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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Lazarre, by Mary Hartwell Catherwood,
+Illustrated by Andre Castaigne
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Lazarre
+
+Author: Mary Hartwell Catherwood
+
+Release Date: February 19, 2005  [eBook #15108]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAZARRE***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Audrey Longhurst, Charlie Kirschner, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 15108-h.htm or 15108-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/1/0/15108/15108-h/15108-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/1/0/15108/15108-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+LAZARRE
+
+by
+
+MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD
+
+With illustrations by André Castaigne
+
+Indianapolis
+The Bown-Merrill Company
+Publishers
+
+1901
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _He mounted toward the guardians of the imperial court
+and fortune was with him_]
+
+
+
+
+
+PRELUDE
+
+
+
+ST. BAT'S
+
+
+
+LAZARRE
+
+
+"My name is Eagle," said the little girl.
+
+The boy said nothing.
+
+"My name is Eagle," she repeated. "Eagle de Ferrier. What is your name?"
+
+Still the boy said nothing.
+
+She looked at him surprised, but checked her displeasure. He was about
+nine years old, while she was less than seven. By the dim light which
+sifted through the top of St. Bat's church he did not appear sullen. He
+sat on the flagstones as if dazed and stupefied, facing a blacksmith's
+forge, which for many generations had occupied the north transept. A
+smith and some apprentices hammered measures that echoed with multiplied
+volume from the Norman roof; and the crimson fire made a spot vivid as
+blood. A low stone arch, half walled up, and blackened by smoke, framed
+the top of the smithy, and through this frame could be seen a bit of St.
+Bat's close outside, upon which the doors stood open. Now an apprentice
+would seize the bellows-handle and blow up flame which briefly sprang
+and disappeared. The aproned figures, Saxon and brawny, made a
+fascinating show in the dark shop.
+
+Though the boy was dressed like a plain French citizen of that year,
+1795, and his knee breeches betrayed shrunken calves, and his sleeves,
+wrists that were swollen as with tumors, Eagle accepted him as her
+equal. His fine wavy hair was of a chestnut color, and his hands and
+feet were small. His features were perfect as her own. But while life
+played unceasingly in vivid expression across her face, his muscles
+never moved. The hazel eyes, bluish around their iris rims, took
+cognizance of nothing. His left eyebrow had been parted by a cut now
+healed and forming its permanent scar.
+
+"You understand me, don't you?" Eagle talked to him. "But you could not
+understand Sally Blake. She is an English girl. We live at her house
+until our ship sails, and I hope it will sail soon. Poor boy! Did the
+wicked mob in Paris hurt your arms?"
+
+She soothed and patted his wrists, and he neither shrank in pain nor
+resented the endearment with male shyness.
+
+Eagle edged closer to him on the stone pavement. She was amused by the
+blacksmith's arch, and interested in all the unusual life around her,
+and she leaned forward to find some response in his eyes. He was
+unconscious of his strange environment. The ancient church of St.
+Bartholomew the Great, or St. Bat's as it was called, in the heart of
+London, had long been a hived village. Not only were houses clustered
+thickly around its outside walls and the space of ground named its
+close; but the inside, degraded from its first use, was parceled out to
+owners and householders. The nave only had been retained as a church
+bounded by massive pillars, which did not prevent Londoners from using
+it as a thoroughfare. Children of resident dissenters could and did hoot
+when it pleased them, during service, from an overhanging window in the
+choir. The Lady Chapel was a fringe-maker's shop. The smithy in the
+north transept had descended from father to son. The south transept,
+walled up to make a respectable dwelling, showed through its open door
+the ghastly marble tomb of a crusader which the thrifty London housewife
+had turned into a parlor table. His crossed feet and hands and upward
+staring countenance protruded from the midst of knick-knacks.
+
+Light fell through the venerable clerestory on upper arcades. Some of
+these were walled shut, but others retained their arched openings into
+the church, and formed balconies from which upstairs dwellers could look
+down at what was passing below.
+
+Two women leaned out of the Norman arcades, separated only by a pillar,
+watching across the nave those little figures seated in front of the
+blacksmith's window. An atmosphere of comfort and thrift filled St.
+Bat's. It was the abode of labor and humble prosperity, not an asylum of
+poverty. Great worthies, indeed, such as John Milton, and nearer our own
+day, Washington Irving, did not disdain to live in St. Bartholomew's
+close. The two British matrons, therefore, spoke the prejudice of the
+better rather than the baser class.
+
+"The little devils!" said one woman.
+
+"They look innocent," remarked the other. "But these French do make my
+back crawl!"
+
+"How long are they going to stay in St. Bat's?"
+
+"The two men with the little girl and the servant intend to sail for
+America next week. The lad, and the man that brought him in--as
+dangerous looking a foreigner as ever I saw!--are like to prowl out any
+time. I saw them go into the smithy, and I went over to ask the smith's
+wife about them. She let two upper chambers to the creatures this
+morning."
+
+"What ails the lad? He has the look of an idiot."
+
+"Well, then, God knows what ails any of the crazy French! If they all
+broke out with boils like the heathen of scripture, it would not
+surprise a Christian. As it is, they keep on beheading one another, day
+after day and month after month; and the time must come when none of
+them will be left--and a satisfaction that will be to respectable
+folks!"
+
+"First the king, and then the queen," mused one speaker. "And now news
+comes that the little prince has died of bad treatment in his prison.
+England will not go into mourning for him as it did for his father, King
+Louis. What a pretty sight it was, to see every decent body in a bit of
+black, and the houses draped, they say, in every town! A comfort it must
+have been to the queen of France when she heard of such Christian
+respect!"
+
+The women's faces, hard in texture and rubicund as beef and good ale
+could make them, leaned silent a moment high above the dim pavement. St.
+Bat's little bell struck the three quarters before ten; lightly,
+delicately, with always a promise of the great booming which should
+follow on the stroke of the hour. Its perfection of sound contrasted
+with the smithy clangor of metal in process of welding. A butcher's boy
+made his way through the front entrance toward a staircase, his feet
+echoing on the flags, carrying exposed a joint of beef on the board upon
+his head.
+
+"And how do your foreigners behave themselves, Mrs. Blake?" inquired the
+neighbor.
+
+"Like French emmy-grays, to be sure. I told Blake when he would have
+them to lodge in the house, that we are a respectable family. But he is
+master, and their lordships has money in their purses."
+
+"French lordships!" exclaimed the neighbor. "Whether they calls
+themselves counts or markises, what's their nobility worth? Nothing!"
+
+"The Markis de Ferrier," retorted Mrs. Blake, nettled by a liberty taken
+with her lodgers which she reserved for herself, "is a gentleman if he
+is an emmy-gray, and French. Blake may be master in his own house, but
+he knows landed gentry from tinkers--whether they ever comes to their
+land again or not."
+
+"Well, then," soothed her gossip, "I was only thinking of them French
+that comes over, glad to teach their betters, or even to work with
+their hands for a crust."
+
+"Still," said Mrs. Blake, again giving rein to her prejudices, "I shall
+be glad to see all French papists out of St. Bat's. For what does
+scripture say?--'Touch not the unclean thing!' And that servant-body,
+instead of looking after her little missus, galloping out of the close
+on some bloody errand!"
+
+"You ought to be thankful, Mrs. Blake, to have her out of the way,
+instead of around our children, poisoning their hinfant minds! Thank God
+they are playing in the church lane like little Christians, safe from
+even that lad and lass yonder!"
+
+A yell of fighting from the little Christians mingled with their hoots
+at choir boys gathering for the ten o'clock service in St. Bat's. When
+Mrs. Blake and her friend saw this preparation, they withdrew their
+dissenting heads from the arcades in order not to countenance what might
+go on below.
+
+Minute followed minute, and the little bell struck the four quarters.
+Then the great bell boomed out ten;--the bell which had given signal for
+lighting the funeral piles of many a martyr, on Smithfield, directly
+opposite the church. Organ music pealed; choir boys appeared from their
+robing-room beside the entrance, pacing two and two as they chanted. The
+celebrant stood in his place at the altar, and antiphonal music rolled
+among the arches; pierced by the dagger voice of a woman in the arcades,
+who called after the retreating butcher's boy to look sharp, and bring
+her the joint she ordered.
+
+Eagle sprang up and dragged the arm of the unmoving boy in the north
+transept. There was a weeping tomb in the chancel which she wished to
+show him,--lettered with a threat to shed tears for a beautiful memory
+if passers-by did not contribute their share; a threat the marble duly
+executed on account of the dampness of the church and the hardness of
+men's hearts. But it was impossible to disturb a religious service. So
+she coaxed the boy, dragging behind her, down the ambulatory beside the
+oasis of chapel, where the singers, sitting side-wise, in rows facing
+each other, chanted the Venite. A few worshipers from the close, all of
+them women, pattered in to take part in this daily office. The smithy
+hammers rang under organ measures, and an odor of cooking sifted down
+from the arcades.
+
+Outside the church big fat-bellied pigeons were cooing about the tower
+or strutting and pecking on the ground. To kill one was a grave offense.
+The worst boy playing in the lane durst not lift a hand against them.
+
+Very different game were Eagle and the other alien whom she led past the
+red faced English children.
+
+"Good day," she spoke pleasantly, feeling their antagonism. They
+answered her with a titter.
+
+"Sally Blake is the only one I know," she explained in French, to her
+companion who moved feebly and stiffly behind her dancing step. "I
+cannot talk English to them, and besides, their manners are not good,
+for they are not like our peasants."
+
+Sally Blake and a bare kneed lad began to amble behind the foreigners,
+he taking his cue smartly and lolling out his tongue. The whole crowd
+set up a shout, and Eagle looked back. She wheeled and slapped the St.
+Bat's girl in the face.
+
+That silent being whom she had taken under her care recoiled from the
+blow which the bare kneed boy instantly gave him, and without defending
+himself or her, shrank down in an attitude of entreaty. She screamed
+with pain at this sight, which hurt worse than the hair-pulling of the
+mob around her. She fought like a panther in front of him.
+
+Two men in the long narrow lane leading from Smithfield, interfered, and
+scattered her assailants.
+
+You may pass up a step into the graveyard, which is separated by a wall
+from the lane. And though nobody followed, the two men hurried Eagle and
+the boy into the graveyard and closed the gate.
+
+It was not a large enclosure, and thread-like paths, grassy and
+ungraveled, wound among crowded graves. There was a very high outside
+wall: and the place insured such privacy as could not be had in St.
+Bat's church. Some crusted stones lay broad as gray doors on ancient
+graves; but the most stood up in irregular oblongs, white and lichened.
+
+A cat call from the lane was the last shot of the battle. Eagle
+valiantly sleeked her disarrayed hair, the breast under her bodice still
+heaving and sobbing. The June sun illuminated a determined child of the
+gray eyed type between white and brown, flushed with fullness of blood,
+quivering with her intensity of feeling.
+
+"Who would say this was Mademoiselle de Ferrier!" observed the younger
+of the two men. Both were past middle age. The one whose queue showed
+the most gray took Eagle reproachfully by her hands; but the other stood
+laughing.
+
+"My little daughter!"
+
+"I did strike the English girl--and I would do it again, father!"
+
+"She would do it again, monsieur the marquis," repeated the laugher.
+
+"Were the children rude to you?"
+
+"They mocked him, father." She pulled the boy from behind a grave-stone
+where he crouched unmoving as a rabbit, and showed him to her guardians.
+"See how weak he is! Regard him--how he walks in a dream! Look at his
+swollen wrists--he cannot fight. And if you wish to make these English
+respect you you have got to fight them!"
+
+"Where is Ernestine? She should not have left you alone."
+
+"Ernestine went to the shops to obey your orders, father."
+
+The boy's dense inertia was undisturbed by what had so agonized the
+girl. He stood in the English sunshine gazing stupidly at her guardians.
+
+"Who is this boy, Eagle?" exclaimed the younger man.
+
+"He does not talk. He does not tell his name."
+
+The younger man seized the elder's arm and whispered to him.
+
+"No, Philippe, no!" the elder man answered. But they both approached the
+boy with a deference which surprised Eagle, and examined his scarred
+eyebrow and his wrists. Suddenly the marquis dropped upon his knees and
+stripped the stockings down those meager legs. He kissed them, and the
+swollen ankles, sobbing like a woman. The boy seemed unconscious of this
+homage. Such exaggeration of her own tenderness made her ask,
+
+"What ails my father, Cousin Philippe?"
+
+Her Cousin Philippe glanced around the high walls and spoke cautiously.
+
+"Who was the English girl at the head of your mob, Eagle?"
+
+"Sally Blake."
+
+"What would Sally Blake do if she saw the little king of France and
+Navarre ride into the church lane, filling it with his retinue, and
+heard the royal salute of twenty-one guns fired for him?"
+
+"She would be afraid of him."
+
+"But when he comes afoot, with that idiotic face, giving her such a good
+chance to bait him--how can she resist baiting him? Sally Blake is
+human."
+
+"Cousin Philippe, this is not our dauphin? Our dauphin is dead! Both my
+father and you told me he died in the Temple prison nearly two weeks
+ago!"
+
+The Marquis de Ferrier replaced the boy's stockings reverently, and
+rose, backing away from him.
+
+"There is your king, Eagle," the old courtier announced to his child.
+"Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, survives in this
+wreck. How he escaped from prison we do not know. Why he is here
+unrecognized in England, where his claim to the throne was duly
+acknowledged on the death of his father, we do not know. But we who have
+often seen the royal child cannot fail to identify him; brutalized as he
+is by the past horrible year of his life."
+
+The boy stood unwinking before his three expatriated subjects. Two of
+them noted the traits of his house, even to his ears, which were full at
+top, and without any indentation at the bottom where they met the sweep
+of the jaw.
+
+The dauphin of France had been the most tortured victim of his country's
+Revolution. By a jailer who cut his eyebrow open with a blow, and
+knocked him down on the slightest pretext, the child had been forced to
+drown memory in fiery liquor, month after month. During six worse
+months, which might have been bettered by even such a jailer, hid from
+the light in an airless dungeon, covered with rags which were never
+changed, and with filth and vermin which daily accumulated, having his
+food passed to him through a slit in the door, hearing no human voice,
+seeing no human face, his joints swelling with poisoned blood, he had
+died in everything except physical vitality, and was taken out at last
+merely a breathing corpse. Then it was proclaimed that this corpse had
+ceased to breathe. The heir of a long line of kings was coffined and
+buried.
+
+While the elder De Ferrier shed nervous tears, the younger looked on
+with eyes which had seen the drollery of the French Revolution.
+
+"I wish I knew the man who has played this clever trick, and whether
+honest men or the rabble are behind it."
+
+"Let us find him and embrace him!"
+
+"_I_ would rather embrace his prospects when the house of Bourbon comes
+again to the throne of France. Who is that fellow at the gate? He looks
+as if he had some business here."
+
+The man came on among the tombstones, showing a full presence and
+prosperous air, suggesting good vintages, such as were never set out in
+the Smithfield alehouse. Instead of being smooth shaven, he wore a very
+long mustache which dropped its ends below his chin.
+
+A court painter, attached to his patrons, ought to have fallen into
+straits during the Revolution. Philippe exclaimed with astonishment--
+
+"Why, it's Bellenger! Look at him!"
+
+Bellenger took off his cap and made a deep reverence.
+
+"My uncle is weeping over the dead English, Bellenger," said Philippe.
+"It always moves him to tears to see how few of them die."
+
+"We can make no such complaint against Frenchmen in these days,
+monsieur," the court painter answered. "I see you have my young charge
+here, enjoying the gravestones with you;--a pleasing change after the
+unmarked trenches of France. With your permission I will take him away."
+
+"Have I the honor, Monsieur Bellenger, of saluting the man who brought
+the king out of prison?" the old man inquired.
+
+Again Bellenger made the marquis a deep reverence, which modestly
+disclaimed any exploit.
+
+"When was this done?--Who were your helpers? Where are you taking him?"
+
+Bellenger lifted his eyebrows at the fanatical royalist.
+
+"I wish I had had a hand in it!" spoke Philippe de Ferrier.
+
+"I am taking this boy to America, monsieur the marquis," the painter
+quietly answered.
+
+"But why not to one of his royal uncles?"
+
+"His royal uncles," repeated Bellenger. "Pardon, monsieur the marquis,
+but did I say he had any royal uncles?"
+
+"Come!" spoke Philippe de Ferrier. "No jokes with us, Bellenger. Honest
+men of every degree should stand together in these times."
+
+Eagle sat down on a flat gravestone, and looked at the boy who seemed to
+be an object of dispute between the men of her family and the other man.
+He neither saw nor heard what passed. She said to herself--
+
+"It would make no difference to me! It is the same, whether he is the
+king or not."
+
+Bellenger's eyes half closed their lids as if for protection from the
+sun.
+
+"Monsieur de Ferrier may rest assured that I am not at present occupied
+with jokes. I will again ask permission to take my charge away."
+
+"You may not go until you have answered some questions."
+
+"That I will do as far as I am permitted."
+
+"Do Monsieur and his brother know that the king is here?" inquired the
+elder De Ferrier, taking the lead.
+
+"What reason have you to believe," responded Bellenger, "that the Count
+de Provence and the Count d'Artois have any interest in this boy?"
+
+Philippe laughed, and kicked the turf.
+
+"We have seen him many a time at Versailles, my friend. You are very
+mysterious."
+
+"Have his enemies, or his friends set him free?" demanded the old
+Frenchman.
+
+"That," said Bellenger, "I may not tell."
+
+"Does Monsieur know that you are going to take him to America?"
+
+"That I may not tell."
+
+"When do you sail, and in what vessel?"
+
+"These matters, also, I may not tell."
+
+"This man is a kidnapper!" the old noble cried, bringing out his sword
+with a hiss. But Philippe held his arm.
+
+"Among things permitted to you," said Philippe, "perhaps you will take
+oath the boy is not a Bourbon?"
+
+Bellenger shrugged, and waved his hands.
+
+"You admit that he is?"
+
+[Illustration: "I will again ask permission to take my charge away"]
+
+"I admit nothing, monsieur. These are days in which we save our heads as
+well as we can, and admit nothing."
+
+"If we had never seen the dauphin we should infer that this is no common
+child you are carrying away so secretly, bound by so many pledges. A man
+like you, trusted with an important mission, naturally magnifies it. You
+refuse to let us know anything about this affair?"
+
+"I am simply obeying orders, monsieur," said Bellenger humbly. "It is
+not my affair."
+
+"You are better dressed, more at ease with the world than any other
+refugee I have seen since we came out of France. Somebody who has money
+is paying to have the child placed in safety. Very well. Any country but
+his own is a good country for him now. My uncle and I will not
+interfere. We do not understand. But liberty of any kind is better than
+imprisonment and death. You can of course evade us, but I give you
+notice I shall look for this boy in America, and if you take him
+elsewhere I shall probably find it out."
+
+"America is a large country," said Bellenger, smiling.
+
+He took the boy by the hand, and made his adieus. The old De Ferrier
+deeply saluted the boy and slightly saluted his guardian. The other De
+Ferrier nodded.
+
+"We are making a mistake, Philippe!" said the uncle.
+
+"Let him go," said the nephew. "He will probably slip away at once out
+of St. Bartholomew's. We can do nothing until we are certain of the
+powers behind him. Endless disaster to the child himself might result
+from our interference. If France were ready now to take back her king,
+would she accept an imbecile?"
+
+The old De Ferrier groaned aloud.
+
+"Bellenger is not a bad man," added Philippe.
+
+Eagle watched her playmate until the closing gate hid him from sight.
+She remembered having once implored her nurse for a small plaster image
+displayed in a shop. It could not speak, nor move, nor love her in
+return. But she cried secretly all night to have it in her arms, ashamed
+of the unreasonable desire, but conscious that she could not be appeased
+by anything else. That plaster image denied to her symbolized the
+strongest passion of her life.
+
+The pigeons wheeled around St. Bat's tower, or strutted burnished on the
+wall. The bell, which she had forgotten since sitting with the boy in
+front of the blacksmith shop, again boomed out its record of time;
+though it seemed to Eagle that a long, lonesome period like eternity had
+begun.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+AWAKING
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+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?"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+"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.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+I sat up with the water trickling down my back. The cry was repeated,
+out of the west.
+
+I knew the woods, but night alters the most familiar places. It was so
+dark in vaults and tunnels of trees and thickets that I might have
+burrowed through the ground almost as easily as thresh a path. The
+million scarcely audible noises that fill a forest surrounded me, and
+twigs not broken by me cracked or shook. Still I made directly toward
+the woman's voice which guided me more plainly; but left off running as
+my ear detected that she was only in perplexity. She called at
+intervals, imperatively but not in continuous screams. She was a white
+woman; for no squaw would publish her discomfort. A squaw if lost would
+camp sensibly on a bed of leaves, and find her way back to the village
+in the morning. The wilderness was full of dangers, but when you are
+elder brother to the bear and the wildcat you learn their habits, and
+avoid or outwit them.
+
+Climbing over rocks and windfalls I came against a solid log wall and
+heard the woman talking in a very pretty chatter the other side of it.
+She only left off talking to call for help, and left off calling for
+help to scold and laugh again. There was a man imprisoned with her, and
+they were speaking English, a language I did not then understand. But
+what had happened to them was very plain. They had wandered into a pen
+built by hunters to trap bears, and could not find the bush-masked and
+winding opening, but were traveling around the walls. It was lucky for
+them that a bear had not arrived first, though in that case their horses
+must have smelled him. I heard the beasts shaking their bridles.
+
+I found my way to the opening, and whistled. At once the woman ceased
+her chatter and drew in her breath, and they both asked me a question
+that needed no interpretation. I told them where they were, and the
+woman began talking at once in my own tongue and spoke it as well as I
+could myself.
+
+"In a bear pen? George, he says we are in a bear pen! Take us out, dear
+chief, before the bear family arrive home from their ball. I don't know
+whether you are a chief or not, but most Indians are. My nurse was a
+chief's daughter. Where are you? I can't see anything but chunks of
+blackness."
+
+I took her horse by the bridle and led him, and so got both the riders
+outside. They had no tinder, and neither had I; and all of us groped for
+the way by which they had come to the bear pen. The young man spurred
+his horse in every direction, and turned back unable to get through.
+
+Though we could not see one another I knew that both the adventurers
+were young, and that they expected to be called to severe account for
+the lawless act they were committing. The girl, talking English, or
+French, or Mohawk almost in one breath, took the blame upon herself and
+made light of the boy's self-reproaches.
+
+She laughed and said--"My father thinks I am with Miss Chantry, and Miss
+Chantry thinks I am with my father. He will blame her for letting me
+ride with George Croghan to meet him, and lose the way and so get into
+the bear pen. And she will blame my father, and your dearest Annabel
+will let the Count de Chaumont and Miss Chantry fight it out. It is not
+an affair for youth to meddle with, George."
+
+Having her for interpreter the boy and I consulted. I might have led him
+back to our hunting camp, but it was a hard road for a woman and an
+impossible one for horses. There was no inhabited house nearer than De
+Chaumont's own. He decided they must return to the road by which they
+had come into the bear pen, and gladly accepted my offer to go with him;
+dismounting and leading Annabel de Chaumont's horse while I led his. We
+passed over rotten logs and through black tangles, the girl bending to
+her saddle bow, unwearied and full of laughter. It was plain that he
+could not find any outlet, and falling behind with the cumbered horse he
+let me guide the party.
+
+I do not know by what instinct I felt my way, conscious of slipping
+between the wild citizens of that vast town of trees; but we finally
+reached a clearing and saw across the open space a lighted cabin. Its
+sashless windows and defective chinks were gilded with the yellow light
+that comes from a glowing hearth.
+
+"I know this place!" exclaimed Annabel. "It is where the Saint-Michels
+used to live before they went to my father's settlement at Le Rayville.
+Look at the house! Nobody lives there. It must be full of witches."
+
+Violin music testified that the witches were merry. We halted, and the
+horses neighed and were answered by others of their kind.
+
+"George Croghan's grandmother was struck by a witch ball. And here her
+grandson stands, too tired to run. But perhaps there aren't any witches
+in the house. I don't believe wicked things would be allowed to enter
+it. The Saint-Michels were so pious, and ugly, and resigned to the
+poverty of refugees. Their society was so good for me, my mother, when
+she was alive, made me venerate them until I hated them. Holy Sophie
+died and went to heaven. I shall never see her again. She was, indeed,
+excellent. This can't be a nest of witches. George, why don't you go and
+knock on the door?"
+
+It was not necessary, for the door opened and a man appeared, holding
+his violin by the neck. He stepped out to look around the cabin at some
+horses fastened there, and saw and hailed us.
+
+I was not sorry to be allowed to enter, for I was tired to exhaustion,
+and sat down on the floor away from the fire. The man looked at me
+suspiciously, though he was ruddy and good natured. But he bent quite
+over before De Chaumont's daughter, and made a flourish with his hand
+in receiving young Croghan. There were in the cabin with him two women
+and two little girls; and a Canadian servant like a fat brown bear came
+from the rear of the house to look at us and then went back to the
+horses.
+
+All the women began to speak, but Annabel de Chaumont could talk faster
+than the four others combined, so they knew our plight before we learned
+that they were the Grignon and Tank families, who were going into the
+west to find settlement and had made the house their camp for one night.
+The Dutch maid, dark and round-eyed, and the flaxen little Grignon, had
+respect for their elders and held their tongues while Madame Tank and
+Madame Grignon spoke, but Annabel de Chaumont was like a grove of
+sparrows. The world seemed swarming with young maids. The travelers were
+mere children, while the count's daughter was startling as an angel. Her
+clothing fitted her body like an exquisite sheath. I do not know what it
+was, but it made her look as slim as a dragon fly. Her white and rose
+pink face had a high arched nose, and was proud and saucy. She wore her
+hair beaten out like mist, with rich curly shreds hanging in front of
+her ears to her shoulders. She shook her head to set her hat straight,
+and turned her eyes in rapid smiling sweeps. I knew as well then as I
+ever did afterwards that she was bound to befool every man that came
+near her.
+
+There were only two benches in the cabin, but it was floored and better
+made than our hunting lodges. The temporary inmates and their guests
+sat down in a long row before the fire. I was glad to make a pillow of a
+saddle near the wall, and watch their backs, as an outsider.
+Mademoiselle de Chaumont absorbed all eyes and all attention. She told
+about a ball, to which she had ridden with her governess and servants a
+three days' journey, and from which all the dancers were riding back a
+three days' journey to join in another ball at her father's house. With
+the hospitality which made Le Ray de Chaumont's manor the palace of the
+wilderness as it existed then, she invited the hosts who sheltered her
+for the night, to come to the ball and stay all summer. And they
+lamented that they could not accept the invitation, being obliged to
+hurry on to Albany, where a larger party would give them escort on a
+long westward journey.
+
+The head of the house took up his bow, as if musing on the ball, and
+Annabel de Chaumont wriggled her feet faster and faster. Tireless as
+thistledown that rolls here and there at the will of the wind, up she
+sprang and began to dance. The children watched her spellbound. None of
+us had ever seen the many figures through which she passed, or such
+wonderful dancing. The chimney was built of logs and clay, forming
+terraces. As if it was no longer possible for her to stay on the ground
+she darted from the bench-end to the lowest log, and stepped on up as
+fearlessly as a thing of air, until her head touched the roof. Monsieur
+Grignon played like mad, and the others clapped their hands. While she
+poised so I sat up to watch her, and she noticed me for the first time
+by firelight.
+
+"Look at that boy--he has been hurt--the blood is running down his
+cheek!" she cried. "I thought he was an Indian--and he is white!"
+
+She came down as lightly as she had gone up, and caused me to be haled
+against my will to the middle of a bench. I wanted the women to leave me
+alone, and told them my head had been broken two days before, and was
+nearly well. The mothers, too keen to wash and bandage to let me escape,
+opened a saddle pack and tore good linen.
+
+George Croghan stood by the chimney, slim and tall and handsome. His
+head and face were long, his hair was of a sunny color, and his mouth
+corners were shrewd and good natured. I liked him the moment I saw him.
+Younger in years than I, he was older in wit and manly carriage. While
+he looked on it was hard to have Madame Tank seize my head in her hands
+and examine my eyebrow. She next took my wrists, and not satisfied,
+stripped up the right sleeve and exposed a crescent-shaped scar, one of
+the rare vaccination marks of those days. I did not know what it was.
+Her animated dark eyes drew the brows together so that a pucker came
+between them. I looked at Croghan, and wanted to exclaim--"Help
+yourself! Anybody may handle me!"
+
+"Ursule Grignon!" she said sharply, and Madame Grignon answered,
+
+"Eh, what, Katarina?"
+
+"This is the boy."
+
+"But what boy?"
+
+"The boy I saw on the ship."
+
+"The one who was sent to America--"
+
+Madame Tank put up her hand, and the other stopped.
+
+"But that was a child," Madame Grignon then objected.
+
+"Nine years ago. He would be about eighteen now."
+
+"How old are you?" they both put to me.
+
+Remembering what my father had told Doctor Chantry, I was obliged to own
+that I was about eighteen. Annabel de Chaumont sat on the lowest log of
+the chimney with her feet on a bench, and her chin in her hand,
+interested to the point of silence. Something in her eyes made it very
+galling to be overhauled and have my blemishes enumerated before her and
+Croghan. What had uplifted me to Madame de Ferrier's recognition now
+mocked, and I found it hard to submit. It would not go well with the
+next stranger who declared he knew me by my scars.
+
+"What do they call you in this country?" inquired Madame Tank.
+
+I said my name was Lazarre Williams.
+
+"It is not!" she said in an undertone, shaking her head.
+
+I made bold to ask with some warmth what my name was then, and she
+whispered--"Poor child!"
+
+It seemed that I was to be pitied in any case. In dim self-knowledge I
+saw that the core of my resentment was her treating me with
+commiseration. Madame de Ferrier had not treated me so.
+
+"You live among the Indians?" Madame Tank resumed.
+
+The fact was evident.
+
+"Have they been kind to you?"
+
+I said they had.
+
+Madame Tank's young daughter edged near her and inquired in a whisper,
+
+"Who is he, mother?"
+
+"Hush!" answered Madame Tank.
+
+The head of the party laid down his violin and bow, and explained to us:
+
+"Madame Tank was maid of honor to the queen of Holland, before reverses
+overtook her. She knows court secrets."
+
+"But she might at least tell us," coaxed Annabel, "if this Mohawk is a
+Dutchman."
+
+Madame Tank said nothing.
+
+"What could happen in the court of Holland? The Dutch are slow coaches.
+I saw the Van Rensselaers once, near Albany, riding in a wagon with
+straw under their feet, on common chairs, the old Patroon himself
+driving. This boy is some off-scouring."
+
+"He outranks you, mademoiselle," retorted Madame Tank.
+
+"That's what I wanted to find out," said Annabel.
+
+I kept half an eye on Croghan to see what he thought of all this woman
+talk. For you cannot help being more dominated by the opinion of your
+contemporaries than by that of the fore-running or following generation.
+He held his countenance in excellent command, and did not meddle even by
+a word. You could be sure, however, that he was no credulous person who
+accepted everything that was said to him.
+
+Madame Tank looked into the reddened fireplace, and began to speak, but
+hesitated. The whole thing was weird, like a dream resulting from the
+cut on my head: the strange white faces; the camp stuff and saddlebags
+unpacked from horses; the light on the coarse floor; the children
+listening as to a ghost story; Mademoiselle de Chaumont presiding over
+it all. The cabin had an arched roof and no loft. The top was full of
+shadows.
+
+"If you are the boy I take you to be," Madame Tank finally said, sinking
+her voice, "you may find you have enemies."
+
+"If I am the boy you take me to be, madame, who am I?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I wish I had not spoken at all. To tell you anything more would only
+plunge you into trouble. You are better off to be as you are, than to
+know the truth and suffer from it. Besides, I may be mistaken. And I am
+certainly too helpless myself to be of any use to you. This much I will
+say: when you are older, if things occur that make it necessary for you
+to know what I know, send a letter to me, and I will write it down."
+
+With delicacy Monsieur Grignon began to play a whisper of a tune on his
+violin. I did not know what she meant by a letter, though I understood
+her. Madame Tank spoke the language as well as anybody. I thought then,
+as idiom after idiom rushed back on my memory, that it was an universal
+language, with the exception of Iroquois and English.
+
+"We are going to a place called Green Bay, in the Northwest Territory.
+Remember the name: Green Bay. It is in the Wisconsin country."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Dawn found me lying wide awake with my head on a saddle. I slipped out
+into the dewy half light.
+
+That was the first time I ever thought about the mountains. They seemed
+to be newly created, standing up with streamers of mist torn and
+floating across their breasts. The winding cliff-bound lake was like a
+gorge of smoke. I felt as if I had reared upon my hind feet, lifting my
+face from the ground to discover there was a God. Some of the prayers
+our priest had industriously beaten into my head, began to repeat
+themselves. In a twinkling I was a child, lonely in the universe,
+separated from my dim old life, instinct with growth, yet ignorant of my
+own needs.
+
+What Madame de Ferrier and Madame Tank had said influenced me less than
+the intense life of my roused activities.
+
+It was mid forenoon by the sun when I reached our lodges, and sat down
+fagged outside my father's door, to think longer before I entered.
+Hunger was the principal sensation, though we had eaten in the cabin the
+night before, and the Indian life inures a man to fasting when he cannot
+come by food. I heard Skenedonk talking to my father and mother in our
+cabin. The village was empty; children and women, hunters and fishermen
+having scattered to woods and waters.
+
+"He ought to learn books," said Skenedonk. "Money is sent you every year
+to be spent upon him: yet you spend nothing upon him."
+
+"What has he needed?" said my father.
+
+"He needs much now. He needs American clothes. He wept at the sight of a
+book. God has removed the touch since he plunged in the water."
+
+"You would make a fool of him," said my father. "He was gone from the
+lodge this morning. You taught him an evil path when you carried him
+off."
+
+"It is a natural path for him: he will go to his own. I stayed and
+talked with De Chaumont, and I bring you an offer. De Chaumont will take
+Lazarre into his house, and have him taught all that a white boy should
+know. You will pay the cost. If you don't, De Chaumont will look into
+this annuity of which you give no account."
+
+"I have never been asked to give account. Could Lazarre learn anything?
+The priest has sat over him. He had food and clothing like my own."
+
+"That is true. But he is changed. Marianne will let him go."
+
+"The strange boy may go," said my mother. "But none of my own children
+shall leave us to be educated."
+
+I got up and went into the cabin. All three knew I had heard, and they
+waited in silence while I approached my mother and put my hands on her
+shoulders. There was no tenderness between us, but she had fostered me.
+The small dark eyes in her copper face, and her shapeless body, were
+associated with winters and summers stretching to a vanishing point.
+
+"Mother," I said, "is it true that I am not your son?"
+
+She made no answer.
+
+"Is it true that the chief is not my father?"
+
+She made no answer.
+
+"Who sends money to be spent on me every year?"
+
+Still she made no answer.
+
+"If I am not your son, whose son am I?"
+
+In the silence I turned to Skenedonk.
+
+"Isn't my name Lazarre Williams, Skenedonk?"
+
+"You are called Lazarre Williams."
+
+"A woman told me last night that it was not my name. Everyone denies me.
+No one owns me and tells whose child I am. Wasn't I born at St. Regis?"
+
+"If you were, there is no record of your birth on the register. The
+chief's other children have their births recorded."
+
+I turned to my father. The desolation of being cut off and left with
+nothing but the guesses of strangers overcame me. I sobbed so the hoarse
+choke echoed in the cabin. Skenedonk opened his arms, and my father and
+mother let me lean on the Oneida's shoulder.
+
+I have thought since that they resented with stoical pain his taking
+their white son from them. They both stood severely reserved, passively
+loosening the filial bond.
+
+All the business of life was suspended, as when there is death in the
+lodge. Skenedonk and I sat down together on a bunk.
+
+"Lazarre," my father spoke, "do you want to be educated?"
+
+The things we pine for in this world are often thrust upon us in a way
+to choke us. I had tramped miles, storming for the privileges that had
+made George Croghan what he was. Fate instantly picked me up from
+unendurable conditions to set me down where I could grow, and I squirmed
+with recoil from the shock.
+
+I felt crowded over the edge of a cliff and about to drop into a valley
+of rainbows.
+
+"Do you want to live in De Chaumont's house and learn his ways?"
+
+My father and mother had been silent when I questioned them. It was my
+turn to be silent.
+
+"Or would you rather stay as you are?"
+
+"No, father," I answered, "I want to go."
+
+The camp had never been dearer. I walked among the Indian children when
+the evening fires were lighted, and the children looked at me curiously
+as at an alien. Already my people had cut me off from them.
+
+"What I learn I will come back and teach you," I told the young men and
+women of my own age. They laughed.
+
+"You are a fool, Lazarre. There is a good home for you at St. Regis. If
+you fall sick in De Chaumont's house who will care?"
+
+"Skenedonk is my friend," I answered.
+
+"Skenedonk would not stay where he is tying you. When the lake freezes
+you will be mad for snowshoes and a sight of the St. Lawrence."
+
+"Perhaps so. But we are not made alike. Do not forget me."
+
+They gave me belts and garters, and I distributed among them all my
+Indian property. Then, as if to work a charm which should keep me from
+breaking through the circle, they joined hands and danced around me. I
+went to every cabin, half ashamed of my desertion, yet unspeakably
+craving a blessing. The old people variously commented on the measure,
+their wise eyes seeing the change in one who had been a child rather
+than a young man among them.
+
+If the wrench from the village was hard, the induction into the manor
+was harder. Skenedonk took me in his boat, skirting the long strip of
+mountainous shore which separated us from De Chaumont.
+
+He told me De Chaumont would permit my father to pay no more than my
+exact reckoning.
+
+"Do you know who sends the money?" I inquired.
+
+The Oneida did not know. It came through an agent in New York.
+
+"You are ten years older than I am. You must remember very well when I
+was born."
+
+"How can that be?" answered Skenedonk. "Nobody in the tribe knows when
+you were born."
+
+"Are children not like the young of other creatures? Where did I come
+from?"
+
+"You came to the tribe with a man, and Chief Williams adopted you."
+
+"Did you see the man?"
+
+"No. I was on the other side of the ocean, in France."
+
+"Who saw him?"
+
+"None of our people. But it is very well known. If you had noticed
+anything you would have heard the story long ago."
+
+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 assured 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 massive 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 cluster 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 gratitude. 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 assembly 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.
+
+I said my father told me Bonaparte was a great soldier, and begged to
+know if he had been deceived.
+
+"Oh!" Miss Chantry responded in a tone which slighted Thomas Williams.
+"Well! I will tell you facts. Napoleon Bonaparte is one of the worst and
+most dangerous men that ever lived. He sets the world by the ears, and
+carries war into every country of Europe. That is his youngest brother
+yonder--that superfine gallant, in the long-tailed white silk coat down
+to his heels, and white small-clothes, with diamond buckles in his
+shoes, and grand lace stock and ruffles. Jerome Bonaparte spent last
+winter in Baltimore; and they say he is traveling in the north now to
+forget a charming American that Napoleon will not let him marry. He has
+got his name in the newspapers of the day, and so has the young lady.
+The French consul warned her officially. For Jerome Bonaparte may be
+made a little king, with other relations of your great soldier."
+
+The young man who might be made a little king was not as large as I was
+myself, and had a delicate and womanish cut of countenance. I said he
+was not fit for a king, and Miss Chantry retorted that neither was
+Napoleon Bonaparte fit for an emperor.
+
+"What is an emperor?" I inquired.
+
+"A chief over kings," Doctor Chantry put in. "Bonaparte is a conqueror
+and can set kings over the countries he has conquered."
+
+I said that was the proper thing to do. Miss Chantry glared at me. She
+had weak hair like her brother, but her eyes were a piercing blue, and
+the angles of her jaws were sharply marked.
+
+Meditating on things outside of my experience I desired to know what the
+white silk man had done.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Then why should the emperor give him a kingdom?"
+
+"Because he is the emperor's brother."
+
+"But he ought to do something himself," I insisted. "It is not enough to
+accept a chief's place. He cannot hold it if he is not fit."
+
+"So the poor Bourbons found. But they were not upstarts at any rate. I
+hope I shall live to see them restored."
+
+Here was another opportunity to inform myself. I asked Miss Chantry who
+the Bourbons were.
+
+"They are the rightful kings of France."
+
+"Why do they let Bonaparte and his brothers take their place?"
+
+Doctor Chantry turned from the promenaders below and, with slow and
+careful speech, gave me my first lesson in history.
+
+"There was a great civil war in France called the Revolution, when part
+of the people ran mad to kill the other part. They cut off the heads of
+the king and queen, and shut up the two royal children in prison. The
+dauphin died."
+
+"What is a dauphin?"
+
+"The heir to the throne of France was called the dauphin."
+
+"Was he the king's son?"
+
+"The king's eldest son."
+
+"If he had brothers were they dauphins too?"
+
+"No. He alone was the dauphin. The last dauphin of France had no living
+brothers. He had only a sister."
+
+"You said the dauphin died."
+
+"In a prison called the Temple, in Paris."
+
+"Was the Temple a prison?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Madame de Ferrier had said her father and some other person did not
+believe the dauphin died in the Temple.
+
+"Suppose he was alive?" I hazarded.
+
+"Suppose who was alive?" said Miss Chantry.
+
+"The dauphin."
+
+"He isn't."
+
+"Did all the people believe he was dead?"
+
+"They didn't care whether he was dead or not. They went on killing one
+another until this man Bonaparte put himself at the head of the army and
+got the upper hand of them. The French are all fire and tow, and the man
+who can stamp on them is their idol."
+
+"You said you hoped you would live to see the Bourbons restored. Dead
+people cannot be restored."
+
+"Oh, the Bourbons are not all dead. The king of France had brothers. The
+elder one of these would be king now if the Bourbons came back to the
+throne."
+
+"But he would not be king if the dauphin lived?"
+
+"No," said Miss Chantry, leaning back indifferently.
+
+My head felt confused, throbbing with the dull ache of healing. I
+supported it, resting my elbow on the railing.
+
+The music, under cover of which we had talked, made one of its pauses.
+Annabel de Chaumont looked up at us, allowing the gentleman in the
+long-tailed silk coat to lead her toward the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Miss Chantry exclaimed, and her face stiffened with an expression which
+I have since learned to know as the fear of dignitaries; experienced
+even by people who profess to despise the dignitaries. Mademoiselle de
+Chaumont shook frizzes around her face, and lifted the scant dress from
+her satin shod feet as she mounted the stairs. Without approaching us
+she sat down on the top step of the landing with young Bonaparte, and
+beckoned to me.
+
+I went at her bidding and stood by the rail.
+
+"Prince Jerome Bonaparte wants to see you. I have told him about the
+bear pen, and Madame Tank, and the mysterious marks on you, and what she
+said about your rank."
+
+I must have frowned, for the young gentleman made a laughing sign to me
+that he did not take Annabel seriously. He had an amiable face, and
+accepted me as one of the oddities of the country.
+
+"What fun," said Annabel, "to introduce a prince of the empire to a
+prince of the woods!"
+
+"What do you think of your brother?" I inquired.
+
+He looked astonished and raised his eyebrows.
