Lazarre Part 8

What Skenedonk said was true. I asked him, bewildered--"Why did I never notice anything?"

The Oneida tapped his bald head.

"When I saw you first you were not the big fellow with speaking eyes that you are to-day. You would sit from sunrise to sunset, looking straight ahead of you and never moving except when food was put in your hand. As you grew older the children dragged you among them to play. You learned to fish, and hunt, and swim; and knew us, and began to talk our language. Now at last you are fully roused, and are going to learn the knowledge there is in books."

I asked Skenedonk how he himself had liked books, and he shook his head, smiling. They were good for white men, very good. An Indian had little use for them. He could read and write and cast accounts. When he made his great journey to the far country, what interested him most was the behavior of the people.

We did not go into the subject of his travels at that time, for I began to wonder who was going to teach me books, and heard with surprise that it was Doctor Chantry.

"But I struck him with the little knife that springs out of a box."

Skenedonk a.s.sured me that Doctor Chantry thought nothing of it, and there was no wound but a scratch. He looked on me as his pupil. He knew all kinds of books.

Evidently Doctor Chantry liked me from the moment I showed fight. His Anglo-Saxon blood was stirred. He received me from Skenedonk, who shook my hand and wished me well, before paddling away.

De Chaumont's house was full as a hive around the three sides of its flowered court. A ball was in preparation, and all the guests had arrived. Avoiding these gentry we mounted stairs toward the roof, and came into a burst of splendor. As far as the eye could see through square east and west windows, unbroken forests stretched to the end of the world, or Lake George wound, sown thick with islands, ranging in size from mere rocks supporting a tree, to wooded acres.

The room which weaned me from aboriginal life was at the top of the central building. Doctor Chantry shuffled over the clean oak floor and introduced me to my appointments. There were curtains like frost work, which could be pushed back from the square panes. At one end of the huge apartment was my huge bed, formidable with hangings. Near it stood a table for the toilet. He opened a closet door in the wall and showed a spiral staircase going down to a tunnel which led to the lake. For when De Chaumont first came into the wilderness and built the central house without its wings, he thought it well to have a secret way out, as his chateau in the old country had.

"The tunnel is damp," said Doctor Chantry. "I never venture into it, though all the corner rooms below give upon this stairway, and mine is just under yours."

It was like returning me the lake to use in my own accustomed way. For the remainder of my furniture I had a study table, a cupboard for clothes, some arm-chairs, a case of books, and a ma.s.sive fireplace with chimney seats at the end of the room opposite the bed.

I asked Doctor Chantry, "Was all this made ready for me before I was sure of coming here?"

"When the count decides that a thing will be done it is usually done,"

said my schoolmaster. "And Madame de Ferrier was very active in forwarding the preparations."

The joy of youth in the unknown was before me. My old camp life receded behind me.

Madame de Ferrier's missal-book lay on the table, and when I stopped before it tongue-tied, Doctor Chantry said I was to keep it.

"She gives it to you. It was treasured in her family on account of personal attachment to the giver. She is not a Catholic. She was brought up as good a Protestant as any English gentlewoman."

"I told her it was my mother's. It seemed to be my mother's. But I don't know--I can't remember."

My master looked at the missal, and said it was a fine specimen of illumination. His manner toward me was so changed that I found it hard to refer to the lancet. This, however, very naturally followed his examination of my head. He said I had healthy blood, and the wound was closing by the first intention. The pink cone at the tip of his nose worked in a whimsical grin as he heard my apology.

"It is not often you will make the medicine man take his own remedy, my lad."

We thus began our relation with the best feeling. It has since appeared that I was a blessing to Doctor Chantry. My education gave him something to do. For although he called himself physician to Count de Chaumont, he had no real occupation in the house, and dabbled with poetry, dozing among books. De Chaumont was one of those large men who gather in the weak. His older servants had come to America with his father, and were as attached as kindred. A natural parasite like Doctor Chantry took to De Chaumont as means of support; and it was pleasing to both of them.

My master asked me when I wanted to begin my studies, and I said, "Now."

We sat down at the table, and I learned the English alphabet, some phrases of English talk, some spelling, and traced my first characters in a copy-book. With consuming desire to know, I did not want to leave off at dusk. In that high room day lingered. The doctor was fretful for his supper before we rose from our task.

