square our accounts."
"That's Doctor Chantry's work. He is full of benevolent intentions--and
never empties himself. When you have learned all your master knows, what
are you going to do with it?"
"I am going to teach our Indians."
"Good. You have a full day's work before you. Founding an estate in the
wilderness is nothing compared to that. You have more courage than De
Chaumont."
Whether the spring or the return of De Chaumont drove me out, I could no
longer stay indoors, but rowed all day long on the lake or trod the
quickening woods. Before old Pierre could get audience with his house
accounts, De Chaumont was in Madame de Ferrier's rooms, inspecting the
wafer blotched letter. He did not appear as depressed as he should have
been by the death of his old friend.
"These French have no hearts," I told Doctor Chantry.
He took off his horn spectacles and wiped his eyes, responding:
"But they find the way to ours!"
Slipping between islands in water paths that wound as a meadow stream
winds through land, I tried to lose myself from the uneasy pain which
followed me everywhere.
There may be people who look over the scheme of their lives with entire
complacence. Mine has been the outcome of such strange misfortunes as to
furnish evidence that there is another fate than the fate we make
ourselves. In that early day I felt the unseen lines tighten around me.
I was nothing but a young student of unknown family, able to read and
write, to talk a little English, with some knowledge of history,
geography, mathematics, and Latin. Strength and scope came by atoms. I
did not know then as I know now that I am a slow grower, even when
making gigantic effort. An oak does not accumulate rings with more
deliberation than I change and build myself.
My master told me a few days later that the count decreed Madame de
Ferrier must go back to France. He intended to go with her and push her
claim; and his daughter and his daughter's governess would bear them
company. Doctor Chantry and I contemplated each other, glaring in mutual
solemnity. His eyes were red and watery, and the nose sharpened its
cone.
"When are they going?" I inquired.
"As soon as arrangements for comfortable sailing can be made. I wish I
were going back to England. I shall have to save twenty-five years
before I can go, but the fund is started."
If I saved a hundred and twenty-five years I could not go anywhere; for
I had nothing to save. The worthlessness of civilization rushed over
me. When I was an Indian the boundless world was mine. I could build a
shelter, and take food and clothes by my strength and skill. My boat or
my strong legs carried me to all boundaries.
I did not know what ailed me, but chased by these thoughts to the lake,
I determined not to go back again to De Chaumont's house. I was sick,
and my mother woods opened her arms. As if to show me what I had thrown
away to haunt the cages of men, one of those strange sights which is
sometimes seen in that region appeared upon the mountain. No one can
tell who lights the torch. A thread of fire ran up like an opening seam,
broadened, and threw out pink ravelings. The flame wavered, paled by
daylight, but shielding itself with strong smoke, and leaped from ledge
to ledge. I saw mighty pines, standing one moment green, and the next,
columns of fire. So the mass diverged, or ran together until a mountain
of fire stood against the sky, and stretched its reflection, a glowing
furnace, across the water.
Flecks of ash sifted on me in the boat. I felt myself a part of it, as I
felt myself a part of the many sunsets which had burned out on that
lake. Before night I penetrated to the heart of an island so densely
overgrown, even in spring when trees had no curtains, that you were lost
as in a thousand mile forest. I camped there in a dry ravine, with
hemlock boughs under and over me, and next day rolled broken logs, and
cut poles and evergreens with my knife, to make a lodge.
It was boyish, unmannerly conduct; but the world had broken, to chaos
around me; and I set up the rough refuge with skill. Some books, my fish
line and knife, were always in the boat with me, as well as a box of
tinder. I could go to the shore, get a breakfast out of the water, and
cook it myself. Yet all that day I kept my fast, having no appetite.
Perhaps in the bottom of my heart I expected somebody to be sent after
me, bearing large inducements to return. We never can believe we are not
valuable to our fellows. Pierre or Jean, or some other servants in the
house, might perforce nose me out. I resolved to hide if such an envoy
approached and to have speech with nobody. We are more or less ashamed
of our secret wounds, and I was not going to have Pierre or Jean report
that I sat sulking in the woods on an island.
