Читать книгу Lazarre - Mary Hartwell Catherwood - Страница 6

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"But look at him," she urged.

"I recognize first," said De Chaumont as he sauntered, "an old robe of my own."

"His mother was reduced to coarse serge, I have been told."

"You speak of an august lady, my dear Eagle. But this is Chief Williams' boy. He has been at the hunting lodges every summer since I came into the wilderness. There you see his father, the half-breed Mohawk."

"I saw the dauphin in London, count. I was a little child, but his scarred ankles and wrists and forehead are not easily forgotten."

"The dauphin died in the Temple, Eagle."

"My father and Philippe never believed that."

"Your father and Philippe were very mad royalists."

"And you have gone over to Bonaparte. They said that boy had all the traits of the Bourbons, even to the shaping of his ear."

"A Bourbon ear hears nothing but Bonaparte in these days," said De Chaumont. "How do you know this is the same boy you saw in London?"

"Last night while he was lying unconscious, after Doctor Chantry had bandaged his head and bled him, I went in to see if I might be of use. He was like some one I had seen. But I did not know him until a moment ago. He ran out of the house like a wild Indian. Then he saw us sitting here, and came and fell down on his knees at sight of that missal. I saw his scars. He claimed the book as his mother's—and you know, count, it was his mother's!"

"My dear child, whenever an Indian wants a present he dreams that you give it to him, or he claims it. Chief Williams' boy wanted your valuable illuminated book. I only wonder he had the taste. The rings on your hands are more to an Indian's liking."

"But he is not an Indian, count. He is as white as we are."

"That signifies nothing. Plenty of white children have been brought up among the tribes. Chief Williams' grandmother, I have heard, was a Yankee woman."

Not one word of their rapid talk escaped an ear trained to faintest noises in the woods. I felt like a tree, well set up and sound, but rooted and voiceless in my ignorant helplessness before the two so frankly considering me.

My father stopped when he saw Madame de Ferrier, and called to me in Iroquois. It was plain that he and Doctor Chantry disagreed. Skenedonk, put out of countenance by my behavior, and the stubbornness of the chief, looked ready to lay his hand upon his mouth in sign of being confounded before white men; for his learning had altered none of his inherited instincts.

But as for me, I was as De Chaumont had said, Chief Williams' boy, faint from blood letting and twenty-four hours' fasting; and the father's command reminded me of the mother's dinner pot. I stood up erect and drew the flowered silk robe around me. It would have been easier to walk on burning coals, but I felt obliged to return the book to Madame de Ferrier. She would not take it. I closed her grasp upon it, and stooping, saluted her hand with courtesy as De Chaumont had done. If he had roared I must have done this devoir. But all he did was to widen his eyes and strike his leg with his riding whip.

My father and I seldom talked. An Indian boy who lives in water and forest all summer and on snowshoes all winter, finds talk enough in the natural world without falling back upon his family. Dignified manners were not lacking among my elders, but speech had seemed of little account to me before this day.

The chief paddled and I sat naked in our canoe;—for we left the flowered robe with a horse-boy at the stables;—the sun warm upon my skin, the lake's blue glamour affecting me like enchantment.

Neither love nor aversion was associated with my father. I took my head between my hands and tried to remember a face that was associated with aversion.

"Father," I inquired, "was anybody ever very cruel to me?"

He looked startled, but spoke harshly.

"What have you got in your head? These white people have been making a fool of you."

"I remember better to-day than I ever remembered before. I am different. I was a child: but to-day manhood has come. Father, what is a dauphin?"

The chief made no answer.

"What is a temple? Is it a church, like ours at St. Regis?"

"Ask the priest."

"Do you know what Bourbon is, father—particularly a Bourbon ear?"

"Nothing that concerns you."

"But how could I have a Bourbon ear if it didn't concern me?"

"Who said you had such an ear?"

"Madame de Ferrier."

The chief grunted.