+
+"I suppose you mean the emperor?"
+
+I told him I did.
+
+"If you want my candid opinion," his eyes twinkled, and he linked his
+hands around his white satin knees, "I think my brother rules his family
+with a rod of iron."
+
+"What will you do," I continued, "when your family are turned out?"
+
+"My faith!" said Annabel, "this in a house favorable to the Empire!"
+
+"A very natural question," said Jerome. "I have often asked myself the
+same thing."
+
+"The king of France," I argued, "and all the Bourbons were turned out.
+Why shouldn't the Bonapartes be?"
+
+"Why shouldn't they, indeed!" responded Jerome. "My mother insists they
+will be. But I wouldn't be the man who undertakes to turn out the
+emperor."
+
+"What is he like?"
+
+"Impossible to describe him."
+
+"Is he no larger than you?"
+
+Annabel gurgled aloud.
+
+"He is not as large."
+
+"Yet he is a great soldier?"
+
+"A great soldier. And he is adored by the French."
+
+"The French," I quoted, "are all fire and tow."
+
+"Thank you!" said Annabel, pulling out her light frizzes.
+
+"You seem interested in the political situation," remarked Prince
+Jerome.
+
+I did not know what he meant by the political situation, but told him I
+had just heard about the Bonapartes.
+
+"Where have you lived?" he laughed.
+
+I told him it didn't matter where people lived; it all depended on
+whether they understood or not.
+
+"What a sage!--I think I'm one of the people who will never be able to
+understand," said Jerome.
+
+I said he did not look as if he had been idiotic, and both he and
+Mademoiselle de Chaumont laughed.
+
+"Monsieur"--
+
+"Lazarre Williams," supplemented Annabel.
+
+"Monsieur Lazarre Williams, whatever your lot in life, you will have one
+advantage over me; you will be an American citizen."
+
+"Haven't I that doleful advantage myself?" mourned Annabel. "A Baltimore
+convent, an English governess--a father that may never go back to
+France!"
+
+"Mademoiselle, all advantages of nationality, of person, of mind, of
+heart, are yours!"
+
+So tipping the interview with a compliment he rose up, and Annabel rose
+also, making him a deep courtesy, and giving him her hand to be led back
+to the floor. He kissed her white forefinger, and bowed to me.
+
+"You have suggested some interesting thoughts, monsieur prince of the
+woods. Perhaps you may yet take your turn on the throne of France. What
+would you do in that case?"
+
+"I would make the people behave themselves if I had to grind them to
+powder."
+
+"Now there spoke old Louis XIV!" laughed young Jerome Bonaparte. We both
+bowed, and he passed down with Annabel into the hall.
+
+I did not know what made Madame de Ferrier watch me from her distant
+place with widened eyes.
+
+Miss Chantry spoke shrilly to her brother behind me.
+
+"You will never be able to do anything with a lad who thrusts himself
+forward like that! He has no sense of fitness!--standing there and
+facing down the brother of a crowned head!--bad as the head is. Of
+course Mademoiselle Annabel set him on; she loves to make people
+ridiculous!"
+
+I walked downstairs after Prince Jerome, threaded a way among gazing
+dancers, and left the hall, stung in my pride.
+
+We do strangely expand and contract in vital force and reach of vision.
+I wanted to put the lake--the world itself--between me and that
+glittering company. The edge of a ball-room and the society of men in
+silks and satins, and of bewitching women, were not intended for me.
+
+Homesickness like physical pain came over me for my old haunts. They
+were newly recognized as beloved. I had raged against them when
+comparing myself to Croghan. But now I thought of the evening camp fire,
+and hunting-stories, of the very dogs that licked my hand; of St. Regis,
+and my loft bed, of snowshoes, and the blue northern river, longing for
+them as the young Mohawks said I should long. Tom betwixt two natures,
+the white man's and the Indian's, I flung a boat out into the water and
+started to go home faster than I had come away. The slowness of a boat's
+progress, pushed by the silly motion of oars, which have not the nice
+discrimination of a paddle, impressed me as I put the miles behind.
+
+When the camp light shone through trees it must have been close to
+midnight, and my people had finished their celebration of the corn
+dance. An odor of sweet roasted ears dragged out of hot ashes reached
+the poor outsider. Even the dogs were too busy to nose me out. I slunk
+as close as I dared and drew myself up a tree, lying stretched with arms
+and legs around a limb.
+
+They would have admitted me to the feast, but as a guest. I had no
+longer a place of my own, either here or there. It was like coming back
+after death, to realize that you were unmissed. The camp was full of
+happiness and laughter. Young men chased the young maids, who ran
+squealing with merriment. My father, Thomas Williams, and my mother,
+Marianne, sat among the elders tranquil and satisfied. They were
+ignorant Indians; but I had no other parents. Skenedonk could be seen,
+laughing at the young Mohawks.
+
+If there was an oval faced mother in my past, who had read to me from
+the missal, I wanted her. If, as Madame Tank said, I outranked De
+Chaumont's daughter, I wanted my rank. It was necessary for me to have
+something of my own: to have love from somebody!
+
+Collapsed and dejected, I crept down the tree and back to the life that
+was now forced upon me whether I wished to continue it or not. Belonging
+nowhere, I remembered my refuge in the new world of books.
+
+Lying stretched in the boat with oars shipped, drifting and turning on
+the crooked lake, I took exact stock of my position in the world, and
+marked out my future.
+
+These things were known:
+
+I was not an Indian.
+
+I had been adopted into the family of Chief Williams.
+
+Money was sent through an agent in New York for my support and
+education.
+
+There were scars on my wrists, ankles, arm and eyebrow.
+
+These scars identified me in Madame de Ferrier's mind and Madame Tank's
+mind as a person from the other side of the world.
+
+I had formerly been deadened in mind.
+
+I was now keenly alive.
+
+These things were not known:
+
+Who I was.
+
+Who sent money for my support and education.
+
+How I became scarred.
+
+What man had placed me among the Indians.
+
+For the future I bound myself with three laws:
+
+To leave alone the puzzle of my past.
+
+To study with all my might and strength.
+
+When I was grown and educated, to come back to my adopted people, the
+Iroquois, draw them to some place where they could thrive, and by
+training and education make them an empire, and myself their leader.
+
+The pale-skin's loathing of the red race had not then entered my
+imagination. I said in conclusion:
+
+"Indians have taken care of me; they shall be my brothers."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+The zigzag track of the boat represented a rift widening between me and
+my past. I sat up and took the oars, feeling older and stronger.
+
+It was primitive man, riding between the highlands, uncumbered, free to
+grasp what was before him.
+
+De Chaumont did not believe in and was indifferent to the waif whom his
+position of great seigneur obliged him to protect. What did I care? I
+had been hidden among the Indians by kindred or guardians humane enough
+not to leave me destitute. They should not trouble my thoughts, and
+neither--I told myself like an Indian--should the imaginings of women.
+
+A boy minds no labor in following his caprices. The long starlit pull I
+reckoned as nothing; and slipped to my room when daylight was beginning
+to surprise the dancers.
+
+It was so easy to avoid people in the spaciousness of De Chaumont's
+manor that I did not again see the young Bonaparte nor any of the guests
+except Croghan. They slept all the following day, and the third day
+separated. Croghan found my room before leaving with his party, and we
+talked as well as we could, and shook hands at parting.
+
+The impressions of that first year stay in my mind as I have heard the
+impressions of childhood remain. It was perhaps a kind of brief
+childhood, swift in its changes, and running parallel with the
+development of youth.
+
+My measure being sent to New York by De Chaumont, I had a complete new
+outfit in clothes; coat, waistcoat, and small-clothes, neckwear,
+ruffles, and shirts, buckle shoes, stockings of mild yarn for cold
+weather, and thread stockings. Like most of the things for which we
+yearn, when I got them I did not like them as well as the Indian
+garments they obliged me to shed.
+
+Skenedonk came to see me nearly every day, and sat still as long as he
+could while I toiled at books. I did not tell him how nearly I had
+disgraced us both by running secretly away to camp. So I was able to go
+back and pay visits with dignity and be taken seriously, instead of
+encountering the ridicule that falls upon retreat.
+
+My father was neither pleased nor displeased. He paid my accounts
+exactly, before the camp broke up for the winter, making Skenedonk his
+agent. My mother Marianne offered me food as she would have offered it
+to Count de Chaumont; and I ate it, sitting on a mat as a guest. Our
+children, particularly the elder ones, looked me over with gravity, and
+refrained from saying anything about my clothes.
+
+Our Iroquois went north before snow flew, and the cabins stood empty,
+leaves drifting through fire-holes in the bark thatch.
+
+There have been students greedy of knowledge. I seemed hollow with the
+fasting of a lifetime. My master at first tried to bind me to times; he
+had never encountered so boundless an appetite. As soon as I woke in the
+morning I reached for a book, and as days became darker, for tinder to
+light a candle. I studied incessantly, dashing out at intervals to lake
+or woods, and returning after wild activity, with increased zest to the
+printed world. My mind appeared to resume a faculty it had suspended,
+and to resume with incredible power. Magnetized by books, I cared for
+nothing else. That first winter I gained hold on English and Latin, on
+French reading, mathematics, geography, and history. My master was an
+Oxford man, and when roused from dawdling, a scholar. He grew foolishly
+proud and fond of what he called my prodigious advance.
+
+De Chaumont's library was a luscious field, and Doctor Chantry was
+permitted to turn me loose in it, so that the books were almost like my
+own. I carried them around hid in my breast; my coat-skirts were
+weighted with books. There were Plutarch's Lives in the old French of
+Amyot, over which I labored; a French translation of Homer; Corneille's
+tragedies; Rochefoucauld; Montaigne's essays, in ten volumes; Thomson's
+poems, and Chesterfield's letters, in English; the life of Petrarch;
+three volumes of Montesquieu's works; and a Bible; which I found greatly
+to my taste. It was a wide and catholic taste.
+
+De Chaumont spent nearly all that autumn and winter in Castorland,
+where he was building his new manor and founding his settlement called
+Le Rayville. As soon as I became a member of his household his
+patriarchal kindness was extended to me, though he regarded me simply as
+an ambitious half-breed.
+
+The strong place which he had built for his first holding in the
+wilderness thus grew into a cloistered school for me. It has vanished
+from the spot where it stood, but I shall forever see it between lake
+and forest.
+
+Annabel de Chaumont openly hated the isolation of the place, and was
+happy only when she could fill it with guests. But Madame de Ferrier
+evidently loved it, remaining there with Paul and Ernestine. Sometimes I
+did not see her for days together. But Mademoiselle de Chaumont, before
+her departure to her Baltimore convent for the winter, amused herself
+with my education. She brought me an old book of etiquette in which
+young gentlemen were admonished not to lick their fingers or crack bones
+with their teeth at table. Nobody else being at hand she befooled with
+Doctor Chantry and me, and I saw for the first time, with surprise, an
+old man's infatuation with a poppet.
+
+It was this foolishness of her brother's which Miss Chantry could not
+forgive De Chaumont's daughter. She was incessant in her condemnation,
+yet unmistakably fond in her English way of the creature she condemned.
+Annabel loved to drag my poor master in flowery chains before his
+relative. She would make wreaths of crimson leaves for his bald head,
+and exhibit him grinning like a weak-eyed Bacchus. Once he sat doting
+beside her at twilight on a bench of the wide gallery while his sister,
+near by, kept guard over their talk. I passed them, coming back from my
+tramp, with a glowing branch in my hand. For having set my teeth in the
+scarlet tart udder of a sumach, all frosted with delicate fretwork, I
+could not resist bringing away some of its color.
+
+"Did you get that for me?" called Annabel. I mounted the steps to give
+it to her, and she said, "Thank you, Lazarre Williams. Every day you
+learn some pretty new trick. Doctor Chantry has not brought me anything
+from the woods in a long while."
+
+Doctor Chantry stirred his gouty feet and looked hopelessly out at the
+landscape.
+
+"Sit here by your dearest Annabel," said Mademoiselle de Chaumont.
+
+Her governess breathed the usual sigh of disgust.
+
+I sat by my dearest Annabel, anxious to light my candle and open my
+books. She shook the frizzes around her cheeks and buried her hands
+under the scarlet branch in her lap.
+
+"Do you know, Lazarre Williams, I have to leave you?"
+
+I said I was sorry to hear it.
+
+"Yes, I have to go back to my convent, and drag poor Miss Chantry with
+me, though she is a heretic and bates the forms of our religion. But she
+has to submit, and so do I, because my father will have nobody but an
+English governess."
+
+"Mademoiselle," spoke Miss Chantry, "I would suggest that you sit on a
+chair by yourself."
+
+"What, on one of those little crowded chairs?" said Annabel.
+
+She reached out her sly hand for mine and drew it under cover of the
+sumach branch.
+
+"I have been thinking about your rank a great deal, Lazarre Williams,
+and wondering what it is."
+
+"If you thought more about your own it would be better," said Miss
+Chantry.
+
+"We are Americans here," said Annabel. "All are equal, and some are
+free. I am only equal. Must your dearest Annabel obey you about the
+chair, Miss Chantry?"
+
+"I said I would suggest that you sit on a chair by yourself."
+
+"I will, dear. You know I always follow your suggestions."
+
+I felt the hand that held mine tighten its grip in a despairing squeeze.
+Annabel suddenly raised the branch high above her head with both arms,
+and displayed Doctor Chantry's hand and mine clasped tenderly in her
+lap. She laughed until even Miss Chantry was infected, and the doctor
+tittered and wiped his eyes.
+
+"Watch your brother, Miss Chantry--don't watch me! You thought he was
+squeezing my hand--and he thought so too! Lazarre Williams is just out
+of the woods and doesn't know any better. But Doctor Chantry--he is
+older than my father!"
+
+"We wished to oblige you, mademoiselle," I said. But the poor English
+gentleman tittered on in helpless admiration. He told me privately--"I
+never saw another girl like her. So full of spirits, and so frank!"
+
+Doctor Chantry did not wear his disfiguring horn spectacles when Annabel
+was near. He wrote a great deal of poetry while the blow of parting from
+her was hanging over him, and read it to me of mornings, deprecating my
+voiceless contempt. I would hear him quarreling with a servant in the
+hall; for the slightest variation in his comfort engendered rages in him
+that were laughable. Then he entered, red-nosed, red-eyed, and
+bloodlessly shivering, with a piece of paper covered by innumerable
+small characters.
+
+"Good morning, my lad," he would say.
+
+"Good morning, Doctor Chantry," I answered.
+
+"Here are a few little stanzas which I have just set down. If you have
+no objection I will read them."
+
+I must have listened like a trapped bear, sitting up and longing to get
+at him, for he usually finished humbly, folding his paper and putting it
+away in his breast. There was reason to believe that he spent valuable
+hours copying all these verses for Annabel de Chaumont. But there is no
+evidence that she carried them with her when she and her governess
+departed in a great coach all gilt and padding. Servants and a wagon
+load of baggage and supplies accompanied De Chaumont's daughter on the
+long journey to her Baltimore convent.
+
+Shaking in every nerve and pale as a sheet, my poor master watched her
+out of sight. He said he should not see his sister again until spring;
+and added that he was a fool, but when a creature of light came across
+his path he could not choose but worship. His affections had been
+blighted by a disappointment in youth, but he had thought he might at
+least bask in passing sunshine, though fated to unhappiness. I was
+ashamed to look at him, or to give any sign of overhearing his weakness,
+and exulted mightily in my youth, despising the enchantments of a woman.
+Madame de Ferrier watched the departure from another side of the
+gallery, and did not witness my poor master's breakdown. She came and
+talked to him, and took more notice of him than I had ever seen her take
+before.
+
+In a day or two he was quite himself, plodding at the lessons, suddenly
+furious at the servants, and giving me fretful histories of his wrongs
+when brandy and water were not put by his bedside at night, or a
+warming-pan was not passed between his sheets.
+
+About this time I began to know without being taught and without
+expressing it in words, that there is a natural law of environment which
+makes us grow like the company we keep. During the first six months of
+my stay in De Chaumont's house Doctor Chantry was my sole companion. I
+looked anxiously into the glass on my dressing-table, dreading to see a
+reflection of his pettiness. I saw a face with large features, eager in
+expression. The eyes were hazel, and bluish around the iris rims, the
+nose aquiline, the chin full, the head high, and round templed. The hair
+was sunny and wavy, not dark and tight fitting like that of my Indian
+father and mother. There would be always a scar across my eyebrow. I
+noticed that the lobe of my ear was not deeply divided from my head, but
+fashioned close to it in triangular snugness, though I could not have
+said so. Regular life and abundant food, and the drive of purpose, were
+developing all my parts. I took childish pleasure in watching my Indian
+boyhood go, and vital force mounting every hour.
+
+Time passed without marking until January. The New England Thanksgiving
+we had not then heard of; and Christmas was a holy day of the church. On
+a January afternoon Madame de Ferrier sent Ernestine to say that she
+wished to see Doctor Chantry and me.
+
+My master was asleep by the fire in an armchair. I looked at his
+disabled feet, and told Ernestine I would go with her alone. She led me
+to a wing of the house.
+
+Even an Indian boy could see through Annabel de Chaumont. But who might
+fathom Madame de Ferrier? Every time I saw her, and that was seldom,
+some change made her another Madame de Ferrier, as if she were a
+thousand women in one. I saw her first a white clad spirit, who stood by
+my head when I awoke; next, a lady who rose up and bowed to me; then a
+beauty among dancers; afterwards, a little girl running across the turf,
+or a kind woman speaking to my master. Often she was a distant figure,
+coming and going with Paul and Ernestine in De Chaumont's woods. If we
+encountered, she always said, "Good day, monsieur," and I answered "Good
+day, madame."
+
+I had my meals alone with Doctor Chantry, and never questioned this
+custom, from the day I entered the house. De Chaumont's chief, who was
+over the other servants, and had come with him from his chateau near
+Blois, waited upon me, while Doctor Chantry was served by another man
+named Jean. My master fretted at Jean. The older servant paid no
+attention to that.
+
+Madame de Ferrier and I had lived six months under the same roof as
+strangers. Consciousness plowed such a direct furrow in front of me that
+I saw little on either side of it. She was a name, that I found written
+in the front of the missal, and copied over and over down foolscap paper
+in my practice of script:
+
+     "Eagle Madeleine Marie de Ferrier."
+     "Eagle Madeleine Marie de Ferrier."
+
+She stood in her sitting room, which looked upon the lake, and before a
+word passed between us I saw she was unlike any of her former selves.
+Her features were sharpened and whitened. She looked beyond me with gray
+colored eyes, and held her lips apart.
+
+"I have news. The Indian brought me this letter from Albany."
+
+I could not help glancing curiously at the sheet in her hand, spotted on
+the back with broken red wafers. It was the first letter I had ever
+seen. Doctor Chantry told me he received but one during the winter from
+his sister, and paid two Spanish reals in postage for it, besides a fee
+and some food and whisky to the Indian who made the journey to deliver
+such parcels. It was a trying and an important experience to receive a
+letter. I was surprised that Madame Tank had recommended my sending one
+into the Wisconsin country.
+
+"Count de Chaumont is gone; and I must have advice."
+
+"Madame," I said, "Doctor Chantry was asleep, but I will wake him and
+bring him here."
+
+"No. I will tell you. Monsieur, my Cousin Philippe is dead."
+
+It might have shocked me more if I had known she had a Cousin Philippe.
+I said stupidly:
+
+"Is he?"
+
+"Cousin Philippe was my husband, you understand."
+
+"Madame, are you married?"
+
+"Of course!" she exclaimed. And I confessed to myself that in no other
+way could Paul be accounted for.
+
+"But you are here alone?"
+
+Two large tears ran down her face.
+
+"You should understand the De Ferriers are poor, monsieur, unless
+something can be saved from our estates that the Bonapartes have given
+away. Cousin Philippe went to see if we could recover any part of them.
+Count de Chaumont thought it a favorable time. But he was too old for
+such a journey; and the disappointments at the end of it."
+
+"Old! Was he old, madame?"
+
+"Almost as old as my father."
+
+"But you are very young."
+
+"I was only thirteen when my father on his deathbed married me to Cousin
+Philippe. We were the last of our family. Now Cousin Philippe is dead
+and Paul and I are orphans!"
+
+She felt her loss as Paul might have felt his. He was gurgling at
+Ernestine's knee in the next room.
+
+"I want advice," she said; and I stood ready to give it, as a man always
+is; the more positively because I knew nothing of the world.
+
+"Cousin Philippe said I must go to France, for Paul's sake, and appeal
+myself to the empress, who has great influence over the emperor. His
+command was to go at once."
+
+"Madame, you cannot go in midwinter."
+
+"Must I go at all?" she cried out passionately. "Why don't you tell me a
+De Ferrier shall not crawl the earth before a Bonaparte! You--of all
+men! We are poor and exiles because we were royalists--are royalists--we
+always shall be royalists! I would rather make a wood-chopper of Paul
+than a serf to this Napoleon!"
+
+She checked herself, and motioned to a chair.
+
+"Sit down, monsieur. Pardon me that I have kept you standing."
+
+I placed the chair for her, but she declined it, and we continued to
+face each other.
+
+"Madame," I said, "you seem to blame me for something. What have I
+done?"
+
+"Nothing, monsieur."
+
+"I will now ask your advice. What do you want me to do that I have not
+done?"
+
+"Monsieur, you are doing exactly what I want you to do."
+
+"Then you are not displeased with me?"
+
+"I am more pleased with you every time I see you. Your advice is good. I
+cannot go in midwinter."
+
+"Are you sure your cousin wanted you to make this journey?"
+
+"The notary says so in this letter. Philippe died in the farm-house of
+one of our peasants, and the new masters could not refuse him burial in
+the church where De Ferriers have lain for hundreds of years. He was
+more fortunate than my father."
+
+This interview with Madame de Ferrier in which I cut so poor a figure,
+singularly influenced me. It made me restless, as if something had
+entered my blood. In January the real spring begins, for then sap
+starts, and the lichens seem to quicken. I felt I was young, and rose up
+against lessons all day long and part of the night. I rushed in haste to
+the woods or the frozen lake, and wanted to do mighty deeds without
+knowing what to undertake. More than anything else I wanted friends of
+my own age. To see Doctor Chantry dozing and hear him grumbling, no
+longer remained endurable; for he reminded me that my glad days were due
+and I was not receiving them. Worse than that, instead of proving
+grateful for all his services, I became intolerant of his opinion.
+
+"De Chaumont will marry her," he said when he heard of Madame de
+Ferrier's widowhood. "She will never be obliged to sue to the
+Bonapartes. The count is as fond of her as he is of his daughter."
+
+"Must a woman marry a succession of fathers?"--I wanted to know.
+
+My master pointed out that the count was a very well favored and
+youthful looking man. His marriage to Madame de Ferrier became even more
+distasteful. She and her poppet were complete by themselves. Wedding her
+to any one was casting indignity upon her.
+
+Annabel de Chaumont was a countess and Madame de Ferrier was a marquise.
+These names, I understood, meant that they were ladies to be served and
+protected. De Chaumont's daughter was served and protected, and as far
+as he was allowed to do so, he served and protected the daughter of his
+fellow countryman.
+
+"But the pride of emigrés," Doctor Chantry said, "was an old story in
+the De Chaumont household. There were some Saint-Michels who lived in a
+cabin, strictly on their own means, refusing the count's help, yet they
+had followed him to Le Rayville in Castorland. Madame de Ferrier lived
+where her husband had placed her, in a wing of De Chaumont's house,
+refusing to be waited on by anybody but Ernestine, paying what her
+keeping cost; when she was a welcome guest."
+
+My master hobbled to see her. And I began to think about her day and
+night, as I had thought about my books; an isolated little girl in her
+early teens, mother and widow, facing a future like a dead wall, with
+daily narrowing fortunes. The seclusion in which she lived made her
+sacred like a religious person. I did not know what love was, and I
+never intended to dote, like my poor master. Before the end of January,
+however, such a change worked in me that I was as fierce for the vital
+world as I had been for the world of books.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+A trick of the eyes, a sweet turning of the mouth corners, the very
+color of the hair--some irresistible physical trait, may compel a
+preference in us that we cannot control; especially when we first notice
+these traits in a woman. My crying need grew to be the presence of
+Madame de Ferrier. It was youth calling to youth in that gorgeous winter
+desert.
+
+Her windows were hoar-frost furred without and curtained within. Though
+I knew where they were I got nothing by tramping past and glancing up. I
+used to saunter through the corridor that led to her rooms, startled yet
+pleased if Ernestine came out on an errand. Then I would close my book
+and nod, and she would courtesy.
+
+"Oh, by the way," I would turn to remark, "I was passing, and thought I
+would knock and ask how Madame de Ferrier is to-day. But you can tell
+me."
+
+When assured of Madame de Ferrier's health I would continue:
+
+"And Paul--how is Paul?"
+
+Paul carried himself marvelously. He was learning to walk. Ernestine
+believed the lie about knocking, and I felt bolder every time I told it.
+
+The Indian part of me thought of going hunting and laying slaughtered
+game at their door. But it was a doubtful way of pleasing, and the bears
+hibernated, and the deer were perhaps a day's journey in the white
+wastes.
+
+I used to sing in the clear sharp air when I took to the frozen lake and
+saw those heights around me. I look back upon that winter, across what
+befell me afterwards, as a time of perfect peace; before virgin snows
+melted, when the world was a white expanse of innocence.
+
+Our weather-besieged manor was the center of it. Vaguely I knew there
+was life on the other side of great seas, and that New York, Boston,
+Philadelphia, Baltimore and New Orleans were cities in which men moved
+and had their being. My country, the United States, had bought from
+Napoleon Bonaparte a large western tract called Louisiana, which
+belonged to France. A new state named Ohio was the last added to the
+roll of commonwealths. Newspapers, which the Indian runner once or twice
+brought us from Albany, chronicled the doings of Aaron Burr,
+Vice-President of the United States, who had recently drawn much
+condemnation on himself by a brutal duel.
+
+"Aaron Burr was here once," said my master.
+
+"What is he like?" I inquired.
+
+"A lady-killer."
+
+"But he is next in dignity to the President."
+
+Doctor Chantry sniffed.
+
+"What is even the President of a federation like this, certain to fall
+to pieces some fine day!"
+
+I felt offended; for my instinct was to weld people together and hold
+them so welded.
+
+"If I were a president or a king," I told him, "and men conspired to
+break the state, instead of parleying I would hang them up like dogs."
+
+"Would you?"
+
+Despising the country in which he found himself, my master took no
+trouble to learn its politics. But since history had rubbed against us
+in the person of Jerome Bonaparte, I wanted to know what the world was
+doing.
+
+"Colonel Burr had a pleasant gentleman with him at the manor," Doctor
+Chantry added. "His name was Harmon Blennerhassett; a man of good
+English stock, though having a wild Irish strain, which is deplorable."
+
+The best days of that swift winter were Sundays, when my master left off
+snapping, and stood up reverently in our dining-room to read his church
+service. Madame de Ferrier and Paul and Ernestine came from their
+apartment to join in the Protestant ritual; and I sat beside them so
+constantly that the Catholic priest who arrived at Easter to dress up
+the souls of the household, found me in a state of heresy.
+
+I have always thought a woman needs a dark capping of hair, whatever her
+complexion, to emphasize her beauty. For light locks seem to fray out to
+nothing, and waste to air instead of fitly binding a lovely countenance.
+Madame de Ferrier's hair was of exactly the right color. Her eyebrows
+were distinct dark lines, and the lashes were so dense that you noticed
+the curling rim they made around her gray eyes. Whether the gift of
+looking to your core is beauty or not, I can only say she had it. And I
+could not be sworn what her features were; such life and expression
+played over and changed them every moment.
+
+As to her figure, it was just in its roundness and suppleness, and had a
+lightness of carriage that I have never seen equaled. There was charm in
+looking at without approaching her that might have satisfied me
+indefinitely, if De Chaumont had not come home.
+
+Ernestine herself made the first breach in that sacred reserve. The old
+woman met me in the hall, courtesied, and passed as usual. I turned
+behind the broad ribbons which hung down her back from cap to heels, and
+said:
+
+"Oh, by the way, Ernestine, how is Madame de Ferrier? I was going to
+knock--"
+
+And Ernestine courtesied again, and opened the door, standing aside for
+me to enter.
+
+Madame de Ferrier sat on a bearskin before the hearth with Paul, who
+climbed over her and gave her juicy kisses. There was a deep wood fire,
+upheld by very tall andirons having cups in their tops, which afterwards
+I learned were called posset cups. She was laughing so that her white
+teeth showed, and she made me welcome like a playmate; remaining on the
+rug, and bidding Ernestine set a chair for me near the fire.
+
+"It is very kind of you to spare me some time, monsieur," said Madame de
+Ferrier. She admonished Paul--"Don't choke your little mother."
+
+I told her boldly that nothing but the dread of disturbing her kept me
+from knocking every day. We had always walked into the lodges without
+knocking, and I dwelt on this as one of my new accomplishments.
+
+"I am not studying night and day," she answered. "Sophie Saint-Michel
+and her mother were my teachers, and they are gone now, one to heaven
+and the other to Castorland."
+
+Remembering what Annabel de Chaumont said about holy Sophie I inquired
+if she had been religious.
+
+"The Saint-Michels were better than religious; both mother and daughter
+were eternally patient with the poor count, whose troubles unsettled his
+reason. They had no dear old Ernestine, and were reduced to the hardest
+labor. I was a little child when we came to America, yet even then the
+spirit of the Saint-Michels seemed to me divine."
+
+"I wish I could remember when I was a little child."
+
+"Can you not recall anything?"
+
+"I have a dim knowledge of objects."
+
+"What objects?"
+
+"St. Regis church, and my taking first communion; and the hunting, the
+woods and water, boats, snowshoes, the kind of food I liked; Skenedonk
+and all my friends--but I scarcely knew them as persons until I awoke."
+
+"What is your first distinct recollection?"
+
+"Your face."
+
+"Mine?"
+
+"Yes, yours, madame. I saw it above me when you came into the room at
+night."
+
+She looked past me and said:
+
+"You have fortunately missed some of the most terrible events that ever
+happened in the world, monsieur. My mother and father, my two brothers,
+Cousin Philippe and I, were in prison together. My mother and brothers
+were taken, and we were left."
+
+I understood that she spoke of the Terror, about which I was eager to
+know every then unwritten detail. Doctor Chantry had told me many
+things. It fascinated me far more than ancient history, which my master
+was inclined to press upon me.
+
+"How can you go back to France, madame?"
+
+"That's what I ask myself every day. That life was like a strange
+nightmare. Yet there was our chateau, Mont-Louis, two or three days'
+journey east from Paris. The park was so beautiful. I think of it, and
+of Paul."
+
+"And what about this country, madame? Is there nothing beautiful here?"
+
+"The fact has been impressed on me, monsieur, that it does not belong to
+me. I am an emigré. In city or country my father and Cousin Philippe
+kept me with them. I have seen nothing of young people, except at balls.
+We had no intimate friends. We were always going back. I am still
+waiting to go back, monsieur--and refusing to go if I must."
+
+It was plain that her life had been as restricted as mine, though the
+bonds were different. She was herded with old people, made a wife and
+mother while yet a child, nursed in shadow instead of in the hot
+sunshine which produced Annabel de Chaumont.
+
+After that we met each other as comrades meet, and both of us changed
+like the face of nature, when the snow went and warm winds came.
+
+This looking at her without really approaching was going on innocently
+when one day Count de Chaumont rode up to the manor, his horse and his
+attendant servants and horses covered with mud, filling the place with a
+rush of life.
+
+He always carried himself as if he felt extremely welcome in this world.
+And though a man ought to be welcome in his own house, especially when
+he has made it a comfortable refuge for outsiders, I met him with the
+secret resentment we bear an interloper.
+
+He looked me over from head to foot with more interest than he had ever
+before shown.
+
+"We are getting on, we are getting on! Is it Doctor Chantry, or the
+little madame, or the winter housing? Our white blood is very much in
+evidence. When Chief Williams comes back to the summer hunting he will
+not know his boy."
+
+"The savage is inside yet, monsieur," I told him. "Scratch me and see."
+
+"Not I," he laughed.
+
+"It is late for thanks, but I will now thank you for taking me into your
+house."
+
+"He has learned gratitude for little favors! That is Madame de Ferrier's
+work."
+
+"I hope I may be able to do something that will square our accounts."
+
+"That's Doctor Chantry's work. He is full of benevolent intentions--and
+never empties himself. When you have learned all your master knows, what
+are you going to do with it?"
+
+"I am going to teach our Indians."
+
+"Good. You have a full day's work before you. Founding an estate in the
+wilderness is nothing compared to that. You have more courage than De
+Chaumont."
+
+Whether the spring or the return of De Chaumont drove me out, I could no
+longer stay indoors, but rowed all day long on the lake or trod the
+quickening woods. Before old Pierre could get audience with his house
+accounts, De Chaumont was in Madame de Ferrier's rooms, inspecting the
+wafer blotched letter. He did not appear as depressed as he should have
+been by the death of his old friend.
+
+"These French have no hearts," I told Doctor Chantry.
+
+He took off his horn spectacles and wiped his eyes, responding:
+
+"But they find the way to ours!"
+
+Slipping between islands in water paths that wound as a meadow stream
+winds through land, I tried to lose myself from the uneasy pain which
+followed me everywhere.
+
+There may be people who look over the scheme of their lives with entire
+complacence. Mine has been the outcome of such strange misfortunes as to
+furnish evidence that there is another fate than the fate we make
+ourselves. In that early day I felt the unseen lines tighten around me.
+I was nothing but a young student of unknown family, able to read and
+write, to talk a little English, with some knowledge of history,
+geography, mathematics, and Latin. Strength and scope came by atoms. I
+did not know then as I know now that I am a slow grower, even when
+making gigantic effort. An oak does not accumulate rings with more
+deliberation than I change and build myself.
+
+My master told me a few days later that the count decreed Madame de
+Ferrier must go back to France. He intended to go with her and push her
+claim; and his daughter and his daughter's governess would bear them
+company. Doctor Chantry and I contemplated each other, glaring in mutual
+solemnity. His eyes were red and watery, and the nose sharpened its
+cone.
+
+"When are they going?" I inquired.
+
+"As soon as arrangements for comfortable sailing can be made. I wish I
+were going back to England. I shall have to save twenty-five years
+before I can go, but the fund is started."
+
+If I saved a hundred and twenty-five years I could not go anywhere; for
+I had nothing to save. The worthlessness of civilization rushed over
+me. When I was an Indian the boundless world was mine. I could build a
+shelter, and take food and clothes by my strength and skill. My boat or
+my strong legs carried me to all boundaries.
+
+I did not know what ailed me, but chased by these thoughts to the lake,
+I determined not to go back again to De Chaumont's house. I was sick,
+and my mother woods opened her arms. As if to show me what I had thrown
+away to haunt the cages of men, one of those strange sights which is
+sometimes seen in that region appeared upon the mountain. No one can
+tell who lights the torch. A thread of fire ran up like an opening seam,
+broadened, and threw out pink ravelings. The flame wavered, paled by
+daylight, but shielding itself with strong smoke, and leaped from ledge
+to ledge. I saw mighty pines, standing one moment green, and the next,
+columns of fire. So the mass diverged, or ran together until a mountain
+of fire stood against the sky, and stretched its reflection, a glowing
+furnace, across the water.
+
+Flecks of ash sifted on me in the boat. I felt myself a part of it, as I
+felt myself a part of the many sunsets which had burned out on that
+lake. Before night I penetrated to the heart of an island so densely
+overgrown, even in spring when trees had no curtains, that you were lost
+as in a thousand mile forest. I camped there in a dry ravine, with
+hemlock boughs under and over me, and next day rolled broken logs, and
+cut poles and evergreens with my knife, to make a lodge.
+
+It was boyish, unmannerly conduct; but the world had broken, to chaos
+around me; and I set up the rough refuge with skill. Some books, my fish
+line and knife, were always in the boat with me, as well as a box of
+tinder. I could go to the shore, get a breakfast out of the water, and
+cook it myself. Yet all that day I kept my fast, having no appetite.
+
+Perhaps in the bottom of my heart I expected somebody to be sent after
+me, bearing large inducements to return. We never can believe we are not
+valuable to our fellows. Pierre or Jean, or some other servants in the
+house, might perforce nose me out. I resolved to hide if such an envoy
+approached and to have speech with nobody. We are more or less ashamed
+of our secret wounds, and I was not going to have Pierre or Jean report
+that I sat sulking in the woods on an island.
+
+It was very probable that De Chaumont's household gave itself no trouble
+about my disappearance. I sat on my hemlock floor until the gray of
+twilight and studied Latin, keeping my mind on the text; save when a
+squirrel ventured out and glided bushy trained and sinuous before me, or
+the marble birches with ebony limbs, drew me to gloat on them. The white
+birch is a woman and a goddess. I have associated her forever with that
+afternoon. Her poor cousin the poplar, often so like her as to deceive
+you until ashen bough and rounded leaf instruct the eye, always grows
+near her like a protecting servant. The poor cousin rustles and fusses.
+But my calm lady stands in perfect beauty, among pines straight as
+candles, never tremulous, never trivial. All alabaster and ebony, she
+glows from a distance; as, thinking of her, I saw another figure glow
+through the loop-holes of the woods.
+
+It was Madame de Ferrier.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+A leap of the heart and dizziness shot through me and blurred my sight.
+The reality of Madame de Ferrier's coming to seek me surpassed all
+imaginings.
+
+She walked with quick accustomed step, parting the second growth in her
+way, having tracked me from the boat. Seeing my lodge in the ravine she
+paused, her face changing as the lake changes; and caught her breath. I
+stood exultant and ashamed down to the ground.
+
+"Monsieur, what are you doing here?" Madame de Ferrier cried out.
+
+"Living, madame," I responded.
+
+"Living? Do you mean you have returned to your old habits?"
+
+"I have returned to the woods, madame."
+
+"You do not intend to stay here?"
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"You must not do it!"
+
+"What must I do?"
+
+"Come back to the house. You have given us much anxiety."
+
+I liked the word "us" until I remembered it included Count de Chaumont.
+
+"Why did you come out here and hide yourself?"
+
+My conduct appeared contemptible. I looked mutely at her.
+
+"What offended you?"
+
+"Nothing, madame."
+
+"Did you want Doctor Chantry to lame himself hobbling around in search
+of you, and the count to send people out in every direction?"
+
+"No, madame."
+
+"What explanation will you make to the count?"
+
+"None, madame." I raised my head. "I may go out in the woods without
+asking leave of Count de Chaumont."
+
+"He says you have forsaken your books and gone back to be an Indian."
+
+I showed her the Latin book in my hand. She glanced slightly at it, and
+continued to make her gray eyes pass through my marrow.
+
+Shifting like a culprit, I inquired:
+
+"How did you know I was here?"
+
+"Oh, it was not hard to find you after I saw the boat. This island is
+not large."
+
+"But who rowed you across the lake, madame?"
+
+"I came by myself, and nobody except Ernestine knows it. I can row a
+boat. I slipped through the tunnel, and ventured."
+
+"Madame, I am a great fool. I am not worth your venturing."
+
+"You are worth any danger I might encounter. But you should at least go
+back for me."
+
+"I will do anything for you, madame. But why should I go back?--you will
+not long be there."
+
+"What does that matter? The important thing is that you should not lapse
+again into the Indian."
+
+"Is any life but the life of an Indian open to me, madame?"
+
+She struck her hands together with a scream.
+
+"Louis! Sire!"
+
+Startled, I dropped the book and it sprawled at her feet like the open
+missal. She had returned so unexpectedly to the spirit of our first
+meeting.
+
+"O, if you knew what you are! During my whole life your name has been
+cherished by my family. We believed you would sometime come to your own.
+Believe in yourself!"
+
+I seemed almost to remember and perceive what I was--as you see in
+mirage one inverted boat poised on another, and are not quite sure, and
+the strange thing is gone.
+
+Perhaps I was less sure of the past because I was so sure of the
+present. A wisp of brown mist settling among the trees spread cloud
+behind her. What I wanted was this woman, to hide in the woods for my
+own. I could feed and clothe her, deck her with necklaces of garnets
+from the rocks, and wreaths of the delicate sand-wort flower. She said
+she would rather make Paul a woodchopper than a suppliant, taking the
+constitutional oath. I could make him a hunter and a fisherman. Game,
+bass, trout, pickerel, grew for us in abundance. I saw this vision with
+a single eye; it looked so possible! All the crude imaginings of youth
+colored the spring woods with vivid beauty. My face betrayed me, and
+she spoke to me coldly.
+
+"Is that your house, monsieur?"
+
+I said it was.
+
+"And you slept there last night?"
+
+"I can build a much better one."
+
+"What did you have for dinner?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"What did you have for breakfast?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+Evidently the life I proposed to myself to offer her would not suit my
+lady!
+
+She took a lacquered box from the cover of her wrappings, and moved down
+the slope a few steps.
+
+"Come here to your mother and get your supper."
+
+I felt tears rush to my eyes. She sat down, spread a square of clean
+fringed linen upon the ground, and laid out crusty rounds of buttered
+bread that were fragrant in the springing fragrance of the woods, firm
+slices of cold meat, and a cunning pastry which instantly maddened me. I
+was ashamed to be such a wolf.
+
+We sat with our forest table between us and ate together.
+
+"I am hungry myself," she said.
+
+A glorified veil descended on the world. If evening had paused while
+that meal was in progress it would not have surprised me. There are half
+hours that dilate to the importance of centuries. But when she had
+encouraged me to eat everything to the last crumb, she shook the
+fringed napkin, gathered up the lacquered box, and said she must be
+gone.
+
+"Monsieur, I have overstepped the bounds of behavior in coming after
+you. The case was too urgent for consideration of myself. I must hurry
+back, for the count's people would not understand my secret errand
+through the tunnel. Will you show yourself at the house as soon as
+possible?"
+
+I told her humbly that I would.
+
+"But let me put you in the boat, madame."
+
+She shook her head. "You may follow, after I am out of sight. If you
+fail to follow"--she turned in the act of departing and looked me
+through.
+
+I told her I would not fail.
+
+When Madame de Ferrier disappeared beyond the bushes I sat down and
+waited with my head between my hands, still seeing upon closed eyelids
+her figure, the scant frock drawn around it, her cap of dark hair under
+a hood, her face moving from change to change. And whether I sat a year
+or a minute, clouds had descended when I looked, as they often did in
+that lake gorge. So I waited no longer, but followed her.
+
+The fog was brown, and capped the evening like a solid dome, pressing
+down to the earth, and twisting smoke fashion around my feet. It threw
+sinuous arms in front of me as a thing endowed with life and capable of
+molding itself; and when I reached my boat and pushed off on the water,
+a vast mass received and enveloped me.
+
+More penetrating than its clamminess was the thought that Madame de
+Ferrier was out in it alone.
+
+I tried one of the long calls we sometimes used in hunting. She might
+hear, and understand that I was near to help her. But it was shouting
+against many walls. No effort pierced the muffling substance which
+rolled thickly against the lungs. Remembering it was possible to
+override smaller craft, I pulled with caution, and so bumped lightly
+against the boat that by lucky chance hovered in my track.