It was very probable that De Chaumont's household gave itself no trouble
about my disappearance. I sat on my hemlock floor until the gray of
twilight and studied Latin, keeping my mind on the text; save when a
squirrel ventured out and glided bushy trained and sinuous before me, or
the marble birches with ebony limbs, drew me to gloat on them. The white
birch is a woman and a goddess. I have associated her forever with that
afternoon. Her poor cousin the poplar, often so like her as to deceive
you until ashen bough and rounded leaf instruct the eye, always grows
near her like a protecting servant. The poor cousin rustles and fusses.
But my calm lady stands in perfect beauty, among pines straight as
candles, never tremulous, never trivial. All alabaster and ebony, she
glows from a distance; as, thinking of her, I saw another figure glow
through the loop-holes of the woods.
It was Madame de Ferrier.
VIII
A leap of the heart and dizziness shot through me and blurred my sight.
The reality of Madame de Ferrier's coming to seek me surpassed all
imaginings.
She walked with quick accustomed step, parting the second growth in her
way, having tracked me from the boat. Seeing my lodge in the ravine she
paused, her face changing as the lake changes; and caught her breath. I
stood exultant and ashamed down to the ground.
"Monsieur, what are you doing here?" Madame de Ferrier cried out.
"Living, madame," I responded.
"Living? Do you mean you have returned to your old habits?"
"I have returned to the woods, madame."
"You do not intend to stay here?"
"Perhaps."
"You must not do it!"
"What must I do?"
"Come back to the house. You have given us much anxiety."
I liked the word "us" until I remembered it included Count de Chaumont.
"Why did you come out here and hide yourself?"
My conduct appeared contemptible. I looked mutely at her.
"What offended you?"
"Nothing, madame."
"Did you want Doctor Chantry to lame himself hobbling around in search
of you, and the count to send people out in every direction?"
"No, madame."
"What explanation will you make to the count?"
"None, madame." I raised my head. "I may go out in the woods without
asking leave of Count de Chaumont."
"He says you have forsaken your books and gone back to be an Indian."
I showed her the Latin book in my hand. She glanced slightly at it, and
continued to make her gray eyes pass through my marrow.
Shifting like a culprit, I inquired:
"How did you know I was here?"
"Oh, it was not hard to find you after I saw the boat. This island is
not large."
"But who rowed you across the lake, madame?"
"I came by myself, and nobody except Ernestine knows it. I can row a
boat. I slipped through the tunnel, and ventured."
"Madame, I am a great fool. I am not worth your venturing."
"You are worth any danger I might encounter. But you should at least go
back for me."
"I will do anything for you, madame. But why should I go back?--you will
not long be there."
"What does that matter? The important thing is that you should not lapse
again into the Indian."
"Is any life but the life of an Indian open to me, madame?"
She struck her hands together with a scream.
"Louis! Sire!"
Startled, I dropped the book and it sprawled at her feet like the open
missal. She had returned so unexpectedly to the spirit of our first
meeting.
"O, if you knew what you are! During my whole life your name has been
cherished by my family. We believed you would sometime come to your own.
Believe in yourself!"
I seemed almost to remember and perceive what I was--as you see in
mirage one inverted boat poised on another, and are not quite sure, and
the strange thing is gone.
Perhaps I was less sure of the past because I was so sure of the
present. A wisp of brown mist settling among the trees spread cloud
behind her. What I wanted was this woman, to hide in the woods for my
own. I could feed and clothe her, deck her with necklaces of garnets
from the rocks, and wreaths of the delicate sand-wort flower. She said
she would rather make Paul a woodchopper than a suppliant, taking the
constitutional oath. I could make him a hunter and a fisherman. Game,
bass, trout, pickerel, grew for us in abundance. I saw this vision with
a single eye; it looked so possible! All the crude imaginings of youth
colored the spring woods with vivid beauty. My face betrayed me, and
she spoke to me coldly.
