Lazarre Part 1

Lazarre.

by Mary Hartwell Catherwood.

"My name is Eagle," said the little girl.

The boy said nothing.

"My name is Eagle," she repeated. "Eagle de Ferrier. What is your name?"

Still the boy said nothing.

She looked at him surprised, but checked her displeasure. He was about nine years old, while she was less than seven. By the dim light which sifted through the top of St. Bat's church he did not appear sullen. He sat on the flagstones as if dazed and stupefied, facing a blacksmith's forge, which for many generations had occupied the north transept. A smith and some apprentices hammered measures that echoed with multiplied volume from the Norman roof; and the crimson fire made a spot vivid as blood. A low stone arch, half walled up, and blackened by smoke, framed the top of the smithy, and through this frame could be seen a bit of St.

Bat's close outside, upon which the doors stood open. Now an apprentice would seize the bellows-handle and blow up flame which briefly sprang and disappeared. The ap.r.o.ned figures, Saxon and brawny, made a fascinating show in the dark shop.

Though the boy was dressed like a plain French citizen of that year, 1795, and his knee breeches betrayed shrunken calves, and his sleeves, wrists that were swollen as with tumors, Eagle accepted him as her equal. His fine wavy hair was of a chestnut color, and his hands and feet were small. His features were perfect as her own. But while life played unceasingly in vivid expression across her face, his muscles never moved. The hazel eyes, bluish around their iris rims, took cognizance of nothing. His left eyebrow had been parted by a cut now healed and forming its permanent scar.

"You understand me, don't you?" Eagle talked to him. "But you could not understand Sally Blake. She is an English girl. We live at her house until our ship sails, and I hope it will sail soon. Poor boy! Did the wicked mob in Paris hurt your arms?"

She soothed and patted his wrists, and he neither shrank in pain nor resented the endearment with male shyness.

Eagle edged closer to him on the stone pavement. She was amused by the blacksmith's arch, and interested in all the unusual life around her, and she leaned forward to find some response in his eyes. He was unconscious of his strange environment. The ancient church of St.

Bartholomew the Great, or St. Bat's as it was called, in the heart of London, had long been a hived village. Not only were houses cl.u.s.tered thickly around its outside walls and the s.p.a.ce of ground named its close; but the inside, degraded from its first use, was parceled out to owners and householders. The nave only had been retained as a church bounded by ma.s.sive pillars, which did not prevent Londoners from using it as a thoroughfare. Children of resident dissenters could and did hoot when it pleased them, during service, from an overhanging window in the choir. The Lady Chapel was a fringe-maker's shop. The smithy in the north transept had descended from father to son. The south transept, walled up to make a respectable dwelling, showed through its open door the ghastly marble tomb of a crusader which the thrifty London housewife had turned into a parlor table. His crossed feet and hands and upward staring countenance protruded from the midst of knick-knacks.

Light fell through the venerable clerestory on upper arcades. Some of these were walled shut, but others retained their arched openings into the church, and formed balconies from which upstairs dwellers could look down at what was pa.s.sing below.

Two women leaned out of the Norman arcades, separated only by a pillar, watching across the nave those little figures seated in front of the blacksmith's window. An atmosphere of comfort and thrift filled St.

Bat's. It was the abode of labor and humble prosperity, not an asylum of poverty. Great worthies, indeed, such as John Milton, and nearer our own day, Washington Irving, did not disdain to live in St. Bartholomew's close. The two British matrons, therefore, spoke the prejudice of the better rather than the baser cla.s.s.

"The little devils!" said one woman.

"They look innocent," remarked the other. "But these French do make my back crawl!"

"How long are they going to stay in St. Bat's?"

"The two men with the little girl and the servant intend to sail for America next week. The lad, and the man that brought him in--as dangerous looking a foreigner as ever I saw!--are like to prowl out any time. I saw them go into the smithy, and I went over to ask the smith's wife about them. She let two upper chambers to the creatures this morning."

"What ails the lad? He has the look of an idiot."

"Well, then, G.o.d knows what ails any of the crazy French! If they all broke out with boils like the heathen of scripture, it would not surprise a Christian. As it is, they keep on beheading one another, day after day and month after month; and the time must come when none of them will be left--and a satisfaction that will be to respectable folks!"

"First the king, and then the queen," mused one speaker. "And now news comes that the little prince has died of bad treatment in his prison.

England will not go into mourning for him as it did for his father, King Louis. What a pretty sight it was, to see every decent body in a bit of black, and the houses draped, they say, in every town! A comfort it must have been to the queen of France when she heard of such Christian respect!"

The women's faces, hard in texture and rubicund as beef and good ale could make them, leaned silent a moment high above the dim pavement. St.

Bat's little bell struck the three quarters before ten; lightly, delicately, with always a promise of the great booming which should follow on the stroke of the hour. Its perfection of sound contrasted with the smithy clangor of metal in process of welding. A butcher's boy made his way through the front entrance toward a staircase, his feet echoing on the flags, carrying exposed a joint of beef on the board upon his head.