+
+"Is it you, madame?" I asked.
+
+She hesitated.
+
+"Is it you, monsieur?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I think I am lost. There is no shore. The fog closed around me so soon.
+I was waiting for it to lift a little."
+
+"It may not lift until morning, madame. Let me tie your boat to mine."
+
+"Do you know the way?"
+
+"There is no way. We shall have to feel for the shore. But Lake George
+is narrow, and I know it well."
+
+"I want to keep near you."
+
+"Come into my boat, and let me tie the other one astern."
+
+She hesitated again, but decided, "That would be best."
+
+I drew the frail shells together--they seemed very frail above such
+depths--and helped her cross the edges. We were probably the only people
+on Lake George. Tinder lighted in one boat would scarcely have shown us
+the other, though in the sky an oval moon began to make itself seen
+amidst rags of fog. The dense eclipse around us and the changing light
+overhead were very weird.
+
+Madame de Ferrier's hands chilled mine, and she shook in her thin cape
+and hood. Our garments were saturated. I felt moisture trickling down my
+hair and dropping on my shoulders.
+
+She was full of vital courage, resisting the deadly chill. This was not
+a summer fog, lightly to be traversed. It went dank through the bones.
+When I had helped her to a bench, remembering there was nothing dry to
+wrap around her, I slipped off my coat and forcibly added its thickness
+to her shoulders.
+
+"Do you think I will let you do that, monsieur?"
+
+My teeth chattered and shocked together so it was impossible to keep
+from laughing, as I told her I always preferred to be coatless when I
+rowed a boat.
+
+We could see each other by the high light that sometimes gilded the
+face, and sometimes was tarnished almost to eclipse. Madame de Ferrier
+crept forward, and before I knew her intention, cast my garment again
+around me. I helped the boat shift its balance so she would have to
+grasp at me for support; the chilled round shape of her arm in my hand
+sent waves of fire through me. With brazen cunning, moreover, that
+surprised myself, instead of pleading, I dictated.
+
+"Sit beside me on the rower's bench, madame, and the coat will stretch
+around both of us."
+
+Like a child she obeyed. We were indeed reduced to saving the warmth of
+our bodies. I shipped my oars and took one for a paddle, bidding Madame
+de Ferrier to hold the covering in place while I felt for the shore. She
+did so, her arm crossing my breast, her soft body touching mine. She was
+cold and still as the cloud in which we moved; but I was a god, riding
+triumphantly high above the world, satisfied to float through celestial
+regions forever, bearing in my breast an unquenchable coal of fire.
+
+The moon played tricks, for now she was astern, and now straight ahead,
+in that confusing wilderness of vapor.
+
+"Madame," I said to my companion, "why have you been persuaded to go
+back to France?"
+
+She drew a deep breath.
+
+"I have not been persuaded. I have been forced by circumstances. Paul's
+future is everything."
+
+"You said you would rather make him a woodchopper than a suppliant to
+the Bonapartes."
+
+"I would. But his rights are to be considered first. He has some small
+chance of regaining his inheritance through the influence of Count de
+Chaumont now. Hereafter there may be no chance. You know the fortunes
+and lands of all emigrés were forfeited to the state. Ours have finally
+reached the hands of one of Napoleon's officers. I do not know what will
+be done. I only know that Paul must never have cause to reproach me."
+
+I was obliged to do my duty in my place as she was doing her duty in
+hers; but I wished the boat would sink, and so end all journeys to
+France. It touched shore, on the contrary, and I grasped a rock which
+jutted toward us. It might be the point of an island, it might be the
+eastern land, as I was inclined to believe, for the moon was over our
+right shoulders.
+
+Probing along with the oar I found a cove and a shallow bottom, and
+there I beached our craft with a great shove.
+
+"How good the earth feels underfoot!" said Madame de Ferrier. We were
+both stiff. I drew the boats where they could not be floated away, and
+we turned our faces to the unknown. I took her unresisting arm to guide
+her, and she depended upon me.
+
+This day I look back at those young figures groping through cloud as at
+disembodied and blessed spirits. The man's intensest tenderness,
+restrained by his virginhood and his awe of the supple delicate shape at
+his side, was put forth only in her service. They walked against bushes.
+He broke a stick, and with it probed every yard of the ascent which they
+were obliged to make. Helping his companion from bush to log, from seam
+to seam of the riven slope, from ledge to ledge, he brought her to a
+level of high forest where the fog was thinner, and branches interlaced
+across their faces.
+
+The climb made Madame de Ferrier draw her breath quickly. She laughed
+when we ended it. Though I knew the shores as well as a hunter, it was
+impossible to recognize any landmark. The trees, the moss, and forest
+sponge under our feet, the very rocks, were changed by that weird
+medium. And when the fog opened and we walked as through an endless
+tunnel of gray revolving stone, it was into a world that never existed
+before and would never exist again.
+
+There was no path. Creeping under and climbing over obstacles, sometimes
+enclosed by the whiteness of steam, sometimes walking briskly across
+lighted spaces, we reached a gorge smoking as the lake smoked in the
+chill of early mornings. Vapor played all its freaks on that brink. The
+edge had been sharply defined. But the fog shut around us like a
+curtain, and we dared not stir.
+
+Below, a medallion shaped rift widened out, and showed us a scene as I
+have since beheld such things appear upon the stage. Within the round
+changing frame of wispy vapor two men sat by a fire of logs and
+branches. We could smell wood smoke, and hear the branches crackle,
+convincing us the vision was real. Behind them stood a cabin almost as
+rude as my shelter on the island.
+
+One man was a grand fellow, not at all of the common order, though he
+was more plainly clothed than De Chaumont. His face was so familiar that
+I almost grasped recognition--but missed it. The whole cast was full and
+aquiline, and the lobe of his ear, as I noticed when light fell on his
+profile, sat close to his head like mine.
+
+The other man worked his feet upon the treadle of a small wheel, which
+revolved like a circular table in front of him, and on this he deftly
+touched something which appeared to be an earthenware vessel. His thin
+fingers moved with spider swiftness, and shaped it with a kind of magic.
+He was a mad looking person, with an air of being tremendously driven by
+inner force. He wore mustaches the like of which I had never seen,
+carried back over his ears; and these hairy devices seemed to split his
+countenance in two crosswise.
+
+Some broken pottery lay on the ground, and a few vessels, colored and
+lustrous so they shone in the firelight, stood on a stump near him.
+
+The hollow was not a deep one, but if the men had been talking, their
+voices did not reach us until the curtain parted.
+
+"You are a great fool or a great rascal, or both, Bellenger," the
+superior man said.
+
+"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 nobles 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 eyeballs 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."
+
+"Do you remember nothing of your childhood?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Did you ever see Bellenger before?"
+
+"I never saw him before to-night."
+
+"But I saw him," said Madame de Ferrier, "in London, when I was about
+seven years old. It made a stronger impression on me than anything else
+that ever happened in my life, except"--she stopped.
+
+"Except the taking off of my mother and brothers to the guillotine."
+
+The man who told me to call him Louis Philippe turned toward her, with
+attention as careful as his avoidance when she wished to be unobserved.
+She rose, and came around the fire, making a deep courtesy.
+
+"My family may not be unknown to his royal highness the Duke of Orleans.
+We are De Ferriers of Mont-Louis; emigrés now, like many others."
+
+"Madame, I knew your family well. They were loyal to their king."
+
+"My father died here in America. Before we sailed we saw this man in
+London."
+
+"And with him--"
+
+"A boy."
+
+"Do you remember the boy well?"
+
+"I remember him perfectly."
+
+The wailing in the cabin became louder and turned to insistent animal
+howls. Instead of a babe the imprisoned creature was evidently a dog. I
+wondered that the potter did not let him out to warm his hide at the
+fire.
+
+"Did you ever see the boy again?"
+
+"I did not see him again until he was brought to Count de Chaumont's
+house last summer."
+
+"Why to De Chaumont? Le Ray de Chaumont is not one of us. He is of the
+new nobility. His chateau near Blois was bought by his grandfather, and
+he takes his name from the estate. I have heard he is in favor with
+Bonaparte."
+
+"Even we of the old nobility, prince, may be reduced to seek favor of
+Bonaparte."
+
+"Heaven forbid, madame. I say nothing against him; though I could say
+much."
+
+"Say nothing against Count de Chaumont. Count de Chaumont befriends all
+emigrés."
+
+"I have nothing to say against Count de Chaumont. He is not of our
+party; he is of the new. Fools! If we princes had stood by each other as
+the friends of the Empire stand by their emperor, we could have killed
+the Terror."
+
+The animal in the cabin by this time was making such doleful cries I
+said to the potter.
+
+"Let him out. It is dreadful to be shut in by walls."
+
+The potter, stooping half over and rolling stiffly from foot to foot in
+his walk, filled me with compunction at having been brutal to so pitiful
+a creature, and I hurried to open the door for him. The animal clawed
+vigorously inside, and the instant I pushed back the ill-fitted slabs,
+it strained through and rushed on all fours to the fire. Madame de
+Ferrier fled backward, for what I liberated could hardly be seen without
+dread.
+
+It was a human being. Its features were a boy's, and the tousled hair
+had a natural wave. While it crouched for warmth I felt the shock of
+seeing a creature about my own age grinning back at me, fishy eyed and
+black mouthed.
+
+"There!" Bellenger said, straightening up in his place like a bear
+rising from all fours. "That is the boy your De Ferriers saw in London."
+
+I remembered the boy Madame Tank had told about. Whether myself or this
+less fortunate creature was the boy, my heart went very pitiful toward
+him. Madame de Ferrier stooped and examined, him; he made a juicy noise
+of delight with his mouth.
+
+"This is not the boy you had in London, monsieur," she said to
+Bellenger.
+
+The potter waved his hands and shrugged.
+
+"You believe, madame, that Lazarre is the boy you saw in London?" said
+Louis Philippe.
+
+"I am certain of it."
+
+"What proofs have you?"
+
+"The evidence of my eyes."
+
+"Tell that to Monsieur!" exclaimed the potter.
+
+"Who is Monsieur?" I asked.
+
+"The eldest brother of the king of France is called Monsieur. The Count
+de Provence will be called Monsieur until he succeeds Louis XVII and is
+crowned Louis XVIII--if that time ever comes. He cannot be called Louis
+XVII"--the man who told me to call him Louis Philippe took my arm, and I
+found myself walking back and forth with him as in a dream while he
+carefully formed sentence after sentence. "Because the dauphin who died
+in the Temple prison was Louis XVII. But there are a few who say he did
+not die: that a dying child was substituted for him: that he was
+smuggled out and carried to America, Bellenger was the agent employed.
+The dauphin's sister is married to her cousin, the nephew of Monsieur.
+She herself believes these things; and it is certain a sum of money is
+sent out to America every year for his maintenance. He was reduced to
+imbecility when removed from the Temple. It is not known whether he will
+ever be fit to reign if the kingdom returns to him. No communication has
+been held with him. He was nine years old when removed from the Temple:
+he would now be in his nineteenth year. When I last saw him he was a
+smiling little prince with waving hair and hazel eyes, holding to his
+mother's hand"--
+
+"Stop!"
+
+The frenzy of half recollection came on me, and that which I had put
+away from my mind and sworn to let alone, seized and convulsed me.
+Dreams, and sensations, and instincts massed and fell upon me in an
+avalanche of conviction.
+
+I was that uncrowned outcast, the king of France!
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+WANDERING
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+A primrose dawn of spring touched the mountains as Madame de Ferrier and
+I stepped into the tunnel's mouth. The wind that goes like a besom
+before sunrise, swept off the fog to corners of the sky, except a few
+spirals which still unwound from the lake. The underground path to De
+Chaumont's manor descended by terraces of steps and entered blackness.
+
+A rank odor of earth filled it; and I never passed that way without
+hearkening for the insect-like song of the rattlesnake. The ground was
+slippery, and thick darkness seemed to press the soul out of the body.
+Yet I liked it; for when we reached the staircase of rock that entered
+the house, she would vanish.
+
+And so it was.
+
+She did say--"Good-night--and good-morning."
+
+And I answered, "Good-morning and good-night."
+
+We were both physically exhausted. My head swarmed as with sparkles, and
+a thousand emotions tore me, for I was at the age when we risk all on
+chances. I sat alone on the steps, unmindful of that penetrating chill
+of stone which increases rather than decreases, the longer you sit upon
+it, and thought of all that had been said by my new friend at the
+camp-fire, while the moon went lower and lower, the potter turned his
+wheel, and the idiot slept.
+
+The mixed and oblique motives of human nature--the boy's will--worked
+like gigantic passions.
+
+She had said very little to me in the boat, and I had said very little
+to her; not realizing that the camp talk, in which she took no part,
+separated us in a new way.
+
+Sitting alone on the steps I held this imaginary conversation with her.
+
+"I am going to France!"
+
+"You, monsieur?"
+
+"Yes, I!"
+
+"How are you going?"
+
+"I don't know; but I am going!"
+
+"The Duke of Orleans did not mention such a thing."
+
+"Bother the Duke of Orleans!"
+
+"When are you going?"
+
+"Now!"
+
+"But it may not be best to go at this time."
+
+"It is always best to go where you are!"
+
+"Monsieur, do not throw away your future on an unconsidered move."
+
+"Madame, I will throw away my eternity!"
+
+Then I went back through the tunnel to the beach, stripped, and took a
+plunge to clear my head and warm my blood, rubbing off with my shirt.
+
+On reaching my room the first thing I did was to make a bundle of
+everything I considered necessary and desirable. There was no reason for
+doing this before lying down; but with an easier mind I closed my eyes;
+and opened them to find sunset shining through the windows, and Doctor
+Chantry keeping guard in an arm-chair at my side.
+
+"Nature has taken her revenge on you, my lad," said he. "And now I am
+going to take mine."
+
+"I have slept all day!"
+
+"Renegades who roam the woods all night must expect to sleep all day."
+
+"How do you know I have been in the woods all night?"
+
+"I heard you slipping up the tunnel stairs without any shoes on at
+daylight. I have not been able to sleep two nights on account of you."
+
+"Then why don't you go to bed yourself, my dear master?"
+
+"Because I am not going to let you give me the slip another time. I am
+responsible for you: and you will have me on your back when you go
+prowling abroad again."
+
+"Again?" I questioned innocently.
+
+"Yes, again, young sir! I have been through your luggage, and find that
+you have packed changes of clothing and things necessary and unnecessary
+to a journey,--even books."
+
+"I hope you put them neatly together"--
+
+"Nothing of the kind. I scattered them."
+
+"Do you want me to go bare into the world?" I laughed.
+
+"Lazarre," said my master, "you were a good lad, studious and zealous
+beyond anything I ever saw."
+
+"And now I am bad and lazy."
+
+"You have dropped your books and taken to wild ways."
+
+"There is one thing, dear master, I haven't done: I haven't written
+poetry."
+
+He blinked and smiled, and felt in his breast pocket, but thought better
+of it, and forebore to draw the paper out. There was no escaping his
+tenacious grip. He sat by and exercised me in Latin declensions while I
+dressed. We had our supper together. I saw no member of the household
+except the men, Pierre and Jean. Doctor Chantry ordered a mattress put
+in my room and returned there with me.
+
+We talked long on the approaching departure of the count and Madame de
+Ferrier. He told me the latest details of preparation, and tremulously
+explained how he must feel the loss of his sister.
+
+"I have nothing left but you, Lazarre."
+
+"My dear master," I said, patting one of his shriveled hands between
+mine, "I am going to be open with you."
+
+I sat on the side of my bed facing his arm-chair, and the dressing-glass
+reflected his bald head and my young head drawn near together.
+
+"Did you ever feel as if you were a prince?"
+
+Doctor Chantry wagged a pathetic negative.
+
+"Haven't you ever been ready to dare anything and everything, because
+something in you said--I must!"
+
+Again Doctor Chantry wagged a negative.
+
+"Now I have to break bounds--I have to leave the manor and try my
+fortune! I can't wait for times and seasons--to be certain of this--to
+be certain of that!--I am going to leave the house to-night--and I am
+going to France!"
+
+"My God!" cried Doctor Chantry, springing up. "He is going to
+France!--Rouse the servants!--Call De Chaumont!" He struck his gouty
+foot against the chair and sat down nursing it in both hands. I
+restrained him and added my sympathy to his groans.
+
+"Have you as much as a Spanish real of your own, my lad?" he catechised
+me, when the foot was easy.
+
+I acknowledged that I had not.
+
+"It costs dear to travel about the world. It is not like coming down the
+trail from St. Regis to Lake George. How are you to travel without
+money?"
+
+I laughed at the very uncertainty, and answered that money would be
+found.
+
+"Found! It isn't found, I tell you! It is inherited by the idle, or
+gathered by the unscrupulous, or sweated and toiled for! It costs days
+and years, and comes in drops. You might as well expect to find a
+kingdom, lad!"
+
+"Maybe I shall find a kingdom, master!"
+
+"Oh, what a thing it is to be young!" sighed Doctor Chantry.
+
+I felt it myself, and hugged my youth.
+
+"Do you know how to reach the sea-port?" he continued.
+
+I said anybody could follow the Hudson to New York.
+
+"You're bitten, my poor lad! It's plain what ails you. You might as well
+try to swim the Atlantic. De Chaumont intends her for himself. And in
+the unjust distribution of this world, your rival has the power and you
+have the feelings. Stay where you are. You'll never forget it, but it
+will hurt less as years go by."
+
+"Master," I said to him, "good sense is on your side. But if I knew I
+should perish, I would have to go!"
+
+And I added from fullness of conviction--
+
+"I would rather undertake to do something, and perish, than live a
+thousand years as I am."
+
+Doctor Chantry struck the chair arm with his clenched fist.
+
+"My lad, so would I--so would I!--I wish I had been dowered with your
+spirit!--I'm going with you!"
+
+As soon as he had made this embarrassing resolution my master blew his
+nose and set his British jaws firmly together. I felt my own jaw drop.
+
+"Have you as much as a Spanish real of your own?" I quoted.
+
+"That I have, young sir, and some American notes, such as they are, and
+good English pounds, beside."
+
+"And do you know how to reach the seaport?"
+
+"Since I came that way I can return that way. You have youth, my lad,
+but I have brains and experience."
+
+"It's plain what ails you, Doctor Chantry. And you might as well try to
+swim the Atlantic."
+
+My poor master dropped his head on his breast, and I was ashamed of
+baiting him and began to argue tenderly. I told him he could not bear
+hardships; he was used to the soft life in De Chaumont's house; while my
+flesh had been made iron in the wilderness. I intended to take a boat
+from those hidden at our summer camp, to reach the head of Lake George.
+But from that point to the Hudson river--where the town of Luzerne now
+stands--it was necessary to follow a trail. I could carry the light
+canoe over the trail, but he could not even walk it.
+
+The more I reasoned with him the more obstinate he became. There was a
+wonderful spring called Saratoga, which he had visited with De Chaumont
+a few years before as they came into the wilderness; he was convinced
+that the water would set him on foot for the rest of the journey.
+
+"It is twenty-nine miles above Albany. We could soon reach it," he
+urged.
+
+"I have heard of it," I answered. "Skenedonk has been there. But he says
+you leave the river and go into the woods."
+
+"I know the way," he testily insisted. "And there used to be near the
+river a man who kept horses and carried visitors to the spring."
+
+The spirit of reckless adventure, breaking through years of extreme
+prudence, outran youth.
+
+"What will you do in France?" I put to him. He knew no more than I what
+I should do.
+
+And there was Count de Chaumont to be considered. How would he regard
+such a leave-taking?
+
+Doctor Chantry was as insensible to De Chaumont as I myself. Still he
+agreed to write a note to his protector while I prepared my quill to
+write one to Madame de Ferrier. With the spirit of the true parasite he
+laid all the blame on me, and said he was constrained by duty to follow
+and watch over me since it was impossible to curb a nature like mine.
+And he left a loop-hole open for a future return to De Chaumont's easy
+service, when the hardships which he willingly faced brought him his
+reward.
+
+This paper he brazenly showed me while I was struggling to beg Madame de
+Ferrier's pardon, and to let her know that I aimed at something definite
+whether I ever reached port or not.
+
+I reflected with satisfaction that he would probably turn back at
+Saratoga. We descended together to his room and brought away the things
+he needed. In bulk they were twice as large as the load I had made for
+myself. He also wrote out strict orders to Pierre to seal up his room
+until his return. The inability of an old man to tear himself from his
+accustomed environment cheered my heart.
+
+We then went back to bed, and like the two bad boys we were, slept
+prepared for flight.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+"This is fine!" said Doctor Chantry, when we descended from the rough
+stage which had brought us across a corduroy trail, and found ourselves
+at the entrance of a spacious wooden tavern. "When I passed Saratoga
+before there were only three log houses, and the inn had two rooms below
+and one above. It was lighted by pine torches stuck in the chinks of the
+wall--and see how candles shine through these windows!"
+
+The tavern stood in a cleared place with miles of forest around it, and
+a marsh stretching near by. Dusk could not prevent our seeing a few log
+habitations, one of them decorated with a merchant's sign. We entered
+among swarming crowds, a little world dropped into the backwoods. This
+was more surprising because we had just left behind us a sense of wild
+things gathering to their night haunts, and low savage cries, and
+visions of moose and deer through far-off arches.
+
+A man who appeared to be the host met us, his sprightly interest in our
+welfare being tempered by the consciousness of having many guests; and
+told us the house was full, but he would do what he could for us.
+
+"Why is the house full?" fretted Doctor Chantry. "What right have you,
+my dear sir, to crowd your house and so insure our discomfort?"
+
+"None at all, sir," answered the host good naturedly. "If you think you
+can do better, try for lodgings at the store-keeper's."
+
+"The store-keeper's!" Doctor Chantry's hysterical cry turned some
+attention to us. "I shall do nothing of the kind. I demand the best you
+have, sir."
+
+"The best I can give you," amended our host. "You see we are very full
+of politicians from Washington. They crowd to the spring."
+
+My master turned his nose like the inflamed horn of a unicorn against
+the politicians from Washington, and trotted to the fireplace where
+blazing knots cheered a great tap-room set with many tables and benches.
+
+And there rested Skenedonk in silent gravity, toasting his moccasins.
+The Iroquois had long made Saratoga a gathering place, but I thought of
+this Oneida as abiding in St. Regis village; for our people did not come
+to the summer hunting in May.
+
+Forgetting that I was a runaway I met him heartily, and the fawn eyes in
+his bald head beamed their accustomed luster upon me. I asked him where
+my father and mother and the rest of the tribe were, and he said they
+had not left St. Regis.
+
+"And why are you so early?" I inquired.
+
+He had been at Montreal, and had undertaken to guide a Frenchman as far
+as Saratoga. It is not easy to surprise an Indian. But I wondered that
+Skenedonk accepted my presence without a question, quite as if he had
+himself made the appointment.
+
+However, the sights to be seen put him out of my head. Besides the
+tap-room crowded with men there was a parlor in which women of fashion
+walked about, contrasting with the place. They had all been to a spring
+to drink water; for only one spring was greatly used then; and they
+talked about the medicinal effects. Some men left the stronger waters,
+which could be had at a glittering portcullised bar opposite the
+fireplace in the tap-room, to chat with these short-waisted beauties. I
+saw one stately creature in a white silk ball costume, his stockings
+splashed to the knees with mud from the corduroy road.
+
+But the person who distinguished himself from everybody else by some
+nameless attraction, was a man perhaps forty years old, who sat in a
+high-backed settle at a table near the fire. He was erect and thin as a
+lath, long faced, square browed and pale. His sandy hair stood up like
+the bristles of a brush. Carefully dressed, with a sword at his side--as
+many of the other men had--he filled my idea of a soldier; and I was not
+surprised to hear his friends sitting opposite call him General Jackson.
+
+An inkstand, a quill and some paper were placed before him, but he
+pushed them aside with his glass of toddy to lift one long fore-finger
+and emphasize his talk. He had a resonant, impressive voice, with a
+manner gentle and persuasive, like a woman's: and he was speaking of
+Aaron Burr, the man whose duel had made such a noise in the newspapers.
+
+[Illustration: He pushed them aside with his glass of toddy to lift one
+long fore-finger and emphasize his talk.]
+
+"I disagree with you, Mr. Campbell. You are prejudiced against Mr. Burr
+on account of his late unfortunate affair. Even in that case I maintain
+every man has a right to honor and satisfaction. But he loves the
+Spanish on our southwestern borders no better than I do,--and you know
+how I love the Spanish!"
+
+The other man laughed, lounging against the table.
+
+"You can't believe anything ill of Aaron Burr, General."
+
+I might have given attention to what they were saying, since here were
+men from Washington, the very fountain of government, if Doctor Chantry
+had not made me uneasy. He chose the table at which they were sitting
+and placed himself in the seat nearest the fire, with the utmost nicety
+about his own comfort. He wiped his horn spectacles, and produced his
+own ink and quill and memorandum from a breast pocket. I had begged the
+doctor to keep strict account between us, that I might pay back from my
+pension whatever he spent on me, and with fine spider-like characters he
+was proceeding to debit me with the stage fare, when another quill
+barred his entrance to his ink-horn.
+
+He took off his spectacles and glared pink-eyed at the genial gentleman
+with sandy upright hair.
+
+"Sir!" he cried, "that is my ink!"
+
+General Jackson, absorbed in talk, did not notice Doctor Chantry, who
+half arose and shouted directly at his ear,
+
+"Sir, that is my ink!"
+
+He knocked the interloping quill in the direction of its owner.
+
+The genial sandy gentleman changed countenance in a way to astonish
+beholders.
+
+"Have I disputed it, sir?"
+
+"No, sir, but you have dipped into it without asking leave."
+
+"By God, sir, what is a fip'ny-bit's worth of ink?"
+
+"But it's mine, sir!"
+
+"I see, sir; you're a Yankee, sir!"
+
+"I'm not, sir; I'm English--the finest race in the world!"
+
+General Jackson looked him up and down as they rose fronting each other,
+and filled the air with dazzling words.
+
+"I should judge so, sir, by the specimen I see before me!"
+
+Doctor Chantry was like a fighting-cock, and it was plainly his age
+which kept the other from striking him. He was beginning our journey
+well, but I felt bound to intercept whatever fell upon him, and stood
+between them. The other men at the table rose with General Jackson.
+
+"Gentlemen," I pleaded with the best words I could command in the
+language, "do not forget your dignity, and disturb the peace of this
+house for a bottle of ink!"
+
+The quarrel was ridiculous, and the Southerners laughed. General
+Jackson himself again changed countenance, and gave me, I do not know
+why, a smile that must have been reflected from the face of a woman he
+adored. But my poor master showed the bull-dog; and taking him by the
+arm and the collar I toddled him away from that table to a dark entry,
+where I held him without any admonition save a sustained grip. He became
+like a child, weeping and trembling, and declaring that everybody was in
+league against him. Argument is wasted on people having such infirmity
+of temper. When he was well cooled I put him in an arm-chair by a fire
+in the ladies' parlor, and he was soon very meek and tractable, watching
+the creatures he so admired.
+
+"You must go to bed as soon as you have your supper," I said to him.
+"The journey to Saratoga has been a hard one for you. But Skenedonk is
+here fortunately, and he can take you home again."
+
+My master looked at me with the shrewishness of an elephant. I had not
+at that time seen an elephant. When I did see one, however, the shifting
+of its eyes brought back the memory of Doctor Chantry when I had him at
+bay by the fire.
+
+"You are not going to get away from me," he responded. "If you are tired
+of it, so am I. Otherwise, we proceed."
+
+"If you pick quarrels with soldiers and duelists at every step, what are
+we to do?"
+
+"I picked no quarrel. It is my luck. Everyone is against me!" He hung
+his head in such a dejected manner that I felt ashamed of bringing his
+temperament to account: and told him I was certain no harm would come
+of it.
+
+"I am not genial," Doctor Chantry owned; "I wish I were. Now you are
+genial, Lazarre. People take to you. You attract them. But whatever I
+am, you are obliged to have my company: you cannot get along without me.
+You have no experience, and no money. I have experience,--and a few
+pounds:--not enough to retire into the country upon, in England; but
+enough to buy a little food for the present."
+
+I thought I could get along better without the experience and even the
+few pounds, than with him as an encumbrance; though I could not bring
+myself to the cruelty of telling him so. For there is in me a fatal
+softness which no man can have and overbear others in this world. It
+constrains me to make the other man's cause my own, though he be at war
+with my own interests.
+
+Therefore I was at the mercy of Skenedonk, also. The Indian appeared in
+the doorway and watched me. I knew he thought there was to be trouble
+with the gentleman from Washington, and I went to him to ease his mind.
+
+Skenedonk had nothing to say, however, and made me a sign to follow him.
+As we passed through the tap-room, General Jackson gave me another
+pleasant look. He had resumed his conversation and his own ink-bottle as
+if he had never been interrupted.
+
+The Indian led me upstairs to one of the chambers, and opened the door.
+
+In the room was Louis Philippe, and when we were shut alone together, he
+embraced me and kissed me as I did not know men embraced and kissed.
+
+"Do you know Skenedonk?" I exclaimed.
+
+"If you mean the Indian who brought you at my order, he was my guide
+from Montreal."
+
+"But he was not with you at the potter's camp."
+
+"Yes, he was in the hut, wrapped in his blanket, and after you drove the
+door in he heard all that was said. Lazarre"--Louis Philippe took my
+face in his hands--"make a clean breast of it."
+
+We sat down, and I told him without being questioned what I was going to
+do. He gravely considered.
+
+"I saw you enter the house, and had a suspicion of your undertaking. It
+is the worst venture you could possibly make at this time. We will begin
+with my family. Any belief in you into which I may have been betrayed is
+no guaranty of Monsieur's belief. You understand," said Louis Philippe,
+"that Monsieur stands next to the throne if there is no dauphin, or an
+idiot dauphin?"
+
+I said I understood.
+
+"Monsieur is not a bad man. But Bellenger, who took charge of the
+dauphin, has in some manner and for some reason, provided himself with a
+substitute, and he utterly denies you. Further: supposing that you are
+the heir of France, restored to your family and proclaimed--of what use
+is it to present yourself before the French people now? They are
+besotted with this Napoleon. The Empire seems to them a far greater
+thing than any legitimate monarchy. Of what use, do I say? It would be a
+positive danger for you to appear in France at this time! Napoleon has
+proscribed every Bourbon. Any prince caught alive in France will be put
+to death. Do you know what he did last year to the Duke d'Enghien? He
+sent into Germany for the duke, who had never harmed him, never
+conspired against him--had done nothing, in fact, except live an
+innocent life away from the seat of Napoleon's power. The duke was
+brought to Paris under guard and put in the dungeons of Vincennes. He
+demanded to see Bonaparte. Bonaparte would not see him. He was tried by
+night, his grave being already dug in the castle ditch. That lovely
+young fellow--he was scarcely above thirty--was taken out to the ditch
+and shot like a dog!"
+
+I stood up with my hands clenched.
+
+"Sit down," said Louis Philippe. "There is no room in the world at this
+time for anybody but that jealous monster."
+
+"He shall not tie me here," I said.
+
+"You intend to go?"
+
+"I intend to go."
+
+"This Bonaparte," said Louis Philippe, "has his troubles. His brother
+Jerome has married an American in Baltimore. A fine explosion that will
+make when it reaches his ears. Where are you going to land, Lazarre?"
+
+I said that must depend on the ship I took.
+
+"And what are you going to do when you land?"
+
+I said I would think that out later.
+
+Then the spirit being upon me, I burst bounds and told him impetuously
+that I was going to learn what the world held for me. Without means,
+without friends, or power or prospects, or certainty of any good
+results--impudent--reckless--utterly rash--"I am going," I cried,
+"because I must go!"
+
+"There is something about you which inspires love, my boy," said Louis
+Philippe; and I heard him with astonishment. "Perhaps it comes from the
+mother; she was a witcher of all mankind."
+
+"I cannot understand why any one should love so ignorant a creature, but
+God grant there be others that love me, too; for I have lived a life
+stinted of all affection. And, indeed, I did not know I wanted it until
+last year. When we talked late the other night, and you told me the
+history of all my family, the cruelest part of my lot seemed the
+separation from those that belonged to me. Separation from what is our
+own ought not to be imposed upon us even by God Himself!"
+
+"What!" said Louis Philippe, "is he following a woman!"
+
+My face burned, and probably went white, for I felt the blood go back on
+my heart. He took my hand and stroked it.
+
+"Don't chain yourself behind that chariot. Wait a little while for your
+good star to rise. I wish I had money. I wish I could be of use to you
+in France. I wish I stood nearer to Monsieur, for your sake. Every one
+must love this bold pure face. It bears some resemblance to Madame
+Royal. The sister of the dauphin is a good girl, not many years your
+senior. Much dominated by her uncles, but a royal duchess. It is the
+fashion now to laugh at chivalry. You are the most foolish example of it
+I ever saw! It is like seeing a knight without horse, armor, or purse,
+set out to win an equipment before he pursues his quest! Yet I love you
+for it, my boy!"
+
+"It would be well for me if I had more friends like you."
+
+"Why, I can be of no use! I cannot go back to France at this time, and
+if I could, what is my influence there? I must wander around in foreign
+parts, a private gentleman eking out my living by some kind of industry.
+What are you going to do with the fretful old fellow you have with you?"
+
+I groaned and laughed.
+
+"Carry him on my back. There is no getting rid of him. He is following
+me to France. He is my lesson-master."
+
+"How will you support him?"
+
+"He is supporting me at present. But I would rather take my chances
+alone."
+
+"You have another follower," said Louis Philippe. "Your Indian has been
+in France, and after hearing our talk at the camp, he foresaw you might
+be moved to this folly, and told me he intended to guide you there, or
+wherever you go!"
+
+"And Skenedonk, too!"
+
+I shook with laughter. It was so like Skenedonk to draw his conclusions
+and determine on the next step.
+
+"What shall I do with them?"
+
+"The old master can be your secretary, and as for the Indian, you can
+take him for your servant."
+
+"A secretary and a servant, for an outcast without a penny to his
+pouch!"
+
+"You see the powers that order us are beginning well with you. Starting
+with a secretary and a servant, you may end with a full household and a
+court! I ought to add my poor item of tribute, and this I can do. There
+is a ship-master taking cargo this month in New York bay, who is a
+devoted royalist; a Breton sailor. For a letter from me he will carry
+you and your suite to the other side of the world; but you will have to
+land in his port."
+
+"And what will the charges be?"
+
+"Nothing, except gratitude, if I put the case as strongly to him as I
+intend to do. God knows I may be casting a foul lot for you. His ship is
+staunch, rigged like the Italian salt ships. But it is dirty work
+crossing the sea; and there is always danger of falling into the hands
+of pirates. Are you determined?"
+
+I looked him in the eyes, and said I was; thanking him for all his
+goodness to one who had so little expectation of requiting him. The
+sweet heartiness of an older man so far beyond myself in princely
+attainments and world knowledge, who could stoop to such a raw savage,
+took me by storm.
+
+I asked him if he had any idea who the idiot was that we had seen in
+Bellenger's camp. He shook his head, replying that idiots were
+plentiful, and the people who had them were sometimes glad to get rid of
+them.
+
+"The dauphin clue has been very cleverly managed by--Bellenger, let us
+say," Louis Philippe remarked. "If you had not appeared, I should not
+now believe there is a dauphin."
+
+I wanted to tell him all the thoughts tossing in my mind; but silence is
+sometimes better than open speech. Facing adventure, I remembered that I
+had never known the want of food for any length of time during my
+conscious life. And I had a suspicion the soft life at De Chaumont's had
+unstrung me for what was before me. But it lasted scarce a year, and I
+was built for hardship.
+
+He turned to his table to write the ship-master's letter. Behold, there
+lay a book I knew so well that I exclaimed----
+
+"Where did you get my missal?"
+
+"Your missal, Lazarre? This is mine."
+
+I turned the leaves, and looked at the back. It was a continuation of
+the prayers of the church. There were blank leaves for the inscribing of
+prayers, and one was written out in a good bold hand.
+
+"His Majesty Louis XVI composed and wrote that prayer himself," said
+Louis Philippe. "The comfort-loving priests had a fashion of dividing
+the missal into three or four parts, that a volume might not be so heavy
+to carry about in their pockets. This is the second volume. It was
+picked up in the Tuileries after that palace was sacked."
+
+I told him mine must be the preceding volume, because I did not know
+there was any continuation. The prayers of the church had not been my
+study.
+
+"Where did you get yours, Lazarre?"
+
+"Madame de Ferrier gave it to me. When I saw it I remembered, as if my
+head were split open to show the picture, that my mother had read from
+that very book to me. I cannot explain it, but so it was."
+
+"I am not surprised she believes, against Bellenger's evidence, that you
+are Louis of France."
+
+"I will bring my book and show it to you."
+
+We compared the volumes after supper, and one was the mate of the other.
+
+The inn dining-room had one long table stretched down its entire length,
+heaped with wild meats and honey and pastries and fish in abundance.
+General Jackson sat at one end, and at the other sat the landlord,
+explaining to all his guests what each dish was, and urging good
+appetite. I sat by Louis Philippe, whose quality was known only to
+myself, with Doctor Chantry on the other side fretting for the
+attendance to which Jean had used him.
+
+My master was so tired that I put him early to bed; and then sat talking
+nearly all night with the gracious gentleman to whom I felt bound by
+gratitude and by blood.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Dieppe, high and glaring white above the water, will always symbolize to
+me the gate of France. The nobility of that view remained in my thoughts
+when half the distance to Paris was traversed.
+
+I could shut my eyes and see it as I lay on the straw in a post-house
+stable. A square hole in the front of the grenier gave upon the
+landscape. Even respectable houses in that part of the country were then
+built with few or no windows; but delicious masses of grayness they
+were, roofed with thick and overhanging thatch.
+
+"The stables of France are nothing but covered dunghills," Doctor
+Chantry grumbled; so when I crept with the Indian to lodgings over the
+cattle, one of the beds in the house was hired for the gouty master.
+Even at inns there were two or three beds in a room where they set us to
+dine.
+
+"An English inn-keeper would throw their furniture into the fire!" he
+cried in a language fortunately not understood.
+
+"But we have two good rooms on the ground floor, and another for
+Skenedonk," I sometimes remonstrated with him, "at three shillings and
+sixpence a day, in your money."
+
+"You would not see any man, let his rank be what it may," Doctor
+Chantry retorted, "dining in his bedroom, in England. And look at these
+walls!--papered with two or three kinds of paper, the bare spots hung
+with tapestry moth-eaten and filled with spiders! And what have we for
+table?--a board laid on cross-bars! And the oaken chairs are
+rush-bottomed, and so straight the backs are a persecution! The door
+hinges creak in these inns, the wind blows through--"
+
+So his complaints went on, for there never was a man who got so much out
+of small miseries. Skenedonk and I must have failed to see all in our
+travels that he put before us. For we were full of enjoyment and wonder:
+at the country people, wooden shod, the women's caps and long cloaks; at
+the quiet fair roads which multiplied themselves until we often paused
+enchanted in a fairy world of sameness; at market-towns, where fountains
+in the squares were often older than America, the country out of which
+we arrived.
+
+Skenedonk heard without shifting a muscle all Doctor Chantry's
+grievances; and I told him we ought to cherish them, for they were views
+of life we could not take ourselves. Few people are made so delicately
+that they lose color and rail at the sight of raw tripe brought in by a
+proud hostess to show her resources for dinner; or at a chicken coming
+upon the table with its head tucked beneath its wing.
+
+"We are fed with poulet, poulet, nothing but poulet," said Doctor
+Chantry, "until the poulets themselves are ashamed to look us in the
+face!"
+
+We fared well, indeed, and the wine was good, and my master said he must
+sustain himself on it though it proved his death. He could not march as
+Skenedonk and I regularly marched. We hired a cart to lift him and our
+knapsacks from village to village, with a driver who knew the road to
+Paris. When the distances were long we sometimes mounted beside him. I
+noticed that the soil of this country had not the chalk look of other
+lands which I afterwards saw to the east and north; but Napoleon was
+already making good the ancient thoroughfares.
+
+When my master was on shipboard he enjoyed the sea even less than the
+free air of these broad stretches; for while he could cast an eye about
+and approve of something under the sky--perhaps a church steeple, or the
+color of a thatch which filled me with joy--he could not approve of
+anything aboard a ship. Indeed, it was pity to have no delight in
+cleaving the water, and in the far-off spouting of whales, to say
+nothing of a living world that rides in undulations. For my part, I
+loved even the creaking of a ship, and the uncertainty of ever coming to
+port, and the anxiety lest a black flag should show above every sail we
+passed. The slow progress of man from point to point in his experience,
+while it sometimes enrages, on the whole interests me; and the monotony
+of a voyage has a sweetness like the monotony of daily bread. I looked
+out of the grenier window upon the high road, and upon the June sun in
+the act of setting; for we had supped and gone early to rest after a
+hard day. Post horses were stamping underneath, all ready for some noble
+count who intended to make another stage of his journey before
+nightfall.
+
+Small obtrusive cares, such as the desire that my shoes should last well
+into Paris, mingled with joy in the smell of the earth at sunset, and
+the looking forward to seeing Madame de Ferrier again. I wrapped myself
+every night in the conviction that I should see her, and more freely
+than I had ever seen her in America.
+
+There was a noise of horses galloping, and the expected noble count
+arrived; being no other than De Chaumont with his post coaches. He
+stepped out of the first, and Ernestine stepped out of the second,
+carrying Paul. She took him to his mother. The door flew open, and the
+woman I adored received her child and walked back and forth with him.
+Annabel leaned out while the horses were changed. I saw Miss Chantry,
+and my heart misgave me, remembering her brother's prolonged lament at
+separation from her.
+
+He was, I trusted, already shut into one of those public beds which are
+like cupboards; for the day had begun for us at three of the morning.
+But if he chose to show himself, and fall upon De Chaumont for luxurious
+conveyance to Paris, I was determined that Skenedonk and I should not
+appear. I wronged my poor master, who told me afterwards he watched
+through a crack of the cupboard bed with his heart in his mouth.
+
+The pause was a very short one, for horses are soon changed. Madame de
+Ferrier threw a searching eye over the landscape. It was a mercy she did
+not see the hole in the grenier, through which I devoured her, daring
+for the first time to call her secretly--Eagle--the name that De
+Chaumont used with common freedom! Now how strange is this--that one
+woman should be to a man the sum of things! And what was her charm I
+could not tell, for I began to understand there were many beautiful
+women in the world, of all favors, and shapely perhaps as the one of my
+love. Only her I found drawing the soul out of my body; and none of the
+others did more than please the eye like pictures.
+
+The carriages were gone with the sun, and it was no wonder all fell gray
+over the world.
+
+De Chaumont had sailed behind us, and he would be in Paris long before
+us.
+
+I had first felt some uneasiness, and dread of being arrested on our
+journey; though our Breton captain--who was a man of gold that I would
+travel far to see this day, if I could, even beneath the Atlantic, where
+he and his ship now float--obtained for us at Dieppe, on his own pledge,
+a kind of substitute for passports. We were a marked party, by reason of
+the doctor's lameness and Skenedonk's appearance. The Oneida, during his
+former sojourn in France, had been encouraged to preserve the novelty
+of his Indian dress. As I had nothing to give him in its place it did
+not become me to find fault. And he would have been more conspicuous
+with a cocked hat on his bare red scalp, and knee breeches instead of
+buckskins. Peasants ran out to look at him, and in return we looked at
+them with a good will.