"Is that your house, monsieur?"
I said it was.
"And you slept there last night?"
"I can build a much better one."
"What did you have for dinner?"
"Nothing."
"What did you have for breakfast?"
"Nothing."
Evidently the life I proposed to myself to offer her would not suit my
lady!
She took a lacquered box from the cover of her wrappings, and moved down
the slope a few steps.
"Come here to your mother and get your supper."
I felt tears rush to my eyes. She sat down, spread a square of clean
fringed linen upon the ground, and laid out crusty rounds of buttered
bread that were fragrant in the springing fragrance of the woods, firm
slices of cold meat, and a cunning pastry which instantly maddened me. I
was ashamed to be such a wolf.
We sat with our forest table between us and ate together.
"I am hungry myself," she said.
A glorified veil descended on the world. If evening had paused while
that meal was in progress it would not have surprised me. There are half
hours that dilate to the importance of centuries. But when she had
encouraged me to eat everything to the last crumb, she shook the
fringed napkin, gathered up the lacquered box, and said she must be
gone.
"Monsieur, I have overstepped the bounds of behavior in coming after
you. The case was too urgent for consideration of myself. I must hurry
back, for the count's people would not understand my secret errand
through the tunnel. Will you show yourself at the house as soon as
possible?"
I told her humbly that I would.
"But let me put you in the boat, madame."
She shook her head. "You may follow, after I am out of sight. If you
fail to follow"--she turned in the act of departing and looked me
through.
I told her I would not fail.
When Madame de Ferrier disappeared beyond the bushes I sat down and
waited with my head between my hands, still seeing upon closed eyelids
her figure, the scant frock drawn around it, her cap of dark hair under
a hood, her face moving from change to change. And whether I sat a year
or a minute, clouds had descended when I looked, as they often did in
that lake gorge. So I waited no longer, but followed her.
The fog was brown, and capped the evening like a solid dome, pressing
down to the earth, and twisting smoke fashion around my feet. It threw
sinuous arms in front of me as a thing endowed with life and capable of
molding itself; and when I reached my boat and pushed off on the water,
a vast mass received and enveloped me.
More penetrating than its clamminess was the thought that Madame de
Ferrier was out in it alone.
I tried one of the long calls we sometimes used in hunting. She might
hear, and understand that I was near to help her. But it was shouting
against many walls. No effort pierced the muffling substance which
rolled thickly against the lungs. Remembering it was possible to
override smaller craft, I pulled with caution, and so bumped lightly
against the boat that by lucky chance hovered in my track.
"Is it you, madame?" I asked.
She hesitated.
"Is it you, monsieur?"
"Yes."
"I think I am lost. There is no shore. The fog closed around me so soon.
I was waiting for it to lift a little."
"It may not lift until morning, madame. Let me tie your boat to mine."
"Do you know the way?"
"There is no way. We shall have to feel for the shore. But Lake George
is narrow, and I know it well."
"I want to keep near you."
"Come into my boat, and let me tie the other one astern."
She hesitated again, but decided, "That would be best."
I drew the frail shells together--they seemed very frail above such
depths--and helped her cross the edges. We were probably the only people
on Lake George. Tinder lighted in one boat would scarcely have shown us
the other, though in the sky an oval moon began to make itself seen
amidst rags of fog. The dense eclipse around us and the changing light
overhead were very weird.
Madame de Ferrier's hands chilled mine, and she shook in her thin cape
and hood. Our garments were saturated. I felt moisture trickling down my
hair and dropping on my shoulders.
She was full of vital courage, resisting the deadly chill. This was not
a summer fog, lightly to be traversed. It went dank through the bones.
When I had helped her to a bench, remembering there was nothing dry to
wrap around her, I slipped off my coat and forcibly added its thickness
to her shoulders.
