Читать книгу Lazarre - Mary Hartwell Catherwood - Страница 5

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I remember poising naked upon a rock, ready to dive into Lake George. This memory stands at the end of a diminishing vista; the extreme point of coherent recollection. My body and muscular limbs reflected in the water filled me with savage pride.

I knew, as the beast knows its herd, that my mother Marianne was hanging the pot over the fire pit in the center of our lodge; the children were playing with other papooses; and my father was hunting down the lake. The hunting and fishing were good, and we had plenty of meat. Skenedonk, whom I considered a person belonging to myself, was stripping more slowly on the rock behind me. We were heated with wood ranging. Aboriginal life, primeval and vigor-giving, lay behind me when I plunged expecting to strike out under the delicious forest shadow.

When I came up the sun had vanished, the woods and their shadow were gone. So were the Indian children playing on the shore, and the shore with them. My mother Marianne might still be hanging her pot in the lodge. But all the hunting lodges of our people were as completely lost as if I had entered another world.

My head was bandaged, as I discovered when I turned it to look around. The walls were not the log walls of our lodge, chinked with moss and topped by a bark roof. On the contrary they were grander than the inside of St. Regis church where I took my first communion, though that was built of stone. These walls were paneled, as I learned afterward to call that noble finishing, and ornamented with pictures, and crystal sockets for candles. The use of the crystal sockets was evident, for one shaded wax light burned near me. The ceiling was not composed of wooden beams like some Canadian houses, but divided itself into panels also, reflecting the light with a dark rosy shining. Lace work finer than a priest's white garments fluttered at the windows.

I had dived early in the afternoon, and it was night. Instead of finding myself still stripped for swimming, I had a loose robe around me, and a coverlet drawn up to my armpits. The couch under me was by no means of hemlock twigs and skins, like our bunks at home: but soft and rich. I wondered if I had died and gone to heaven; and just then the Virgin moved past my head and stood looking down at me. I started to jump out of a window, but felt so little power to move that I only twitched, and pretended to be asleep, and watched her as we sighted game, with eyes nearly shut. She had a poppet of a child on one arm that sat up instead of leaning against her shoulder, and looked at me, too. The poppet had a cap on its head, and was dressed in lace, and she wore a white dress that let her neck and arms out, but covered her to the ground. This was remarkable, as the Indian women covered their necks and arms, and wore their petticoats short. I could see this image breathe, which was a marvel, and the color moving under her white skin. Her eyes seemed to go through you and search all the veins, sending a shiver of pleasure down your back.

Now I knew after the first start that she was a living girl holding a living baby, and when my father, Thomas Williams, appeared at the door of the room, it was certain I could not be in heaven. It came over me in a flash that I myself was changed. In spite of the bandages my head was as clear as if all its faculties were washed and newly arranged. I could look back into my life and perceive things that I had only sensed as a dumb brute. A fish thawed out after being frozen, and reanimated through every sparkling scale and tremulous fin, could not have felt its resurrection more keenly. My broken head gave me no trouble at all.

The girl and baby disappeared as soon as I saw my father; which was not surprising, for he could not be called a prepossessing half-breed. His lower lip protruded and hung sullenly. He had heavy brows and a shaggy thatch of hair. Our St. Regis Iroquois kept to the buckskins, though they often had hunting shirts of fulled flannel; and my father's buckskins were very dirty.

A little man, that I did not know was in the room, shuffled across the floor to keep my father from entering. Around the base of his head he had a thin curtain of hair scarcely reaching his shoulders. His nose pointed upward. Its tip was the shape of a candle extinguisher. He wore horn spectacles; and knee breeches, waistcoat and coat of black like the ink which fades to brown in a drying ink-horn. He put his hands together and took them apart uncertainly, and shot out his lip and frowned, as if he had an universal grudge and dared not vent it.

He said something in a language I did not understand, and my father made no answer. Then he began a kind of Anglo-French, worse than the patois we used at St. Regis when we did not speak Iroquois. I made out the talk between the two, understanding each without hesitation.

"Sir, who are you?"

"The chief, Thomas Williams," answered my father.

"Pardon me, sir; but you are unmistakably an Indian."

"Iroquois chief," said my father. "Mohawk."

"That being the case, what authority have you for calling yourself Thomas Williams?" challenged the little man.

"Thomas Williams is my name."

"Impossible, sir! Skenedonk, the Oneida, does not assume so much. He lays no claim to William Jones or John Smith, or some other honest British name."

The chief maintained silent dignity.

"Come, sir, let me have your Indian name! I can hear it if I cannot repeat it."

Silently contemptuous, my father turned toward me.

"Stop, sir!" the man in the horn spectacles cried. "What do you want?"

"I want my boy."

"Your boy? This lad is white."

"My grandmother was white," condescended the chief. "A white prisoner from Deerfield. Eunice Williams."

