Lazarre Part 61

"But how could he help living?"

"True enough. G.o.d's times are not ours. But see what he has made of her!"

I thought of my Cloud-Mother walking enclosed from the world upon a height of changeless youth. She could not feel another shock. She was past both ambition and poverty. If she had ever felt the sweet anguish of love--Oh! she must have understood when she kissed me and said: "I will come to you sometime!"--the anguish--the hoping, waiting, expecting, receiving nothing, all were gone by. Even mother cares no longer touched her. Paul was grown. She could not be made anything that was base. Unseen forces had worked with her and would work with her still.

"You told me," I said to Madame Ursule, "the Indians were afraid of her when they burned the settlement. Was the change so sudden?"

"Madame Jordan's story was like this: It happened in broad daylight. Two men went into the woods hunting bee trees. The Indians caught and killed them within two miles of the clearing--some of those very Winnebagoes you treated with for your land. It was a sunshiny day in September. You could hear the poultry crowing, and the children playing in the dooryards. Madeleine's little Paul was never far away from her. The Indians rushed in with yells and finished the settlement in a few minutes. Madame Jordan and her family were protected, but she saw children dashed against trees, and her neighbors struck down and scalped before she could plead for them. And little good pleading would have done. An Indian seized Paul. His father and the old servant lay dead across the doorstep. His mother would not let him go. The Indian dragged her on her knees and struck her on the head. Madame Jordan ran out at the risk of being scalped herself, and got the poor girl into her cabin.

The Indian came back for Madeleine's scalp. Madeleine did not see him.

She never seemed to notice anybody again. She stood up quivering the whole length of her body, and laughed in his face. It was dreadful to hear her above the cries of the children. The Indian went away like a scared hound. And none of the others would touch her."

After I heard this story I was thankful every day that Eagle could not remember; that natural happiness had its way with her elastic body.

Madame Ursule told me the family learned to give her liberty. She rowed alone upon the river, and went where she pleased. The men in La Baye would step aside for her. Strangers disturbed her by bringing the consciousness of something unusual.

Once I surprised Marie and Katarina sitting close to the fire at twilight, talking about lovers. Eagle was near them on a stool.

"That girl," exclaimed Katarina, speaking of the absent with strong disapproval, "is one of the kind that will let another girl take her sweetheart and then sit around and look injured! Now if she could get him from me she might have him! But she'd have to get him first!"

Eagle listened in the att.i.tude of a young sister, giving me to understand by a look that wisdom flowed, and she was learning.

We rose one morning to find the world buried in snow. The river was frozen and its channel padded thick. As for the bay, stretches of snow fields, with dark pools and broken gray ridges met ice at the end of the world.

It was so cold that paper stuck to the fingers like feathers, and the nails tingled with frost. The white earth creaked under foot, and when a sled went by the snow cried out in shrill long resistance, a spirit complaining of being trampled. Explosions came from the river, and elm limbs and timbers of the house startled us. White fur clothed the inner key holes. Tree trunks were black as ink against a background of snow.

The oaks alone kept their dried foliage, which rattled like many skeletons, instead of rustling in its faded redness, because there was no life in it.

But the colder it grew the higher Grignon's log fires mounted. And when channels were cut in the snow both along the ridge above Green Bay, and across country in every direction, French trains moved out with jangling bells, and maids and men uttered voice sounds which spread as by miracle on the diffusing air from horizon to horizon. You could hear the officers speaking across the river; and dogs were like to shake the sky down with their barking. Echoes from the smallest noises were born in that magnified, glaring world.

The whole festive winter spun past. Marie and Katarina brought young men to the peaks of hope in the "twosing" seat, and plunged them down to despair, quite in the American fashion. Christmas and New Year's days were great festivals, when the settlement ate and drank at Pierre Grignon's expense, and made him glad as if he fathered the whole post.

Madame Grignon spun and looked to the house. And a thousand changes pa.s.sed over the landscape. But in all that time no one could see any change in my Cloud-Mother. She sewed like a child. She laughed, and danced gavottes. She trod the snow, or m.u.f.fled in robes, with Madame Ursule and the girls, flew over it in a French train; a sliding box with two or three horses. .h.i.tched tandem. Every evening I sat by her side at the fire, while she made little coats and trousers for me. But remembrance never came into her eyes. The cloud stood round about her as it did when I first tried to penetrate it.

My own dim days were often in mind. I tried to recall sensations. But I had lived a purely physical life. Her blunders of judgment and delusion of bodily shrinking were no part of my experience. The thinking self in me had been paralyzed. While the thinking self in her was alive, in a cloud. Both of us were memoryless, excepting her recollection of Paul.

After March sent the ice out of river and bay, spring came with a rush as it comes in the north. Perhaps many days it was silently rising from tree roots. In February we used to say:--"This air is like spring." But after such bold speech the arctic region descended upon us again, and we were snowed in to the ears. Yet when the end of March unlocked us, it seemed we must wait for the month of Mary to give us soft air and blue water. Then suddenly it was spring, and every living soul knew it. Life revived with pa.s.sion. Longings which you had forgotten came and took you by the throat, saying, "You shall no longer be satisfied with negative peace. Rouse, and live!" Then flitting, exquisite, purple flaws struck across milk-opal water in the bay. Fishing boats lifted themselves in mirage, sailing lightly above the water; and islands sat high, with a cushion of air under them.