"Do you think I will let you do that, monsieur?"
My teeth chattered and shocked together so it was impossible to keep
from laughing, as I told her I always preferred to be coatless when I
rowed a boat.
We could see each other by the high light that sometimes gilded the
face, and sometimes was tarnished almost to eclipse. Madame de Ferrier
crept forward, and before I knew her intention, cast my garment again
around me. I helped the boat shift its balance so she would have to
grasp at me for support; the chilled round shape of her arm in my hand
sent waves of fire through me. With brazen cunning, moreover, that
surprised myself, instead of pleading, I dictated.
"Sit beside me on the rower's bench, madame, and the coat will stretch
around both of us."
Like a child she obeyed. We were indeed reduced to saving the warmth of
our bodies. I shipped my oars and took one for a paddle, bidding Madame
de Ferrier to hold the covering in place while I felt for the shore. She
did so, her arm crossing my breast, her soft body touching mine. She was
cold and still as the cloud in which we moved; but I was a god, riding
triumphantly high above the world, satisfied to float through celestial
regions forever, bearing in my breast an unquenchable coal of fire.
The moon played tricks, for now she was astern, and now straight ahead,
in that confusing wilderness of vapor.
"Madame," I said to my companion, "why have you been persuaded to go
back to France?"
She drew a deep breath.
"I have not been persuaded. I have been forced by circumstances. Paul's
future is everything."
"You said you would rather make him a woodchopper than a suppliant to
the Bonapartes."
"I would. But his rights are to be considered first. He has some small
chance of regaining his inheritance through the influence of Count de
Chaumont now. Hereafter there may be no chance. You know the fortunes
and lands of all emigrés were forfeited to the state. Ours have finally
reached the hands of one of Napoleon's officers. I do not know what will
be done. I only know that Paul must never have cause to reproach me."
I was obliged to do my duty in my place as she was doing her duty in
hers; but I wished the boat would sink, and so end all journeys to
France. It touched shore, on the contrary, and I grasped a rock which
jutted toward us. It might be the point of an island, it might be the
eastern land, as I was inclined to believe, for the moon was over our
right shoulders.
Probing along with the oar I found a cove and a shallow bottom, and
there I beached our craft with a great shove.
"How good the earth feels underfoot!" said Madame de Ferrier. We were
both stiff. I drew the boats where they could not be floated away, and
we turned our faces to the unknown. I took her unresisting arm to guide
her, and she depended upon me.
This day I look back at those young figures groping through cloud as at
disembodied and blessed spirits. The man's intensest tenderness,
restrained by his virginhood and his awe of the supple delicate shape at
his side, was put forth only in her service. They walked against bushes.
He broke a stick, and with it probed every yard of the ascent which they
were obliged to make. Helping his companion from bush to log, from seam
to seam of the riven slope, from ledge to ledge, he brought her to a
level of high forest where the fog was thinner, and branches interlaced
across their faces.
The climb made Madame de Ferrier draw her breath quickly. She laughed
when we ended it. Though I knew the shores as well as a hunter, it was
impossible to recognize any landmark. The trees, the moss, and forest
sponge under our feet, the very rocks, were changed by that weird
medium. And when the fog opened and we walked as through an endless
tunnel of gray revolving stone, it was into a world that never existed
before and would never exist again.
There was no path. Creeping under and climbing over obstacles, sometimes
enclosed by the whiteness of steam, sometimes walking briskly across
lighted spaces, we reached a gorge smoking as the lake smoked in the
chill of early mornings. Vapor played all its freaks on that brink. The
edge had been sharply defined. But the fog shut around us like a
curtain, and we dared not stir.
Below, a medallion shaped rift widened out, and showed us a scene as I
have since beheld such things appear upon the stage. Within the round
changing frame of wispy vapor two men sat by a fire of logs and
branches. We could smell wood smoke, and hear the branches crackle,
convincing us the vision was real. Behind them stood a cabin almost as
rude as my shelter on the island.