+
+We reached the very barriers of Paris, however, without falling into
+trouble. And in the streets were so many men of so many nations that
+Skenedonk's attire seemed no more bizarre than the turbans of the east
+or the white burnous of the Arab.
+
+It was here that Skenedonk took his rôle as guide, and stalked through
+narrow crooked streets, which by comparison made New York, my first
+experience of a city, appear a plain and open village.
+
+I do not pretend to know anything about Paris. Some spots in the mystic
+labyrinth stand out to memory, such as that open space where the
+guillotine had done its work, the site of the Bastille, and a long
+street leading from the place of the Bastille, parallel with the river;
+and this I have good reason to remember. It is called Rue St. Antoine. I
+learned well, also, a certain prison, and a part of the ancient city
+called Faubourg St. Germain. One who can strike obscure trails in the
+wilderness of nature, may blunt his fine instincts on the wilderness of
+man.
+
+This did not befall the Indian. He took a bee line upon his old tracks,
+and when the place was sighted we threaded what seemed to be a rivulet
+between cliffs, for a moist depressed street-center kept us straddling
+something like a gutter, while with outstretched hands we could brace
+the opposite walls.
+
+We entered a small court where a gruff man, called a concierge, having a
+dirty kerchief around his head, received us doubtfully. He was not the
+concierge of Skenedonk's day. We showed him coin; and Doctor Chantry sat
+down in his chair and looked at him with such contempt that his respect
+increased.
+
+The house was clean, and all the stairs we climbed to the roof were well
+scoured. From the mansard there was a beautiful view of Paris, with
+forest growth drawing close to the heart of the city. For on that side
+of the world men dare not murder trees, but are obliged to respect and
+cherish them.
+
+My poor master stretched himself on a bed by the stooping wall, and in
+disgust of life and great pain of feet, begged us to order a pan of
+charcoal and let him die the true Parisian death when that is not met on
+the scaffold. Skenedonk said to me in Iroquois that Doctor Chantry was a
+sick old woman who ought to be hidden some place to die, and it was his
+opinion that the blessing of the church would absolve us. We could then
+make use of the pouch of coin to carry on my plans.
+
+My plans were more ridiculous than Skenedonk's. His at least took sober
+shape, while mine were still the wild emotions of a young man's mind.
+Many an hour I had spent on the ship, watching the foam speed past her
+side, trying to foresee my course like hers in a trackless world. But it
+seemed I must wait alertly for what destiny was making mine.
+
+We paid for our lodgings, three commodious rooms, though in the mansard;
+my secretary dragging himself to sit erect with groans and record the
+increasing debt of myself and my servant.
+
+"Come, Skenedonk," I then said. "Let us go down to the earth and buy
+something that Doctor Chantry can eat."
+
+That benevolent Indian was quite as ready to go to market as to abate
+human nuisances. And Doctor Chantry said he could almost see English
+beef and ale across the channel; but translated into French they would,
+of course, be nothing but poulet and sour wine. I pillowed his feet with
+a bag of down which he had kicked off his bed, and Skenedonk and I
+lingered along the paving as we had many a time lingered through the
+woods. There were book stalls a few feet square where a man seemed
+smothered in his own volumes; and victual shops where you could almost
+feed yourself for two or three sous; and people sitting outdoors
+drinking wine, as if at a general festival. I thought Paris had comfort
+and prosperity--with hereditary kings overthrown and an upstart in their
+place. Yet the streets were dirty, with a smell of ancientness that
+sickened me.
+
+We got a loaf of bread as long as a staff, a pat of butter in a leaf,
+and a bottle of wine. My servant, though unused to squaw labor, took on
+himself the porterage of our goods, and I pushed from street to street,
+keenly pleased with the novelty, which held somewhere in its volatile
+ether the person of Madame de Ferrier.
+
+Skenedonk blazed our track with his observant eye, and we told ourselves
+we were searching for Doctor Chantry's beef. Being the unburdened hunter
+I undertook to scan cross places, and so came unexpectedly upon the Rue
+St. Antoine, as a man told me it was called, and a great hurrahing that
+filled the mouths of a crowd blocking the thoroughfare.
+
+"Long live the emperor!" they shouted.
+
+The man who told me the name of the street, a baker all in white, with
+his tray upon his head, objected contemptuously.
+
+"The emperor is not in Paris: he is in Boulogne."
+
+"You never know where he is--he is here--there--everywhere!" declared
+another workman, in a long dark garment like a hunting-shirt on the
+outside of his small clothes.
+
+"Long live the emperor!--long live the emperor!"
+
+I pushed forward as two or three heavy coaches checked their headlong
+speed, and officers parted the crowd.
+
+"There he is!" admitted the baker behind me. Something struck me in the
+side, and there was Bellenger the potter, a man I thought beyond the
+seas in America. His head as I saw it that moment put the emperor's head
+out of my mind. He had a knife, and though he had used the handle, I
+foolishly caught it and took it from him. With all his strength he then
+pushed me so that I staggered against the wheel of a coach.
+
+"Assassin!" he screamed; and then Paris fell around my ears.
+
+If anybody had seen his act nobody refrained from joining in the cry.
+
+"Assassin! Assassin! To the lamp post with him!"
+
+I stood stupefied and astonished as an owl blinking in the sunshine, and
+two guards held my collar. The coaches lashed away, carrying the man of
+destiny--as I have since been told he called himself--as rapidly as
+possible, leaving the victim of destiny to be bayed at by that
+many-headed dog, the mongrel populace of Paris.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The idiot boy somewhere upon the hills of Lake George, always in a world
+of fog which could not be discovered again, had often come to my mind
+during my journeys, like a self that I had shed and left behind. But
+Bellenger was a cipher. I forgot him even at the campfire. Now here was
+this poor crazy potter on my track with vindictive intelligence, the day
+I set foot in Paris. Time was not granted even to set the lodging in
+order. He must have crossed the ocean with as good speed as Doctor
+Chantry and Skenedonk and I. He may have spied upon us from the port,
+through the barriers, and even to our mansard. At any rate he had found
+me in a crowd, and made use of me to my downfall: and I could have
+knocked my stupid head on the curb as I was haled away.
+
+One glimpse of Skenedonk I caught while we marched along Rue St.
+Antoine, the gendarmes protecting me from the crowd. He thought I was
+going to the scaffold, where many a strapping fellow had gone in the
+Paris of his youth, and fought to reach me, laying about him with his
+loaf of bread. Skenedonk would certainly trail me, and find a way to be
+of use, unless he broke into trouble as readily as I had done.
+
+My guards crossed the river in the neighborhood of palaces, and came by
+many windings to a huge pile rearing its back near a garden place, and
+there I was turned over to jailers and darkness. The entrance was
+unwholesome. A man at a table opened a tome which might have contained
+all the names in Paris. He dipped his quill and wrote by candlelight.
+
+"Political offender or common criminal?" he inquired.
+
+"Political offender," the officer answered.
+
+"What is he charged with?"
+
+"Trying to assassinate the emperor in his post-chaise."
+
+"La, la, la!" the recorder grunted. "Another attempt! And gunpowder put
+in the street to blow the emperor up only last week. Good luck attends
+him:--only a few windows broken and some common people killed. Taken in
+the act, was this fellow?"
+
+"With the knife in his hand."
+
+"What name?" the recorder inquired.
+
+I had thought on the answer, and told him merely that my name was
+Williams.
+
+"Eh, bien, Monsieur Veeleeum. Take him to the east side among the
+political offenders," said the master-jailer to an assistant or turnkey.
+
+"But it's full," responded the turnkey.
+
+"Shove him in some place."
+
+They searched me, and the turnkey lighted another candle. The meagerness
+of my output was beneath remark. When he had led me up a flight of
+stone steps he paused and inquired,
+
+"Have you any money?"
+
+"No."
+
+"So much the worse for you."
+
+"What is the name of this prison?" I asked.
+
+"Ste. Pélagie," he answered. "If you have no money, and expect to eat
+here, you better give me some trinket to sell for you."
+
+"I have no trinkets to give you."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"Your shirt or breeches will do."
+
+"Are men shut up here to starve?"
+
+The jailer shrugged.
+
+"The bread is very bad, and the beans too hard to eat. We do not furnish
+the rations; it is not our fault. The rule here is nothing buys nothing.
+But sleep in your breeches while you can. You will soon be ready enough
+to eat them."
+
+I was ready enough to eat them then, but forbore to let him know it. The
+whole place was damp and foul. We passed along a corridor less than four
+feet wide, and he unlocked a cell from which a revolting odor came.
+There was no light except what strained through a loophole under the
+ceiling. He turned the key upon me, and I held my nose. Oh, for a deep
+draught of the wilderness!
+
+There seemed to be an iron bed at one side, with a heap of rags on top.
+I resolved to stand up all night before trusting myself to that couch.
+The cell was soon explored. Two strides in each direction measured it.
+The stone walls were marked or cut with names I could dimly see.
+
+I braced my back against the door and watched the loophole where a gray
+hint of daylight told that the sun must be still shining. This faded to
+a blotch in the thick stone, and became obliterated.
+
+Tired by the day's march, and with a taste of clean outdoor air still in
+my lungs, I chose one of the two corners not occupied by the ill odored
+bed, sat down, and fell asleep, dropping my cares. A grating of the lock
+disturbed me. The jailer pushed a jug of water into the room, and
+replaced his bolts.
+
+Afterwards I do not remember anything except that the stone was not
+warm, and my stomach craved, until a groan in my ear stabbed sleep. I
+sat up awake in every nerve. There was nobody in the cell with me.
+Perhaps the groan had come from a neighboring prisoner.
+
+Then a faint stir of covering could be heard upon the bed.
+
+I rose and pressed as far as I could into my corner. No beast of the
+wilderness ever had such terror for me as the unknown thing that had
+been my cell-mate half a night without my knowledge.
+
+Was a vampire--a demon--a witch--a ghost locked in there with me?
+
+It moaned again, so faintly, that compassion instantly got the better of
+superstition.
+
+"Who is there?" I demanded; as if the knowledge of a name would cure
+terror of the suffering thing naming itself.
+
+I got no answer, and taking my resolution in hand, moved toward the bed,
+determined to know what housed with me. The jug of water stood in the
+way, and I lifted it with instinctive answer to the groan.
+
+The creature heard the splash, and I knew by its mutter what it wanted.
+Groping darkly, to poise the jug for an unseen mouth, I realized that
+something helpless to the verge of extinction lay on the bed, and I
+would have to find the mouth myself or risk drowning it. I held the
+water on the bed-rail with my right hand, groped with the other, and
+found a clammy, death-cold forehead, a nose and cavernous cheeks, an
+open and fever roughened mouth. I poured water on my handkerchief and
+bathed the face. That would have been my first desire in extreme
+moments. The poor wretch gave a reviving moan, so I felt emboldened to
+steady the jug and let drop by drop gurgle down its throat.
+
+Forgetting the horror of the bed I sat there, repeating at intervals
+this poor ministration until the porthole again dawned, and blackness
+became the twilight of day.
+
+My cell-mate could not see me. I doubt if he ever knew that a hand gave
+him water. His eyes were meaningless, and he was so gaunt that his body
+scarcely made a ridge on the bed.
+
+Some beans and mouldy bread were put in for my rations. The turnkey
+asked me how I intended to wash myself without basin or ewer or towels,
+and inquired further if he could be of service in disposing of my shirt
+or breeches.
+
+"What ails this man?"
+
+He shrugged, and said the prisoner had been wasting with fever.
+
+"You get fever in Ste. Pélagie," he added, "especially when you eat the
+prison food. This man ought to be sent to the infirmary, but the
+infirmary is overflowing now."
+
+"Who is he?"
+
+"A journalist, or poet, or some miserable canaille of that sort. He will
+soon be out of your way." Our guard craned over to look at him.
+"_Oui_--da! He is a dying man! A priest must be sent to him soon. I
+remember he demanded one several days ago."
+
+But that day and another dragged through before the priest appeared. I
+sent out my waistcoat, and got a wretched meal, and a few spoonfuls of
+wine that I used to moisten the dying man's lips. His life may or may
+not have been prolonged; but out of collapse he opened his mouth
+repeatedly and took the drops. He was more my blessing than I was his.
+
+For I had an experience which has ever since given me to know the souls
+of prisoners.
+
+The first day, in spite of the cell's foulness, I laughed secretly at
+jailers and felt at peace, holding the world at bay. I did not then know
+that Ste. Pélagie was the tomb of the accused, where more than one
+prisoner dragged out years without learning why he was put there. I was
+not brought to any trial or examination.
+
+But gradually an uneasiness which cannot be imagined by one who has not
+felt it, grew upon me. I wanted light. The absence of it was torture!
+Light--to vivify the stifling air, which died as this man was dying--as
+I should die--in blinding mirk!
+
+Moisture broke out all over my body, and cold dew stood on my forehead.
+How could human lungs breathe the midnight of blackening walls? The
+place was hot with the hell of confinement. I said over and over--"O
+God, Thou art Light!--in Thee is no darkness at all!"
+
+This anguish seemed a repetition of something I had endured once before.
+The body and spirit remembered, though the mind had no register. I
+clawed at the walls. If I slept, it was to wake gasping, fighting upward
+with both hands.
+
+The most singular phase was that I reproached myself for not soaking up
+more sun in the past. Oh, how much light was going to waste over wide
+fields and sparkling seas! The green woods, the green grass--they had
+their fill of sun, while we two perished!
+
+I remembered creeping out of glare under the shadow of rocks, and
+wondered how I could have done it! If I ever came to the sun again I
+would stretch myself and roll from side to side, to let it burn me well!
+How blessed was the tan we got in summer from steeping in light!
+
+Looking at my cell-mate I could have rent the walls.
+
+"We are robbed," I told his deaf ears. "The light, poured freely all
+over the city, the light that belongs to you and me as much as to
+anybody, would save you! I wish I could pick you up and carry you out
+where the sun would shine through your bones! But let us be glad, you
+and I, that there is a woman who is not buried like a whitening sprout
+under this weight of stone! She is free, to walk around and take the
+light in her gray eyes and the wind in her brown hair. I swear to God if
+I ever come out of this I will never pass so much as a little plant
+prostrate in darkness, without helping it to the light."
+
+It was night by the loophole when our turnkey threw the door open. I
+heard the priest and his sacristan joking in the corridor before they
+entered carrying their sacred parcels. The priest was a doddering old
+fellow, almost deaf, for the turnkey shouted at his ear, and dim of
+sight, for he stooped close to look at the dying man, who was beyond
+confession.
+
+"Bring us something for a temporary altar," he commanded the turnkey,
+who stood candle in hand.
+
+The turnkey gave his light to the sacristan, and taking care to lock us
+in, hurried to obey.
+
+I measured the lank, ill-strung assistant, more an overgrown boy than a
+man of brawn, but expanded around his upper part by the fullness of a
+short white surplice. He had a face cheerful to silliness.
+
+The turnkey brought a board supported by crosspieces; and withdrew,
+taking his own candle, as soon as the church's tapers were lighted.
+
+The sacristan placed the temporary altar beside the foot of the bed,
+arrayed it, and recited the Confiteor.
+
+Then the priest mumbled the Misereatur and Indulgentiam.
+
+I had seen extreme unction administered as I had seen many another
+office of the church in my dim days, with scarcely any attention. Now
+the words were terribly living. I knew every one before it rolled off
+the celebrant's lips. Yet under that vivid surface knowledge I carried
+on as vivid a sequence of thought.
+
+The priest elevated the ciborium, repeating,
+
+"Ecce Agnus Dei."
+
+Then three times--"Domine, non sum dignus."
+
+I heard and saw with exquisite keenness, yet I was thinking,
+
+"If I do not get out of here he will have to say those words over me."
+
+He put the host in the parted mouth of the dying, and spoke--
+
+"Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vetam
+aeternam."
+
+I thought how easy it would be to strip the loose surplice over the
+sacristan's head. There was a swift clip of the arm around your
+opponent's neck which I had learned in wrestling, that cut the breath
+off and dropped him as limp as a cloth. It was an Indian trick. I said
+to myself it would be impossible to use that trick on the sacristan if
+he left the cell behind the deaf old priest. I did not want to hurt him.
+Still, he would have a better chance to live after I had squeezed his
+neck, than I should have if I did not squeeze it.
+
+The priest took out of a silver case a vessel of oil, and a branch. He
+sprinkled holy water with the branch, upon the bed, the walls, the
+sacristan and me, repeating,
+
+"Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem
+dealbabor."
+
+While I bent my head to the drops, I knew it was impossible to choke
+down the sacristan, strip off his surplice, invest myself with it and
+get out of the cell before priest or turnkey looked back. The sacrilege
+of such an attack would take all the strength out of me.
+
+The priest said the Exaudi nos, exhorted the insensible figure, then
+recited the Credo and the Litany, the sacristan responding.
+
+Silence followed.
+
+I knew the end was approaching. My hands were as cold as the nerveless
+one which would soon receive the candle. I told myself I should be a
+fool to attempt it. There was not one chance in a hundred. I should not
+squeeze hard enough. The man would yell. If I were swift as lightning
+and silent as force, they would take me in the act. It was impossible.
+But people who cannot do impossible things have to perish.
+
+The priest dipped his thumb in oil, and with it crossed the eyes, ears,
+nose, mouth, and hands of him who was leaving the use of these five
+senses and instruments of evil.
+
+Then he placed a lighted candle in the stiffened fingers, and ended
+with--
+
+"Accipe lampadem ardentem custodi unctionem tuam."
+
+I said to myself--"I cannot do it! Nobody could! It is impossible!"
+
+The sacristan now began to strip the altar and pack all the sacred
+implements into their cases: preparing his load in the center of the
+room.
+
+The man was dead.
+
+The sacristan's last office was to fix the two lighted altar candles on
+the head and foot railing of the bed. They showed the corpse in its
+appalling stillness, and stood like two angels, with the pit between
+them.
+
+The sacristan rapped upon the door to let the turnkey know it was time
+to unlock.
+
+I drew the thick air to my lung depths. The man who would breathe no
+more was not as rigid as I stood. But there was no use in attempting
+such a thing!
+
+The turnkey opened a gap of doorway through which he could see the
+candles and the bed. He opened no wider than the breadth of the priest,
+who stepped out as the sacristan bent for the portables.
+
+There was lightning in my arm as it took the sacristan around the neck
+and let him limp upon the stones. The tail of the priest's cassock was
+scarcely through the door.
+
+"Eh bien! sacristan," called the turnkey. "Make haste with your load. I
+have this death to report. He is not so pretty that you must stand
+gazing at him all night!"
+
+I had the surplice over the sacristan's head and over mine, and backed
+out with my load, facing the room.
+
+If my jailer had thrust his candle at me, if the priest had turned to
+speak, if the man in the cell had got his breath before the bolt was
+turned, if my white surplice had not appeared the principal part of me
+in that black place--.
+
+It was impossible!--but I had done it.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The turnkey's candle made a star-point in the corridor. He walked ahead
+of the priest and I walked behind. We descended to the entrance where
+the man with the big book sat taking stock of another wretch between
+officers. I saw as I shaded my face with the load, that his inattentive
+eye dwelt on my surplice, which would have passed me anywhere in France.
+
+"Good-night, monsieur the curé," said the turnkey, letting us through
+the outer door.
+
+"Good-night, good-night," the priest responded.
+
+"And to you, sacristan."
+
+"Good-night," I muttered, and he came a step after me. The candle was
+yet in his hand, showing him my bulk, and perhaps the small clothes he
+had longed to vend. I expected hue and cry, but walked on after the
+priest, and heard the heavy doors jar, and breathed again.
+
+Hearkening behind and in front, on the right and the left, I followed
+him in the direction of what I have since learned to call the Jardin des
+Plantes. It is near Ste. Pélagie.
+
+The priest, wearied by his long office, spoke only once about the
+darkness; for it was a cloudy night; and did not attend to my muttered
+response. I do not know what sympathy the excellent old man might have
+shown to an escaped prisoner who had choked his sacristan, and I had no
+mind to test it. He turned a corner, and with the wall angle between us,
+I eased down the sacred furniture, drew off the surplice and laid that
+upon it, and took to my heels up the left hand street; for the guard had
+brought me across the river to Ste. Pélagie.
+
+I had no hat, and the cut of my coat showed that I had lost a waistcoat.
+Avoiding the little circles of yellowness made by lamp posts, I reached
+without mishap of falling into the hands of any patrol, a bridge
+crossing to an island point, and from the other side of the point to the
+opposite shore. At intervals along the parapet dim lights were placed.
+
+Compared to Lake George, which wound like a river, and the mighty St.
+Lawrence as I remembered it, the Seine was a narrow stream. Some boats
+made constellations on the surface. The mass of island splitting it into
+two branches was almost the heart of Paris. There were other foot
+passengers on the bridge, and a gay carriage rolled by. I did not see
+any gendarmes, and only one foot passenger troubled me.
+
+I was on the bridge above the left arm of the river when an ear trained
+in the woods caught his footstep, pausing as mine paused, and hurrying
+as mine hurried. If the sacristan had been found in Ste. Pélagie a
+pursuer would not track me so delicately, and neither would Skenedonk
+hold back on the trail. I stopped in the shade when we two were alone on
+the second span, and wheeled, certain of catching my man under the
+flare of a cresset. I caught him, and knew that it was Bellenger
+following me.
+
+My mind was made up in an instant. I walked back to settle matters with
+him, though slaughter was far from my thoughts. I had done him no harm;
+but he was my enemy, and should be forced to let me alone.
+
+The fellow who had appeared so feeble at his cabin that I opened the
+door for him, and so poor-spirited that his intellect claimed pity,
+stood up as firm as a bear at my approach, and met my eyes with perfect
+understanding.
+
+Not another thing do I remember. The facts are simply these: I faced
+Bellenger; no blows passed; my mind flashed blank with the partial
+return of that old eclipse which has fallen upon me after strong
+excitement, in more than one critical moment. The hiatus seems brief
+when I awake though it may have lasted hours. I know the eclipse has
+been upon me, like the wing-shadow of eternity; but I have scarcely let
+go of time.
+
+I could not prove that Bellenger dragged me to the parapet and threw me
+into the river. If I had known it I should have laughed at his doing so,
+for I could swim like a fish, through or under water, and sit on the
+lake bottom holding my breath until Skenedonk had been known to dive for
+me.
+
+When next I sensed anything at all it was a feeling of cold.
+
+I thought I was lying in one of the shallow runlets that come into Lake
+George, and the pebbles were an uneasy bed, chilling my shoulders. I was
+too stiff to move, or even turn my head to lift out of water the ear on
+which it rested. But I could unclose my eyelids, and this is what I
+saw:--a man naked to his waist, half reclining against a leaning slab of
+marble, down which a layer of water constantly moved. His legs were
+clothed, and his other garments lay across them. His face had sagged in
+my direction. There was a deep slash across his forehead, and he showed
+his teeth and his glassy eyes at the joke.
+
+Beyond this silent figure was a woman as silent. The ridge of his body
+could not hide the long hair spread upon her breast. I considered the
+company and the moisture into which I had fallen with unspeakable
+amazement. We were in a low and wide stone chamber with a groined
+ceiling, supported by stone pillars. A row of lamps was arranged above
+us, so that no trait or feature might escape a beholder.
+
+That we were put there for show entered my mind slowly and brought
+indignation. To be so helpless and so exposed was an outrage against
+which I struggled in nightmare impotence; for I was bare to my hips
+also, and I knew not what other marks I carried beside those which had
+scarred me all my conscious life.
+
+Now in the distance, and echoing, feet descended stairs.
+
+I knew that people were coming to look at us, and I could not move a
+muscle in resentment.
+
+I heard their voices, fringed with echoes, before either speaker came
+within my vision.
+
+"This is the mortuary chapel of the Hôtel Dieu?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur the marquis, this is the mortuary chapel."
+
+"Um! Cheerful place!"
+
+"Much more cheerful than the bottom of the river, monsieur the marquis."
+
+"No doubt. Never empty, eh?"
+
+"I have been a servant of the Hôtel Dieu fourteen years, monsieur the
+marquis, and have not yet seen all the marble slabs vacant."
+
+"You receive the bodies of the drowned?"
+
+"And place them where they may be seen and claimed."
+
+"How long do you keep them?"
+
+"That depends. Sometimes their friends seek them at once. We have kept a
+body three months in the winter season, though he turned very green."
+
+"Are all in your present collection gathering verdure?"
+
+"No, monsieur. We have a very fresh one, just brought in; a big stalwart
+fellow, with the look of the country about him."
+
+"Small clothes?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur."
+
+"Buckle shoes?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur."
+
+"Hair light and long?"
+
+"The very man, monsieur the marquis."
+
+"I suppose I shall have to look at him. If he had to make himself
+unpleasant he should have stayed at the chateau where his mother could
+identify him. He is one of my peasants, come to Paris to see life! I
+must hold my nose and do it."
+
+"It is not necessary to hold the nose, monsieur."
+
+"After fourteen years, perhaps not."
+
+I heard the snap of a snuff-box lid as the marquis fortified himself.
+
+My agony for the woman who was to be looked at turned so sharp that I
+uttered a click in my throat. But they passed her, and merely glanced at
+my next neighbor.
+
+The old marquis encountered my fixed stare. Visibly it shocked through
+him. He was all gray, and curled and powdered, instead of being clipped
+close and smooth in the style of the Empire; an exquisite, thin-featured
+man, high of nose and eyebrows, not large, but completely turned out as
+ample man and bright spirit. The slightest fragrance of scent was in his
+presence, and a shade of snuff on his upper lip appeared fine
+supercilious hairs.
+
+I did not look at the servant of the Hôtel Dieu. The old noble and I
+held each other with unflinching gaze.
+
+"Do you recognize him, monsieur?"
+
+"I do," the old noble deliberately answered. "I should know this face
+anywhere. Have him taken to my carriage directly."
+
+"Your carriage, monsieur! He can be sent--"
+
+"I said take him to my carriage."
+
+"It shall be done. His eyes have opened since he came in. But they
+sometimes look as if they would speak! Their faces change constantly.
+This other man who is grinning to-night may be quite serious to-morrow."
+
+"And by the end of the month sorry enough, eh?"
+
+The servant of the Hôtel Dieu tittered amiably, and I knew he was going
+for help to lift me off the slab, when he uttered a cry of surprise. The
+old marquis wheeled sharply, and said:
+
+"Eh, bien! Is this another of them, promenading himself?"
+
+I felt the Oneida coming before his silent moccasins strode near me. He
+did not wait an instant, but dragged me from the wet and death cold
+marble to the stone floor, where he knelt upon one knee and supported
+me. O Skenedonk! how delicious was the warmth of your healthy body--how
+comforting the grip of your hunter arms! Yet there are people who say an
+Indian is like a snake! I could have given thanks before the altar at
+the side of the crypt, which my fixed eyes encountered as he held me.
+The marble dripped into its gutter as if complaining of my escape.
+
+"Oh, my dear friend!" cried the servant.
+
+Skenedonk answered nothing at all.
+
+"Who is this gentleman," the marquis inquired, "that seems to have the
+skin of a red German sausage drawn tight over his head?"
+
+"This is an American Indian, monsieur the marquis."
+
+"An Indian?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur; but he understands French."
+
+"Thank you for the hint. It may save me from having a German sausage
+drawn tight over my head. I have heard that American Indians practice
+giving their friends that appearance. How do you know he understands
+French?"
+
+"I think it is the man who used to come to the Hôtel Dieu years ago,
+when I was new in its service. He was instructed in religion by
+churchmen in Paris, and learned the language. Oh, my dear monsieur--I
+think it is Iroquois that he is called--I am aware the Americans have
+different manners, but here we do not go into the mortuary chapel of the
+Hôtel Dieu and disarrange the bodies without permission!"
+
+Skenedonk's eyes probably had less of the fawn in them than usual. I
+felt the guttural sound under his breast.
+
+"I have found him, and now I will take him."
+
+"But that is the marquis' servant!"
+
+"The marquis is his servant!"
+
+"Oh, my dear monsieur the Indian! You speak of a noble of France, the
+Marquis du Plessy! Be satisfied," pleaded the servitor of the Hôtel
+Dieu, "with this other body, whom no one is likely to claim! I may be
+permitted to offer you that, if you are determined--though it may cost
+me my place!--and after fourteen years' service! It you would appease
+him, monsieur the marquis--though I do not know whether they ever take
+money."
+
+"I will appease him," said the old noble. "Go about your errand and be
+quick."
+
+The servant fled up the stairs.
+
+"This man is not dead, my friend," said the Marquis du Plessy.
+
+Skenedonk knew it.
+
+"But he will not live long in this cursed crypt," the noble added. "You
+will get into my carriage with him, we will take him and put him in hot
+sheets, and see what we can do for him."
+
+I could feel Skenedonk's antagonism giving way in the relaxing of his
+muscles.
+
+But maintaining his position the Oneida asserted:
+
+"He is not yours!"
+
+"He belongs to France."
+
+"France belongs to him!" the Indian reversed.
+
+"Eh, eh! Who is this young man?"
+
+"The king."
+
+"We have no king now, my friend. But assuming there is a man who should
+be king, how do you know this is the one?"
+
+If Skenedonk made answer in words it was lost to me. The spirit sank to
+submergence in the body, I remember combating motion like a drugged
+person.
+
+Torpor and prostration followed the recurring eclipse as that followed
+excitement and shock. I was not ill; and gathered knowledge of the
+environment, which was different from anything I had before experienced.
+De Chaumont's manor was a wilderness fortress compared to this private
+hotel of an ancient family in the heart of Paris.
+
+I lay in a bed curtained with damask, and looked through open glass
+doors at a garden. Graveled walks, bosky trees and masses of flowers,
+plats of grass where arbored seats were placed, stretched their vista to
+a wall clothed in ivy, which proved to be the end of a chapel. For high
+over the curtain of thick green shone a rose window. The afternoon sun
+laid bare its fine staining, but only in the darkness when the church
+was illuminated and organ music rolled from it, did the soul of that
+window appear struck through with light.
+
+Strange servants and Doctor Chantry by glimpses, and the old noble and
+the Oneida almost constantly, were about me. Doctor Chantry looked
+complacently through the curtains and wished me good-morning. I smiled
+to see that he was lodged as he desired, and that his clothes had been
+renewed in fine cloth, with lawn to his neck and silk stockings for his
+shrunk calves. My master was an elderly beau; and I gave myself no care
+that he had spent his money--the money of the expedition--on foppery.
+
+Skenedonk also had new toggery in scarfs and trinkets which I did not
+recognize, and his fine buckskins were cleaned. The lackeys appeared
+subservient to him, and his native dignity was never more impressive
+than in that great house. I watched my host and my servant holding
+interviews, which Skenedonk may have considered councils, on the benches
+in the garden, and from which my secretary, the sick old woman, seemed
+excluded. But the small interest of seeing birds arrive on branches, and
+depart again, sufficed me; until an hour when life rose strongly.
+
+I sat up in bed, and finding myself alone, took advantage of an
+adjoining room where a marble bath was set in the floor. Returning
+freshened from the plunge, with my sheet drawn around me, I found one of
+those skilled and gentle valets who seem less men than he-maids.
+
+"I am to dress monsieur when monsieur is ready," said this person.
+
+"I am ready now," I answered, and he led me into a suite of rooms and
+showed me an array which took my breath: dove-colored satin knee
+breeches, and a long embroidered coat of like color, a vest sprigged
+with rosebuds, cravat and lace ruffles, long silk stockings and shoes to
+match in extravagance, a shirt of fine lawn, and a hat for a nobleman.
+
+"Tell your master," I said to the lackey, "that he intends me great
+kindness, but I prefer my own clothes."
+
+"These are monsieur's own clothes, made to his order and measure."
+
+"But I gave no order, and I was not measured."
+
+The man raised his shoulders and elbows with gentlest dissent.
+
+"These are only a few articles of monsieur's outfit. Here is the key. If
+monsieur selects another costume he will find each one complete."
+
+By magic as it seemed, there was a wardrobe full of fineries provided
+for my use. The man displayed them; in close trousers and coats with
+short fronts, or knee breeches and long tails; costumes, he said, for
+the street, for driving, riding, traveling, for evening, and for
+morning; and one white satin court dress. At the marquis' order he had
+laid out one for a ball. Of my old clothes not a piece was to be seen.
+
+The miracle was that what he put upon me fitted me. I became transformed
+like my servant and my secretary, and stood astonished at the result.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+"Enter the prince of a fairy tale," said the Marquis du Plessy when the
+lackey ushered me into the garden.
+
+It was a nest of amber at that time of sunset, and he waited for me at a
+table laid for supper, under a flat canopy of trees which had their tops
+trained and woven into a mat.
+
+I took his hand to kiss, but he rose up and magnificently placed me in a
+chair opposite himself.
+
+"Your benefits are heavy, monsieur," I said. "How shall I acknowledge
+them?"
+
+"You owe me nothing at all," he answered; "as you will see when I have
+told you a true story. It would sound like a lie if anything were
+incredible in these fabulous times."
+
+"But you do not know anything about me."
+
+"I am well instructed in your history, by that charming attendant in
+fringed leather breeches, who has been acquainted with you much longer
+than you have been acquainted with yourself."
+
+"Yet I am not sure of deserving the marquis' interest."
+
+"Has the marquis admitted that he feels any interest in you? Though this
+I will own: few experiences have affected me like your living eyes
+staring out of the face of my dead king!"
+
+We met each other again with a steady gaze like that in the mortuary
+chapel.
+
+"Do you believe I am ----?"
+
+"Do I believe you are ----? Who said there was such a person in
+existence?"
+
+"Louis Philippe."
+
+"The Duke of Orleans? Eh, bien! What does he know of the royal family?
+He is of the cadette branch."
+
+"But he told me the princess, the dauphin's sister, believes that the
+dauphin was taken alive from the Temple and sent to America."
+
+"My dear Lazarre, I do not say the Duke of Orleans would lie--far be it
+from me--though these are times in which we courageously attack our
+betters. But he would not object to seeing the present pretender ousted.
+Why, since his father voted for the death of Louis XVI, he and his are
+almost outlawed by the older branch! Madame Royal, the Duchess of
+Angoulęme, cannot endure him. I do not think she would speak to him!"
+
+"He is my friend," I said stoutly.
+
+"Remember you are another pretender, and he has espoused your cause. I
+think him decent myself--though there used to be some pretty stories
+told about him and the fair sentimentalist who educated him--Madame de
+Genlis. But I am an old man; I forget gossip."
+
+My host gave lively and delicate attention to his food as it was
+brought, and permitted nothing to be overheard by his lackeys.
+
+The evening was warm, and fresh with the breath of June; and the garden,
+by a contrivance of lamps around its walls, turned into a dream world
+after sunset faded.
+
+It was as impossible to come to close terms with this noble of the old
+régime as with a butterfly. He alighted on a subject; he waved his
+wings, and rose. I felt a clumsy giant while he fluttered around my
+head, smiling, mocking, thrusting his pathos to the quick.
+
+"My dear boy, I do not say that I believe in you; I do not observe
+etiquette with you. But I am going to tell you a little story about the
+Tuileries. You have never seen the palace of the Tuileries?"
+
+I said I had not.
+
+"It has been restored for the use of these Bonapartes. When I say these
+Bonapartes, Lazarre, I am not speaking against the Empire. The Empire
+gave me back my estates. I was not one of the stringent emigrés. My
+estates are mine, whoever rules in France. You may consider me a
+betwixt-and-betweener. Do so. My dear boy, I am. My heart is with my
+dead king. My carcass is very comfortable, both in Paris and on my
+ancestral lands. Napoleon likes me as an ornament to his bourgeois
+court. I keep my opinion of him to myself. Do you like garlic, my boy?"
+
+I told him I was not addicted to the use of it.
+
+"Garlic is divine. God gave it to man. A hint of it in the appropriate
+dish makes life endurable. I carry a piece in a gold box at the bottom
+of my vest pocket, that I may occasionally take it out and experience a
+sense of gratitude for divine benefits."
+
+He took out his pet lump, rubbed it on the outside of his wine bottle,
+poured out a glassful and drank it, smiling adorably at me in ecstasy!
+
+"We were speaking of the Tuileries. You should have seen the place when
+it was sacked after the flight of the royal family. No, you should not
+have seen it! I am glad you were gone. Mirrors were shattered, and
+lusters, vases, china, gold candlesticks, rolled about and were trampled
+on the floor. The paintings were stabbed with pikes; tables, screens,
+gilt stools, chairs crushed, and carpets cut to pieces; garments of all
+kinds strewn and torn; all that was not carried off by pillagers being
+thus destroyed. It was yet a horrible sight days after the mob had done
+their work, and slaughtered bodies of guards had been carried away, and
+commissioners with their clerks and assistants began to restore order."
+
+"Did you see the Tuileries at that time, monsieur?"
+
+"I did. I put on the clothes of one of my peasants, slumped in Jacquot's
+wooden shoes, and kept my mouth open as well as I could for the dust.
+The fantastic was yet in my blood. Exile takes that out of everybody
+except your royal uncle of Provence. But I knew in my heart what I would
+help do with that mob, if our turn ever came again!"
+
+His dark eyes rested on the red wine as on a pool of blood.
+
+"Sick of the ruin, I leaned out to look in the garden, from a window in
+the queen's own apartment. I stepped on a shelf, which appeared fixed
+under the window; but it moved, and I found that it could be pushed on
+grooves into the wall. There was a cavity made to hold it. It had
+concealed two armchairs placed opposite each other, so cunningly that
+their paneled sides yet looked a part of the thick wall. I sat down in
+one of them, and though the cushion was stiff, I felt something hard
+under it."
+
+Monsieur du Plessy glanced around in every direction to satisfy himself
+that no ears lurked within hearing.
+
+"Eh, bien! Under the cushion I found the queen's jewel-case!
+Diamonds--bags of gold coin--a half circlet of gems!--since the great
+necklace was lost such an array had not seen the light in France. The
+value must be far above a million francs."
+
+The marquis fixed his eyes on me and said:
+
+"What should I have done with it, Lazarre?"
+
+"It belonged to the royal family," I answered.
+
+"But everything which belonged to the royal family had been confiscated
+to the state. I had just seen the belongings of the royal family
+trampled as by cattle. First one tyrant and then another rose up to tell
+us what we should do, to batten himself off the wretched commonwealth,
+and then go to the guillotine before his successor. As a good citizen I
+should have turned these jewels and stones and coins over to the state.
+But I was acting the part of Jacquot, and as an honest peasant I whipped
+them under my blouse and carried them away. In my straits of exile I
+never decreased them. And you may take inventory of your property and
+claim it when we rise from the table."
+
+My heart came up in my throat. I reached across and caught his hands.
+
+"You believe in me--you believe in me!"
+
+"Do I observe any etiquette with you, Lazarre? This is the second time I
+have brought the fact to your notice. I particularly wish you to note
+that I do not observe any etiquette with you."
+
+"What does a boy who has been brought up among Indians know about
+etiquette! But you accept me, or you could not put the property you have
+loyally and at such risk saved for my family, into my hands."
+
+"I don't accept even your uncle of Provence. The king of Spain and I
+prefer to call him by that modest title. Since you died or were removed
+from the Temple, he has taken the name of Louis XVIII, and maintained a
+court at the expense of the czar of Russia and the king of Spain. He is
+a fine Latinist; quotes Latin verse; and keeps the mass bells
+everlastingly ringing; the Russians laugh at his royal masses! But in my
+opinion the sacred gentleman is either moral slush or a very deep
+quicksand. It astonishes me," said the Marquis du Plessy, "to find how
+many people I do disapprove of! I really require very little of the
+people I am obliged to meet."
+
+He smoothed my hands which were yet holding his, and exploded:
+
+"The Count of Provence is an old turtle! Not exactly a reptile, for
+there is food in him. But of a devilish flat head and cruel snap of the
+jaws!"
+
+"How can that be," I argued, "when his niece loves him so? And even I,
+in the American woods, with mind eclipsed, was not forgotten. He sent me
+of the money that he was obliged to receive in charity!"
+
+"It is easy to dole out charity money; you are squeezing other people's
+purses, not your own. What I most object to in the Count of Provence, is
+that assumption of kingly airs, providing the story is true which leaked
+secretly among the emigrés. The story which I heard was that the dauphin
+had not died, but was an idiot in America. An idiot cannot reign. But
+the throne of France is not clamoring so loud for a Bourbon at present
+that the idiot's substitute must be proclaimed and hold a beggar's
+court. There are mad loyalists who swear by this eighteenth Louis. I am
+not one of them. In fact, Lazarre, I was rather out of tune with your
+house!"
+
+"Not you!" I said.
+
+"I do not fit in these times. I ought to have gone with my king and my
+friends under the knife. Often I am ashamed of myself for slipping away.
+That I should live to see disgusting fools in the streets of Paris,
+after the Terror was over!--young men affecting the Greek and Roman
+manner--greeting one another by wagging of the head! They wore gray
+coats with black collars, gray or green cravats, carried cudgels, and
+decreed that all men should have the hair plaited, powdered, and
+fastened up with a comb, like themselves! The wearer of a queue was
+likely to be knocked on the head. These creatures used to congregate at
+the old Feydeau theater, or meet around the entrance of the Louvre, to
+talk classical jargon, and wag!"
+
+The Marquis du Plessy drew himself together with a strong shudder. I had
+the desire to stand between him and the shocks of an alien world. Yet
+there was about him a tenacious masculine strength, an adroitness of
+self-protection which needed no champion.
+
+"Did the Indian tell you about a man named Bellenger?" I inquired.
+
+"Bellenger is part of the old story about the dauphin's removal. I heard
+of him first at Coblenz. And I understand now that he is following you
+with another dauphin, and objecting to you in various delicate ways.
+Napoleon Bonaparte is master of France, and in the way to be master of
+Europe, because he has a nice sense of the values of men, and the best
+head for detail that was ever formed in human shape. There is something
+almost supernatural in his grasp of affairs. He lets nothing escape him.
+The only mistake he ever made was butchering the young Duke
+d'Enghien--the courage and clearness of the man wavered that one
+instant; and by the way, he borrowed my name for the duke's incognito
+during the journey under arrest! England, Russia, Austria and Sweden are
+combining against Napoleon. He will beat them. For while other men
+sleep, or amuse themselves, or let circumstance drive them, he is
+planning success and providing for all possible contingencies. Take a
+leaf out of the general's book, my boy. No enemy is contemptible. If you
+want to force the hand of fortune--scheme!--scheme!--all the
+time!--out-scheme the other fellow!"
+
+The marquis rose from the table.
+
+"I am longer winded," he said, "than a man named De Chaumont, who has
+been importuning Bonaparte, in season and out of season, to reinstate an
+American emigré, a Madame de Ferrier."
+
+"Will Bonaparte restore her lands?" I asked, feeling my voice like a
+rope in my throat.
+
+"Do you know her family?"
+
+"I knew Madame de Ferrier in America."