The girls manifested increasing interest in what they called the Pigeon Roost settlement affair. Madame Ursule had no doubt told them what I said. They pitied my Cloud-Mother and me with the condescending pity of the very young, and unguardedly talked where they could be heard.

"Oh, she'll come to her senses some time, and he'll marry her of course," was the conclusion they invariably reached; for the thing must turn out well to meet their approval. How could they foresee what was to happen to people whose lives held such contrasts?

"Father Pierre says he's nearly twenty-eight; I call him an old bachelor," declared Katarina; "and she was a married woman. They are really very old to be in love."

"You don't know what you'll do when you are old," said Marie.

"Ah, I dread it," groaned Katarina.

"So do I."

"But there is grandmother. She doesn't mind it. And beaux never trouble her now."

"No," sighed the other. "Beaux never trouble her now."

Those spring days I was wild with restlessness. Life revived to dare things. We heard afterwards that about that time the meteor rushed once more across France. Napoleon landed at a Mediterranean port, gathering force as he marched, swept Louis XVIII away like a cobweb in his path, and moved on to Waterloo. The greatest Frenchman that ever lived fell ultimately as low as St. Helena, and the Bourbons sat again upon the throne. But the changes of which I knew nothing affected me in the Illinois Territory.

Sometimes I waked at night and sat up in bed, hot with indignation at the injustice done me, which I could never prove, which I did not care to combat, yet which unreasonably waked the fighting spirit in me. Our natures toss and change, expand or contract, influenced by invisible powers we know not why.

One April night I sat up in the veiled light made by a clouded moon.

Rain points multiplied themselves on the window gla.s.s; I heard their sting. The impulse to go out and ride the wind, or pick the river up and empty it all at once into the bay, or tear Eagle out of the cloud, or go to France and proclaim myself with myself for follower; and other feats of like nature, being particularly strong in me, I struck the pillow beside me with my fist. Something bounced from it on the floor with a clack like wood. I stretched downward from one of Madame Ursule's thick feather beds, and picked up what brought me to my feet. Without letting go of it I lighted my candle. It was the padlocked book which Skenedonk said he had burned.

And there the scoundrel lay at the other side of the room, wrapped in his blanket from head to foot, mummied by sleep. I wanted to take him by the scalp lock and drag him around on the floor.

He had carried it with him, or secreted it somewhere, month after month.

I could imagine how the state of the writer worked on his Indian mind.

He repented, and was not able to face me, but felt obliged to restore what he had withheld. So waiting until I slept, he brought forth the padlocked book and laid it on the pillow beside my head; thus beseeching pardon, and intimating that the subject was closed between us.

I got my key, and then a fit of shivering seized me. I put the candle stand beside the pillow and lay wrapped in bedding, clenching the small chilly padlock and sharp-cornered boards. Remembering the change which had come upon the life recorded in it, I hesitated. Remembering how it had eluded me before, I opened it.

The few entries were made without date. The first pages were torn out, crumpled, and smoothed and pasted to place again. Rose petals and violets and some bright poppy leaves, crushed inside its lids, slid down upon the bedcover.

VIII

The padlocked book--In this book I am going to write you, Louis, a letter which will never be delivered; because I shall burn it when it is finished. Yet that will not prevent my tantalizing you about it. To the padlocked book I can say what I want to say. To you I must say what is expedient.

That is a foolish woman who does violence to love by inordinate loving.

Yet first I will tell you that I sink to sleep saying, "He loves me!"

and rise to the surface saying, "He loves me!" and sink again saying, "He loves me!" all night long.

The days when I see you are real days, finished and perfect, and this is the best of them all. G.o.d forever bless in paradise your mother for bearing you. If you never had come to the world I should not have waked to life myself. And why this is I cannot tell. The first time I ever saw your tawny head and tawny eyes, though you did not notice me, I said, "Whether he is the king or not would make no difference." Because I knew you were more than the king to me.

Sire, you told me once you could not understand why people took kindly to you. There is in you a gentle dignity and manhood, most royal. As you come into a room you cast your eyes about unfearing. Your head and shoulders are erect. You are like a lion in suppleness and tawny color, which influences me against my will. You inspire Confidence. Even girls like Annabel, who feel merely at their finger ends, and are as well satisfied with one husband as another, know you to be solid man, not the mere image of a man. Besides these traits there is a power going out from you that takes hold of people invisibly. My father told me there was a man at the court of your father who could put others to sleep by a waving of his hands. I am not comparing you to this charlatan; yet when you touch my hand a strange current runs through me.

When we were in Paris I used to dress myself every morning like a priestess going to serve in a temple. And what was it for? To worship one dear head for half an hour perhaps.

You robbed me of the sight of you for two months.

Sophie Saint-Michel told me to beware of loving a man. To-day he says, "I love you! I need you! I shall go to the devil without you!" To-morrow he turns to his affairs. In six months he says, "I was a fool!" Next year he says, "Who was it that drove me wild for a time last year? What was her name?"

Is love a game where men and women try to outwit each other, and man boasts, "She loves me"--not "I love her"?

You are two persons. Lazarre belongs to me. He follows, he thinks about me. He used to slip past my windows at Lake George, and cast his eyes up at the panes. But Louis is my sovereign. He sees and thinks and acts without me, and his lot is apart from mine.