One man was a grand fellow, not at all of the common order, though he
was more plainly clothed than De Chaumont. His face was so familiar that
I almost grasped recognition--but missed it. The whole cast was full and
aquiline, and the lobe of his ear, as I noticed when light fell on his
profile, sat close to his head like mine.
The other man worked his feet upon the treadle of a small wheel, which
revolved like a circular table in front of him, and on this he deftly
touched something which appeared to be an earthenware vessel. His thin
fingers moved with spider swiftness, and shaped it with a kind of magic.
He was a mad looking person, with an air of being tremendously driven by
inner force. He wore mustaches the like of which I had never seen,
carried back over his ears; and these hairy devices seemed to split his
countenance in two crosswise.
Some broken pottery lay on the ground, and a few vessels, colored and
lustrous so they shone in the firelight, stood on a stump near him.
The hollow was not a deep one, but if the men had been talking, their
voices did not reach us until the curtain parted.
"You are a great fool or a great rascal, or both, Bellenger," the
superior man said.
"Most people are, your highness," responded the one at the wheel. He
kept it going, as if his earthenware was of more importance than the
talk.
"You are living a miserable life, roving about."
"Many other Frenchmen are no better off than I am, my prince."
"True enough. I've roved about myself."
"Did you turn schoolmaster in Switzerland, prince?"
"I did. My family are in Switzerland now."
"Some of the nobles were pillaged by their peasants as well as by the
government. But your house should not have lost everything."
"You are mistaken about our losses. The Orleans Bourbons have little or
no revenue left. Monsieur and Artois were the Bourbons able to maintain
a court about them in exile. So you have to turn potter, to help support
the idiot and yourself?"
"Is your highness interested in art?"
"What have I to do with art?"
"But your highness can understand how an idea will haunt a man. It is
true I live a wretched life, but I amuse myself trying to produce a
perfect vase. I have broken thousands. If a shape answers my
expectations, that very shape is certain to crack in the burning or run
in the glaze."
"Then you don't make things to sell?"
"Oh, yes. I make noggins and crockery to sell in the towns. There is a
kind of clay in these hills that suits me."
"The wonderful vase," said the other yawning, "might perhaps interest me
more if some facts were not pressing for discussion. I am a man of
benevolent disposition, Bellenger."
"Your royal highness--"
"Stop! I have been a revolutionist, like my poor father, whose memory
you were about to touch--and I forbid it. But I am a man whose will it
is to do good. It is impossible I should search you out in America to
harm my royal cousin. Now I want to know the truth about him."
Madame de Ferrier had forgotten her breath. We both stood fastened on
that scene in another world, guiltless of eavesdropping.
The potter shifted his eyes from side to side, seeming to follow the
burr of his vessel upon the wheel.
"I find you with a creature I cannot recognize as my royal cousin. If
this is he, sunk far lower than when he left France in your charge, why
are two-thirds of his pension sent out from New York to another person,
while you receive for his maintenance only one-third?"
The potter bounded from his wheel, letting the vessel spin off to
destruction, and danced, stretching his long mustaches abroad in both
hands as the ancients must have rent their clothes. He cried that he had
been cheated, stripped, starved.
"I thought they were straitened in Monsieur's court," he raged, "and
they have been maintaining a false dauphin!"
"As I said, Bellenger," remarked his superior, "you are either a fool or
the greatest rascal I ever saw."
He looked at Bellenger attentively.
"Yet why should you want to mix clues--and be rewarded with evident
misery? And how could you lose him out of your hand and remain
unconscious of it? He was sent to the ends of the earth for safety--poor
shattered child!--and if he is safe elsewhere, why should you be
pensioned to maintain another child? They say that a Bourbon never
learns anything; but I protest that a Bourbon knows well what he does
know. I feel sure my uncle intends no harm to the disabled heir. Who is
guilty of this double dealing? I confess I don't understand it."