"I see, sir. You get your Williams from the Yankees. And is this lad's mother white, too?"

"No. Mohawk."

"Why, man, his body is like milk! He is no son of yours."

The chief marched toward me.

"Let him alone! If you try to drag him out of the manor I will appeal to the authority of Le Ray de Chaumont."

My father spoke to me with sharp authority—

"Lazarre!"

"What do you call him?" the little man inquired, ambling beside the chief.

"Eleazer Williams is his name. But in the lodges, at St. Regis, everywhere, it is Lazarre."

"How old is he?"

"About eighteen years."

"Well, Thomas Williams," said my fretful guardian, his antagonism melting to patronage, "I will tell you who I am, and then you can feel no anxiety. I am Doctor Chantry, physician to the Count de Chaumont. The lad cut his head open on a rock, diving in the lake, and has remained unconscious ever since. This is partly due to an opiate I have administered to insure complete quiet; and he will not awake for several hours yet. He received the best surgery as soon as he was brought here and placed in my hands by the educated Oneida, Skenedonk."

"I was not near the lodge," said my father. "I was down the lake, fishing."

"I have bled him once, and shall bleed him again; though the rock did that pretty effectually. But these strapping young creatures need frequent blood-letting."

The chief gave him no thanks, and I myself resolved to knock the little doctor down, if he came near me with a knife.

"In the absence of Count de Chaumont, Thomas," he proceeded, "I may direct you to go and knock on the cook's door, and ask for something to eat before you go home."

"I stay here," responded my father.

"There is not the slightest need of anybody's watching beside the lad to-night. I was about to retire when you were permitted to enter. He is sleeping like an infant."

"He belongs to me," the chief said.

Doctor Chantry jumped at the chief in rage.

"For God's sake, shut up and go about your business!"

It was like one of the little dogs in our camp snapping at the patriarch of them all, and recoiling from a growl. My father's hand was on his hunting knife; but he grunted and said nothing. Doctor Chantry himself withdrew from the room and left the Indian in possession. Weak as I was I felt my insides quake with laughter. My very first observation of the whimsical being tickled me with a kind of foreknowledge of all his weak fretfulness.

My father sat down on the floor at the foot of my couch, where the wax light threw his shadow, exaggerating its unmoving profile. I noticed one of the chairs he disdained as useless; though when eating or drinking with white men he sat at table with them. The chair I saw was one that I faintly recognized, as furniture of some previous experience, slim legged, gracefully curved, and brocaded. Brocaded was the word. I studied it until I fell asleep.

The sun, shining through the protected windows, instead of glaring into our lodge door, showed my father sitting in the same position when I woke, and Skenedonk at my side. I liked the educated Iroquois. He was about ten years my senior. He had been taken to France when a stripling, and was much bound to the whites, though living with his own tribe. Skenedonk had the mildest brown eyes I ever saw outside a deer's head. He was a bald Indian with one small scalp lock. But the just and perfect dome to which his close lying ears were attached needed no hair to adorn it. You felt glad that nothing shaded the benevolence of his all-over forehead. By contrast he emphasized the sullenness of my father; yet when occasion had pressed there never was a readier hand than Skenedonk's to kill.

I tossed the cover back to spring out of bed with a whoop. But a woman in a high cap with ribbons hanging down to her heels, and a dress short enough to show her shoes, stepped into the room and made a courtesy. Her face fell easily into creases when she talked, and gave you the feeling that it was too soft of flesh. Indeed, her eyes were cushioned all around. She spoke and Skenedonk answered her in French. The meaning of every word broke through my mind as fire breaks through paper.

"Madame de Ferrier sent me to inquire how the young gentleman is."

Skenedonk lessened the rims around his eyes. My father grunted.

"Did Madame de Ferrier say 'the young gentleman?'" Skenedonk inquired.

"I was told to inquire. I am her servant Ernestine," said the woman, her face creased with the anxiety of responding to questions.

"Tell Madame de Ferrier that the young gentleman is much better, and will go home to the lodges to-day."

"She said I was to wait upon him, and give him his breakfast under the doctor's direction."

"Say with thanks to Madame de Ferrier that I wait upon him."

Ernestine again courtesied, and made way for Doctor Chantry. He came in quite good natured, and greeted all of us, his inferiors, with a humility I then thought touching, but learned afterwards to distrust. My head already felt the healing blood, and I was ravenous for food. He bound it with fresh bandages, and opened a box full of glittering knives, taking out a small sheath. From this he made a point of steel spring like lightning.

"We will bring the wholesome lancet again into play, my lad," said Doctor Chantry. I waited in uncertainty with my feet on the floor and my hands on the side of the couch, while he carefully removed coat and waistcoat and turned up his sleeves.

"Ernestine, bring the basin," he commanded.