+
+"Their estate lies next to mine. And what is the little De Ferrier like
+since she is grown?"
+
+"A beautiful woman."
+
+"Ah--ah! Bonaparte's plan will then be easy of execution. You may see
+her this evening here in the Faubourg St. Germain. I believe she is to
+appear at Madame de Permon's, where Bonaparte may look in."
+
+My host bolted the doors of his private cabinet, and took from the
+secret part of a wall cupboard the queen's jewel-case. We opened it
+between us. The first thing I noticed was a gold snuffbox, set with
+portraits of the king, the queen, and their two children.
+
+How I knew them I cannot tell. Their pictured faces had never been put
+before my conscious eyes until that moment. Other portraits might have
+been there. I had no doubt, no hesitation.
+
+I was on my knees before the face I had seen in spasms of
+remembrance--with oval cheeks, and fair hair rolled high--and open
+neck--my royal mother!
+
+Next I looked at the king, heavier of feature, honest and straight
+gazing, his chin held upward; at the little sister, a smaller miniature
+of the queen; at the softly molded curves of the child that was myself!
+
+The marquis turned his back.
+
+Before I could speak I rose and put my arms around him. He wheeled, took
+my hand, stood at a little distance, and kissed it.
+
+We said not one word about the portraits, but sat down with the
+jewel-case again between us.
+
+"These stones and coins are also my sister's, monsieur the marquis?"
+
+He lifted his eyebrows.
+
+"I had ample opportunity, my dear boy, to turn them into the exchequer
+of the Count of Provence. Before his quarrel with the late czar of
+Russia he maintained a dozen gentlemen-in-waiting, and perhaps as many
+ladies, to say nothing of priests, servants, attendants of attendants,
+and guards. This treasure might last him two years. If the king of Spain
+and his majesty of Russia got wind of it, and shut off their pensions,
+it would not last so long. I am too thrifty a Frenchman to dissipate the
+hoards of the state in foreign parts! Yet, if you question my taste--I
+will not say my honesty, Lazarre--"
+
+"I question nothing, monsieur! I ask advice."
+
+"Eh, bien! Then do not be quite as punctilious as the gentleman who got
+turned out of the debtor side of Ste. Pélagie into an alley. 'This will
+not do,' says he. So around he posts to the entrance, and asks for
+admittance again!"
+
+"Catch me knocking at Ste. Pélagie for admittance again!"
+
+"Then my advice is to pay your tailor, if he has done his work
+acceptably."
+
+"He has done it marvelously, especially in the fitting."
+
+"A Parisian workman finds it no miracle to fit a man from his old
+clothes. I took the liberty of sending your orders. Having heard my
+little story, you understand that you owe me nothing but your society;
+and a careful inventory of this trust."
+
+We were a long time examining the contents of the case. There were six
+bags of coin, all gold louis; many unset gems; rings for the hand; and
+clusters of various sorts which I knew not how to name, that blazed
+with a kind of white fire very dazzling. The half-way crown was crusted
+thick with colored stones the like of which I could not have imagined in
+my dreams. Their names, the marquis told me, were sapphires, emeralds,
+rubies; and large clear diamonds, like beads of rain. When everything
+was carefully returned to place, he asked:
+
+"Shall I still act as your banker?"
+
+I begged him to hide the jewel box again, and he concealed it in the
+wall.
+
+"We go to the Rue Ste. Croix, Lazarre, which is an impossible place for
+your friend Bellenger at this time. Do you dance a gavotte?"
+
+I told him I could dance the Indian corn dance, and he advised me to
+reserve this accomplishment.
+
+"Bonaparte's police are keen on any scent, especially the scent of a
+prince. His practical mind would reject the Temple story, if he ever
+heard it; and there are enough live Bourbons for him to watch."
+
+"But there is the Count de Chaumont," I suggested.
+
+"He is not a man that would put faith in the Temple story, either, and I
+understand he is kindly disposed towards you."
+
+"I lived in his house nearly a year."
+
+"He is not a bad fellow for the new sort. I feel certain of him. He is
+coaxing my friendship because of ancient amity between the houses of Du
+Plessy and De Ferrier."
+
+"Did you say, monsieur, that Bonaparte intends to restore Madame de
+Ferrier's lands?"
+
+"They have been given to one of his rising officers."
+
+"Then he will not restore them?"
+
+"Oh, yes, with interest! His plan is to give her the officer for a
+husband."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Even in those days of falling upon adventure and taking hold of life
+with the arrogance of young manhood, I knew the value of money, though
+it has always been my fault to give it little consideration. Experience
+taught me that poverty goes afoot and sleeps with strange bed-fellows.
+But I never minded going afoot or sharing the straw with cattle.
+However, my secretary more than once took a high hand with me because he
+bore the bag; and I did mind debt chasing my heels like a rising tide.
+
+Our Iroquois had their cottages in St. Regis and their hunting cabins on
+Lake George. They went to church when not drunk and quarrelsome, paid
+the priest his dues, labored easily, and cared nothing for hoarding. But
+every step of my new life called for coin.
+
+As I look back on that hour the dominating thought rises clearly.
+
+To see men admitting that you are what you believe yourself to be, is
+one of the triumphs of existence. The jewel-case stamped identification
+upon me. I felt like one who had communicated with the past and received
+a benediction. There was special provision in the way it came to me;
+for man loves to believe that God watches over and mothers him.
+
+Forgetting--if I had ever heard--how the ancients dreaded the powers
+above when they had been too fortunate, I went with the marquis in high
+spirits to the Rue Ste. Croix. There were pots of incense sending little
+wavers of smoke through the rooms, and the people might have peopled a
+dream. The men were indeed all smooth and trim; but the women had given
+rein to their fancies.
+
+Our hostess was a fair and gracious woman, of Greek ancestry, as
+Bonaparte himself was, and her daughter had been married to his favorite
+general, the marquis told me.
+
+I notice only the unusual in clothing; the scantiness of ladies' apparel
+that clung like the skin, and lay upon the oak floor in ridges, among
+which a man must shove his way, was unusual to me.
+
+I saw, in space kept cleared around her chair, one beauty with nothing
+but sandals on her feet, though these were white as milk, silky skinned
+like a hand, and ringed with jewels around the toes.
+
+Bonaparte's youngest sister stood receiving court. She was attired like
+a Bacchante, with bands of fur in her hair, topped by bunches of gold
+grapes. Her robe and tunic of muslin fine as air, woven in India, had
+bands of gold, clasped with cameos, under the bosom and on the arms.
+Each woman seemed to have planned outdoing the others in conceits which
+marked her own fairness.
+
+I looked anxiously down the spacious room without seeing Madame de
+Ferrier. The simplicity, which made for beauty of houses in France,
+struck me, in the white and gold paneling, and the chimney, which lifted
+its mass of design to the ceiling. I must have been staring at this and
+thinking of Madame de Ferrier when my name was called in a lilting and
+excited fashion:
+
+"Lazarre!"
+
+There was Mademoiselle de Chaumont in the midst of gallants, and better
+prepared to dance a gavotte than any other charmer in the room. For her
+gauze dress, fastened on the shoulders so that it fell not quite off her
+bosom, reached only to the middle of the calf. This may have been for
+the protection of rosebuds with which ribbons drawn lengthwise through
+the skirt, were fringed; but it also showed her child-like feet and
+ankles, and made her appear tiptoe like a fairy, and more remarkable
+than any other figure except the barefooted dame. She held a crook
+massed with ribbons and rosebuds in her hand, rallying the men to her
+standard by the lively chatter which they like better than wisdom.
+
+Mademoiselle Annabel gave me her hand to kiss, and made room for the
+Marquis du Plessy and me in her circle. I felt abashed by the looks
+these courtiers gave me, but the marquis put them readily in the
+background, and delighted in the poppet, taking her quite to himself.
+
+"We hear such wonderful stories about you, Lazarre! Besides, Doctor
+Chantry came to see us and told us all he knew. Remember, Lazarre
+belonged to us before you discovered him, monsieur the Marquis du
+Plessy! He and I are Americans!"
+
+Some women near us commented, as seemed to be the fashion in that
+society, with a frankness which Indians would have restrained.
+
+"See that girl! The emperor may now imagine what his brother Jerome has
+done! Her father has brought her over from America to marry her, and it
+will need all his money to accomplish that!"
+
+Annabel shook the rain of misty hair at the sides of her rose pink face,
+and laughed a joyful retort.
+
+"No wonder poor Prince Jerome had to go to America for a wife! Did you
+ever see such hairy faced frights as these Parisians of the Empire!
+Lazarre fell ill looking at them. He pretends he doesn't see women,
+monsieur, and goes about with his coat skirts loaded with books. I used
+to be almost as much afraid of him as I am of you!"
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle, I dread to enter paradise."
+
+"Why, monsieur?"
+
+"The angels are afraid of me!"
+
+"Not when you smile."
+
+"Teach me that adorable smile of yours!"
+
+"Oh, how improving you will be to Lazarre, monsieur! He never paid me a
+compliment in his life. He never said anything but the truth."
+
+"The lucky dog! What pretty things he had to say!"
+
+Annabel laughed and shook her mist in great enjoyment. I liked to watch
+her, yet I wondered where Madame de Ferrier was, and could not bring
+myself to inquire.
+
+"These horrible incense pots choke me," said Annabel.
+
+"I like them," said the marquis.
+
+"Do you? So do I," she instantly agreed with him.
+
+"Though we get enough incense in church."
+
+"I should think so! Do you like mass?"
+
+"I was brought up on my knees. But I never acquired the real devotee's
+back."
+
+"Sit on your heels," imparted Annabel in strict confidence. "Try it."
+
+"I will. Ah, mademoiselle, any one who could bring such comfort into
+religion might make even wedlock endurable!"
+
+Madame de Ferrier appeared between the curtains of a deep window. She
+was talking with Count de Chaumont and an officer in uniform. Her face
+pulsed a rosiness like that quiver in winter skies which we call
+northern lights. The clothes she wore, being always subdued by her head
+and shoulders, were not noticeable like other women's clothes. But I
+knew as soon as her eyes rested on me that she found me changed.
+
+De Chaumont came a step to meet me, and I felt miraculously equal to
+him, with some power which was not in me before.
+
+"You scoundrel, you have fallen into luck!" he said heartily.
+
+"One of our proverbs is, 'A blind pig will find an acorn once in a
+while.'"
+
+"There isn't a better acorn in the woods, or one harder to shake down.
+How did you do it?"
+
+I gave him a wise smile and held my tongue; knowing well that if I had
+remained in Ste. Pélagie and the fact ever came to De Chaumont's ears,
+like other human beings he would have reprehended my plunging into the
+world.
+
+"We are getting on tremendously, Lazarre! When your inheritance falls
+in, come back with me to Castorland. We will found a wilderness empire!"
+
+I did not inquire what he meant by my inheritance falling in. The
+marquis pressed behind me, and when I had spoken to Madame de Ferrier I
+knew it was his right to take the hand of the woman who had been his
+little neighbor.
+
+"You don't remember me, madame?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I do, Monsieur du Plessy; and your wall fruit, too!"
+
+"The rogue! Permit me to tell you those pears are hastening to be ready
+for you once more."
+
+"And Bichette, monsieur--is dear old Bichette alive?"
+
+"She is alive, and draws the chair as well as ever. I hear you have a
+little son. He may love the old pony and chair as you used to love
+them."
+
+"Seeing you, monsieur, is like coming again to my home!"
+
+"I trust you may come soon."
+
+They spoke of fruit and cattle. Neither dared mention the name of any
+human companion associated with the past.
+
+I took opportunity to ask Count de Chaumont if her lands were recovered.
+A baffled look troubled his face.
+
+"The emperor will see her to-night," he answered. "It is impossible to
+say what can be done until the emperor sees her."
+
+"Is there any truth in the story that he will marry her to the officer
+who holds her estate?"
+
+The count frowned.
+
+"No--no! That's impossible."
+
+"Will the officer sell his rights if Madame de Ferrier's are not
+acknowledged?"
+
+"I have thought of that. And I want to consult the marquis."
+
+When he had a chance to draw the marquis aside, I could speak to Madame
+de Ferrier without being overheard; though my time might be short. She
+stood between the curtains, and the man in uniform had left his place to
+me.
+
+"Well, I am here," I said.
+
+"And I am glad," she answered.
+
+"I am here because I love you."
+
+She held a fold of the curtain in her hand and looked down at it; then
+up at me.
+
+"You must not say that again."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You know why."
+
+"I do not."
+
+"Remember who you are."
+
+"I am your lover."
+
+She looked quickly around the buzzing drawing-room, and leaned
+cautiously nearer.
+
+"You are my sovereign."
+
+"I believe that, Eagle. But it does not follow that I shall ever reign."
+
+"Are you safe here? Napoleon Bonaparte has spies."
+
+"But he has regard also for old aristocrats like the Marquis du Plessy."
+
+"Yet remember what he did to the Duke d'Enghien. A Bourbon prince is not
+allowed in France."
+
+"How many people consider me a Bourbon prince? I told you why I am here.
+Fortune has wonderfully helped me since I came to France. Lazarre, the
+dauphin from the Indian camps, brazenly asks you to marry him, Eagle!"
+
+Her face blanched white, but she laughed.
+
+"No De Ferrier ever took a base advantage of royal favor. Don't you
+think this is a strange conversation in a drawing-room of the Empire? I
+hated myself for being here--until you came in."
+
+"Eagle, have you forgotten our supper on the island?"
+
+"Yes, sire." She scarcely breathed the word.
+
+"My unanointed title is Lazarre. And I suppose you have forgotten the
+fog and the mountain, too?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Lazarre!"
+
+"Yes, Lazarre."
+
+"You love me! You shall love me!"
+
+"As a De Ferrier should; no farther!"
+
+Her lifted chin expressed a strength I could not combat. The slight,
+dark-haired girl, younger than myself, mastered and drew me as if my
+spirit was a stream, and she the ocean into which it must flow. Darkness
+like that of Ste. Pélagie dropped over the brilliant room. I was nothing
+after all but a palpitating boy, venturing because he must venture.
+Light seemed to strike through her blood, however, endowing her with a
+splendid pallor.
+
+"I am going," I determined that moment, "to Mittau."
+
+The adorable curve of her eyelids, unlike any other eyelids I ever saw,
+was lost to me, for her eyes flew wide open.
+
+"To ----"
+
+She looked around and hesitated to pronounce the name of the Count of
+Provence.
+
+"Yes. I am going to find some one who belongs to me."
+
+"You have the marquis for a friend."
+
+"And I have also Skenedonk, and our tribe, for my friends. But there is
+no one who understands that a man must have some love."
+
+"Consult Marquis du Plessy about going to Mittau. It may not be wise.
+And war is threatened on the frontier."
+
+"I will consult him, of course. But I am going."
+
+"Lazarre, there were ladies on the ship who cursed and swore, and men
+who were drunk the greater part of the voyage. I was brought up in the
+old-fashioned way by the Saint-Michels, so I know nothing of present
+customs. But it seems to me our times are rude and wicked. And you, just
+awake to the world, have yet the innocence of that little boy who sank
+into the strange and long stupor. If you changed I think I could not
+bear it!"
+
+"I will not change."
+
+A stir which must have been widening through the house as a ripple
+widens on a lake, struck us, and turned our faces with all others to a
+man who stood in front of the chimney. He was not large in person, but
+as an individual his presence was massive--was penetrating. I could have
+topped him by head and shoulders; yet without mastery. He took snuff as
+he slightly bowed in every direction, shut the lid with a snap, and
+fidgeted as if impatient to be gone. He had a mouth of wonderful beauty
+and expression, and his eyes were more alive than the eyes of any other
+man in the assembly. I felt his gigantic force as his head dipped
+forward and he glanced about under his brows.
+
+"There is the emperor," De Chaumont told Eagle; and I thought he made
+indecent haste to return and hale her away before Napoleon.
+
+The greatest soldier in Europe passed from one person to another with
+the air of doing his duty and getting rid of it. Presently he raised his
+voice, speaking to Madame de Ferrier so that, all in the room might
+hear.
+
+"Madame, I am pleased to see that you wear leno. I do not like those
+English muslins, sold at the price of their weight in gold, and which do
+not look half as well as beautiful white leno. Wear leno, cambric, or
+silk, ladies, and then my manufactures will flourish."
+
+I wondered if he would remember the face of the man pushed against his
+wheel and called an assassin, when the Marquis du Plessy named me to him
+as the citizen Lazarre.
+
+"You are a lucky man, Citizen Lazarre, to gain the marquis for your
+friend. I have been trying a number of years to make him mine."
+
+"All Frenchmen are the friends of Napoleon," the marquis said to me.
+
+I spoke directly to the sovereign, thereby violating etiquette, my
+friend told me afterwards, laughing; and Bonaparte was a stickler for
+precedent.
+
+"But all Frenchmen," I could not help reminding the man in power, "are
+not faithful friends."
+
+He gave me a sharp look as he passed on, and repeated what I afterward
+learned was one of his favorite maxims:
+
+"A faithful friend is the true image."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+"Must you go to Mittau?" the Marquis du Plessy said when I told him what
+I intended to do. "It is a long, expensive post journey; and part of the
+way you may not be able to post. Riga, on the gulf beyond Mittau, is a
+fine old town of pointed gables and high stone houses. But when I was in
+Mittau I found it a mere winter camp of Russian nobles. The houses are
+low, one-story structures. There is but one castle, and in that his
+Royal Highness the Count of Provence holds mimic court."
+
+We were riding to Versailles, and our horses almost touched sides as my
+friend put his hand on my shoulder.
+
+"Don't go, Lazarre. You will not be welcome there."
+
+"I must go, whether I am welcome or not."
+
+"But I may not last until you come back."
+
+"You will last two months. Can't I post to Mittau and back in two
+months?"
+
+"God knows."
+
+I looked at him drooping forward in the saddle, and said:
+
+"If you need me I will stay, and think no more about seeing those of my
+own blood."
+
+"I do need you; but you shall not stay. You shall go to Mittau in my
+own post-carriage. It will bring you back sooner."
+
+But his post-carriage I could not accept. The venture to Mittau, its
+wear and tear and waste, were my own; and I promised to return with all
+speed. I could have undertaken the road afoot, driven by the necessity I
+felt.
+
+"The Duchess of Angoulęme is a good girl," said the marquis, following
+the line of my thoughts. "She has devoted herself to her uncle and her
+husband. When the late czar withdrew his pension, and turned the whole
+mimic court out of Mittau, she went with her uncle, and even waded the
+snow with him when they fell into straits. Diamonds given to her by her
+grandmother, the Empress Maria Theresa, she sold for his support. But
+the new czar reinstated them; and though they live less pretentiously at
+Mittau in these days, they still have their priest and almoner, the Duke
+of Guiche, and other courtiers hanging upon them. My boy, can you make a
+court bow and walk backwards? You must practice before going into
+Russia."
+
+"Wouldn't it be better," I said, "for those who know how, to practice
+the accomplishment before me?"
+
+"Imagine the Count of Provence stepping down from playing royalty to do
+that!" my friend laughed.
+
+"I don't know why he shouldn't, since he knows I am alive. He has sent
+money every year for my support."
+
+"An established custom, Lazarre, gains strength every day it is
+continued. You see how hard it is to overturn an existing system,
+because men have to undo the work they have been doing perhaps for a
+thousand years. Time gives enormous stability. Monsieur the Count of
+Provence has been practicing royalty since word went out that his nephew
+had died in the Temple. It will be no easy matter to convince him you
+are fit to play king in his stead."
+
+This did not disturb me, however. I thought more of my sister. And I
+thought of vast stretches across the center of Europe. The Indian
+stirred in me, as it always did stir, when the woman I wanted was
+withdrawn from me.
+
+I could not tell my friend, or any man, about Madame de Ferrier. This
+story of my life is not to be printed until I am gone from the world.
+Otherwise the things set down so freely would remain buried in myself.
+
+Some beggars started from hovels, running like dogs, holding diseased
+and crooked-eyed children up for alms, and pleading for God's sake that
+we would have pity on them. When they disappeared with their coin I
+asked the marquis if there had always been wretchedness in France.
+
+"There is always wretchedness everywhere," he answered. "Napoleon can
+turn the world upside down, but he cannot cure the disease of hereditary
+poverty. I never rode to Versailles without encountering these people."
+
+When we entered the Place d'Armes fronting the palace, desolation worse
+than that of the beggars faced us. That vast noble pile, untenanted and
+sacked, symbolized the vanished monarchy of France. Doors stood wide.
+The court was strewn with litter and filth; and grass started rank
+betwixt the stones where the proudest courtiers in the world had trod. I
+tried to enter the queen's rooms, but sat on the steps leading to them,
+holding my head in my hands. It was as impossible as it had been to
+enter the Temple.
+
+The fountains which once made a concert of mist around their lake basin,
+satisfying like music, the marquis said, were dried, and the figures
+broken. Millions had been spent upon this domain of kings, and nothing
+but the summer's natural verdure was left to unmown stretches. The foot
+shrank from sending echoes through empty palace apartments, and from
+treading the weedy margins of canal and lake.
+
+"I should not have brought you here, Lazarre," said my friend.
+
+"I had to come, monsieur."
+
+We walked through meadow and park to the little palaces called Grand and
+Petit Trianon, where the intimate life of the last royal family had been
+lived. I looked well at their outer guise, but could not explore them.
+
+The groom held our horses in the street that leads up to the Place
+d'Armes, and as we sauntered back, I kicked old leaves which had fallen
+autumn after autumn and banked the path.
+
+It rushed over me again!
+
+I felt my arms go above my head as they did when I sank into the depths
+of recollection.
+
+"Lazarre! Are you in a fit?" The Marquis du Plessy seized me.
+
+"I remember! I remember! I was kicking the leaves--I was walking with my
+father and mother--somewhere--somewhere--and something threatened us!"
+
+"It was in the garden of the Tuileries," said the Marquis du Plessy
+sternly. "The mob threatened you, and you were going before the National
+Assembly! I walked behind. I was there to help defend the king."
+
+We stood still until the paroxysmal rending in my head ceased. Then I
+sat on the grassy roadside trying to smile at the marquis, and shrugging
+an apology for my weakness. The beauty of the arched trees disappeared,
+and when next I recognized the world we were moving slowly toward Paris
+in a heavy carriage, and I was smitten with the conviction that my
+friend had not eaten the dinner he ordered in the town of Versailles.
+
+I felt ashamed of the weakness which came like an eclipse, and withdrew
+leaving me in my strength. It ceased to visit me within that year, and
+has never troubled me at all in later days. Yet, inconsistently, I look
+back as to the glamour of youth; and though it worked me hurt and
+shame, I half regret that it is gone.
+
+The more I saw of the Marquis du Plessy the more my slow tenacious heart
+took hold on him. We went about everywhere together. I think it was his
+hope to wed me to his company and to Paris, and shove the Mittau venture
+into an indefinite future; yet he spared no pains in obtaining for me my
+passports to Courland.
+
+At this time, with cautious, half reluctant hand, he raised the veil
+from a phase of life which astonished and revolted me. I loved a woman.
+The painted semblances of women who inhabited a world of sensation had
+no effect upon me.
+
+"You are wonderfully fresh, Lazarre," the marquis said. "If you were not
+so big and male I would call you mademoiselle! Did they never sin in the
+American backwoods?"
+
+Then he took me in his arms like a mother, and kissed me, saying, "Dear
+son and sire, I am worse than your great-grandfather!"
+
+Yet my zest for the gaiety of the old city grew as much as he desired.
+The golden dome of the Invalides became my bubble of Paris, floating
+under a sunny sky.
+
+Whenever I went to the hotel which De Chaumont had hired near the
+Tuileries, Madame de Ferrier received me kindly; having always with her
+Mademoiselle de Chaumont or Miss Chantry, so that we never had a word in
+private. I thought she might have shown a little feeling in her rebuff,
+and pondered on her point of view regarding my secret rank. De
+Chaumont, on the other hand, was beneath her in everything but wealth.
+How might she regard stooping to him?
+
+Miss Chantry was divided between enforced deference and a Saxon
+necessity to tell me I would not last. I saw she considered me one of
+the upstarts of the Empire, singularly favored above her brother, but
+under my finery the same French savage she had known in America.
+
+Eagle brought Paul to me, and he toddled across the floor, looked at me
+wisely, and then climbed my knee.
+
+Doctor Chantry had been living in Paris a life above his dreams of
+luxury. When occasionally I met my secretary he was about to drive out;
+or he was returning from De Chaumont's hotel. And there I caught my poor
+master reciting poems to Annabel, who laughed and yawned, and made faces
+behind her fan. I am afraid he drew on the marquis' oldest wines,
+finding indulgence in the house; and he sent extravagant bills to me for
+gloves and lawn cravats. It was fortunate that De Chaumont took him
+during my absence. He moved his belongings with positive rapture. The
+marquis and I both thought it prudent not to publish my journey.
+
+Doctor Chantry went simpering, and abasing himself before the French
+noble with the complete subservience of a Saxon when a Saxon does become
+subservient.
+
+"The fool is laughable," said the Marquis du Plessy. "Get rid of him,
+Lazarre. He is fit for nothing but hanging upon some one who will feed
+him."
+
+"He is my master," I answered. "I am a fool myself."
+
+"You will come back from Mittau convinced of that, my boy. The wise
+course is to join yourself to events, and let them draw your chariot. My
+dislikers say I have temporized with fate. It is true I am not so
+righteous as to smell to heaven. But two or three facts have been deeply
+impressed on me. There is nothing more aggressive than the virtue of an
+ugly, untempted woman; or the determination of a young man to set every
+wrong thing in the world right. He cannot wait, and take mellow interest
+in what goes on around him, but must leap into the ring. You could live
+here with me indefinitely, while the nation has Bonaparte, like the
+measles. When the disease has run its course--we may be able to bring
+evidence which will make it unnecessary for the Count of Provence to
+hasten here that France may have a king."
+
+"I want to see my sister, monsieur."
+
+"And lose her and your own cause forever."
+
+But he helped me to hire a strong traveling chaise, and stock it with
+such comforts as it would bear. He also turned my property over to me,
+recommending that I should not take it into Russia. Half the jewels, at
+least, I considered the property of the princess in Mittau; but his
+precaution influenced me to leave three bags of coin in Doctor
+Chantry's care; for Doctor Chantry was the soul of thrift with his own;
+and to send Skenedonk with the jewel-case to the marquis' bank. The
+cautious Oneida took counsel of himself and hid it in the chaise. He
+told me when we were three days out.
+
+It is as true that you are driven to do some things as that you can
+never entirely free yourself from any life you have lived. That sunny
+existence in the Faubourg St. Germain, the morning and evening talks
+with a man who bound me to him as no other man has since bound me, were
+too dear to leave even briefly without wrenching pain. I dreamed nightly
+of robbers and disaster, of being ignominiously thrust out of Mittau, of
+seeing a woman whose face was a blur and who moved backward from me when
+I called her my sister; of troops marching across and trampling me into
+the earth as straw. I groaned in spirit. Yet to Mittau I was spurred by
+the kind of force that seems to press from unseen distances, and is as
+fatal as temperament.
+
+When I paid my last visit at De Chaumont's hotel, and said I was going
+into the country, Eagle looked concerned, as a De Ferrier should; but
+she did not turn her head to follow my departure. The game of man and
+woman was in its most blindfold state between us.
+
+There was one, however, who watched me out of sight. The marquis was
+more agitated than I liked to see him. He took snuff with a constant
+click of the lid.
+
+The hills of Champagne, green with vines, and white as with an underlay
+of chalk, rose behind us. We crossed the frontier, and German hills took
+their places, with a castle topping each. I was at the time of life when
+interest stretches eagerly toward every object; and though this journey
+cannot be set down in a story as long as mine, the novelty--even the
+risks, mischances and wearinesses of continual post travel, come back
+like an invigorating breath of salt water.
+
+The usual route carried us eastward to Cracow, the old capital of
+Poland, scattered in ruined grandeur within its brick walls. Beyond it I
+remember a stronghold of the Middle Ages called the fortress of
+Landskron.
+
+The peasants of this country, men in shirts and drawers of coarse linen,
+and women with braided hair hanging down under linen veils, stopped
+their carts as soon as a post-carriage rushed into sight, and bent
+almost to the earth. At post-houses the servants abased themselves to
+take me by the heel. In no other country was the spirit of man so
+broken. Poles of high birth are called the Frenchmen of the north, and
+we saw fair men and women in sumptuous polonaises and long robes who
+appeared luxurious in their traveling carriages. But stillness and
+solitude brooded on the land. From Cracow to Warsaw wide reaches of
+forest darkened the level. Any open circle was belted around the horizon
+with woods, pines, firs, beech, birch, and small oaks. Few cattle fed on
+the pastures, and stunted crops of grain ripened in the melancholy
+light.
+
+From Cracow to Warsaw is a distance of one hundred and thirty leagues,
+if the postilion lied not, yet on that road we met but two carriages and
+not more than a dozen carts. Scattering wooden villages, each a line of
+hovels, appeared at long intervals.
+
+Post-houses were kept by Jews, who fed us in the rooms where their
+families lived. Milk and eggs they had none to offer us; and their beds
+were piles of straw on the ground, seldom clean, never untenanted by
+fleas.
+
+Beggars ran beside us on the wretched roads as neglected as themselves.
+Where our horses did not labor through sand, the marshy ground was paved
+with sticks and boughs, or the surface was built up with trunks of trees
+laid crosswise.
+
+In spacious, ill-paved Warsaw, through which the great Vistula flows, we
+rested two days. I knelt with confused thoughts, trying to pray in the
+Gothic cathedral. We walked past it into the old town, of high houses
+and narrow streets, like a part of Paris.
+
+In Lithuania the roads were paths winding through forests full of stumps
+and roots. The carriage hardly squeezed along, and eight little horses
+attached to it in the Polish way had much ado to draw us. The postilions
+were young boys in coarse linen, hardy as cattle, who rode bare-back
+league upon league.
+
+Old bridges cracked and sagged when we crossed them. And here the
+forests rose scorched and black in spots, because the peasants, bound to
+pay their lords turpentine, fired pines and caught the heated ooze.
+
+Within the proper boundary of Russia our way was no better. There we saw
+queer projections of boards around trees to keep bears from climbing
+after the hunters.
+
+The Lithuanian peasants had few wants. Their carts were put together
+without nails. Their bridles and traces were made of bark. They had no
+tools but hatchets. A sheepskin coat and round felt cap kept a man warm
+in cold weather. His shoes were made of bark, and his home of logs with
+penthouse roof.
+
+In houses where travelers slept the candles were laths of deal, about
+five feet long, stuck into crevices of the wall or hung over tables. Our
+hosts carried them about, dropping unheeded sparks upon the straw beds.
+
+In Grodno, a town of falling houses and ruined palaces, we rested again
+before turning directly north.
+
+There my heart began to sink. We had spent four weeks on a comfortless
+road, working always toward the goal. It was nearly won. A speech of my
+friend the marquis struck itself out sharply in the northern light.
+
+"You are not the only Pretender, my dear boy. Don't go to Mittau
+expecting to be hailed as a novelty. At least two peasants have started
+up claiming to be the prince who did not die in the Temple, and have
+been cast down again, complaining of the treatment of their dear sister!
+The Count d'Artois says he would rather saw wood for a living than be
+king after the English fashion. I would rather be the worthless old
+fellow I am than be king after the Mittau fashion; especially when his
+Majesty, Louis XVIII, sees you coming!"
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Purposely we entered Mittau about sunset, which was nearer ten o'clock
+than nine in that northern land; coming through wheat lands to where a
+network of streams forms the river Aa. In this broad lap of the province
+of Courland sat Mittau. Yelgava it was called by the people among whom
+we last posted, and they pronounced the word as if naming something as
+great as Paris.
+
+It was already July, St. John's day being two weeks gone; yet the echoes
+of its markets and feastings lingered. The word "Johanni" smote even an
+ear deaf to the language. It was like a dissolving fair.
+
+"You are too late for Johanni," said the German who kept the house for
+travelers, speaking the kind of French we heard in Poland. "Perhap it is
+just as well for you. This Johanni has nearly ruined me!"
+
+Yet he showed a disposition to hire my singular servant from me at a
+good wage, walking around and around Skenedonk, who bore the scrutiny
+like a pine tree.
+
+The Oneida enjoyed his travels. It was easy for him to conform to the
+thoughts and habits of Europe. We had not talked about the venture into
+Russia. He simply followed me where I went without asking questions,
+proving himself faithful friend and liberal minded gentleman.
+
+We supped privately, and I dressed with care. Horses were put in for our
+last short post of a few streets. We had suffered such wretched quarters
+on the way that the German guest-house spread itself commodiously. Yet
+its walls were the flimsiest slabs. I heard some animal scratching and
+whining in the next chamber. On the post-road, however, we had not
+always a wall betwixt ourselves and the dogs.
+
+The palace in Mittau stood conspicuous upon an island in the river. As
+we approached, it looked not unlike a copy of Versailles. The pile was
+by no means brilliant with lights, as the court of a king might glitter,
+finding reflection upon the stream. We drove with a clatter upon the
+paving, and a sentinel challenged us.
+
+I had thought of how I should obtain access to this secluded royal
+family, and Skenedonk was ready with the queen's jewel-case in his
+hands. Not on any account was he to let it go out of them until I took
+it and applied the key; but gaining audience with Madame d'Angoulęme, he
+was to tell her that the bearer of that casket had traveled far to see
+her, and waited outside.
+
+Under guard the Oneida had the great doors shut behind him. The wisdom
+of my plan looked less conspicuous as time went by. The palace loomed
+silent, without any cheer of courtiers. The horses shook their straps,
+and the postilion hung lazily by one leg, his figure distinct against
+the low horizon still lighted by after-glow. Some Mittau noises came
+across the Aa, the rumble of wheels, and a barking of dogs.
+
+When apprehension began to pinch my heart of losing my servant and my
+whole fortune in the abode of honest royal people, and I felt myself but
+a poor outcast come to seek a princess for my sister, a guard stood by
+the carriage, touching his cap, and asked me to follow him.
+
+We ascended the broad steps. He gave the password to a sentinel there,
+and held wide one leaf of the door. He took a candle; and otherwise dark
+corridors and ante-chambers, somber with heavy Russian furnishings, rugs
+hung against the walls, barbaric brazen vessels and curious vases,
+passed like a half-seen vision.
+
+Then the guard delivered me to a gentleman in a blue coat, with a red
+collar, who belonged to the period of the Marquis du Plessy without
+being adorned by his whiteness and lace. The gentleman staring at me,
+strangely polite and full of suspicion, conducted me into a well-lighted
+room where Skenedonk waited by the farther door, holding the jewel-case
+as tenaciously as he would a scalp.
+
+I entered the farther door. It closed behind me.
+
+A girl stood in the center of this inner room, looking at me. I remember
+none of its fittings, except that there was abundant light, showing her
+clear blue eyes and fair hair, the transparency of her skin, and her
+high expression. She was all in black, except a floating muslin cape or
+fichu, making a beholder despise the finery of the Empire.
+
+We must have examined each other even sternly, though I felt a sudden
+giving way and heaving in my breast. She was so high, so sincere! If I
+had been unfit to meet the eyes of that princess I must have shriveled
+before her.
+
+From side to side her figure swayed, and another young girl, the only
+attendant in the room, stretched out both arms to catch her.
+
+We put her on a couch, and she sat gasping, supported by the lady in
+waiting. Then the tears ran down her face, and I kissed the transparent
+hands, my own flesh and blood, I believed that hour as I believe to
+this.
+
+"O Louis--Louis!"
+
+The wonder of her knowledge and acceptance of me, without a claim being
+put forward, was around me like a cloud.
+
+"You were so like my father as you stood there--I could see him again as
+he parted from us! What miracle has restored you? How did you find your
+way here? You are surely Louis?"
+
+I sat down beside her, keeping one hand between mine.
+
+"Madame, I believe as you believe, that I am Louis Charles, the dauphin
+of France. And I have come to you first, as my own flesh and blood, who
+must have more knowledge and recollection of things past than I myself
+can have. I have not long been waked out of the tranced life I formerly
+lived."
+
+"I have wept more tears for the little brother--broken in intellect and
+exiled farther than we--than for my father and mother. They were at
+peace. But you, poor child, what hope was there for you? Was the person
+who had you in his charge kind to you? He must have been. You have grown
+to be such a man as I would have you!"
+
+"Everybody has been kind to me, my sister."
+
+"Could they look in that face and be unkind? All the thousand questions
+I have to ask must be deferred until the king sees you. I cannot wait
+for him to see you! Mademoiselle de Choisy, send a message at once to
+the king!"
+
+The lady in waiting withdrew to the door, and the royal duchess quivered
+with eager anticipation.
+
+"We have had pretended dauphins, to add insult to exile. You may not
+take the king unaware as you took me! He will have proofs as plain as
+his Latin verse. But you will find his Majesty all that a father could
+be to us, Louis! I think there never was a man so unselfish!--except,
+indeed, my husband, whom you cannot see until he returns."
+
+Again I kissed my sister's hand. We gazed at each other, our different
+breeding still making strangeness between us, across which I yearned;
+and she examined me.
+
+Many a time since I have reproached myself for not improving those
+moments with the most candid and right-minded princess in Europe, by
+forestalling my enemies. I should have told her of my weakness instead
+of sunning my strength in the love of her. I should have made her see my
+actual position, and the natural antagonism of the king, who would not
+so readily see a strong personal resemblance when that was not
+emphasized by some mental stress, as she and three very different men
+had seen it.
+
+Instead of making cause with her, however, I said over and
+over--"Marie-Therese! Marie-Therese!"--like a homesick boy come again to
+some familiar presence. "You are the only one of my family I have seen
+since waking; except Louis Philippe."
+
+"Don't speak of that man, Louis! I detest the house of Orleans as a
+Christian should detest only sin! His father doomed ours to death!"
+
+"But he is not to blame for what his father did."
+
+"What do you mean by waking?"
+
+"Coming to my senses."
+
+"All that we shall hear about when the king sees you."
+
+"I knew your picture on the snuffbox."
+
+"What snuffbox?"
+
+"The one in the queen's jewel-case."
+
+"Where did you find that jewel-case?"
+
+"Do you remember the Marquis du Plessy?"
+
+"Yes. A lukewarm loyalist, if loyalist at all in these times."
+
+"My best friend."
+
+"I will say for him that he was not among the first emigrés. If the
+first emigrés had stayed at home and helped their king, they might have
+prevented the Terror."
+
+"The Marquis du Plessy stayed after the Tuileries was sacked. He found
+the queen's jewel-case, and saved it from confiscation to the state."
+
+"Where did he find it? Did you recognize the faces?"
+
+"Oh, instantly!"
+
+The door opened, deferring any story, for that noble usher who had
+brought me to the presence of Marie-Therese stood there, ready to
+conduct us to the king.
+
+My sister rose and I led her by the hand, she going confidently to
+return the dauphin to his family, and the dauphin going like a fool.
+Seeing Skenedonk standing by the door, I must stop and fit the key to
+the lock of the queen's casket, and throw the lid back to show her
+proofs given me by one who believed in me in spite of himself. The
+snuffbox and two bags of coin were gone, I saw with consternation, but
+the princess recognized so many things that she missed nothing,
+controlling herself as her touch moved from trinket to trinket that her
+mother had worn.
+
+"Bring this before the king," she said. And we took it with us, the
+noble in blue coat and red collar carrying it.
+
+"His Majesty," Marie-Therese told me as we passed along a corridor,
+"tries to preserve the etiquette of a court in our exile. But we are
+paupers, Louis. And mocking our poverty, Bonaparte makes overtures to
+him to sell the right of the Bourbons to the throne of France!"
+
+She had not yet adjusted her mind to the fact that Louis XVIII was no
+longer the one to be treated with by Bonaparte or any other potentate,
+and the pretender leading her smiled like the boy of twenty that he was.
+
+"Napoleon can have no peace while a Bourbon in the line of succession
+lives."
+
+"Oh, remember the Duke d'Enghien!" she whispered.
+
+Then the door of a lofty but narrow cabinet, lighted with many candles,
+was opened, and I saw at the farther end a portly gentleman seated in an
+arm-chair.
+
+A few gentlemen and two ladies in waiting, besides Mademoiselle de
+Choisy, attended.
+
+Louis XVIII rose from his seat as my sister made a deep obeisance to
+him, and took her hand and kissed it. At once, moved by some singular
+maternal impulse, perhaps, for she was half a dozen years my senior, as
+a mother would whimsically decorate her child, Marie-Therese took the
+half circlet of gems from the casket, reached up, and set it on my head.
+
+For an instant I was crowned in Mittau, with my mother's tiara.
+
+I saw the king's features turn to granite, and a dark red stain show on
+his jaws like coloring on stone. The most benevolent men, and by all his
+traits he was one of the most benevolent, have their pitiless moments.
+He must have been prepared to combat a pretender before I entered the
+room. But outraged majesty would now take its full vengeance on me for
+the unconsidered act of the child he loved.
+
+"First two peasants, Hervagault and Bruneau, neither of whom had the
+audacity to steal into the confidence of the tenderest princess in
+Europe with the tokens she must recognize, or to penetrate into the
+presence," spoke the king: "and now an escaped convict from Ste.
+Pélagie, a dandy from the Empire!"
+
+I was only twenty, and he stung me.
+
+"Your royal highness," I said, speaking as I believed within my rights,
+"my sister tries to put a good front on my intrusion into Mittau."
+
+I took the coronet from my head and gave it again to the hand which had
+crowned me. Marie-Therese let it fall, and it rocked near the feet of
+the king.
+
+"Your sister, monsieur! What right have you to call Madame d'Angoulęme
+your sister!"
+
+"The same right, monsieur, that you have to call her your niece."
+
+The features of the princess became pinched and sharpened under the
+softness of her fair hair.
+
+"Sire, if this is not my brother, who is he?"
+
+Louis XVIII may have been tender to her every other moment of his life,
+but he was hard then, and looked beyond her toward the door, making a
+sign with his hand.
+
+That strange sympathy which works in me for my opponent, put his
+outraged dignity before me rather than my own wrong. Deeper, more
+sickening than death, the first faintness of self-distrust came over me.
+What if my half-memories were unfounded hallucinations? What if my
+friend Louis Philippe had made a tool of me, to annoy this older Bourbon
+branch that detested him? What if Bellenger's recognition, and the
+Marquis du Plessy's, and Marie-Therese's, went for nothing? What if some
+other, and not this angry man, had sent the money to America--
+
+The door opened again. We turned our heads, and I grew hot at the
+cruelty which put that idiot before my sister's eyes. He ran on all
+fours, his gaunt wrists exposed, until Bellenger, advancing behind, took
+him by the arm and made him stand erect. It was this poor creature I had
+heard scratching on the other side of the inn wall.
+
+How long Bellenger had been beforehand with me in Mittau I could not
+guess. But when I saw the scoundrel who had laid me in Ste. Pélagie, and
+doubtless dropped me in the Seine, ready to do me more mischief, smug
+and smooth shaven, and fine in the red-collared blue coat which seemed
+to be the prescribed uniform of that court, all my confidence returned.
+I was Louis of France. I could laugh at anything he had to say.