Servants were hurrying up and down stairs. The whole house had an air of festivity. Doctor Chantry asked me to wait in a lower corridor while he made some change in his dress.

I sat down on a broad window sill, and when I had waited a few minutes, Mademoiselle de Chaumont darted around a corner, bare armed and bare necked. She collapsed to the floor at sight of me, and then began to dance away in the opposite direction with stiff leaps, as a lamb does in spring-time.

I saw she was in pain or trouble, needing a servant, and made haste to reach her; when she hid her face on both arms against the wall.

"Go off!" she hissed. "--S-s-s! Go off! I haven't anything on!--Don't go off! Open my door for me quick!--before anybody else comes into the hall!"

"Which door is it?" I asked. She showed me. It had a spring catch, and she had stepped into the hall to see if the catch was set.

"The catch was set!" gasped Mademoiselle de Chaumont. "Break the door--get it open--anyway--Quick!"

By good fortune I had strength enough in my shoulder to set the door wide off its spring, and she flew to the middle of the room slamming it in my face.

Fitness and unfitness required nicer discrimination than the crude boy from the woods possessed. When I saw her in the ball-room she had very little more on than when I saw her in the hall, and that little clung tight around her figure. Yet she looked quite unconcerned.

After we had eaten supper Doctor Chantry and I sat with his sister where we could see the dancing, on a landing of the stairway. De Chaumont's generous house was divided across the middle by a wide hall that made an excellent ball-room. The sides were paneled, like the walls of the room in which I first came to my senses. Candles in sconces were reflected by the polished, dark floor. A platform for his fiddlers had been built at one end. Festoons of green were carried from a cl.u.s.ter of lights in the center of the ceiling, to the corners, making a bower or canopy under which the dancers moved.

It is strange to think that not one stone remains upon another and scarcely a trace is left of this manor. When De Chaumont determined to remove to his seat at Le Rayville, in what was then called Castorland, he had his first hold pulled down.

Miss Chantry was a blunt woman. Her consideration for me rested on my being her brother's pupil. She spoke more readily than he did. From our cove we looked over the railing at an active world.

"Madame Eagle is a picture," remarked Miss Chantry. "---- Eagle! What a name for civilized people to give a christened child! But these French are as likely as not to call their boys Anne or Marie, and it wouldn't surprise me if they called their girls Cat or Dog. Eagle or Crow, she is the handsomest woman on the floor."

"Except Mademoiselle Annabel," the doctor ventured to amend.

"That Annabel de Chaumont," his sister vigorously declared, "has neither conscience nor grat.i.tude. But none of the French have. They will take your best and throw you away with a laugh."

My master and I watched the brilliant figures swimming in the glow of wax candles. Face after face could be singled out as beautiful, and the scant dresses revealed taper forms. Madame de Ferrier's garments may have been white or blue or yellow; I remember only her satin arms and neck, the rosy color of her face, and the powder on her hair making it white as down. Where this a.s.sembly was collected from I did not know, but it acted on the spirits and went like volatile essence to the brain.

"Pheugh!" exclaimed Miss Chantry, "how the French smell!"

I asked her why, if she detested them so, she lived in a French family, and she replied that Count de Chaumont was an exception, being almost English in his tastes. He had lived out of France since his father came over with La Fayette to help the rebellious Americans.

I did not know who the rebellious Americans were, but inferred that they were people of whom Miss Chantry thought almost as little as she did of the French.

Croghan looked quite a boy among so many experienced gallants, but well appointed in his dress and stepping through the figures featly. He was, Miss Chantry said, a student of William and Mary College.

"This company of gentry will be widely scattered when it disperses home," she told us. "There is at least one man from over-seas."

I thought of the Grignon and Tank families, who were probably on the road to Albany. Miss Chantry bespoke her brother's attention.

"There he is."

"Who?" the doctor inquired.

"His highness," she incisively responded, "Prince Jerome Bonaparte."

I remembered my father had said that Bonaparte was a great soldier in a far off country, and directly asked Miss Chantry if the great soldier was in the ball-room.

She breathed a snort and turned upon my master. "Pray, are you teaching this lad to call that impostor the great soldier?"

Doctor Chantry denied the charge and cast a weak-eyed look of surprise at me.