My father may have thought the doctor was about to inflict a vicarious puncture on himself. Skenedonk, with respect for civilized surgery, waited. I did not wait. The operator bared me to the elbow and showed a piece of plaster already sticking on my arm. The conviction of being outraged in my person came upon me mightily, and snatching the wholesome lancet I turned its spring upon the doctor. He yelled. I leaped through the door like a deer, and ran barefooted, the loose robe curdling above my knees. I had the fleetest foot among the Indian racers, and was going to throw the garment away for the pure joy of feeling the air slide past my naked body, when I saw the girl and poppet baby who had looked at me during my first consciousness. They were sitting on a blanket under the trees of De Chaumont's park, which deepened into wilderness.

The baby put up a lip, and the girl surrounded it with her arm, dividing her sympathy with me. I must have been a charming object. Though ravenous for food and broken-headed, I forgot my state, and turned off the road of escape to stare at her like a tame deer.

She lowered her eyes wisely, and I got near enough without taking fright to see a book spread open on the blanket, showing two illuminated pages. Something parted in me. I saw my mother, as I had seen her in some past life:—not Marianne the Mohawk, wife of Thomas Williams, but a fair oval-faced mother with arched brows. I saw even her pointed waist and puffed skirts, and the lace around her open neck. She held the book in her hands and read to me from it.

I dropped on my knees and stretched my arms above my head, crying aloud as women cry with gasps and chokings in sudden bereavement. Nebulous memories twisted all around me and I could grasp nothing. I raged for what had been mine—for some high estate out of which I had fallen into degradation. I clawed the ground in what must have seemed convulsions to the girl. Her poppet cried and she hushed it.

"Give me my mother's book!" I strangled out of the depths of my throat; and repeated, as if torn by a devil—"Give me my mother's book!"

She blanched so white that her lips looked seared, and instead of disputing my claim, or inquiring about my mother, or telling me to begone, she was up on her feet. Taking her dress in her finger tips and settling back almost to the ground in the most beautiful obeisance I ever saw, she said—

"Sire!"

Neither in Iroquois nor in Iroquois-French had such a name been given to me before. I had a long title signifying Tree-Cutter, which belonged to every chief of our family. But that word—"Sire!"—and her deep reverence seemed to atone in some way for what I had lost. I sat up, quieting myself, still moved as water heaves. She put the missal on the lap of my single garment, and drew back a step, formally standing. My scarred ankles, at which the Indian children used to point, were exposed to her gaze, for I never would sit on them after the manner of the tribe. There was no restraining the tears that ran down my face. She might have mocked me, but she remained white and quiet; while I sat as dumb as a dog, and as full of unuttered speech. Looking back now I can see what passionate necessity shook me with throbs to be the equal of her who had received me as a superior.

De Chaumont's manor house, facing a winding avenue, could be seen from where we were. It was of stone, built to enclose a court on three sides, in the form that I afterwards recognized as that of French palaces. There were a great many flowers in the court, and vines covered the ends of the wings. All those misty half remembered hunting seasons that I had spent on Lake George were not without some knowledge. The chimneys and roofs of Le Ray de Chaumont's manor often looked at me through trees as I steered my boat among the islands. He was a great land owner, having more than three hundred thousand acres of wilderness. And he was friendly with both Indians and Americans. His figure did not mean much to me when I saw it, being merely a type of wealth, and wealth extends little power into the wilderness.

The poppet of a child climbed up and held to the girl's dress. She stooped over and kissed it, saying, "Sit down, Paul." The toy human being seemed full of intelligence, and after the first protest examined me fearlessly, with enchanting smiles about the mouth and eyes. I noticed even then an upward curling of the mouth corners and a kind of magic in the liquid blue gaze, of which Paul might never be conscious, but which would work on every beholder.

That a child should be the appendage of such a very young creature as the girl, surprised me no more than if it had been a fawn or a dog. In the vivid moments of my first rousing to life I had seen her with Paul in her arms; and he remained part of her.

We heard a rush of horses up the avenue, and out of the woods came Le Ray de Chaumont and his groom, the wealthy land owner equipped in gentleman's riding dress from his spurs to his hat. He made a fine show, whip hand on his hip and back erect as a pine tree. He was a man in middle life, but he reined up and dismounted with the swift agility of a youth, and sent his horse away with the groom, as soon as he saw the girl run across the grass to meet him. Taking her hand he bowed over it and kissed it with pleasing ceremony, of which I approved. An Iroquois chief in full council had not better manners than Le Ray de Chaumont.

Paul and I waited to see what was going to happen, for the two came toward us, the girl talking rapidly to the man. I saw my father and Skenedonk and the doctor also coming from the house, and they readily spied me sitting tame as a rabbit near the baby.

You never can perceive yourself what figure you are making in the world: for when you think you are the admired of all eyes you may be displaying a fool; and when life seems prostrated in you it may be that you show as a monument on the heights. But I could not be mistaken in De Chaumont's opinion of me. He pointed his whip handle at me, exclaiming—

"What!—that scarecrow, madame?"