+
+Behind him entered a priest, who advanced up the room, and made
+obeisance to the king, as Bellenger did.
+
+Madame d'Angoulęme looked once at the idiot, and hid her eyes: the king
+protecting her. I said to myself,
+
+"It will soon be against my breast, not yours, that she hides her face,
+my excellent uncle of Provence!"
+
+Yet he was as sincere a man as ever said to witnesses,
+
+"We shall now hear the truth."
+
+The few courtiers, enduring with hardiness a sight which they perhaps
+had seen before though Madame d'Angoulęme had not, made a rustle among
+themselves as if echoing,
+
+"Yes, now we shall hear the truth!"
+
+The king again kissed my sister's hand, and placed her in a seat beside
+his arm-chair, which he resumed.
+
+"Monsieur the Abbé Edgeworth," he said, "having stood on the scaffold
+with our martyred sovereign, as priest and comforter, is eminently the
+one to conduct an examination like this, which touches matters of
+conscience. We leave it in his hands."
+
+Abbé Edgeworth, fine and sweet of presence, stood by the king, facing
+Bellenger and the idiot. That poor creature, astonished by his
+environment, gazed at the high room corners, or smiled experimentally at
+the courtiers, stretching his cracked lips over darkened fangs.
+
+"You are admitted here, Bellenger," said the priest, "to answer his
+Majesty's questions in the presence of witnesses."
+
+"I thank his Majesty," said Bellenger.
+
+The abbé began as if the idiot attracted his notice for the first time.
+
+"Who is the unfortunate child you hold with your right hand?"
+
+"The dauphin of France, monsieur the abbé," spoke out Bellenger, his
+left hand on his hip.
+
+"What! Take care what you say! How do you know that the dauphin of
+France is yet among the living?"
+
+Bellenger's countenance changed, and he took his hand off his hip and
+let it hang down.
+
+"I received the prince, monsieur, from those who took him out of the
+Temple prison."
+
+"And you never exchanged him for another person, or allowed him to be
+separated from you?"
+
+Bellenger swore with ghastly lips--"Never, on my hopes of salvation,
+monsieur the abbé!"
+
+"Admitting that somebody gave you this child to keep--by the way, how
+old is he?"
+
+"About twenty years, monsieur."
+
+"What right had you to assume he was the dauphin?"
+
+"I had received a yearly pension, monsieur, from his Majesty himself,
+for the maintenance of the prince."
+
+"You received the yearly pension through my hand, acting as his
+Majesty's almoner, His Majesty was ever too bountiful to the
+unfortunate. He has many dependents. Where have you lived with your
+charge?"
+
+"We lived in America, sometimes in the woods; and sometimes in towns."
+
+"Has he ever shown hopeful signs of recovering his reason?"
+
+"Never, monsieur the abbé."
+
+Having touched thus lightly on the case of the idiot, Abbé Edgeworth
+turned to me.
+
+The king's face retained its granite hardness. But Bellenger's passed
+from shade to shade of baffled confidence; recovering only when the
+priest said,
+
+"Now look at this young man. Have you ever seen him before?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur, I have; both in the American woods, and in Paris."
+
+"What was he doing in the American woods?"
+
+"Living on the bounty of one Count de Chaumont, a friend of
+Bonaparte's."
+
+"Who is he?"
+
+"A French half-breed, brought up among the Indians."
+
+"What name does he bear?"
+
+"He is called Lazarre."
+
+"But why is a French half-breed named Lazarre attempting to force
+himself on the exiled court here in Mittau?"
+
+"People have told him that he resembles the Bourbons, monsieur."
+
+"Was he encouraged in this idea by the friend of Bonaparte whom you
+mentioned?"
+
+"I think not, monsieur the abbé. But I heard a Frenchman tell him he was
+like the martyred king, and since that hour he has presumed to consider
+himself the dauphin."
+
+"Who was this Frenchman?"
+
+"The Duke of Orleans, Louis Philippe de Bourbon, monsieur the abbé."
+
+There was an expressive movement among the courtiers.
+
+"Was Louis Philippe instrumental in sending him to France?"
+
+"He was. He procured shipping for the pretender."
+
+"When the pretender reached Paris, what did he do?"
+
+"He attempted robbery, and was taken in the act and thrown into Ste.
+Pélagie. I saw him arrested."
+
+"What were you doing in Paris?"
+
+"I was following and watching this dangerous pretender, monsieur the
+abbé."
+
+"Did you leave America when he did?"
+
+"The evening before, monsieur. And we outsailed him."
+
+"Did you leave Paris when he did?"
+
+"Three days later, monsieur. But we passed him while he rested."
+
+"Why do you call such an insignificant person a dangerous pretender?"
+
+"He is not insignificant, monsieur: as you will say, when you hear what
+he did in Paris."
+
+"He was thrown into the prison of Ste. Pélagie, you told me."
+
+"But he escaped, by choking a sacristan so that the poor man will long
+bear the marks on his throat. And the first thing I knew he was high in
+favor with the Marquis du Plessy, and Bonaparte spoke to him; and the
+police laughed at complaints lodged against him."
+
+"Who lodged complaints against him?"
+
+"I did, monsieur."
+
+"But he was too powerful for you to touch?"
+
+"He was well protected, monsieur the abbé. He flaunted. While the poor
+prince and myself suffered inconvenience and fared hard--"
+
+"The poor prince, you say?"
+
+"We never had a fitting allowance, monsieur," Bellenger declared
+aggressively. "Yet with little or no means I tried to bring this
+pretender to justice and defend his Majesty's throne."
+
+"Pensioners are not often so outspoken in their dissatisfaction,"
+remarked the priest.
+
+I laughed as I thought of the shifts to which Bellenger must have been
+put. Abbé Edgeworth with merciless dryness inquired,
+
+"How were you able to post to Mittau?"
+
+"I borrowed money of a friend in Paris, monsieur, trusting that his
+Majesty will requite me for my services."
+
+"But why was it necessary for you to post to Mittau, where this
+pretender would certainly meet exposure?"
+
+"Because I discovered that he carried with him a casket of the martyred
+queen's jewels, stolen from the Marquis du Plessy."
+
+"How did the Marquis du Plessy obtain possession of the queen's jewels?"
+
+"That I do not know."
+
+"But the jewels are the lawful property of Madame d'Angoulęme. He must
+have known they would be seized."
+
+"I thought it necessary to bring my evidence against him, monsieur."
+
+"There was little danger of his imposing himself upon the court. Yet you
+are rather to be commended than censured, Bellenger. Did this pretender
+know you were in Paris?"
+
+"He saw me there."
+
+"Many times?"
+
+"At least twice, monsieur the abbé."
+
+"Did he avoid you?"
+
+"I avoided him. I took pains to keep him from knowing how I watched
+him."
+
+"You say he flaunted. When he left Paris for Mittau was the fact
+generally reported?"
+
+"No, monsieur."
+
+"You learned it yourself?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur."
+
+"But he must have known you would pursue him."
+
+"He left with great secrecy, monsieur the abbé." It was given out that
+he was merely going to the country."
+
+"What made you suspect he was coming to Mittau?"
+
+"He hired a strong post-chaise and made many preparations."
+
+"But didn't his friend the Marquis du Plessy discover the robbery? Why
+didn't he follow and take the thief?"
+
+"Dead men don't follow, monsieur the abbé. The Marquis du Plessy had a
+duel on his hands, and was killed the day after this Lazarre left
+Paris."
+
+Of all Bellenger's absurd fabrications this story was the most
+ridiculous. I laughed again. Madame d'Angoulęme took her hands from her
+face and our eyes met one instant, but the idiot whined like a dog. She
+shuddered, and covered her sight.
+
+The priest turned from Bellenger to me with a fair-minded expression,
+and inquired,
+
+"What have you to say?"
+
+I had a great deal to say, though the only hearer I expected to convince
+was my sister. If she believed in me I did not care whether the others
+believed or not. I was going to begin with Lake George, the mountain,
+and the fog, and Bellenger's fear of me, and his rage when Louis
+Philippe told him the larger portion of the money sent from Europe was
+given to me.
+
+Facing Marie-Therese, therefore, instead of the Abbé Edgeworth, I spoke
+her name. She looked up once more. And instead of being in Mittau, I
+was suddenly on a balcony at Versailles!
+
+The night landscape, chill and dim, stretched beyond a multitude of
+roaring mouths, coarse lips, flaming eyes, illuminated by torches, the
+heads ornamented with a three-colored thing stuck into the caps. My hand
+stretched out for support, and met the tight clip of my mother's
+fingers. I knew that she was towering between Marie-Therese and me a
+fearless palpitating statue. The devilish roaring mob shot above itself
+a forced, admiring, piercing cry--"Long live the queen!" Then all became
+the humming of bees--the vibration of a string--nothing!
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+Blackness surrounded the post-carriage in which I woke, and it seemed to
+stand in a tunnel that was afire at one end. Two huge trees, branches
+and all, were burning on a big hearth, stones glowing under them; and
+figures with long beards, in black robes, passed betwixt me and the
+fire, stirring a cauldron. If ever witches' brewing was seen, it looked
+like that.
+
+The last eclipse of mind had come upon me without any rending and
+tearing in the head, and facts returned clearly and directly. I saw the
+black robed figures were Jews cooking supper at a large fireplace, and
+we had driven upon the brick floor of a post-house which had a door
+nearly the size of a gable. At that end spread a ghostly film of open
+land, forest and sky. I lay stretched upon cushions as well as the
+vehicle would permit, and was aware by a shadow which came between me
+and the Jews that Skenedonk stood at the step.
+
+"What are you about?" I spoke with a rush of chagrin, sitting up. "Are
+we on the road to Paris?"
+
+"Yes," he answered.
+
+"You have made a mistake, Skenedonk!"
+
+"No mistake," he maintained. "Wait until I bring you some supper. After
+supper we can talk."
+
+"Bring the supper at once then, for I am going to talk now."
+
+"Are you quite awake?"
+
+"Quite awake. How long did it last this time?"
+
+"Two days."
+
+"We are not two days' journey out of Mittau?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, when you have horses put in to-morrow morning, turn them back to
+Mittau."
+
+Skenedonk went to the gigantic hearth, and one of the Jews ladled him
+out a bowlful of the cauldron stew, which he brought to me.
+
+The stuff was not offensive and I was hungry. He brought another bowlful
+for himself, and we ate as we had often done in the woods. The fire
+shone on his bald pate and gave out the liquid lights of his fawn eyes.
+
+"I have made a fool of myself in Mittau, Skenedonk."
+
+"Why do you want to go back?"
+
+"Because I am not going to be thrown out of the palace without a
+hearing."
+
+"What is the use?" said Skenedonk. "The old fat chief will not let you
+stay. He doesn't want to hear you talk. He wants to be king himself."
+
+"Did you see me sprawling on the floor like the idiot?"
+
+"Not like the idiot. Your face was down."
+
+"Did you see the duchess?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What did she do?"
+
+"Nothing. She leaned on the women and they took her away."
+
+"Tell me all you saw."
+
+"When you went in to hold council, I watched, and saw a priest and
+Bellenger and the boy that God had touched, all go in after you. So I
+knew the council would be bad for you, Lazarre, and I stood by the door
+with my knife in my hand. When the talk had gone on awhile I heard
+something like the dropping of a buck on the ground, and sprang in, and
+the men drew their swords and the women screamed. The priest pointed at
+you and said, 'God has smitten the pretender!' Then they all went out of
+the room except the priest, and we opened your collar. I told him you
+had fallen like that before, and the stroke passed off in sleep. He said
+your carriage waited, and if I valued your safety I would put you in it
+and take you out of Russia. He called servants to help me carry you. I
+thought about your jewels; but some drums began to beat, and I thought
+about your life!"
+
+"But, Skenedonk, didn't my sister--the lady I led by the hand, you
+remember--speak to me again, or look at me, or try to revive me?"
+
+"No. She went away with the women carrying her."
+
+"She believed in me--at first! Before I said a word she knew me! She
+wouldn't leave me merely because her uncle and a priest thought me an
+impostor! She is the tenderest creature on earth, Skenedonk--she is
+more like a saint than a woman!"
+
+"Some saints on the altar are blind and deaf," observed the Oneida. "I
+think she was sick."
+
+"I have nearly killed her! And I have been tumbled out of Mittau as a
+pretender!"
+
+"You are here. Get some men to fight, and we will go back."
+
+"What a stroke--to lose my senses at the moment I needed them most!"
+
+"You kept your scalp."
+
+"And not much else. No! If you refuse to follow me, and wait here at
+this post-house, I am going back to Mittau!"
+
+"I go where you go," said Skenedonk. "But best go to sleep now."
+
+This I was not able to do until long tossing on the thorns of chagrin
+wore me out. I was ashamed like a prodigal, baffled, and hurt to the
+bruising of my soul. A young man's chastened confidence in himself is
+hard to bear, but the loss of what was given as a heritage at birth is
+an injustice not to be endured.
+
+The throne of France was never my goal, to be reached through blood and
+revolution. Perhaps the democratic notions in my father's breast have
+found wider scope in mine. I wanted to influence men, and felt even at
+that time that I could do it; but being king was less to my mind than
+being acknowledged dauphin, and brother, and named with my real name.
+
+I took my fists in my hands and swore to force recognition, if I
+battered a lifetime on Mittau.
+
+At daylight our post-horses were put to the chaise and I gave the
+postilion orders myself. The little fellow bowed himself nearly double,
+and said that troops were moving behind us to join the allied forces
+against Napoleon.
+
+At once the prospect of being snared among armies and cut off from all
+return to Paris, appalled me as a greater present calamity than being
+cast out of Mittau. Mittau could wait for another expedition.
+
+"Very well," I said. "Take the road to France."
+
+We met August rains. We were bogged. A bridge broke under us. We dodged
+Austrian troops. It seemed even then a fated thing that a Frenchman
+should retreat ignominiously from Russia.
+
+There is a devilish antagonism of inanimate and senseless things, begun
+by discord in ourselves, which works unreasonable torture. Our return
+was an abominable journal which I will not recount, and going with it
+was a mortifying facility for drawing opposing forces.
+
+However, I knew my friend the marquis expected me to return defeated. He
+gave me my opportunity as a child is indulged with a dangerous
+plaything, to teach it caution.
+
+He would be in his chateau of Plessy, cutting off two days' posting to
+Paris. And after the first sharp pangs of chagrin and shame at losing
+the fortune he had placed in my hands, I looked forward with impatience
+to our meeting.
+
+"We have nothing, Skenedonk!" I exclaimed the first time there was
+occasion for money on the road. "How have you been able to post? The
+money and the jewel-case are gone."
+
+"We have two bags of money and the snuffbox," said the Oneida. "I hid
+them in the post-carriage."
+
+"But I had the key of the jewel-case."
+
+"You are a good sleeper," responded Skenedonk.
+
+I blessed him heartily for his forethought, and he said if he had known
+I was a fool he would not have told me we carried the jewel-case into
+Russia.
+
+I dared not let myself think of Madame de Ferrier. The plan of buying
+back her estates, which I had nurtured in the bottom of my heart, was
+now more remote than America.
+
+One bag of coin was spent in Paris, but three remained there with Doctor
+Chantry. We had money, though the more valuable treasure stayed in
+Mittau.
+
+In the sloping hills and green vines of Champagne we were no longer
+harassed dodging troops, and slept the last night of our posting at
+Epernay. Taking the road early next morning, I began to watch for Plessy
+too soon, without forecasting that I was not to set foot within its
+walls.
+
+We came within the marquis' boundaries upon a little goose girl,
+knitting beside her flock. Her bright hair was bound with a woolen cap.
+Delicious grass, and the shadow of an oak, under which she stood, were
+not to be resisted, so I sent the carriage on. She looked open-mouthed
+after Skenedonk, and bobbed her dutiful, frightened courtesy at me.
+
+The marquis' peasants were by no means under the influence of the
+Empire, as I knew from observing the lad whom he had sought among the
+drowned in the mortuary chapel of the Hôtel Dieu, and who was afterwards
+found in a remote wine shop seeing sights. The goose girl dared not
+speak to me unless I required it of her, and the unusual notice was an
+honor she would have avoided.
+
+"What do you do here?" I inquired.
+
+Her little heart palpitated in the answer--"Oh, guard the geese."
+
+"Do they give you trouble?"
+
+"Not much, except that wicked gander." She pointed out with her
+knitting-needle a sleek white fellow, who flirted his tail and turned an
+eye, quavering as if he said--"La, la, la!"
+
+"What does he do?"
+
+"He would be at the vines and the corn, monsieur."
+
+"Bad gander!"
+
+"I switch him," she informed me, like a magistrate.
+
+"But that would only make him run."
+
+"Also I have a string in my pocket, and I tie him by the leg to a
+tree."
+
+"Serves him right. Is the Marquis du Plessy at the chateau?"
+
+Her face grew shaded, as a cloud chases sunlight before it across a
+meadow. "Do you mean the new marquis, the old marquis' cousin, monsieur?
+He went away directly after the burial."
+
+"What burial?"'
+
+"The old marquis' burial. That was before St. John's day."
+
+"Be careful what you say, my child!"
+
+"Didn't you know he was dead, _monsieur?_"
+
+"I have been on a journey. Was his death sudden?"
+
+"He was killed in a duel in Paris."
+
+I sat down on the grass with my head in my hands. Bellenger had told the
+truth.
+
+One scant month the Marquis du Plessy fostered me like a son. To this
+hour my slow heart aches for the companionship of the lightest, most
+delicate spirit I ever encountered in man.
+
+Once I lifted my head and insisted,
+
+"It can't be true!"
+
+"Monsieur," the goose girl asserted solemnly, "it is true. The blessed
+St. Alpin, my patron, forget me if I tell you a lie."
+
+Around the shadowed spot where I sat I heard trees whispering on the
+hills, and a cart rumbling along the hardened dust of the road.
+
+"Monsieur," spoke the goose girl out of her good heart, "if you want to
+go to his chapel I will show you the path."
+
+She tied a string around the leg of the wicked gander and attached him
+to the tree, shaking a wand at him in warning. He nipped her sleeve, and
+hissed, and hopped, his wives remonstrating softly; but his guardian
+left him bound and carried her knitting down a valley to a stream,
+across the bridge, and near an opening in the bushes at the foot of a
+hill.
+
+"Go all to the right, monsieur," she said, "and you will come to the
+chapel where the Du Plessys are buried."
+
+I gave her the largest coin in my pocket, and she flew back as well as
+the spirit of childhood could fly in wooden shoes. All the geese, formed
+in a line, waddled to meet her, perhaps bearing a memorial of wrongs
+from their husband.
+
+The climb was steep, rounding a darkened ferny shoulder of lush forest,
+yet promising more and more a top of sunlight. At the summit was a
+carriage road which ascended by some easier plane. Keeping all to the
+right as the goose girl directed, I found a chapel like a shrine.
+
+It was locked. Through the latticed door I could see an altar,
+whereunder the last Du Plessy who had come to rest there, doubtless lay
+with his kin.
+
+I sat down on one of the benches under the trees. The ache within me
+went deep. But all that sunny hillcrest seemed brightened by the
+marquis. It was cheerful as his smile. "Let us have a glass of wine and
+enjoy the sun," he said in the breeze flowing around his chapel. "And
+do you hear that little citizen of the tree trunks, Lazarre?"
+
+The perfume of the woods rose invisibly to a cloudless sky. My last
+tryst with my friend was an hour in paradise's antechamber.
+
+The light quick stepping of horses and their rattling harness brought
+Madame de Ferrier's carriage quickly around the curve fronting the
+chapel. Her presence was the one touch which the place lacked, and I
+forgot grief, shame, impatience at being found out in my trouble, and
+stood at her step with my hat in my hand.
+
+She said--"O Lazarre!"--and Paul beat on Ernestine's knee, echoing--"O
+Zar!" and my comfort was absolute as release from pain, because she had
+come to visit her old friend the marquis.
+
+I helped her down and stood with her at the latticed door.
+
+"How bright it is here!" said Eagle.
+
+"It is very bright. I came up the hill from a dark place."
+
+"Did the news of his death meet you on the post-road?"
+
+"It met me at the foot of this hill. The goose girl told me."
+
+"Oh, you have been hurt!" she said, looking at me. "Your face is all
+seamed. Don't tell me about Mittau to-day. Paul and I are taking
+possession of the estates!"
+
+"Napoleon has given them back to you!"
+
+"Yes, he has! I begged the De Chaumonts to let me come alone! By hard
+posting we reached Mont-Louis last night. You are the only person in
+France to whom I would give that vacant seat in the carriage to-day."
+
+I cared no longer for my own loss, as I am afraid has been too much my
+way all through life; or whether I was a prince or not. Like paradise
+after death, as so many of our best days come, this perfect day was
+given me by the marquis himself. Eagle's summer dress touched me. Paul
+and Ernestine sat facing us, and Paul ate cherries from a little basket,
+and had his fingers wiped, beating the cushion with his heels in excess
+of impatience to begin again.
+
+We paused at a turn of the height before descending, where fields could
+be seen stretching to the horizon, woods fair and clean as parks,
+without the wildness of the American forest, and vineyards of bushy
+vines that bore the small black grapes. Eagle showed me the far
+boundaries of Paul's estates. Then we drove where holly spread its
+prickly foliage near the ground, where springs from cliffs trickled
+across delicious lanes.
+
+Hoary stone farmhouses, built four-square like a fortress, each having a
+stately archway, saluted us as we passed by. The patron and his wife
+came out, and laborers, pulling their caps, dropped down from high-yoked
+horses.
+
+But when the long single street of stone cottages which formed the
+village opened its arms, I could see her breast swelling and her gray
+eyes sweeping all with comprehensive rush.
+
+An elderly man, shaking some salad in a wire basket, dropped it at his
+feet, and bowed and bowed, sweeping his cap to the ground. Some women
+who were washing around a roofed pool left their paddles, and ran,
+wiping suds from their arms; and houses discharged their inmates, babies
+in children's arms, wives, old men, the simplicity of their lives and
+the openness of their labor manifest. They surrounded the carriage.
+Eagle stood Paul upon his feet that they might worship him, and his
+mouth corners curled upward, his blue-eyed fearless look traveled from
+face to face, while her gloved hand was kissed, and God was praised that
+she had come back.
+
+"O Jean!" she cried, "is your mother alive?" and "Marguerite! have you a
+son so tall?"
+
+An old creature bent double, walked out on four feet, two of them being
+sticks, lifted her voice, and blessed Eagle and the child a quarter of
+an hour. Paul's mother listened reverently, and sent him in Ernestine's
+arms for the warped human being to look upon at close range with her
+failing sight. He stared at her unafraid, and experimentally put his
+finger on her knotted cheek; at which all the women broke into chorus as
+I have heard blackbirds rejoice.
+
+"I have not seen them for so long!" Madame de Ferrier said, wiping her
+eyes. "We have all forgotten our behavior!"
+
+An inverted pine tree hung over the inn door, and dinner was laid for us
+in its best room, where host and hostess served the marquise and the
+young marquis almost on their knees.
+
+When we passed out at the other end of the village, Eagle showed me a
+square-towered church.
+
+"The De Ferriers are buried there--excepting my father. I shall put a
+tablet in the wall for Cousin Philippe. Few Protestants in France had
+their rights and privileges protected as ours were by the throne. I
+mention this fact, sire, that you may lay it up in your mind! We have
+been good subjects, well worth our salt in time of war."
+
+Best of all was coming to the chateau when the sun was about an hour
+high. The stone pillars of the gateway let us upon a terraced lawn,
+where a fountain played, keeping bent plumes of water in the air. The
+lofty chateau of white stone had a broad front, with wings. Eagle bade
+me note the two dove-cotes or pigeon towers, distinctly separate
+structures, one flanking each wing, and demonstrating the antiquity of
+the house. For only nobles in medieval days were accorded the privilege
+of keeping doves.
+
+Should there be such another evening for me when I come to paradise, if
+God in His mercy brings me there, I shall be grateful, but hardly with
+such fresh-hearted joy. Night descends with special benediction on
+remote ancient homes like Mont-Louis. We walked until sunset in the
+park, by lake, and bridged stream, and hollied path; Ernestine
+carrying Paul or letting him pat behind, driving her by her long cap
+ribbons while he explored his mother's playground. But when the birds
+began to nest, and dewfall could be felt, he was taken to his supper and
+his bed, giving his mother a generous kiss, and me a smile of his
+upcurled mouth corners. His forehead was white and broad, and his blue
+eyes were set well apart.
+
+[Illustration: We walked until sunset in the park, by lake, and bridged
+stream, and hollied path.]
+
+I can yet see the child looking over Ernestine's shoulder. She carried
+him up stairs of oak worn hollow like stone, a mighty hand-wrought
+balustrade rising with them from hall to roof.
+
+We had our supper in a paneled room where the lights were reflected as
+on mirrors of polished oak, and the man who served us had served Madame
+de Ferrier's father and grandfather. The gentle old provincial went
+about his duty as a religious rite.
+
+There was a pleached walk like that in the marquis' Paris garden, of
+branches flattened and plaited to form an arbor supported by tree
+columns; which led to a summer-house of stone smothered in ivy. We
+walked back and forth under this thick roof of verdure. Eagle's cap of
+brown hair was roughened over her radiant face, and the open throat of
+her gown showed pulses beating in her neck. Her lifted chin almost
+touched my arm as I told her all the Mittau story, at her request.
+
+"Poor Madame d'Angoulęme! The cautious priest and the king should not
+have taken you from me like that! She knew you as I knew you; and a
+woman's knowing is better than a man's proofs. She will have times of
+doubting their policy. She will remember the expression of your mouth,
+your shrugs, and gestures--the little traits of the child Louis, that
+reappear in the man."
+
+"I wish I had never gone to Mittau to give her a moment's distress."
+
+"Is she very beautiful?"
+
+"She is like a lily made flesh. She has her strong dislikes, and one of
+them is Louis Philippe--"
+
+"Naturally," said Eagle.
+
+"But she seemed sacred to me. Perhaps a woman brings that hallowedness
+out of martyrdom."
+
+"God be with the royal lady! And you, sire!"
+
+"And you!--may you be always with me, Eagle!"
+
+"This journey to Mittau changes nothing. You were wilful. You would go
+to the island in Lake George: you would go to Mittau."
+
+"Both times you sent me."
+
+"Both times I brought you home! Let us not be sorrowful to-night."
+
+"Sorrowful! I am so happy it seems impossible that I come from Mittau,
+and this day the Marquis du Plessy died to me! I wish the sun had been
+tied to the trees, as the goose girl tied her gander."
+
+"But I want another day," said Eagle. "I want all the days that are my
+due at home."
+
+We ascended the steps of the stone pavilion, and sat down in an arch
+like a balcony over the sunken garden. Pears and apricots, their
+branches flattened against the wall, showed ruddy garnered sunlight
+through the dusk. The tangled enclosure sloped down to the stream, from
+which a fairy wisp of mist wavered over flower bed and tree. Dew and
+herbs and the fragrance of late roses sent up a divine breath, invisibly
+submerging us, like a tide rising out of the night.
+
+Madame de Ferrier's individual traits were surprised in this nearness,
+as they never had been when I saw her at a distance in alien
+surroundings. A swift ripple, involuntary and glad, coursed down her
+body; she shuddered for joy half a minute or so.
+
+Two feet away, I worshiped her smiling eyes and their curved ivory lids,
+her rounded head with its abundant cap of hair, her chin, her shoulders,
+her bust, the hands in her lap, the very sweep of her scant gown about
+her feet.
+
+The flash of extreme happiness passing, she said gravely,
+
+"But that was a strange thing--that you should fall unconscious!"
+
+"Not so strange," I said; and told her how many times before the
+eclipse--under the edge of which my boyhood was passed--had completely
+shadowed me. At the account of Ste. Pélagie she leaned toward me, her
+hands clenched on her breast. When we came to the Hôtel Dieu she leaned
+back pallid against the stone.
+
+"Dear Marquis du Plessy!" she whispered, as his name entered the story.
+
+When it was ended she drew some deep breaths in the silence.
+
+"Sire, you must be very careful. That Bellenger is an evil man."
+
+"But a weak one."
+
+"There may be a strength of court policy behind him."
+
+"The policy of the court at Mittau is evidently a policy of denial."
+
+"Your sister believed in you."
+
+"Yes, she believed in me."
+
+"I don't understand," said Madame de Ferrier, leaning forward on her
+arms, "why Bellenger had you in London, and another boy on the
+mountain."
+
+"Perhaps we shall never understand it."
+
+"I don't understand why he makes it his business to follow you."
+
+"Let us not trouble ourselves about Bellenger."
+
+"But are you safe in France since the Marquis du Plessy's death?"
+
+"I am safe to-night, at least."
+
+"Yes, far safer than you would be in Paris."
+
+"And Skenedonk is my guard."
+
+"I have sent a messenger to Plessy for him," Madame de Ferrier said. "He
+will be here in the morning."
+
+I thanked her for remembering him in the excitement of her home coming.
+We heard a far sweet call through a cleft of the hills, and Eagle turned
+her head.
+
+"That must be the shepherd of Les Rochers. He has missed a lamb. Les
+Rochers is the most distant of our farms, but its night noises can be
+heard through an opening in the forest. Paul will soon be listening for
+all these sounds! We must drive to Les Rochers to-morrow. It was there
+that Cousin Philippe died."
+
+I could not say how opportunely Cousin Philippe had died. The violation
+of her childhood by such a marriage rose up that instant a wordless
+tragedy.
+
+"Sire, we are not observing etiquette in Mont-Louis as they observe it
+at Mittau. I have been talking very familiarly to my king. I will keep
+silent. You speak."
+
+"Madame, you have forbidden me to speak!"
+
+She gave me a startled look, and said,
+
+"Did you know Jerome Bonaparte has come back? He left his wife in
+America. She cannot be received in France, because she has committed the
+crime of marrying a prince. She is to be divorced for political
+reasons."
+
+"Jerome Bonaparte is a hound!" I spoke hotly.
+
+"And his wife a venturesome woman--to marry even a temporary prince."
+
+"I like her sort, madame!"
+
+"Do you, sire?"
+
+"Yes, I like a woman who can love!"
+
+"And ruin?"
+
+"How could you ruin me?"
+
+"The Saint-Michels brought me up," said Eagle. "They taught me what is
+lawful and unlawful. I will never do an unlawful thing, to the disgrace
+and shame of my house. A woman should build her house, not tear it
+down."
+
+"What is unlawful?"
+
+"It is unlawful for me to encourage the suit of my sovereign."
+
+"Am I ever likely to be anything but what they call in Mittau a
+pretender, Eagle?"
+
+"That we do not know. You shall keep yourself free from entanglements."
+
+"I am free from them--God knows I am free enough!--the lonesomest, most
+unfriended savage that ever set out to conquer his own."
+
+"You were born to greatness. Great things will come to you."
+
+"If you loved me I could make them come!"
+
+"Sire, it isn't healthy to sit in the night air. We must go out of the
+dew."
+
+"Oh, who would be healthy! Come to that, who would be such a royal
+beggar as I am?"
+
+"Remember," she said gravely, "that your claim was in a manner
+recognized by one of the most cautious, one of the least ardent
+royalists, in France."
+
+The recognition she knew nothing about came to my lips, and I told her
+the whole story of the jewels. The snuffbox was in my pocket. Sophie
+Saint-Michel had often described it to her.
+
+She sat and looked at me, contemplating the stupendous loss.
+
+"The marquis advised me not to take them into Russia," I acknowledged.
+
+"There is no robbery so terrible as the robbery committed by those who
+think they are doing right."
+
+"I am one of the losing Bourbons."
+
+"Can anything be hidden in that closet in the queen's dressing-room
+wall?" mused Eagle. "I believe I could find it in the dark, Sophie told
+me so often where the secret spring may be touched. When the De
+Chaumonts took me to the Tuileries I wanted to search for it. But all
+the state apartments are now on the second floor, and Madame Bonaparte
+has her own rooms below. Evidently she knows nothing of the secrets of
+the place. The queen kept her most beautiful robes in that closet. It
+has no visible door. The wall opens. And we have heard that a door was
+made through the back of it to let upon a spiral staircase of stone, and
+through this the royal family made their escape to Varennes, when they
+were arrested and brought back."
+
+We fell into silence at mention of the unsuccessful flight which could
+have changed history; and she rose and said--"Good-night, sire."
+
+Next morning there was such a delicious world to live in that breathing
+was a pleasure. Dew gauze spread far and wide over the radiant domain.
+Sounds from cattle, and stables, and the voices of servants drifted on
+the air. Doves wheeled around their towers, and around the chateau
+standing like a white cliff.
+
+I walked under the green canopy watching the sun mount and waiting for
+Madame de Ferrier. When she did appear the old man who had served her
+father followed with a tray. I could only say--"Good-morning, madame,"
+not daring to add--"I have scarcely slept for thinking of you."
+
+"We will have our coffee out here," she told me.
+
+It was placed on the broad stone seat under the arch of the pavilion
+where we sat the night before; bread, unsalted butter from the farms,
+the coffee, the cream, the loaf sugar. Madame de Ferrier herself opened
+a door in the end of the wall and plunged into the dew of the garden.
+Her old servant exclaimed. She caught her hair in briers and laughed,
+tucking it up from falling, and brought off two great roses, each the
+head and the strength of a stem, to lay beside our plates. The breath of
+roses to this hour sends through my veins the joy of that.
+
+Then the old servant gathered wall fruit for us, and she sent some in
+his hand to Paul. Through a festooned arch of the pavilion giving upon
+the terraces, we saw a bird dart down to the fountain, tilt and drink,
+tilt and drink again, and flash away. Immediately the multitudinous
+rejoicing of a skylark dropped from upper air. When men would send
+thanks to the very gate of heaven their envoy should be a skylark.
+
+Eagle was like a little girl as she listened.
+
+"This is the first day of September, sire."
+
+"Is it? I thought it was the first day of creation."
+
+"I mention the date that you may not forget it. Because I am going to
+give you something to-day."
+
+My heart leaped like a conqueror's.
+
+Her skin was as fresh as the roses, looking marvelous to touch. The
+shock of imminent discovery went through me. For how can a man consider
+a woman forever as a picture? A picture she was, in the short-waisted
+gown of the Empire, of that white stuff Napoleon praised because it was
+manufactured in France. It showed the line of her throat, being parted
+half way down the bosom by a ruff which encircled her neck and stood
+high behind it. The transparent sleeves clung to her arms, and the
+slight outline of her figure looked long in its close casing.
+
+The gown tail curled around her slippered foot damp from the plunge in
+the garden. She gave it a little kick, and rippled again suddenly
+throughout her length.
+
+Then her face went grave, like a child's when it is surprised in
+wickedness.
+
+"But our fathers and mothers would have us forget their suffering in the
+festival of coming home, wouldn't they, Lazarre?"
+
+"Surely, Eagle."
+
+"Then why are you looking at me with reproach?"
+
+"I'm not."
+
+"Perhaps you don't like my dress?"
+
+I told her it was the first time I had ever noticed anything she wore,
+and I liked it.
+
+"I used to wear my mother's clothes. Ernestine and I made them over. But
+this is new; for the new day, and the new life here."
+
+"And the day," I reminded her, "is the first of September."
+
+She laughed, and opened her left hand, showing me two squat keys so
+small that both had lain concealed under two of her finger tips.
+
+"I am going to give you a key, sire."
+
+"Will it unlock a woman's mind?"
+
+"It will open a padlocked book. Last night I found a little blank-leaved
+book, with wooden covers. It was fastened by a padlock, and these keys
+were tied to it. You may have one key: I will keep the other."
+
+"The key to a padlocked book with nothing in it."
+
+Her eyes tantalized me.
+
+"I am going to put something in it. Sophie Saint-Michel said I had a
+gift for putting down my thoughts. If the gift appeared to Sophie when I
+was a child, it must grow in me by use. Every day I shall put some of my
+life into the book. And when I die I will bequeath it to you!"
+
+"Take back the key, madame. I have no desire to look into your coffin."
+
+She extended her hand.
+
+"Then our good and kind friend Count de Chaumont shall have it."
+
+"He shall not!"
+
+I held to her hand and kept my key.
+
+She slipped away from me. The laughter of the child yet rose through the
+dignity of the woman.
+
+"When may I read this book, Eagle?"
+
+"Never, of my free will, sire. How could I set down all I thought about
+you, for instance, if the certainty was hanging over me that you would
+read my candid opinions and punish me for them!"
+
+"Then of what use is the key?"
+
+"You would rather have it than give it to another, wouldn't you?"
+
+"Decidedly."
+
+"Well, you will have the key to my thoughts!"
+
+"And if the book ever falls into my hands--"
+
+"I will see that it doesn't!"
+
+"I will say, years from now--"
+
+"Twenty?"
+
+"Twenty? O Eagle!"
+
+"Ten."
+
+"Months? That's too long!"
+
+"No, ten years, sire."
+
+"Not ten years, Eagle. Say eight."
+
+"No, nine."
+
+"Seven. If the book falls into my hands at the end of seven years, may I
+open it?"
+
+"I may safely promise you that," she laughed. "The book will never fall
+into your hands."
+
+I took from my pocket the gold snuffbox with the portraits on the lid,
+and placed my key carefully therein. Eagle leaned forward to look at
+them. She took the box in her hand, and gazed with long reverence,
+drooping her head.
+
+Young as I was, and unskilled in the ways of women, that key worked
+magic comfort. She had given me a link to hold us together. The
+inconsistent, contradictory being, old one instant with the wisdom of
+the Saint-Michels, rippling full of unrestrained life the next, denying
+me all hope, yet indefinitely tantalizing, was adorable beyond words. I
+closed my eyes: the blinding sunshine struck them through the ivied
+arch.
+
+Turning my head as I opened them, I saw an old man come out on the
+terrace.
+
+He tried to search in every direction, his gray head and faded eyes
+moving anxiously. Madame de Ferrier was still. I heard her lay the
+snuffbox on the stone seat. I knew, though I could not let myself watch
+her, that she stood up against the wall, a woman of stone, her lips
+chiseled apart.
+
+"Eagle--Eagle!" the old man cried from the terrace.
+
+She whispered--"Yes, Cousin Philippe!"
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Swiftly as she passed between the tree columns, more swiftly her youth
+and vitality died in that walk of a few yards.
+
+We had been girl and boy together a brief half hour, heedless and gay.
+When she reached the arbor end, our chapter of youth was ended.
+
+I saw her bloodless face as she stepped upon the terrace.
+
+The man stretched his arms to her. As if the blight of her spirit fell
+upon him, the light died out of his face and he dropped his arms at his
+sides.
+
+He was a courtly gentleman, cadaverous and shabby as he stood, all the
+breeding of past generations appearing in him.
+
+"Eagle?" he said. The tone of piteous apology went through me like a
+sword.
+
+She took his hands and herself drew them around her neck. He kissed her
+on both cheeks.
+
+"O Cousin Philippe!"
+
+"I have frightened you, child! I meant to send a message first--but I
+wanted to see you--I wanted to come home!"
+
+"Cousin Philippe, who wrote that letter?"
+
+"The notary, child. I made him do it."
+
+"It was cruel!" She gave way, and brokenly sobbed, leaning helpless
+against him.
+
+The old marquis smoothed her head, and puckered his forehead under the
+sunlight, casting his eyes around like a culprit.
+
+"It was desperate. But I could do nothing else! You see it has
+succeeded. While I lay in hiding, the sight of the child, and your
+youth, has softened Bonaparte. That was my intention, Eagle!"
+
+"The peasants should have told me you were living!"
+
+"They didn't know I came back. Many of them think I died in America. The
+family at Les Rochers have been very faithful; and the notary has held
+his tongue. We must reward them, Eagle. I have been hidden very closely.
+I am tired of such long hiding!"
+
+He looked toward the chateau and lifted his voice sharply--
+
+"Where's the baby? I haven't seen the baby!"
+
+With gracious courtesy, restraining an impulse to plunge up the steps,
+he gave her his arm; and she swayed against it as they entered.
+
+When I could see them no more, I rose, and put my snuffbox in my breast.
+The key rattled in it.
+
+A savage need of hiding when so wounded, worked first through the
+disorder that let me see none of the amenities of leave-taking,
+self-command, conduct.
+
+I was beyond the gates, bare-headed, walking with long strides, when an
+old mill caught my eye, and I turned towards it, as we turn to trifles
+to relieve us from unendurable tension. The water dripped over the
+wheel, and long green beard trailed from its chin down the sluice. In
+this quieting company Skenedonk spied me as he rattled past with the
+post-carriage; and considering my behavior at other times, he was not
+enough surprised to waste any good words of Oneida.
+
+He stopped the carriage and I got in. He pointed ahead toward a curtain
+of trees which screened the chateau.
+
+"Paris," I answered.
+
+"Paris," he repeated to the postilion, and we turned about. I looked
+from hill to stream, from the fruited brambles of blackberry to reaches
+of noble forest, realizing that I should never see those lands again, or
+the neighboring crest where my friend the marquis slept.
+
+We posted the distance to Paris in two days.
+
+What the country was like or what towns we passed I could not this hour
+declare with any certainty. At first making effort and groping numbly in
+my mind, but the second day grasping determination, I formed my plans,
+and talked them over with Skenedonk. We would sail for America on the
+first convenient ship; waiting in Paris only long enough to prepare for
+the post journey to a port. Charges must at once be settled with Doctor
+Chantry, who would willingly stay in Paris while the De Chaumonts
+remained there.
+
+Beyond the voyage I did not look. The first faint tugging of my foster
+country began to pull me as it has pulled many a broken wretch out of
+the conditions of the older world.
+
+Paris was horrible, with a lonesomeness no one could have foreseen in
+its crowded streets. A taste of war was in the air. Troops passed to
+review. Our post-carriage met the dashing coaches of gay young men I
+knew, who stared at me without recognition. Marquis du Plessy no longer
+made way for me and displayed me at his side.
+
+I drove to his hotel in the Faubourg St. Germain for my possessions. It
+was closed: the distant relative who inherited after him being an heir
+with no Parisian tastes. The care-taker, however, that gentle old valet
+like a woman, who had dressed me in my first Parisian finery, let us in,
+and waited upon us with food I sent him out to buy. He gave me a letter
+from my friend, which he had held to deliver on my return, in case any
+accident befell the marquis. He was tremulous in his mourning, and all
+his ardent care of me was service rendered to the dead.
+
+I sat in the garden, with the letter spread upon the table where we had
+dined. Its brevity was gay. The writer would have gone under the knife
+with a jest. He did not burden me with any kind of counsel. We had
+touched. We might touch again. It was as if a soul sailed by, waving its
+hat.
+
+"My Dear Boy:--
+
+"I wanted you, but it was best you should not stay and behold the
+depravity of your elders. It is about a woman.
+
+"May you come to a better throne than the unsteady one of France.
+
+     "Your friend and servant,
+             Etienne du Plessy.
+
+"Garlic is the spice of life, my boy!"
+
+I asked no questions about the affair in which he had been engaged. If
+he had wanted me to know he would have told me.
