Lazarre Part 17

"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 n.o.bles 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s 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."