Now whether by our long and silent stare we drew his regard, or chance
cast his eye upward, the potter that instant saw us standing in the
cloud above him. He dropped by his motionless wheel, all turned to clay
himself. The eyeballs stuck from his face. He opened his mouth and
screeched as if he had been started and could not leave off--
"The king!--the king!--the king!--the king!"
IX
The fool's outcry startled me less than Madame de Ferrier. She fell
against me and sank downward, so that I was obliged to hold her up in my
arms. I had never seen a woman swoon. I thought she was dying, and
shouted to them below to come and help me.
The potter sat sprawling on the ground, and did not bestir himself to do
anything. As soon as my hands and mind were free I took him by the
scruff of the neck and kicked him behind with a good will. My rage at
him for disregarding her state was the savage rage of an Iroquois. The
other man laughed until the woods rang. Madame de Ferrier sat up in what
seemed to me a miraculous manner. We bathed her temples with brandy, and
put her on a cushion of leaves raked up and dried to make a seat by the
fire. The other man, who helped me carry her into the ravine, stood with
his hat off, as was her due. She thanked him and thanked me, half
shrouding her face with her hood, abashed at finding herself lost among
strangers in the night; which was my fault. I told him I had been a bad
guide for a lady who had missed her way; and he said we were fortunate
to reach a camp instead of stumbling into some danger.
He was much older than I, at least fourteen years, I learned
afterwards, but it was like meeting Skenedonk again, or some friend from
whom I had only been parted.
The heartening warmth of the fire made steam go up from our clothes; and
seeing Madame de Ferrier alive once more, and the potter the other side
of his wheel taking stock of his hurt, I felt happy.
We could hear in the cabin behind us a whining like that uttered by a
fretful babe.
My rage at the potter ending in good nature, I moved to make some amends
for my haste; but he backed off.
"You startled us," said the other man, "standing up in the clouds like
ghosts. And your resemblance to one who has been dead many years is very
striking, monsieur."
I said I was sorry if I had kicked the potter without warrant, but it
seemed to me a base act to hesitate when help was asked for a woman.
"Yet I know little of what is right among men, monsieur," I owned. "I
have been learning with a master in Count de Chaumont's manor house less
than a year. Before that my life was spent in the woods with the
Indians, and they found me so dull that I was considered witless until
my mind awoke."
"You are a fine fellow," the man said, laying his hands on my shoulders.
"My heart goes out to you. You may call me Louis Philippe. And what may
I call you?"
"Lazarre."
He had a smiling good face, square, but well curved and firm. Now that I
saw him fronting me I could trace his clear eyebrows, high forehead, and
the laughter lines down his cheeks. He was long between the eyes and
mouth, and he had a full and resolute chin.
"You are not fat, Lazarre," said Philippe, "your forehead is wide rather
than receding, and you have not a double chin. Otherwise you are the
image of one--Who are you?"
"I don't know."
"Don't know who you are?"
"No. We heard all that you and the potter were saying down here, and I
wondered how many boys there are in America that are provided for
through an agent in New York, without knowing their parents. Now that is
my case."
"Do you say you have lived among the Indians?"
"Yes: among the Iroquois."
"Who placed you there?"
"No one could tell me except my Indian father; and he would not tell."
"Do you remember nothing of your childhood?"
"Nothing."
"Did you ever see Bellenger before?"
"I never saw him before to-night."
"But I saw him," said Madame de Ferrier, "in London, when I was about
seven years old. It made a stronger impression on me than anything else
that ever happened in my life, except"--she stopped.
"Except the taking off of my mother and brothers to the guillotine."
The man who told me to call him Louis Philippe turned toward her, with
attention as careful as his avoidance when she wished to be unobserved.
She rose, and came around the fire, making a deep courtesy.
"My family may not be unknown to his royal highness the Duke of Orleans.
We are De Ferriers of Mont-Louis; emigrés now, like many others."