"At least she told De Chaumont," I repeated exactly, "I was the boy she saw in London, that her father said had all the traits of the Bourbons. Where is London?"

The chief paddled without replying. Finding him so ignorant on all points of the conversation, or so determined to put me down, I gazed awhile at our shadow gliding in the water, and then began again.

"Father, do you happen to know who Bonaparte is?"

This time he answered.

"Bonaparte is a great soldier."

"Is he a white man or an Indian?"

"He is a Frenchman."

I meditated on the Frenchmen I dimly remembered about St. Regis. They were undersized fellows, very apt to weep when their emotions were stirred. I could whip them all.

"Did he ever come to St. Regis?"

The chief again grunted.

"Does France come to St. Regis?" he retorted with an impatient question.

"What is France, father?"

"A country."

"Shall we ever go there to hunt?"

"Shall we ever go the other side of the sunrise to hunt? France is the other side of the sunrise. Talk to the squaws."

Though rebuked, I determined to do it if any information could be got out of them. The desire to know things was consuming. I had the belated feeling of one who waked to consciousness late in life and found the world had run away from him. The camp seemed strange, as if I had been gone many years, but every object was so wonderfully distinct.

My mother Marianne fed me, and when I lay down dizzy in the bunk, covered me. The family must have thought it was natural sleep. But it was a fainting collapse, which took me more than once afterwards as suddenly as a blow on the head, when my faculties were most needed. Whether this was caused by the plunge upon the rock or the dim life from which I had emerged, I do not know. One moment I saw the children, and mothers from the neighboring lodges, more interested than my own mother: our smoky rafters, and the fire pit in the center of unfloored ground: my clothes hanging over the bunk, and even a dog with his nose in the kettle. And then, as it had been the night before, I waked after many hours.

By that time the family breathing sawed the air within the walls, and a fine starlight showed through the open door, for we had no window. Outside the oak trees were pattering their leaves like rain, reminding me of our cool spring in the woods. My bandaged head was very hot, in that dark lair of animals where the log bunks stretched and deepened shadow.

If Skenedonk had been there I would have asked him to bring me water, with confidence in his natural service. The chief's family was a large one, but not one of my brothers and sisters seemed as near to me as Skenedonk. The apathy of fraternal attachment never caused me any pain. The whole tribe was held dear.

I stripped off Doctor Chantry's unendurable bandages, and put on my clothes, for there were brambles along the path. The lodges and the dogs were still, and I crept like a hunter after game, to avoid waking them. Our village was an irregular camp, each house standing where its owner had pleased to build it on the lake shore. Behind it the blackness of wooded wilderness seemed to stretch to the end of the world.

The spring made a distinct tinkle in the rush of low sound through the forest. A rank night sweetness of mints and other lush plants mixed its spirit with the body of leaf earth. I felt happy in being a part of all this, and the woods were to me as safe as the bed-chamber of a mother. It was fine to wallow, damming the span of escaping water with my fevered head. Physical relief and delicious shuddering coolness ran through me.

From that wet pillow I looked up and thought again of what had happened that day, and particularly of the girl whom De Chaumont had called Madame de Ferrier and Eagle. Every word that she had spoken passed again before my mind. Possibilities that I had never imagined rayed out from my recumbent body as from the hub of a vast wheel. I was white. I was not an Indian. I had a Bourbon ear. She believed I was a dauphin. What was a dauphin, that she should make such a deep obeisance to it? My father the chief, recommending me to the squaws, had appeared to know nothing about it.

All that she believed De Chaumont denied. The rich book which stirred such torment in me—"you know it was his mother's!" she said—De Chaumont thought I merely coveted. I can see now that the crude half-savage boy wallowing in the spring stream, set that woman as high as the highest star above his head, and made her the hope and symbol of his possible best.

A woman's long cry, like the appeal of that one on whom he meditated, echoed through the woods and startled him out of his wallow.