+
+The garden was more than I could endure. I lay down early and slept
+late, as soon as I awoke in the morning beginning preparation for
+leaving France. Yet two days passed, for we were obliged to exchange our
+worn post-carriage for another after waiting for repairs. The old valet
+packed my belongings; though I wondered what I was going to do with them
+in America. The outfit of a young man of fashion overdressed a refugee
+of diminished fortune.
+
+For no sooner was I on the street than a sense of being unmistakably
+watched grew upon me. I scarcely caught anybody in the act. A succession
+of vanishing people passed me from one to another. A working man in his
+blouse eyed me; and disappeared. In the afternoon it was a soldier who
+turned up near my elbow, and in the evening he was succeeded by an
+equally interested old woman. I might not have remembered these people
+with distrust if Skenedonk had not told me he was trailed by changing
+figures, and he thought it was time to get behind trees.
+
+Bellenger might have returned to Paris, and set Napoleon's spies on the
+least befriended Bourbon of all; or the police upon a man escaped from
+Ste. Pélagie after choking a sacristan.
+
+The Indian and I were not skilled in disguises as our watchers were. Our
+safety lay in getting out of Paris. Skenedonk undertook to stow our
+belongings in the post-chaise at the last minute. I went to De
+Chaumont's hotel to bring the money from Doctor Chantry and to take
+leave without appearing to do so.
+
+Mademoiselle de Chaumont seized me as I entered. Her carriage stood in
+the court. Miss Chantry was waiting in it while Annabel's maid fastened
+her glove.
+
+"O Lazarre!" the poppet cried, her heartiness going through me like
+wine. "Are you back? And how you are changed! They must have abused you
+in Russia. We heard you went to Russia. But since dear Marquis du Plessy
+died we never hear the truth about anything."
+
+I acknowledged that I had been to Russia.
+
+"Why did you go there? Tell your dearest Annabel. She won't tell."
+
+"To see a lady."
+
+Annabel shook her fretwork of misty hair.
+
+"That's treason to me. Is she beautiful?"
+
+"Very."
+
+"Kind?"
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"Well, you're not. By the way, why are you looking so wan if she is
+beautiful and kind?"
+
+"I didn't say she was beautiful and kind for me, did I?"
+
+"No, of course not. She has jilted you, the wretch. Your dearest Annabel
+will console you, Lazarre!" She clasped my arm with both hands. "Madame
+de Ferrier's husband is alive!"
+
+"What consolation is there in that?"
+
+"A great deal for me. She has her estates back, and he was only hiding
+until she got them. I know the funniest thing!"
+
+Annabel hooked her finger and led me to a small study or cabinet at the
+end of the drawing-room.
+
+A profusion of the most beautiful stuffs was arranged there for display.
+
+"Look!" the witch exclaimed, pinching my wrist in her rapture. "India
+muslin embroidered in silver lama, Turkish velvet, ball dresses for a
+bride, ribbons of all colors, white blond, Brussels point, Cashmere
+shawls, veils in English point, reticules, gloves, fans, essences, a
+bridal purse of gold links--and worse than all,--except this string of
+perfect pearls--his portrait on a medallion of ivory, painted by
+Isabey!"
+
+"What is this collection?"
+
+"A corbeille!"
+
+"What's a corbeille?"
+
+Annabel crossed her hands in desperation. "Oh, haven't you been in Paris
+long enough to know what a corbeille is? It's the collection of gifts a
+bridegroom makes for his bride. He puts his taste, his sentiment,
+his"--she waved her fingers in the air--"as well as his money, into it.
+A corbeille shows what a man is. He must have been collecting it ever
+since he came to France. I feel proud of him. I want to pat him on his
+dear old back!"
+
+Not having him there to pat she patted me.
+
+"You are going to be married?"
+
+"Who said I was going to be married?"
+
+"Isn't this your corbeille?"
+
+Annabel lifted herself to my ear.
+
+"It was Madame de Ferrier's!"
+
+"What!"
+
+"I'm sure of it!"
+
+"Who bought it?"
+
+"Count de Chaumont, of course."
+
+"Was Madame de Ferrier going to marry him?"
+
+"Who wouldn't marry a man with such a corbeille?"
+
+"Was she?"
+
+"Don't grind your teeth at your dearest Annabel. She hadn't seen it, but
+it must have decided her. I am sure he intended to marry Madame de
+Ferrier, and he does most things he undertakes to do. That inconsiderate
+wretch of a Marquis de Ferrier--to spoil such a corbeille as this! But
+Lazarre!" She patted her gloved hands. "Here's the consolation:--my
+father will be obliged to turn his corbeille into my trousseau when I am
+married!"
+
+"What's a trousseau?"
+
+"Goose! It's a bride's wardrobe, I knew he had something in this
+cabinet, but he never left the key in the door until to-day. He was so
+completely upset when the De Ferriers came into Paris!"
+
+"Are they in Paris?"
+
+"Yes, at their own hotel. The old marquis has posted here to thank the
+emperor! The emperor is away with the troops, so he is determined at
+least to thank the empress at the assembly to-night."
+
+"Will Madame de Ferrier go to the Tuileries?"
+
+"Assuredly. Fancy how furious my father must be!"
+
+"May I enter?" said the humblest of voices outside the door.
+
+We heard a shuffling step.
+
+Annabel made a face and clenched her hands. The sprite was so harmless I
+laughed at her mischief. She brought in Doctor Chantry as she had
+brought me, to behold the corbeille; covering her father's folly with
+transparent fabrications, which anybody but the literal Briton must have
+seen through. He scarcely greeted me at all, folding his hands, pale and
+crushed, the sharp tip of his nose standing up more than ever like a
+porcelain candle-extinguisher, while I was anxious to have him aside, to
+get my money and take my leave.
+
+"See this beautiful corbeille, Doctor Chantry! Doesn't it surprise you
+Lazarre should have such taste? We are going this morning to the mayor
+of the arrondissement. Nothing is so easy as civil marriage under the
+Empire! Of course the religious sacrament in the church of the Capuchins
+follows, and celebrating that five minutes before midnight, will make
+all Paris talk! Go with us to the mayor, Doctor Chantry!"
+
+"No," he answered, "no!"
+
+"My father joins us there. We have kept Miss Chantry waiting too long.
+She will be tired of sitting in the carriage."
+
+Chattering with every breath Annabel entrained us both to the court, my
+poor master hobbling after her a victim, and staring at me with hatred
+when I tried to get a word in undertone.
+
+I put Annabel into the coach, and Miss Chantry made frigid room for me.
+
+"Hasten yourself, Lazarre," said Mademoiselle de Chaumont.
+
+I looked back at the poor man who was being played with, and she cried
+out laughing--
+
+"Did you go to Russia a Parisian to come back a bear?"
+
+I entered her coach, intending to take my leave as soon as I had seen
+Count de Chaumont. Annabel chattered all the way about civil marriage,
+and directed Miss Chantry to wait for us while we went in to the mayor.
+I was perhaps too indifferent to the trick. The usually sharp governess,
+undecided and piqued, sat still.
+
+The count was not in the mayor's office. A civil marriage was going
+forward, and a strange bridal party looked at us.
+
+"Now, Lazarre," the strategist confided, "your dearest Annabel is going
+to cover herself with Parisian disgrace. You don't know how maddening
+it is to have every step dogged by a woman who never was, never could
+have been--and manifestly never will be--young! Wasn't that a divine
+flash about the corbeille and the mayor? Miss Chantry will wait outside
+half a day. As I said, she will be very tired of sitting in the
+carriage. This is what you must do; smuggle me out another way; call
+another carriage, and take me for a drive and wicked dinner. I don't
+care what the consequences are, if you don't!"
+
+I said I certainly didn't, and that I was ready to throw myself in the
+Seine if that would amuse her; and she commended my improvement in
+manners. We had a drive, with a sympathetic coachman; and a wicked
+dinner in a suburb, which would have been quite harmless on American
+ground. The child was as full of spirits as she had been the night she
+mounted the cabin chimney. But I realized that more of my gold pieces
+were slipping away, and I had not seen Doctor Chantry.
+
+"We were going to the mayor's," she maintained, when reproached. "My
+father would have joined us if he had been there. He would certainly
+have joined us if he had seen me alone with you. Nothing is so easy as
+civil marriage under the Empire. Of course the religious sacrament
+follows, when people want it, and if it is celebrated in the church of
+the Capuchins--or any other church--five minutes before midnight, it
+will make all Paris talk! Every word I said was true!"
+
+"But Doctor Chantry believed something entirely different."
+
+"You can't do anything for the English," said Annabel. "Next week he
+will say haw-haw."
+
+Doctor Chantry could not be found when we returned to her father's
+hotel. She gave me her fingers to kiss in good-bye, and told me I was
+less doleful.
+
+"We thought you were the Marquis du Plessy's son, Lazarre. I always have
+believed that story the Holland woman told in the cabin, about your rank
+being superior to mine. Don't be cut up about Madame de Ferrier! You may
+have to go to Russia again for her, but you'll get her!"
+
+The witch shook the mist of hair at the sides of her pretty aquiline
+face, blew a kiss at me, and ran up the staircase and out of my life.
+After waiting long for Doctor Chantry I hurried to Skenedonk and sent
+him with instructions to find my master and conclude our affair before
+coming back.
+
+The Indian silently entered the Du Plessy hotel after dusk, crestfallen
+and suspicious. He brought nothing but a letter, left in Doctor
+Chantry's room; and no other trace remained of Doctor Chantry.
+
+"What has he done with himself, Skenedonk?" I exclaimed.
+
+The Oneida begged me to read that we might trail him.
+
+It was a long and very tiresome letter written in my master's spider
+tracks, containing long and tiresome enumerations of his services. He
+presented a large bill for his guardianship on the voyage and across
+France. He said I was not only a Rich Man through his Influence, but I
+had proved myself an ungrateful one, and had robbed him of his only
+Sentiment after a disappointed Existence. My Impudence was equaled only
+by my astonishing Success, and he chose not to contemplate me as the
+Husband of Beauty and Lofty Station, whose Shoes he in his Modesty and
+Worth, felt unworthy to unlatch. Therefore he withdrew that very day
+from Paris, and would embrace the Opportunity of going into pensive
+Retirement and rural Contemplation, in his native Kingdom; where his
+Sister would join him when she could do so with Dignity and Propriety.
+
+I glanced from line to line smiling, but the postscript brought me to my
+feet.
+
+"The Deposit which you left with me I shall carry with me, as no more
+than my Due for lifting low Savagery to high Gentility, and beg to
+subscribe my Thanks for at least this small Tribute of Gratitude."
+
+"Doctor Chantry is gone with the money!"
+
+Skenedonk bounded up grasping the knife which he always carried in a
+sheath hanging from his belt.
+
+"Which way did the old woman go?"
+
+"Stop," I said.
+
+The Indian half crouched for counsel.
+
+"I'll be a prince! Let him have it."
+
+"Let him rob you?"
+
+"We're quits, now. I've paid him for the lancet stab I gave him."
+
+"But you haven't a whole bagful of coin left."
+
+"We brought nothing into France, and it seems certain we shall take
+nothing but experience out of it. And I'm young, Skenedonk. He isn't."
+
+The Oneida grunted. He was angrier than I had ever seen him.
+
+"We ought to have knocked the old woman on the head at Saratoga," he
+responded.
+
+Annabel's trick had swept away my little fortune. With recklessness
+which repeated loss engenders I proposed we scatter the remaining coin
+in the street, but Skenedonk prudently said we would divide and conceal
+it in our clothes. I gave the kind valet a handful to keep his heart
+warm; and our anxieties about our valuables were much lightened.
+
+Then we consulted about our imminent start, and I told my servant it
+would be better to send the post-chaise across the Seine. He agreed with
+me. And for me to come to it as if by accident the moment we were ready
+to join each other on the road. He agreed to that. All of our belongings
+would be put into it by the valet and himself, and when we met we would
+make a circuit and go by the way of St. Denis.
+
+"We will meet," I told him, "at eleven o'clock in front of the
+Tuileries."
+
+Skenedonk looked at me without moving a muscle.
+
+"I want to see the palace of the Tuileries before I leave France."
+
+He still gazed at me.
+
+"At any risk, I am going to the Tuileries to-night!"
+
+My Iroquois grunted. A glow spread all over his copper face and head. If
+I had told him I was going to an enemy's central camp fire to shake a
+club in the face of the biggest chief, he could not have thought more of
+my daring or less of my common sense.
+
+"You will never come out."
+
+"If I don't, Skenedonk, go without me."
+
+He passed small heroics unnoticed.
+
+"Why do you do it?"
+
+I couldn't tell him. Neither could I leave Paris without doing it. I
+assured him many carriages would be there, near the entrance, which was
+called, I believed, the pavilion of Flora; and by showing boldness we
+might start from that spot as well as from any other. He abetted the
+reckless devil in me, and the outcome was that I crossed the Seine
+bridge by myself about ten o'clock; remembering my escape from Ste.
+Pélagie; remembering I should never see the gargoyles on Notre Dame any
+more, or the golden dome of the Invalides, or hear the night hum of
+Paris, whether I succeeded or not. For if I succeeded I should be away
+toward the coast by morning; and if I did not succeed, I should be
+somewhere under arrest.
+
+I can see the boy in white court dress, with no hint of the traveler
+about him, who stepped jauntily out of a carriage and added himself to
+groups entering the Tuileries. The white court dress was armor which he
+put on to serve him in the dangerous attempt to look once more on a
+woman's face. He mounted with a strut toward the guardians of the
+imperial court, not knowing how he might be challenged; and fortune was
+with him.
+
+"Lazarre!" exclaimed Count de Chaumont, hurrying behind to take my
+elbow. "I want you to help me!"
+
+Remembering with sudden remorse Annabel's escape and our wicked dinner,
+I halted eager to do him service. He was perhaps used to Annabel's
+escapes, for a very different annoyance puckered his forehead as he drew
+me aside within the entrance.
+
+"Have you heard the Marquis de Ferrier is alive?"
+
+I told him I had heard it.
+
+"Damned old fox! He lay in hiding until the estates were recovered. Then
+out he creeps to enjoy them!"
+
+I pressed the count's hand. We were one in disapproval.
+
+"It's a shame!" said the count.
+
+It was a shame, I said.
+
+"And now he's posted into Paris to make a fool of himself."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Have you seen Madame de Ferrier?"
+
+"No, I have not seen her."
+
+"I believe we are in time to intercept him. You have a clever head, boy.
+Use it. How shall we get this old fellow out of the Tuileries without
+letting him speak to the emperor?"
+
+"Easily, I should think, since Napoleon isn't here."
+
+"Yes, he is. He dashed into Paris a little while ago, and may leave
+to-night. But he is here."
+
+"Why shouldn't the Marquis de Ferrier speak to Napoleon?"
+
+"Because he is going to make an ass of himself before the court, and
+what's worse, he'll make a laughing-stock of me."
+
+"How can he do that?"
+
+"He is determined to thank the emperor for restoring his estates. He
+might thank the empress, and she wouldn't know what he was talking
+about. But the emperor knows everything. I have used all the arguments I
+dared to use against it, but he is a pig for stubbornness. For my sake,
+for Madame de Ferrier's sake, Lazarre, help me to get him harmlessly out
+of the Tuileries, without making a public scandal about the restitution
+of the land!"
+
+"What scandal can there be, monsieur? And why shouldn't he thank
+Napoleon for giving him back his estates after the fortunes of
+revolution and war?"
+
+"Because the emperor didn't do it. I bought them!"
+
+"You!"
+
+"Yes, I bought them. Come to that, they are my property!"
+
+"Madame de Ferrier doesn't know this?"
+
+"Certainly not. I meant to settle them on her. Saints and angels, boy,
+anybody could see what my intentions were!"
+
+"Then she is as poor as she was in America?"
+
+"Poorer. She has the Marquis de Ferrier!"
+
+We two who loved her, youth and man, rich and powerful, or poor and
+fugitive, felt the passionate need of protecting her.
+
+"She wouldn't accept them if she knew it."
+
+"Neither would the marquis," said De Chaumont. "The Marquis de Ferrier
+might live on the estates his lifetime without any interference. But if
+he will see the emperor, and I can't prevent it any other way, I shall
+have to tell him!"
+
+"Yes, you will have to tell him!"
+
+I thought of Eagle in the village, and the old woman who blessed her a
+quarter of an hour, and Paul standing on the seat to be worshiped. How
+could I go to America and leave her? And what could I do for her when a
+rich man like De Chaumont was powerless?
+
+"Can't you see Napoleon," I suggested, "and ask him to give the marquis
+a moment's private audience, and accept his thanks?"
+
+"No!" groaned De Chaumont. "He wouldn't do it. I couldn't put myself in
+such a position!"
+
+"If Napoleon came in so hurriedly he may not show himself in the state
+apartments to-night."
+
+"But he is accessible, wherever he is. He doesn't deny himself to the
+meanest soldier. Why should he refuse to see a noble of the class he is
+always conciliating when he can?"
+
+"Introduce me to the Marquis de Ferrier," I finally said, "and let me
+see if I can talk against time while you get your emperor out of his
+way."
+
+I thought desperately of revealing to the old royalist what I believed
+myself to be, what Eagle and he believed me to be, and commanding him,
+as his rightful prince, to content himself with less effusive and less
+public gratitude to an usurper. He would live in the country, shrinking
+so naturally from the court that a self-imposed appearance there need
+never be repeated.
+
+I believe this would have succeeded. A half hour more of time might have
+saved years of comfort to Eagle--for De Chaumont was generous--and have
+changed the outcome of my own life. But in scant fifteen minutes our
+fate was decided.
+
+De Chaumont and I had moved with our heads together, from corridor to
+antechamber, from antechamber to curtained salon of the lower floor. The
+private apartments of the Bonaparte family were thrown open, and in the
+mahogany furnished room, all hung with yellow satin, I noticed a Swiss
+clock which pointed its minute finger to a quarter before eleven. I made
+no hurry. My errand was not accomplished. Skenedonk would wait for me,
+and even dare a search if he became suspicious.
+
+The count, knowing what Madame de Ferrier considered me, perhaps knew my
+plan. He turned back at once assenting.
+
+The Marquis and Marquise de Ferrier were that instant going up the grand
+staircase, and would be announced. Eagle turned her face above me, the
+long line of her throat uplifted, and went courageous and smiling on her
+way. The marquis had adapted himself to the court requirements of the
+Empire. Noble gentleman of another period, he stalked a piteous
+masquerader where he had once been at home.
+
+Count de Chaumont grasped my arm and we hurried up the stairs after
+them. The end of a great and deep room was visible, and I had a glimpse,
+between heads and shoulders, of a woman standing in the light of many
+lusters. She parted her lips to smile, closing them quickly, but having
+shown little dark teeth. She was of exquisite shape, her face and arms
+and bosom having a clean fair polish like the delicate whiteness of a
+magnolia, as I have since seen that flower in bloom. She wore a small
+diadem in her hair, and her short-waisted robe trailed far back among
+her ladies. I knew without being told that this was the empress of the
+French.
+
+De Chaumont's hand was on my arm, but another hand touched my shoulder.
+I looked behind me. This time it was not an old woman, or a laborer in
+a blouse, or a soldier; but I knew my pursuer in his white court dress.
+Officer of the law, writ in the lines of his face, to my eyes appeared
+all over him.
+
+"Monsieur Veeleeum!"
+
+As soon as he said that I understood it was the refugee from Ste.
+Pélagie that he wanted.
+
+"Certainly," I answered. "Don't make a disturbance."
+
+"You will take my arm and come with me, Monsieur Veeleeum."
+
+"I will do nothing of the kind until my errand is finished," I answered
+desperately.
+
+De Chaumont looked sharply at the man, but his own salvation required
+him to lay hold on the marquis. As he did so, Eagle's face and my face
+encountered in a panel of mirror, two flashes of pallor; and I took my
+last look.
+
+"You will come with me now," said the gendarme at my ear.
+
+She saw him, and understood his errand.
+
+There was no chance. De Chaumont wheeled ready to introduce me to the
+marquis. I was not permitted to speak to him. But Eagle took my right
+arm and moved down the corridor with me.
+
+Decently and at once the disguised gendarme fell behind where he could
+watch every muscle without alarming Madame de Ferrier. She appeared not
+to see him. I have no doubt he praised himself for his delicacy and her
+unconsciousness of my arrest.
+
+"You must not think you can run away from me," she said.
+
+"I was coming back," I answered, making talk.
+
+My captor's person heaved behind me, signifying that he silently
+laughed. He kept within touch.
+
+"Do you know the Tuileries well?" inquired Eagle.
+
+"No. I have never been in the palace before."
+
+"Nor I, in the state apartments."
+
+We turned from the corridor into a suite in these upper rooms, the
+gendarme humoring Madame de Ferrier, and making himself one in the crowd
+around us. De Chaumont and the Marquis de Ferrier gave chase. I saw them
+following, as well as they could.
+
+"This used to be the queen's dressing-room," said Eagle. We entered the
+last one in the suite.
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Quite sure."
+
+"This is the room you told me you would like to examine?"
+
+"The very one. I don't believe the Empire has made any changes in it.
+These painted figures look just as Sophie described them."
+
+Eagle traced lightly with her finger one of the shepherdesses dancing on
+the panel; and crossed to the opposite side of the room. People who
+passed the door found nothing to interest them, and turned away, but the
+gendarme stayed beside us. Eagle glanced at him as if resenting his
+intrusion, and asked me to bring her a candle and hold it near a mark
+on the tracery. The gendarme himself, apologetic but firm, stepped to
+the sconce and took the candle. I do not know how the thing was done, or
+why the old spring and long unused hinges did not stick, but his back
+was toward us--she pushed me against the panel and it let me in.
+
+And I held her and drew her after me, and the thing closed. The wall had
+swallowed us.
+
+We stood on firm footing as if suspended in eternity. No sound from the
+swarming palace, not even possible noise made by the gendarme, reached
+us. It was like being earless, until she spoke in the hollow.
+
+"Here's the door on the staircase, but it will not open!"
+
+I groped over every inch of it with swift haste in the blackness.
+
+"Hurry--hurry!" she breathed. "He may touch the spring himself--it moves
+instantly!"
+
+"Does this open with a spring, too?"
+
+"I don't know. Sophie didn't know!"
+
+"Are you sure there is any door here?"
+
+"She told me there was."
+
+"This is like a door, but it will not move."
+
+It sprang inward against us, a rush of air and a hollow murmur as of
+wind along the river, following it.
+
+"Go--be quick!" said Madame de Ferrier.
+
+"But how will you get out?"
+
+"I shall get out when you are gone."
+
+"O, Eagle, forgive me!" (Yet I would have dragged her in with me again!)
+
+"I am in no danger. You are in danger. Goodbye, my liege."
+
+Cautiously she pushed me through the door, begging me to feel for every
+step. I stood upon the top one, and held to her as I had held to her in
+passing through the other wall.
+
+I thought of the heavy days before her and the blank before me. I could
+not let go her wrists. We were fools to waste our youth. I could work
+for her in America. My vitals were being torn from me. I should go to
+the devil without her. I don't know what I said. But I knew the brute
+love which had risen like a lion in me would never conquer the woman who
+kissed me in the darkness and held me at bay.
+
+"O Louis--O Lazarre! Think of Paul and Cousin Philippe! You shall be
+your best for your little mother! I will come to you sometime!"
+
+Then she held the door between us, and I went down around and around the
+spiral of stone.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+ARRIVING
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Even when a year had passed I said of my escape from the Tuileries: "It
+was a dream. How could it have happened?" For the adventures of my
+wandering fell from me like a garment, leaving the one changeless
+passion.
+
+Skenedonk and I met on the ship a New England minister, who looked upon
+and considered us from day to day. I used to sit in the stern, the miles
+stretching me as a rack stretches flesh and tendons. The minister
+regarded me as prostrated by the spider bite of that wicked Paris; out
+of which he learned I had come, by talking to my Oneida.
+
+The Indian and I were a queer pair that interested him, and when he
+discovered that I bore the name of Eleazar Williams his friendship was
+sealed to us. Eunice Williams of Deerfield, the grandmother of Thomas
+Williams, was a traditional brand never snatched from the burning, in
+the minister's town of Longmeadow, where nearly every inhabitant was
+descended from or espoused to a Williams. Though he himself was born
+Storrs, his wife was born Williams; and I could have lain at his feet
+and cried, so open was the heart of this good man to a wanderer
+rebounding from a family that disowned the pretender. He was my welcome
+back to America. The breath of eastern pines, and the resinous sweetness
+of western plains I had not yet seen, but which drew me so that I could
+scarcely wait to land, came to me with that man. Before the voyage ended
+I had told him my whole history as far as I knew it, except the story of
+Madame de Ferrier; and the beginning of it was by no means new to him.
+The New England Williamses kept a prayerful eye on that branch
+descending through the Iroquois. This transplanted Briton, returning
+from his one memorable visit to the England of his forefathers, despised
+my Bourbon claims, and even the French contraction of my name.
+
+"What are you going to do now, Eleazar?" he inquired.
+
+Hugging my old dream to myself, feeling my heart leap toward that
+western empire which must fascinate a young man as long as there remain
+any western lands to possess, I told him I intended to educate our
+Iroquois as soon as I could prepare myself to do it, and settle them
+where they could grow into a greater nation.
+
+The man of God kindled in the face. He was a dark-eyed, square-browed,
+serious man, with black hair falling below his white band. His mouth had
+a sweet benign expression, even when he quizzed me about my dauphinhood.
+A New England pastor was a flame that burned for the enlightenment of
+the nations. From that hour it was settled that I should be his pupil,
+and go with him to Longmeadow to finish my education.
+
+When we landed he helped me to sell my Babylonish clothes, except the
+white court dress, to which I clung with tenacity displeasing to him,
+and garb myself in more befitting raiment. By Skenedonk's hand I sent
+some of the remaining gold coins to my mother Marianne and the chief,
+when he rejoined the tribe and went to pass the winter at St. Regis. And
+by no means did I forget to tell him to bring me letters from De
+Chaumont's manor in the spring, if any arrived there for me.
+
+How near to heaven the New England village seemed, with Mount Tom on the
+horizon glorious as Mount Zion, the mighty sweep of meadow land, the
+Connecticut river flowing in great peace, the broad street of elms like
+some gigantic cathedral nave, and in its very midst a shrine--the
+meetinghouse, double-decked with fan-topped windows.
+
+Religion and education were the mainsprings of its life. Pastor Storrs
+worked in his study nearly nine hours a day, and spent the remaining
+hours in what he called visitation of his flock.
+
+This being lifted out of Paris and plunged into Longmeadow was the
+pouring of white hot metal into chill moulds. It cast me. With a
+seething and a roar of loosened forces, the boy passed to the man.
+
+Nearly every night during all those years of changing, for even
+faithfulness has its tides, I put the snuffbox under my pillow, and
+Madame de Ferrier's key spoke to my ear. I would say to myself: "The one
+I love gave me this key. Did I ever sit beside her on a ledge of stone
+overlooking a sunken garden?--so near that I might have touched her!
+Does she ever think of the dauphin Louis? Where is she? Does she know
+that Lazarre has become Eleazar Williams?"
+
+The pastor's house was fronted with huge white fluted pillars of wood,
+upholding a porch roof which shaded the second floor windows. The doors
+in that house had a short-waisted effect with little panels above and
+long panels below. I had a chamber so clean and small that I called it
+in my mind the Monk's Cell, nearly filled with the high posted bed, the
+austere table and chairs. The whitewashed walls were bare of pictures,
+except a painted portrait of Stephen Williams, pastor of Longmeadow from
+1718 to 1783. Daily his laughing eyes watched me as if he found my
+pretensions a great joke. He had a long nose, and a high forehead. His
+black hair crinkled, and a merry crease drew its half circle from one
+cheek around under his chin to the other.
+
+Longmeadow did not receive me without much question and debate. There
+were Williamses in every direction; disguised, perhaps, for that
+generation, under the names of Cooley, Stebbins, Colter, Ely, Hole, and
+so on. A stately Sarah Williams, as Mrs. Storrs, sat at the head of the
+pastor's table. Her disapproval was a force, though it never manifested
+itself except in withdrawal. If Mrs. Storrs had drawn back from me while
+I lived under her roof, I should have felt an outcast indeed. The subtle
+refinement of those Longmeadow women was like the hinted sweetness of
+arbutus flower. Breeding passed from generation to generation. They had
+not mixed their blood with the blood of any outsiders; and their
+forbears were English yeomen.
+
+I threw myself into books as I had done during my first months at De
+Chaumont's, before I grew to think of Madame de Ferrier. One of those
+seven years I spent at Dartmouth. But the greater part of my knowledge I
+owe to Pastor Storrs. Greek and Hebrew he gave me to add to the
+languages I was beginning to own; and he unlocked all his accumulations
+of learning. It was a monk's life that I lived; austere and without
+incident, but bracing as the air of the hills. The whole system was
+monastic, though abomination alighted on that word in Longmeadow. I took
+the discipline into my blood. It will go down to those after me.
+
+There a man had to walk with God whether he wanted to or not.
+
+Living was inexpensive, each item being gaged by careful housekeeping.
+It was a sin to gorge the body, and godly conversation was better than
+abundance. Yet the pastor's tea-table arises with a halo around it. The
+rye and Indian bread, the doughnuts fragrant as flowers, the sparing
+tea, the prim mats which saved the cloth, the wire screen covering
+sponge cake--how sacred they seem!
+
+The autumn that I came to Longmeadow, Napoleon Bonaparte was beaten on
+the sea by the English, but won the battle of Austerlitz, defeating the
+Russian coalition and changing the map of Europe.
+
+I felt sometimes a puppet while this man played his great part. It was
+no comfort that others of my house were nothing to France. Though I did
+not see Louis Philippe again, he wandered in America two or three years,
+and went back to privacy.
+
+During my early novitiate at Longmeadow, Aaron Burr's conspiracy went to
+pieces, dragging down with it that pleasant gentleman, Harmon
+Blennerhassett, startling men like Jackson, who had best befriended him
+unawares. But this in nowise affected my own plans of empire. The
+solidarity of a nation of Indians on a remote tract could be no menace
+to the general government.
+
+Skenedonk came and went, and I made journeys to my people with him. But
+there was never any letter waiting at De Chaumont's for me. After some
+years indeed, the count having returned to Castorland, to occupy his new
+manor at Le Rayville, the mansion I had known was torn down and the
+stone converted to other uses. Skenedonk brought me word early that
+Mademoiselle de Chaumont had been married to an officer of the Empire,
+and would remain in France.
+
+The door between my past and me was sealed. Madame de Ferrier stood on
+the other side of it, and no news from her penetrated its dense barrier.
+I tried to write letters to her. But nothing that I could write was fit
+to send, and I knew not whether she was yet at Mont-Louis. Forever she
+was holding the door against me.
+
+Skenedonk, coming and going at his caprice, stayed a month in every
+year at Longmeadow, where the townspeople, having had a surfeit of
+aboriginal names, called him John. He raised no objection, for that with
+half a dozen other Christian titles had been bestowed on him in baptism;
+and he entered the godly list of Williamses as John Williams.
+
+The first summer I spent in Longmeadow there was an eclipse of the sun
+about the middle of June. I remember lying on open land, my book on its
+face beside me, and watching it through my eyelashes; until the weird
+and awful twilight of a blotted sun in mid-heaven sent birds and beasts
+to shelter as from wrath. When there was but a hairy shining around the
+orbed blackness, and stars trembled out and trembled back, as if they
+said: "We are here. The old order will return," and the earth held its
+breath at threat of eternal darkness, the one I loved seemed to approach
+in the long shadows. It was a sign that out of the worst comes the best.
+But it was a terror to the unprepared; and Pastor Storrs preached about
+it the following Sunday.
+
+The missionary spirit of Longmeadow stirred among the Williamses, and
+many of them brought what they called their mites to Pastor Storrs for
+my education. If I were made a king no revenue could be half so sweet as
+that. The village was richer than many a stonier New England place, but
+men were struggling then all over the wide states and territories for
+material existence.
+
+The pension no longer came from Europe. It ceased when I returned from
+France. Its former payment was considered apocryphal by Longmeadow,
+whose very maids--too white, with a pink spot in each cheek--smiled with
+reserved amusement at a student who thought it possible he could ever be
+a king. I spoke to nobody but Pastor Storrs about my own convictions.
+But local newspapers, with their omniscient grip on what is in the air,
+bandied the subject back and forth.
+
+We sometimes walked in the burying ground among dead Williamses, while
+he argued down my claims, leaving them without a leg to stand on.
+Reversing the usual ministerial formula, "If what has been said is true,
+then it follows, first, secondly," and so on, he used to say:
+
+"Eleazar, you were brought up among the Indians, conscious only of
+bodily existence, and unconscious of your origin; granted. Money was
+sent--let us say from Europe--for your support; granted. Several
+persons, among them one who testified strongly against his will, told
+you that you resembled the Bourbons; granted. You bear on your person
+marks like those which were inflicted on the unfortunate dauphin of
+France; granted. You were malignantly pursued while abroad; granted. But
+what does it all prove? Nothing. It amounts simply to this: you know
+nothing about your early years; some foreign person--perhaps an English
+Williams--kindly interested himself in your upbringing; you were
+probably scalded in the camps; you have some accidental traits of the
+Bourbons; a man who heard you had a larger pension than the idiot he was
+tending, disliked you. You can prove nothing more."
+
+I never attempted to prove anything more to Pastor Storrs. It would have
+been most ungrateful to persuade him I was an alien. At the same time he
+prophesied his hopes of me, and many a judicious person blamed him for
+treating me as something out of the ordinary, and cockering up pride.
+
+A blunter Williams used to take me by the button on the street.
+
+"Eleazar Williams," he would say, "do you pretend to be the son of the
+French king? I tell you what! I will not let the name of Williams be
+disgraced by any relationship to any French monarch! You must do one of
+two things: you must either renounce Williamsism or renounce
+Bourbonism!"
+
+Though there was liberty of conscience to criticise the pastor, he was
+autocrat of Longmeadow. One who preceded Pastor Storrs had it told about
+him that two of his deacons wanted him to appoint Ruling Elders. He
+appointed them; and asked them what they thought the duties were. They
+said he knew best.
+
+"Well," said the pastor, "one of the Ruling Elders may come to my house
+before meeting, saddle my horse, and hold the stirrup while I get on.
+The other may wait at the church door and hold him while I get off, and
+after meeting bring him to the steps. This is all of my work that I can
+consent to let Ruling Elders do for me."
+
+The Longmeadow love of disputation was fostered by bouts which Ruling
+Elders might have made it their business to preserve, if any Ruling
+Elders were willing to accept their appointment. The pastor once went to
+the next town to enjoy argument with a scientific doctor. When he
+mounted his horse to ride home before nightfall the two friends kept up
+their debate. The doctor stood by the horse, or walked a few steps as
+the horse moved. Presently both men noticed a fire in the east; and it
+was sunrise. They had argued all night.
+
+In Longmeadow a man could not help practicing argument. I also practiced
+oratory. And all the time I practiced the Iroquois tongue as well as
+English and French, and began the translation of books into the language
+of the nation I hoped to build. That Indians made unstable material for
+the white man to handle I would not believe. Skenedonk was not unstable.
+His faithfulness was a rock.
+
+For some reason, and I think it was the reach of Pastor Storrs, men in
+other places began to seek me. The vital currents of life indeed sped
+through us on the Hartford and Springfield stage road. It happened that
+Skenedonk and I were making my annual journey to St. Regis when the
+first steamboat accomplished its trip on the Hudson river. About the
+time that the Wisconsin country was included in Illinois Territory, I
+decided to write a letter to Madame Tank at Green Bay, and insist on
+knowing my story as she believed she knew it. Yet I hesitated; and
+finally did not do it. I found afterwards that there was no post-office
+at Green Bay. A carrier, sent by the officers of the fort and villagers,
+brought mail from Chicago. He had two hundred miles of wilderness to
+traverse, and his blankets and provisions as well as the mail to carry;
+and he did this at the risk of his life among wild men and beasts.
+
+The form of religion was always a trivial matter to me. I never ceased
+to love the sacrifice of the mass, which was an abomination and an
+idolatrous practice to Pastor Storrs. The pageantry of the Roman Church
+that first mothered and nurtured me touches me to this day. I love the
+Protestant prayers of the English Church. And I love the stern and
+knotty argument, the sermon with heads and sequences, of the New England
+Congregationalist. For this catholicity Catholics have upbraided me,
+churchmen rebuked me, and dissenters denied that I had any religion at
+all.
+
+When the Episcopal Bishop of New York showed me kindness, and Pastor
+Storrs warned me against being proselyted, I could not tell him the
+charm in the form of worship practiced by the woman I loved. There was
+not a conscious minute when I forgot her. Yet nobody in Longmeadow knew
+of her existence. In my most remorseful days, comparing myself with
+Pastor Storrs, I was never sorry I had clung to her and begged her not
+to let me go alone. For some of our sins are so honestly the expression
+of nature that justification breaks through them.
+
+On the western border there was trouble with dissatisfied Indians, and
+on the sea there was trouble with the British, so that people began to
+talk of war long before it was declared, and to blame President Madison
+for his over-caution in affairs. A battle was fought at Tippecanoe in
+the Indiana Territory, which silenced the Indians for a while. But every
+one knew that the English stood behind them. Militia was mustered, the
+army recruited, and embargo laid upon shipping in the ports, and all
+things were put forward in April of that year, before war was declared
+in June.
+
+I had influence with our tribes. The Government offered me a well paid
+commission to act as its secret agent. Pastor Storrs and the Williamses,
+who had been nurturing a missionary, were smitten with grief to see him
+rise and leap into camps and fields, eager for the open world, the
+wilderness smell; the council, where the red man's mind, a trembling
+balance, could be turned by vivid language; eager, in fact, to live
+where history was being made.
+
+The pastor had clothed me in his mind with ministerial gown and band,
+and the martial blood that quickened he counted an Iroquois strain. Yet
+so inconsistent is human nature, so given to forms which it calls
+creeds, that when I afterwards put on the surplice and read prayers to
+my adopted people, he counted it as great a defection as taking to
+saddle and spur. We cannot leave the expression of our lives to those
+better qualified than we are, however dear they may be. I had to pack my
+saddlebags and be gone, loving Longmeadow none the less because I
+grieved it, knowing that it would not approve of me more if I stayed and
+failed to do my natural part.
+
+The snuffbox and the missal which had belonged to my family in France I
+always carried with me. And very little could be transported on the road
+we took.
+
+John Williams, who came to Longmeadow in deerskins, and paraded his
+burnished red poll among the hatted Williamses, abetted me in turning
+from the missionary field to the arena of war, and never left me. It was
+Skenedonk who served the United States with brawn and endurance, while I
+put such policy and color into my harangues as I could command. We
+shared our meals, our camps, our beds of leaves together. The life at
+Longmeadow had knit me to good use. I could fast or feast, ride or
+march, take the buckskins, or the soldier's uniform.
+
+Of this service I shall write down only what goes to the making of the
+story. The Government was pleased to commend it, and it may be found
+written in other annals than mine.
+
+Great latitude was permitted us in our orders. We spent a year in the
+north. My skin darkened and toughened under exposure until I said to
+Skenedonk, "I am turning an Indian;" and he, jealous of my French blood,
+denied it.
+
+In July we had to thread trails he knew by the lake toward Sandusky.
+There was no horse path wide enough for us to ride abreast. Brush
+swished along our legs, and green walls shut our view on each side. The
+land dipped towards its basin. Buckeye and gigantic chestnut trees,
+maple and oak, passed us from rank to rank of endless forest. Skenedonk
+rode ahead, watching for every sign and change, as a pilot now watches
+the shifting of the current. So we had done all day, and so we were
+doing when fading light warned us to camp.
+
+A voice literally cried out of the wilderness, startling the horses and
+ringing among the tree trunks:
+
+"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, and He hath anointed me to blow the
+trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for behold
+the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring
+flame followeth after them!"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+"That's Johnny Appleseed," said Skenedonk, turning in his saddle.
+
+"What is Johnny Appleseed?"
+
+"He is a man that God has touched," said Skenedonk, using the aboriginal
+phrase that signified a man clouded in mind.
+
+God had hidden him, too. I could see no one. The voice echo still went
+off among the trees.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"Maybe one side, maybe the other."
+
+"Does he never show himself?"
+
+"Oh, yes," Skenedonk said. "He goes to all the settlements. I have often
+seen him when I was hunting on these grounds. He came to our camp. He
+loves to sleep outdoors better than in a cabin."
+
+"Why does he shout at us like a prophet?"
+
+"To warn us that Indians are on the warpath."
+
+"He might have thought we were on the warpath ourselves."
+
+"Johnny Appleseed knows Shawanoes and Tecumseh's men."
+
+The trees, lichened on their north sides, massed rank behind rank
+without betraying any face in their glooms. The Ohio and Indiana forests
+had a nameless quality. They might have been called home-forests, such
+invitations issued from them to man seeking a spot of his own. Nor can
+I make clear what this invitation was. It produced thoughts different
+from those that men were conscious of in the rugged northwest.
+
+"I think myself," said Skenedonk, as we moved farther from the invisible
+voice, "that he is under a vow. But nobody told me that."
+
+"Why do you think so?"
+
+"He plants orchards in every fine open spot; or clears the land for
+planting where he thinks the soil is right."
+
+"Don't other men plant orchards?"
+
+"No. They have not time, or seed. They plant bread. He does nothing but
+plant orchards."
+
+"He must have a great many."
+
+"They are not for himself. The apples are for any one who may pass by
+when they are ripe. He wants to give apples to everybody. Animals often
+nibble the bark, or break down his young trees. It takes long for them
+to grow. But he keeps on planting."
+
+"If other men have no seeds to plant, how does he get them?"
+
+"He makes journeys to the old settlements, where many orchards have
+grown, and brings the seeds from ciderpresses. He carries them from
+Pennsylvania on his back, in leather bags, a bag for each kind of seed."
+
+"Doesn't he ever sell them?"
+
+"Not often. Johnny Appleseed cares nothing for money. I believe he is
+under a vow of poverty. No one laughs at him. The tribes on these
+grounds would not hurt a hair of his head, not only because God has
+touched him, but because he plants apples. I have eaten his apples
+myself."
+
+"Johnny Appleseed!" I repeated, and Skenedonk hastened to tell me:
+
+"He has another name, but I forget it. He is called Johnny Appleseed."
+
+The slim and scarcely perceptible tunnel, among trees, piled with fallen
+logs and newly sprung growths, let us into a wide clearing as suddenly
+as a stream finds its lake. We could not see even the usual cow tracks.
+A cabin shedding light from its hearth surprised us in the midst of
+stumps.
+
+The door stood wide. A woman walked back and forth over a puncheon
+floor, tending supper. Dogs rushed to meet us, and the playing of
+children could be heard. A man, gun in hand, stepped to his door, a
+sentinel. He lowered its muzzle, and made us welcome, and helped us put
+our horses under shelter with his own.
+
+It was not often we had a woman's handiwork in corn bread and game to
+feed ourselves upon, or a bed covered with homespun sheets.
+
+I slept as the children slept, until a voice rang in the clearing:
+
+"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, and He hath anointed me to blow the
+trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for behold
+the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring
+flame followeth after them!"
+
+Every sleeper in the cabin sat upright or stirred. We said in whispered
+chorus:
+
+"Johnny Appleseed!"