"Madame, I knew your family well. They were loyal to their king."
"My father died here in America. Before we sailed we saw this man in
London."
"And with him--"
"A boy."
"Do you remember the boy well?"
"I remember him perfectly."
The wailing in the cabin became louder and turned to insistent animal
howls. Instead of a babe the imprisoned creature was evidently a dog. I
wondered that the potter did not let him out to warm his hide at the
fire.
"Did you ever see the boy again?"
"I did not see him again until he was brought to Count de Chaumont's
house last summer."
"Why to De Chaumont? Le Ray de Chaumont is not one of us. He is of the
new nobility. His chateau near Blois was bought by his grandfather, and
he takes his name from the estate. I have heard he is in favor with
Bonaparte."
"Even we of the old nobility, prince, may be reduced to seek favor of
Bonaparte."
"Heaven forbid, madame. I say nothing against him; though I could say
much."
"Say nothing against Count de Chaumont. Count de Chaumont befriends all
emigrés."
"I have nothing to say against Count de Chaumont. He is not of our
party; he is of the new. Fools! If we princes had stood by each other as
the friends of the Empire stand by their emperor, we could have killed
the Terror."
The animal in the cabin by this time was making such doleful cries I
said to the potter.
"Let him out. It is dreadful to be shut in by walls."
The potter, stooping half over and rolling stiffly from foot to foot in
his walk, filled me with compunction at having been brutal to so pitiful
a creature, and I hurried to open the door for him. The animal clawed
vigorously inside, and the instant I pushed back the ill-fitted slabs,
it strained through and rushed on all fours to the fire. Madame de
Ferrier fled backward, for what I liberated could hardly be seen without
dread.
It was a human being. Its features were a boy's, and the tousled hair
had a natural wave. While it crouched for warmth I felt the shock of
seeing a creature about my own age grinning back at me, fishy eyed and
black mouthed.
"There!" Bellenger said, straightening up in his place like a bear
rising from all fours. "That is the boy your De Ferriers saw in London."
I remembered the boy Madame Tank had told about. Whether myself or this
less fortunate creature was the boy, my heart went very pitiful toward
him. Madame de Ferrier stooped and examined, him; he made a juicy noise
of delight with his mouth.
"This is not the boy you had in London, monsieur," she said to
Bellenger.
The potter waved his hands and shrugged.
"You believe, madame, that Lazarre is the boy you saw in London?" said
Louis Philippe.
"I am certain of it."
"What proofs have you?"
"The evidence of my eyes."
"Tell that to Monsieur!" exclaimed the potter.
"Who is Monsieur?" I asked.
"The eldest brother of the king of France is called Monsieur. The Count
de Provence will be called Monsieur until he succeeds Louis XVII and is
crowned Louis XVIII--if that time ever comes. He cannot be called Louis
XVII"--the man who told me to call him Louis Philippe took my arm, and I
found myself walking back and forth with him as in a dream while he
carefully formed sentence after sentence. "Because the dauphin who died
in the Temple prison was Louis XVII. But there are a few who say he did
not die: that a dying child was substituted for him: that he was
smuggled out and carried to America, Bellenger was the agent employed.
The dauphin's sister is married to her cousin, the nephew of Monsieur.
She herself believes these things; and it is certain a sum of money is
sent out to America every year for his maintenance. He was reduced to
imbecility when removed from the Temple. It is not known whether he will
ever be fit to reign if the kingdom returns to him. No communication has
been held with him. He was nine years old when removed from the Temple:
he would now be in his nineteenth year. When I last saw him he was a
smiling little prince with waving hair and hazel eyes, holding to his
mother's hand"--
"Stop!"
The frenzy of half recollection came on me, and that which I had put
away from my mind and sworn to let alone, seized and convulsed me.
Dreams, and sensations, and instincts massed and fell upon me in an
avalanche of conviction.
I was that uncrowned outcast, the king of France!