Lazarre Part 11

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, unc.u.mbered, 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 dest.i.tute. 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 s.p.a.ciousness 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 appet.i.te. 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. n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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."