"And how do your foreigners behave themselves, Mrs. Blake?" inquired the neighbor.

"Like French emmy-grays, to be sure. I told Blake when he would have them to lodge in the house, that we are a respectable family. But he is master, and their lordships has money in their purses."

"French lordships!" exclaimed the neighbor. "Whether they calls themselves counts or markises, what's their n.o.bility worth? Nothing!"

"The Markis de Ferrier," retorted Mrs. Blake, nettled by a liberty taken with her lodgers which she reserved for herself, "is a gentleman if he is an emmy-gray, and French. Blake may be master in his own house, but he knows landed gentry from tinkers--whether they ever comes to their land again or not."

"Well, then," soothed her gossip, "I was only thinking of them French that comes over, glad to teach their betters, or even to work with their hands for a crust."

"Still," said Mrs. Blake, again giving rein to her prejudices, "I shall be glad to see all French papists out of St. Bat's. For what does scripture say?--'Touch not the unclean thing!' And that servant-body, instead of looking after her little missus, galloping out of the close on some b.l.o.o.d.y errand!"

"You ought to be thankful, Mrs. Blake, to have her out of the way, instead of around our children, poisoning their hinfant minds! Thank G.o.d they are playing in the church lane like little Christians, safe from even that lad and la.s.s yonder!"

A yell of fighting from the little Christians mingled with their hoots at choir boys gathering for the ten o'clock service in St. Bat's. When Mrs. Blake and her friend saw this preparation, they withdrew their dissenting heads from the arcades in order not to countenance what might go on below.

Minute followed minute, and the little bell struck the four quarters.

Then the great bell boomed out ten;--the bell which had given signal for lighting the funeral piles of many a martyr, on Smithfield, directly opposite the church. Organ music pealed; choir boys appeared from their robing-room beside the entrance, pacing two and two as they chanted. The celebrant stood in his place at the altar, and antiphonal music rolled among the arches; pierced by the dagger voice of a woman in the arcades, who called after the retreating butcher's boy to look sharp, and bring her the joint she ordered.

Eagle sprang up and dragged the arm of the unmoving boy in the north transept. There was a weeping tomb in the chancel which she wished to show him,--lettered with a threat to shed tears for a beautiful memory if pa.s.sers-by did not contribute their share; a threat the marble duly executed on account of the dampness of the church and the hardness of men's hearts. But it was impossible to disturb a religious service. So she coaxed the boy, dragging behind her, down the ambulatory beside the oasis of chapel, where the singers, sitting side-wise, in rows facing each other, chanted the Venite. A few worshipers from the close, all of them women, pattered in to take part in this daily office. The smithy hammers rang under organ measures, and an odor of cooking sifted down from the arcades.

Outside the church big fat-bellied pigeons were cooing about the tower or strutting and pecking on the ground. To kill one was a grave offense.

The worst boy playing in the lane durst not lift a hand against them.

Very different game were Eagle and the other alien whom she led past the red faced English children.

"Good day," she spoke pleasantly, feeling their antagonism. They answered her with a t.i.tter.

"Sally Blake is the only one I know," she explained in French, to her companion who moved feebly and stiffly behind her dancing step. "I cannot talk English to them, and besides, their manners are not good, for they are not like our peasants."

Sally Blake and a bare kneed lad began to amble behind the foreigners, he taking his cue smartly and lolling out his tongue. The whole crowd set up a shout, and Eagle looked back. She wheeled and slapped the St.

Bat's girl in the face.

That silent being whom she had taken under her care recoiled from the blow which the bare kneed boy instantly gave him, and without defending himself or her, shrank down in an att.i.tude of entreaty. She screamed with pain at this sight, which hurt worse than the hair-pulling of the mob around her. She fought like a panther in front of him.

Two men in the long narrow lane leading from Smithfield, interfered, and scattered her a.s.sailants.

You may pa.s.s up a step into the graveyard, which is separated by a wall from the lane. And though n.o.body followed, the two men hurried Eagle and the boy into the graveyard and closed the gate.

It was not a large enclosure, and thread-like paths, gra.s.sy and ungraveled, wound among crowded graves. There was a very high outside wall: and the place insured such privacy as could not be had in St.

Bat's church. Some crusted stones lay broad as gray doors on ancient graves; but the most stood up in irregular oblongs, white and lichened.

A cat call from the lane was the last shot of the battle. Eagle valiantly sleeked her disarrayed hair, the breast under her bodice still heaving and sobbing. The June sun illuminated a determined child of the gray eyed type between white and brown, flushed with fullness of blood, quivering with her intensity of feeling.

"Who would say this was Mademoiselle de Ferrier!" observed the younger of the two men. Both were past middle age. The one whose queue showed the most gray took Eagle reproachfully by her hands; but the other stood laughing.

"My little daughter!"

"I did strike the English girl--and I would do it again, father!"

"She would do it again, monsieur the marquis," repeated the laugher.