+
+A tapping, light and regular, on the window, followed. The man was on
+the floor in a breath. I heard the mother groping among the children,
+and whispering:
+
+"Don't wake the baby!"
+
+The fire had died upon the hearth, and they lighted no candle. When
+Johnny Appleseed gave his warning cry in the clearing, and his cautious
+tap on the window, and was instantly gone to other clearings and other
+windows, it meant that the Indians were near.
+
+Skenedonk and I, used to the night alarm and boots and saddle in a
+hurry, put ourselves in readiness to help the family. I groped for
+clothing, and shoved small legs and arms into it. The little creatures,
+obedient and silent, made no whimper at being roused out of dreams, but
+keenly lent themselves to the march.
+
+We brought the horses, and put the woman and children upon them. The
+very dogs understood, and slunk around our legs without giving mouth.
+The cabin door was shut after us without noise, closing in what that
+family called home; a few pots and pans; patchwork quilts; a
+spinning-wheel; some benches; perhaps a child's store of acorn cups and
+broken yellow ware in a log corner. In a few hours it might be smoking a
+heap of ashes; and the world offered no other place so dear. What we
+suffer for is enriched by our suffering until it becomes priceless.
+
+So far on the frontier was this cabin that no community block-house
+stood near enough to give its inmates shelter. They were obliged to go
+with us to Fort Stephenson.
+
+Skenedonk pioneered the all-night struggle on an obscure trail; and he
+went astray sometimes, through blackness of woods that roofed out the
+stars. We floundered in swales sponging full of dead leaves, and drew
+back, scratching ourselves on low-hung foliage.
+
+By dawn the way became easier and the danger greater. Then we paused and
+lifted our rifles if a twig broke near by, or a fox barked, or wind
+rushed among leaves as a patter of moccasins might come. Skenedonk and
+I, sure of the northern Indians, were making a venture in the west. We
+knew nothing of Tecumseh's swift red warriors, except that scarcely a
+year had passed since his allies had tomahawked women and children of
+the garrison on the sand teach at Chicago.
+
+Without kindling any fire we stopped once that day to eat, and by good
+luck and following the river, reached that Lower Sandusky which was
+called Fort Stephenson, about nightfall.
+
+The place was merely a high stockade with blockhouses at the angles, and
+a gate opening toward the river. Within, besides the garrison of a
+hundred and sixty men, were various refugees, driven like our family to
+the fort. And there, coming heartily from the commandant's quarters to
+receive me, was George Croghan, still a boy in appearance, though
+intrusted with this dangerous post. His long face had darkened like
+mine. We looked each other over with the quick and critical scrutiny of
+men who have not met since boyhood, and laughed as we grasped hands.
+
+"You are as welcome to the inside of this bear-pen," said Major Croghan,
+"as you made me to the outside of the one in the wilderness."
+
+"I hope you'll not give me such another tramp after shelter for the
+night as I gave you," I said.
+
+"The best in Fort Stephenson is yours. But your rest depends on the
+enemy. A runner has just come in from the General warning me Proctor and
+Tecumsch are turning their attention this way. I'm ordered to evacuate,
+for the post is considered too weak to hold."
+
+"How soon do you march?"
+
+"I don't march at all. I stay here. I'm going to disobey orders."
+
+"If you're going to disobey orders, you have good reason for doing so."
+
+"I have. It was too late to retreat. I'm going to fight. I hear,
+Lazarre, you know how to handle Indians in the French way."
+
+"My dear Croghan, you insinuate the American way may be better."
+
+"It is, on the western border. It may not be on the northern."
+
+"Then you would not have advised my attempting the Indians here?"
+
+"I shouldn't have discouraged it. When I got the secret order, I said:
+'Bring the French--bring the missionaries--bring anything that will cut
+the comb of Tecumseh!'"
+
+"The missionaries and the French like being classed with--anything," I
+said.
+
+"We're Americans here," Croghan laughed. "The dauphin may have to fight
+in the ditch with the rest of us."
+
+"The dauphin is an American too, and used to scars, as you know. Can you
+give me any news from Green Bay in the Wisconsin country?"
+
+"I was ordered to Green Bay last year to see if anything could be done
+with old Fort Edward Augustus."
+
+"Does my Holland court-lady live there?"
+
+"Not now," he answered soberly. "She's dead."
+
+"That's bad," I said, thinking of lost opportunities.
+
+"Is pretty Annabel de Chaumont ever coming back from France?"
+
+"Not now, she's married."
+
+"That's worse," he sighed. "I was very silly about her when I was a
+boy."
+
+We had our supper in his quarters, and he busied himself until late in
+the night with preparations for defense. The whole place was full of
+cheer and plenty of game, and swarmed like a little fair with moving
+figures. A camp-fire was built at dark in the center of the parade
+ground, heaped logs sending their glow as far as the dark pickets. Heads
+of families drew towards it while the women were putting their children
+to bed; and soldiers off duty lounged there, the front of the body in
+light, the back in darkness.
+
+Cool forest night air flowed over the stockade, swaying smoke this way
+and that. As the fire was stirred, and smoke turned to flame, it showed
+more and more distinctly what dimness had screened.
+
+A man rose up on the other side of it, clothed in a coffee sack, in
+which holes were cut for his head and arms. His hat was a tin kettle
+with the handle sticking out behind like a stiff queue.
+
+Indifferent to his grotesqueness, he took it off and put it on the
+ground beside him, standing ready to command attention.
+
+He was a small, dark, wiry man, barefooted and barelegged, whose black
+eyes sparkled, and whose scanty hair and beard hung down over shoulders
+and breast. Some pokes of leather, much scratched, hung bulging from the
+rope which girded his coffee sack. From one of these he took a few
+unbound leaves, the fragment of a book, spread them open, and began to
+read in a chanting, prophetic key, something about the love of the Lord
+and the mysteries of angels. His listeners kept their eyes on him,
+giving an indulgent ear to spiritual messages that made less demand on
+them than the violent earthly ones to which they were accustomed.
+
+"It's Johnny Appleseed," a man at my side told me, as if the name
+explained anything he might do.
+
+[Illustration: "It's Johnny Appleseed," a man at my side told me]
+
+When Johnny Appleseed finished reading the leaves he put them back in
+his bag, and took his kettle to the well for water. He then brought some
+meal from the cook-house and made mush in his hat.
+
+The others, turning their minds from future mysteries, began to talk
+about present danger, when he stood up from his labor to inquire:
+
+"Is there plenty in the fort for the children to eat?"
+
+"Plenty, Johnny, plenty," several voices assured him.
+
+"I can go without supper if the children haven't enough."
+
+"Eat your supper, Johnny. Major Croghan will give you more if you want
+it," said a soldier.
+
+"And we'll give you jerked Britisher, if you'll wait for it," said
+another.
+
+"Johnny never eats meat," one of the refugees put in. "He thinks it's
+sinful to kill critters. All the things in the woods likes him. Once he
+got into a holler log to sleep, and some squirrels warned him to move
+out, they settled there first; and he done it. I don't allow he'd pick a
+flea off his own hide for fear he'd break its legs so it couldn't hop
+around and make a living."
+
+The wilderness prophet sat down quietly to his meal without appearing to
+notice what was said about him; and when he had eaten, carried his hat
+into the cook-house, where dogs could not get at his remaining
+porridge.
+
+"Now he'll save that for his breakfast," remarked another refugee.
+"There's nothing he hates like waste."
+
+"Talking about squirrels," exclaimed the man at my side, "I believe he
+has a pasture for old, broke-down horses somewhere east in the hills.
+All the bates he can find he swaps young trees for, and they go off with
+him leading them, but he never comes into the settlements on horseback."
+
+"Does he always go barefoot?" I asked.
+
+"Sometimes he makes bark sandals. If you give him a pair of shoes he'll
+give them away to the first person that can wear them and needs them.
+Hunters wrap dried leaves around their leggins to keep the rattlesnakes
+out, but Johnny never protects himself at all."
+
+"No wonder," spoke a soldier. "Any snake'd be discouraged at them
+shanks. A seven-year rattler'd break his fang on 'em."
+
+Johnny came out of the cook-house with an iron poker, and heated it in
+the coals. All the men around the fire waited, understanding what he was
+about to do, but my own breath drew with a hiss through my teeth as he
+laid the red hot iron first on one long cut and then another in his
+travel-worn feet. Having cauterized himself effectually, and returned
+the poker, he took his place in perfect serenity, without any show of
+pain, prepared to accommodate himself to the company.
+
+Some boys, awake with the bigness of the occasion, sat down near Johnny
+Appleseed, and gave him their frank attention. Each boy had his hair cut
+straight around below the ears, where his mother had measured it with an
+inverted bowl, and freshly trimmed him for life in the fort, and perhaps
+for the discomfiture of savages, if he came under the scalping knife.
+Open-mouthed or stern-jawed, according to temperament, the young
+pioneers listened to stories about Tecumseh, and surmises on the enemy's
+march, and the likelihood of a night attack.
+
+"Tippecanoe was fought at four o'clock in the morning," said a soldier.
+
+"I was there," spoke out Johnny Appleseed.
+
+No other man could say as much. All looked at him as he stood on his
+cauterized feet, stretching his arms, lean and sun-cured, upward in the
+firelight.
+
+"Angels were there. In rain and darkness I heard them speak and say, 'He
+hath cast the lot for them, and His hand hath divided it unto them by
+line; they shall possess it forever; from generation to generation shall
+they dwell therein. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad
+for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose!'"
+
+"Say, Johnny, what does an angel look like?" piped up one of the boys,
+quite in fellowship.
+
+Johnny Appleseed turned his rapt vision aside and answered:
+
+"'White robes were given unto every one of them.' There had I laid me
+down in peace to sleep, and the Lord made me to dwell in safety. The
+camp-fires burned red in the sheltered place, and they who were to
+possess the land watched by the campfires. I looked down from my high
+place, from my shelter of leaves and my log that the Lord gave me for a
+bed, and saw the red camp-fires blink in the darkness.
+
+"Then was I aware that the heathen crept betwixt me and the camp,
+surrounding it as a cloud that lies upon the ground. The rain fell upon
+us all, and there was not so much sound as the rustling of grasshoppers
+in tall grass. I said they will surprise the camp and slay the sleepers,
+not knowing that they who were to possess the land watched every man
+with his weapon. But when I would have sounded the trumpet of warning, I
+heard a rifle shot, and all the Indians rose up screeching and rushed at
+the red fires.
+
+"Then a sorcerer leaped upon my high place, rattling many deer hoofs,
+and calling aloud that his brethren might hear his voice. Light he
+promised them for themselves, and darkness for the camp, and he sang his
+war song, shouting and rattling the deer hoofs. Also the Indians rattled
+deer hoofs, and it was like a giant breathing his last, being shot with
+many musket flashes.
+
+"I saw steam through the darkness, for the fires were drenched and
+trampled by the men of the camp, and no longer shone as candles so that
+the Indians might see by them to shoot. The sorcerer danced and
+shouted, the deer hoofs rattled, and on this side and that men fought
+knee to knee and breast to breast. I saw through the wet dawn, and they
+who had crept around the camp as a cloud arose as grasshoppers and fled
+to the swamp.
+
+"Then did the sorcerer sit upon his heels, and I beheld he had but one
+eye, and he covered it from the light.
+
+"But the men in the camp shouted with a mighty shouting. And after their
+shouting I heard again the voices of angels saying: 'He hath cast the
+lot for them, and His hand hath divided it unto them by line; they shall
+possess it forever; from generation to generation shall they dwell
+therein. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them,
+and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose!'"
+
+The speaker sat down, and one of the men remarked:
+
+"So that's the way the battle of Tippecanoe looked to Johnny Appleseed."
+
+But the smallest boy thoughtfully inquired:
+
+"Say, Johnny, haven't the Indians any angels?"
+
+"You'll wish they was with the angels if they ever get you by the hair,"
+laughed one of the men.
+
+Soldiers began moving their single cannon, a six-pounder, from one
+blockhouse to another. All the men jumped up to help, as at the raising
+of a home, and put themselves in the way so ardently that they had to be
+ordered back.
+
+When everybody but ourselves had left the starlit open place, Johnny
+Appleseed lay down and stretched his heels to the blaze. A soldier added
+another log, and kicked into the flame those fallen away. Though it was
+the end of July, Lake Erie cooled the inland forests.
+
+Sentinels were posted in the blockhouses. Quiet settled on the camp; and
+I sat turning many things in my mind besides the impending battle.
+Napoleon Bonaparte had made a disastrous campaign in Russia. If I were
+yet in France; if the Marquis du Plessy had lived; if I had not gone to
+Mittau; if the self I might have been, that always haunts us, stood
+ready to take advantage of the turn--
+
+Yet the thing which cannot be understood by men reared under old
+governments had befallen me. I must have drawn the wilderness into my
+blood. Its possibilities held me. If I had stayed in France at twenty, I
+should have been a Frenchman. The following years made me an American.
+The passion that binds you to a land is no more to be explained than the
+fact that many women are beautiful, while only one is vitally
+interesting.
+
+The wilderness mystic was sitting up looking at me.
+
+"I see two people in you," he said.
+
+"Only two?"
+
+"Two separate men."
+
+"What are their names?"
+
+"Their names I cannot see."
+
+"Well, suppose we call them Louis and Lazarre."
+
+His eyes sparkled.
+
+"You are a white man," he pronounced. "By that I mean you are not
+stained with many vile sins."
+
+"I hadn't an equal chance with other men. I lost nine years."
+
+"Mebby," hazarded Johnny Appleseed cautiously, "you are the one
+appointed to open and read what is sealed."
+
+"If you mean to interpret what you read, I'm afraid I am not the one.
+Where did you get those leaves?"
+
+"From a book that I divided up to distribute among the people."
+
+"Doesn't that destroy the sense?"
+
+"No. I carry the pages in their order from cabin to cabin."
+
+He came around the fire with the lightness of an Indian, and gave me his
+own fragment to examine. It proved to be from the writings of one
+Emanuel Swedenborg.
+
+With a smile which seemed to lessen the size of his face and concentrate
+its expression to a shining point, Johnny Appleseed slid his leather
+bags along the rope girdle, and searched them, one after the other. I
+thought he wanted me to notice his apple seeds, and inquired how many
+kinds he carried. So he showed them in handfuls, brown and glistening,
+or gummed with the sweet blood of cider. These produced pippins; these
+produced russets; these produced luscious harvest apples, that fell in
+August bursting with juicy ripeness. Then he showed me another bagful
+which were not apple seeds at all, but neutral colored specks moving
+with fluid swiftness as he poured them from palm to palm.
+
+"Do you know what this is?"
+
+I told him I didn't.
+
+"It's dogfennel seed."
+
+I laughed, and asked him what kind of apples it bore.
+
+Johnny Appleseed smiled at me again.
+
+"It's a flower. I'm spreading it over the whole of Ohio and Indiana!
+It'll come up like the stars for abundance, and fill the land with
+rankness, and fever and ague will flee away!"
+
+"But how about the rankness?"
+
+"Fever and ague will flee away," he repeated, continuing his search
+through the bags.
+
+He next brought out a parcel, wrapped up carefully in doeskin to protect
+it from the appleseeds; and turned foolish in the face, as bits of
+ribbon and calico fell out upon his knees.
+
+"This isn't the one," he said, bundling it up and thrusting it back
+again. "The little girls, they like to dress their doll-babies, so I
+carry patches for the little girls. Here's what I was looking for."
+
+It was another doeskin parcel, bound lengthwise and crosswise by thongs.
+These Johnny Appleseed reverently loosened, bringing forth a small book
+with wooden covers fastened by a padlock.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+"Where did you get this?" I heard myself asking, a strange voice
+sounding far down the throat.
+
+"From an Indian," the mystic told me quietly. "He said it was bad
+medicine to him. He never had any luck in hunting after it fell to his
+share, so he was glad to give it to me."
+
+"Where did he get it?"
+
+"His tribe took it from some prisoners they killed."
+
+I was running blindly around in a circle to find relief from the news he
+dealt me, when the absurdity of such news overtook me. I stood and
+laughed.
+
+"Who were the prisoners?"
+
+"I don't know," answered Johnny Appleseed.
+
+"How do you know the Indians killed them?"
+
+"The one that gave me this book told me so."
+
+"There are plenty of padlocked books in the world," I said jauntily. "At
+least there must be more than one. How long ago did it happen?"
+
+"Not very long ago, I think; for the book was clean."
+
+"Give it to me," I said, as if I cursed him.
+
+"It's a sacred book," he answered, hesitating.
+
+"Maybe it's sacred. Let me see."
+
+"There may be holy mysteries in it, to be read only of him who has the
+key."
+
+"I have a key!"
+
+I took it out of the snuffbox. Johnny Appleseed fixed his rapt eyes on
+the little object in my fingers.
+
+"Mebby you are the one appointed to open and read what is sealed!"
+
+"No, I'm not! How could my key fit a padlocked book that belonged to
+prisoners killed by the Indians?"
+
+He held it out to me and I took hold of the padlock. It was a small
+steel padlock, and the hole looked dangerously the size of my key.
+
+"I can't do it!" I said.
+
+"Let me try," said Johnny Appleseed.
+
+"No! You might break my key in a strange padlock! Hold it still, Johnny.
+Please don't shake it."
+
+"I'm not shaking it," Johnny Appleseed answered tenderly.
+
+"There's only one way of proving that my key doesn't fit," I said, and
+thrust it in. The ward turned easily, and the padlock came away in my
+hand. I dropped it and opened the book. Within the lid a name was
+written which I had copied a thousand times--"Eagle Madeleine Marie de
+Ferrier."
+
+Still I did not believe it. Nature protects us in our uttermost losses
+by a density through which conviction is slow to penetrate. In some
+mysterious way the padlocked book had fallen into strange hands, and
+had been carried to America.
+
+"If Eagle were in America, I should know it. For De Chaumont would know
+it, and Skenedonk would find it out."
+
+I stooped for the padlock, hooked it in place, and locked the book
+again.
+
+"Is the message to you alone?" inquired Johnny Appleseed.
+
+"Did you ever care for a woman?" I asked him.
+
+Restless misery came into his eyes, and I noticed for the first time
+that he was not an old man; he could not have been above thirty-five. He
+made no answer; shifting from one bare foot to the other, his body
+settling and losing its Indian lightness.
+
+"A woman gave me the key to this book. Her name is written inside the
+lid. I was to read it if it ever fell into my hands, after a number of
+years. Somebody has stolen it, and carried it among the Indians. But
+it's mine. Every shilling in my wallet, the clothes off my back you're
+welcome to--"
+
+"I don't want your money or your clothes."
+
+"But let me give you something in exchange for it."
+
+"What do I need? I always have as much as I want. This is a serviceable
+coat, as good as any man need wish for; and the ravens feed me. And if I
+needed anything, could I take it for carrying a message? I carry good
+tidings of great joy among the people all the time. This is yours. Put
+it in your pocket."
+
+I hid the padlocked book in the breast of my coat, and seized his wrist
+and his hand.
+
+"Be of good courage, white double-man," said Johnny Appleseed. "The Lord
+lift up the light of His countenance upon you, the Lord make His face to
+shine upon you and give you peace!"
+
+He returned to his side of the fire and stretched himself under the
+stars, and I went to Croghan's quarters and lay down with my clothes on
+in the bunk assigned to me.
+
+The book which I would have rent open at twenty, I now carried unsealed.
+The suspense of it was so sweet, and drew my thoughts from the other
+suspense which could not be endured. It was not likely that any person
+about Mont-Louis had stolen the book, and wandered so far. Small as the
+volume was, the boards indented my breast and made me increasingly
+conscious of its presence. I waked in the night and held it.
+
+Next morning Johnny Appleseed was gone from the fort, unafraid of war,
+bent only on carrying the apple of civilization into the wilderness.
+Nobody spoke about his absence, for shells began to fall around us. The
+British and Indians were in sight; and General Proctor sent a flag of
+truce demanding surrender.
+
+Major Croghan's ensign approached the messenger with a flag in reply.
+
+The women gathered their children as chickens under shelter. All in the
+fort were cheerful, and the men joked with the gush of humor which
+danger starts in Americans. I saw then the ready laugh that faced in
+its season what was called Indian summer, because the Indian took then
+advantage of the last pleasant weather to make raids. Such pioneers
+could speak lightly even of powwowing time--the first pleasant February
+days, when savages held councils before descending on the settlements.
+
+Major Croghan and I watched the parley from one of the blockhouses that
+bastioned the place. Before it ended a Shawanoe sprang out of a ravine
+and snatched the ensign's sword. He gave it back reluctantly, and the
+British flag bearer hurried the American within the gates.
+
+General Proctor regretted that so fine a young man as Major Croghan
+should fall into the hands of savages, who were not to be restrained.
+
+"When this fort is taken," said Croghan on hearing the message, "there
+will be nobody left in it to kill."
+
+British gunboats drawn up on the Sandusky river, and a howitzer on the
+shore, opened fire, and cannonaded all day with the poor execution of
+long range artillery. The northwestern angle of the fort was their
+target. Croghan foresaw that the enemy's intention was to make a breach
+and enter there. When night came again, his one six-pounder was moved
+with much labor from that angle into the southwest blockhouse, as
+noiselessly as possible. He masked the embrasure and had the piece
+loaded with a double charge of slugs and grape shot and half a charge of
+powder. Perhaps the British thought him unprovided with any heavy
+artillery.
+
+They were busy themselves, bringing three of the ineffectual
+six-pounders and the howitzer, under darkness, within two hundred and
+fifty yards of the fort; giving a background of woods to their battery.
+About dawn we saw what they had been doing. They concentrated on the
+northwest angle; and still Croghan replied only with muskets, waiting
+for them to storm.
+
+So it went on all day, the gun-proof blockhouse enduring its
+bombardment, and smoke thickening until it filled the stockade as water
+fills a well, and settled like fog between us and the enemy. An attack
+was made on the southern angle where the cannon was masked.
+
+"This is nothing but a feint," Croghan said to the younger officers.
+
+While that corner replied with musketry, he kept a sharp lookout for the
+safety of the northwest blockhouse.
+
+One soldier was brought down the ladder and carried through the murky
+pall to the surgeon, who could do nothing for him. Another turned from a
+loophole with blood upon him, laughing at his mishap. For the
+grotesqueness and inconvenience of a wound are sometimes more swiftly
+felt than its pain. He came back presently with his shoulder bandaged
+and resumed his place at the loophole.
+
+The exhilaration of that powder atmosphere and its heat made soldiers
+throw off their coats, as if the expanding human body was not to be
+confined in wrappings.
+
+In such twilight of war the twilight of Nature overtook us. Another
+feint was made to draw attention from a heavy force of assailants
+creeping within twenty paces, under cover of smoke, to surprise the
+northwest blockhouse.
+
+Musketry was directed against them: they hesitated. The commander led a
+charge, and himself sprang first into the ditch. We saw the fine fellows
+leaping to carry the blockhouse, every man determined to be first in
+making a breach. They filled the ditch.
+
+This was the instant for which Croghan had waited. He opened the
+porthole and unmasked his exactly trained cannon. It enfiladed the
+assailants, sweeping them at a distance of thirty feet; slugs and
+grapeshot hissed, spreading fan rays of death! By the flash of the
+re-loaded six-pounder, we saw the trench filled with dead and wounded.
+
+The besiegers turned.
+
+Croghan's sweating gunners swabbed and loaded and fired, roaring like
+lions.
+
+The Indians, of whom there were nearly a thousand, were not in the
+charge, and when retreat began they went in panic. We could hear calls
+and yells, the clatter of arms, and a thumping of the earth; the strain
+of men tugging cannon ropes; the swift withdrawal of a routed force.
+
+Two thousand more Indians approaching under Tecumseh, were turned back
+by refugees.
+
+Croghan remarked, as we listened to the uproar, "Fort Stephenson can
+hardly be called untenable against heavy artillery."
+
+Then arose cries in the ditch, which penetrated to women's ears. Neither
+side was able to help the wounded there. But before the rout was
+complete, Croghan had water let down in buckets to relieve their thirst,
+and ordered a trench cut under the pickets of the stockade. Through this
+the poor wretches who were able to crawl came in and surrendered
+themselves and had their wounds dressed.
+
+By three o'clock in the morning not a British uniform glimmered red
+through the dawn. The noise of retreat ended. Pistols and muskets
+strewed the ground. Even a sailboat was abandoned on the river, holding
+military stores and the clothing of officers.
+
+"They thought General Harrison was coming," laughed Croghan, as he sat
+down to an early breakfast, having relieved all the living in the trench
+and detailed men to bury the dead. "We have lost one man, and have
+another under the surgeon's hands. Now I'm ready to appear before a
+court-martial for disobeying orders."
+
+"You mean you're ready for your immortal page in history."
+
+"Paragraph," said Croghan; "and the dislike of poor little boys and
+girls who will stick their fists in their eyes when they have to learn
+it at school."
+
+Intense manhood ennobled his long, animated face. The President
+afterwards made him a lieutenant-colonel, and women and his superior
+officers praised him; but he was never more gallant than when he said:
+
+"My uncle, George Rogers Clark, would have undertaken to hold this fort;
+and by heavens, we were bound to try it!"
+
+The other young officers sat at mess with him, hilarious over the
+outcome, picturing General Proctor's state of mind when he learned the
+age of his conqueror.
+
+None of them cared a rap that Daniel Webster was opposing the war in the
+House of Representatives at Washington, and declaring that on land it
+was a failure.
+
+A subaltern came to the mess room door, touching his cap and asking to
+speak with Major Croghan.
+
+"The men working outside at the trenches saw a boy come up from the
+ravine, sir, and fall every few steps, so they've brought him in."
+
+"Does he carry a dispatch?"
+
+"No, sir. He isn't more than nine or ten years old. I think he was a
+prisoner."
+
+"Is he a white boy?"
+
+"Yes, sir, but he's dressed like an Indian."
+
+"I think it unlikely the British would allow the Shawanoes to burden
+their march with any prisoners."
+
+"Somebody had him, and I'm afraid he's been shot either during the
+action or in the retreat. He was hid in the ravine."
+
+"Bring him here," said Croghan.
+
+A boy with blue eyes set wide apart, hair clinging brightly and moistly
+to his pallid forehead, and mouth corners turning up in a courageous
+smile, entered and stood erect before the officer. He was a well made
+little fellow. His tiny buckskin hunting shirt was draped with a sash in
+the Indian fashion, showing the curve of his naked hip. Down this a
+narrow line of blood was moving. Children of refugees, full of pity,
+looked through the open door behind him.
+
+"Go to him, Shipp," said Croghan, as the boy staggered. But he waved the
+ensign back.
+
+"Who are you, my man?" asked the Major.
+
+"I believe," he answered, "I am the Marquis de Ferrier."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+He pitched forward, and I was quicker than Ensign Shipp. I set him on my
+knees, and the surgeon poured a little watered brandy clown his throat.
+
+"Paul!" I said to him.
+
+"Stand back," ordered the surgeon, as women followed their children,
+crowding the room.
+
+"Do you know him, Lazarre?" asked Croghan.
+
+"It's Madame de Ferrier's child."
+
+"Not the baby I used to see at De Chaumont's? What's he doing at Fort
+Stephenson?"
+
+The women made up my bunk for Paul, and I laid him in it. Each wanted to
+take him to her care. The surgeon sent them to the cook-house to brew
+messes for him, and stripped the child, finding a bullet wound in his
+side. Probing brought nothing out, and I did not ask a single question.
+The child should live. There could be no thought of anything else. While
+the surgeon dressed and bandaged that small hole like a sucked-in mouth,
+I saw the boy sitting on saddle-bags behind me, his arms clipping my
+waist, while we threaded bowers of horse paths. I had not known how I
+wanted a boy to sit behind me! No wonder pioneer men were so confident
+and full of jokes: they had children behind them!
+
+He was burning with fever. His eyes swam in it as he looked at me. He
+could not eat when food was brought to him, but begged for water, and
+the surgeon allowed him what the women considered reckless quantities.
+Over stockades came the August rustle of the forest. Morning bird voices
+succeeded to the cannon's reverberations.
+
+The surgeon turned everybody out but me, and looked in by times from his
+hospital of British wounded. I wiped the boy's forehead and gave him his
+medicine, fanning him all day long. He lay in stupor, and the surgeon
+said he was going comfortably, and would suffer little. Once in awhile
+he turned up the corners of his mouth and smiled at me, as if the opiate
+gave him blessed sensations. I asked the surgeon what I should do in the
+night if he came out of it and wanted to talk.
+
+"Let him talk," said the doctor briefly.
+
+Unlike the night before, this was a night of silence. Everybody slept,
+but the sentinels, and the men whose wounds kept them awake; and I was
+both a sentinel, and a man whose wounds kept him awake.
+
+Paul's little hands were scratched; and there was a stone bruise on the
+heel he pushed from cover of the blankets. His small body, compact of so
+much manliness, was fine and sweet. Though he bore no resemblance to his
+mother, it seemed to me that she lay there for me to tend; and the
+change was no more an astounding miracle than the change of baby to
+boy.
+
+I had him all that night for my own, putting every other thought out of
+mind and absorbing his presence. His forehead and his face lost their
+burning heat with the coolness of dawn, which blew our shaded candle,
+flowing from miles of fragrant oaks.
+
+He awoke and looked all around the cabin. I tried to put his opiate into
+his mouth; but something restrained me. I held his hand to my cheek.
+
+"I like you," he spoke out. "Don't you think my mother is pretty?"
+
+I said I thought his mother was the most beautiful woman in the world.
+He curled up his mouth corners and gave me a blue-eyed smile.
+
+"My father is not pretty. But he is a gentleman of France."
+
+"Where are they, Paul?"
+
+He turned a look upon me without answering.
+
+"Paul," I said brutally, "tell me where your father and mother are."
+
+He was so far gone that my voice recalled him. He simply knew me as a
+voice and a presence that he liked.
+
+"With poor old Ernestine," he answered.
+
+"And where is poor old Ernestine?"
+
+He began to shake as if struck with a chill. I drew the blanket closer.
+
+"Paul, you must tell me!"
+
+He shook his head. His mouth worked, and his little breast went into
+convulsions.
+
+He shrieked and threw himself toward me. "My pretty little mother!"
+
+I held him still in a tight grip. "My darling--don't start your wound!"
+
+I could have beaten myself, but the surgeon afterwards told me the child
+was dying when he came into the fort. About dawn, when men's lives sink
+to their lowest ebb with night, his sank away, I smoothed his head and
+kissed and quieted him. Once he looked into space with blurred eyes, and
+curled up his mouth corners when I am sure he no longer saw me.
+
+Thus swiftly ended Paul's unaccountable appearance at the fort. It was
+like the falling of a slain bird out of the sky at my feet. The women
+were tender with his little body. They cried over him as they washed him
+for burial. The children went outside the stockade and brought green
+boughs and August wild flowers, bearing the early autumn colors of gold
+and scarlet. With these they bedded the child in his plank coffin,
+unafraid of his waxen sleep.
+
+Before Croghan went to report to his General, he asked me where we
+should bury the little fellow.
+
+"In the fort, by the southern blockhouse," I answered. "Let Fort
+Stephenson be his monument. It will stand here forever. The woods around
+it will be trampled by prowling savages, and later on by prowling white
+men. Within, nothing will obliterate the place. Give a little fellow a
+bed here, who died between two countries, and will never be a citizen of
+either."
+
+"I don't want to make a graveyard of the fort," said Croghan. But he
+looked at Paul, bent low over him, and allowed him to be buried near the
+southwest angle.
+
+There the child's bones rest to this day. The town of Fremont in the
+commonwealth of Ohio has grown up around them. Young children who climb
+the grassy bastion, may walk above his head, never guessing that a
+little gentleman of France, who died like a soldier of his wound, lies
+deeply cradled there.
+
+Before throwing myself down in the dead heaviness which results from
+continual loss of sleep, I questioned the wounded British soldiers about
+Paul. None of them had seen him. Straggling bands of Indians continually
+joined their force. Captives were always a possibility in the savage
+camp. Paul might have been taken hundreds of miles away.
+
+But I had the padlocked book, which might tell the whole story. With
+desperate haste that could hardly wait to open the lids, I took it out,
+wondering at the patience which long self-restraint had bred in me. I
+was very tired, and stretched my arms across the pillow where Paul's
+head had lain, to rest one instant. But I must have slept. My hand woke
+first, and feeling itself empty, grasped at the book. It was gone, and
+so was the sun.
+
+I got a light and searched, thrusting my arm between the bunk and the
+log wall. It was not on the floor, or in my breast pocket, or in my
+saddle-bags.
+
+The robbery was unendurable. And I knew the Indian who had done it. He
+was the quietest, most stubborn Oneida that ever followed an adopted
+white man. Why he had taken the book I could not understand. But I was
+entirely certain that he had taken it out of my hand while I slept. He
+would not break the padlock and read it, but like a judicious father he
+would take care of a possibly unwholesome volume himself.
+
+I went out and found the bald-headed and well-beloved wretch. He was
+sitting with his knees to his chin by the evening log fire.
+
+"Skenedonk," I said, "I want my book."
+
+"Children and books make a woman of you," he responded. "You had enough
+books at Longmeadow."
+
+"I want it at once," I repeated.
+
+"It's sorcery," he answered.
+
+"It's a letter from Madame de Ferrier, and may tell where she is."
+
+His fawn eyes were startled, but he continued to hug his knees.
+
+"Skenedonk, I can't quarrel with you. You were my friend before I could
+remember. When you know I am so bound to you, how can you deal me a
+deadly hurt?"
+
+"White woman sorcery is the worst sorcery. You thought I never saw it.
+But I did see it. You went after her to Paris. You did not think of
+being the king. So you had to come back with nothing. That's what woman
+sorcery does. Now you have power with the tribes. The President sees
+you are a big man! And she sends a book to you to bewitch you! I knew
+she sent the book as soon as I saw it."
+
+"Do you think she sent Paul?"
+
+He made no answer.
+
+"Madame de Ferrier does not know I have the book."
+
+"You haven't it," said Skenedonk.
+
+"But you have."
+
+"If she wrote and sent a letter she expected it would be received."
+
+"When I said a letter I meant what is called a journal: the writing down
+of what happens daily. Johnny Appleseed got the book from an Indian.
+That is how it was sent to me."
+
+"If you read it you will want to drop everything else and go to find
+her."
+
+This was the truth, for I was not under military law.
+
+"Where is the book?"
+
+"Down my back," said Skenedonk.
+
+I felt the loose buckskin.
+
+"It isn't there."
+
+"In my front," said Skenedonk.
+
+I ran my hand over his chest, finding nothing but bone and brawn.
+
+"There it is," he said, pointing to a curled wisp of board at the edge
+of the fire. "I burnt it."
+
+"Then you've finished me."
+
+I turned and left him sitting like an image by the fire.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Before I left Fort Stephenson, I wrote a letter to Count de Chaumont,
+telling him about Paul's death and asking for news of the De Ferriers.
+The answer I begged him to send to Sandusky, which the British now
+despaired of taking. But although Skenedonk made a long journey for it
+twice during the half year, I got no answer.
+
+The dangerous work of the next few months became like a long debauch.
+Awake, we were dodging betwixt hostile tribes, or dealing with those
+inclined to peace. Asleep, I was too exhausted to dream. It was a
+struggle of the white force of civilization with the red sense of
+justice. I wrestled with Algonquin dialects as I had wrestled with
+Greek. Ottawas and Chippewas, long friendly to the French, came more
+readily than other tribes to agreement with Americans.
+
+Wherever I went I pushed the quest that was uppermost in my mind, but
+without finding any trace of Madame de Ferrier.
+
+From the measure constantly taken betwixt other men of my time and
+myself, this positive knowledge resulted.
+
+In spite of the fact that many treated me as a prince, I found myself an
+average man. I had no military genius. In argument, persuasive,
+graceful--even eloquent--were the adjectives applied to me; not sweeping
+and powerful. I should have made a jog-trot king, no better than my
+uncle of Provence; no worse than my uncle of Artois, who would rather
+saw wood than reign a constitutional monarch, and whom the French people
+afterward turned out to saw wood. My reign might have been neat; it
+would never have been gaudily splendid. As an average man, I could well
+hold my own in the world.
+
+Perry on the lakes, General Jackson in the southwest, Harrison in the
+west, and Lawrence on the ocean were pushing the war towards its close;
+though as late as spring the national capital was burned by the British,
+and a gentleman whom they gaily called "Old Jimmy Madison," temporarily
+driven out. But the battle on the little river Thames, in October,
+settled matters in the Northwest.
+
+The next April, after Leipsic, Napoleon Bonaparte was banished to the
+island of Elba; and Louis XVIII passed from his latest refuge at
+Hartwell House in England, to London; where the Prince Regent honored
+him and the whole capital cheered him; and thence to Paris where he was
+proclaimed king of France. We heard of it in due course, as ships
+brought news. I was serving with the American forces.
+
+The world is fluid to a boy. He can do and dare anything. But it hardens
+around a man and becomes a wall through which he must cut. I felt the
+wall close around me.
+
+In September I was wounded at the battle of Plattsburg on Lake
+Champlain. Three men, besides the General and the doctor, and my Oneida,
+showed a differing interest in me, while I lay with a gap under my left
+arm, in a hospital tent.
+
+First came Count de Chaumont, his face plowed with lines; no longer the
+trim gentleman, youthfully easy, and in his full maturity, that he had
+been when I first saw him at close range.
+
+He sat down on a camp seat by my cot, and I asked him before he could
+speak--
+
+"Where is Madame de Ferrier?"
+
+"She's dead," he answered.
+
+"I don't believe it."
+
+"You're young. I'm going back to France for a while. France will not be
+what it was under the Empire. I'm tired of most things, however, and my
+holdings here make me independent of changes there."
+
+"What reason have you to think that she is dead?"
+
+"Do you know the Indiana Territory well?"
+
+"The northern part only."
+
+"It happened in what was called the Pigeon Roost settlement at the fork
+of the White River. The Kickapoos and Winnebagoes did it. There were
+about two dozen people in the settlement."
+
+"I asked how you know these things."
+
+"I have some of the best Indian runners that ever trod moccasins, and
+when I set them to scouting, they generally find what I want;--so I know
+a great many things."
+
+"But Paul--"
+
+"It's an old custom to adopt children into the tribes. You know your
+father, Chief Williams, is descended from a white girl who was a
+prisoner. There were about two dozen people in the settlement, men,
+women and children. The majority of the children were dashed against
+trees. It has been consolation to me to think she did not survive in the
+hands of savages."
+
+The hidden causes which work out results never worked out a result more
+improbable. I lay silent, and De Chaumont said,
+
+"Do you remember the night you disappeared from the Tuileries?"
+
+"I remember it."
+
+"You remember we determined not to let the Marquis de Ferrier see
+Napoleon. When you went down the corridor with Eagle I thought you were
+luring him. But she told us afterward you were threatened with arrest,
+and she helped you out of the Tuileries by a private stairway."
+
+"Did it make any stir in the palace?"
+
+"No. I saw one man hurrying past us. But nobody heard of the arrest
+except Eagle."
+
+"How did she get out?"
+
+"Out of what?"
+
+"The queen's closet."
+
+"She was in the garden. She said she went down the private stairway to
+avoid the gendarme. She must have done it cleverly, for she came in on
+the arm of Junot and the matter was not noticed. There stood my
+emergency facing me again. You had deserted. What made you imagine you
+were threatened with arrest?"
+
+"Because a gendarme in court dress laid his hand on my shoulder and told
+me I was to come with him."
+
+"Well, you may have drawn the secret police upon you. You had been
+cutting a pretty figure. It was probably wise to drop between walls and
+get out of France. Do you know why you were arrested?"
+
+"I think the groundless charge would have been an attack upon Napoleon."
+
+"You never attacked the emperor!"
+
+"No. But I had every reason to believe such a charge would be sworn
+against me if I ever came to trial."
+
+"Perhaps that silly dauphin story leaked out in Paris. The emperor does
+hate a Bourbon. But I thought you had tricked me. And the old marquis
+never took his eyes off the main issue. He gave Eagle his arm, and was
+ready to go in and thank the emperor."
+
+"You had to tell him?"
+
+"I had to tell him."
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"Not a word. All the blood seemed to be drawn out of his veins, and his
+face fell in. Then it burned red hot, and instead of good friend and
+benefactor, I saw myself a convict. His big staring blue eyes came out
+of a film like an owl's, and shot me through. I believe he saw
+everything I ever did in my life, and my intentions about Eagle most
+plainly of all. He bowed and wished me good-night, and took her out of
+the Tuileries."
+
+"But you saw him again?"
+
+"He never let me see him again, or her either. I am certain he forbade
+her to communicate with us. They did not go back to Mont-Louis. They
+left their hotel in Paris. I wrote imploring him to hold the estates. My
+messages were returned. I don't know how he got money enough to
+emigrate. But emigrate they did; avoiding Castorland, where the
+Saint-Michels, who brought her up, lived in comfort, and might have
+comforted her, and where I could have made her life easy. He probably
+dragged her through depths of poverty, before they joined a company
+bound for the Indiana Territory, where the Pigeon Roost settlement was
+planted. I have seen old Saint-Michel work at clearing, and can imagine
+the Marquis de Ferrier sweating weakly while he chopped trees. It is a
+satisfaction to know they had Ernestine with them. De Ferrier might have
+plowed with Eagle," said the count hotly. "He never hesitated to make
+use of her."
+
+While I had been living a monk's studious, well-provided life, was she
+toiling in the fields? I groaned aloud.
+
+De Chaumont dropped his head on his breast.
+
+"It hurts me more than I care to let anybody but you know, Lazarre. If I
+hadn't received that letter I should have avoided you. I wish you had
+saved Paul. I would adopt him."
+
+"I think not, my dear count."
+
+"Nonsense, boy! I wouldn't let you have him."
+
+"You have a child."
+
+"Her husband has her. But let us not pitch and toss words. No use
+quarreling over a dead boy. What right have you to Eagle's child?"
+
+"Not your right of faithful useful friendship. Only my own right."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Nothing that she ever admitted."
+
+"I was afraid of you," said De Chaumont, "when you flowered out with old
+Du Plessy, like an heir lost in emigration and found again. You were a
+startling fellow, dropping on the Faubourg; and anything was possible
+under the Empire. You know I never believed the dauphin nonsense, but a
+few who remembered, said you looked like the king. You were the king to
+her; above mating with the best of the old nobility. She wouldn't have
+married you."
+
+"Did she ever give you reason to think she would marry you?"
+
+"She never gave me reason to think she would marry anybody. But what's
+the use of groaning? There's distraction abroad. I took the trails to
+see you, when I heard you were with the troops on Champlain. I shall be
+long in France. What can I do for you, my boy?"
+
+"Nothing, count. You have already done much."
+
+"She had a foolish interest in you. The dauphin!--Too good to sit at
+table with us, you raw savage!--Had to be waited on by old Jean! And she
+would have had me serve you, myself!"
+
+He laughed, and so did I. We held hands, clinging in fellowship.
+
+"I might not have refused your service; like Marquis de Ferrier."
+
+The count's face darkened.
+
+"I'll not abuse him. He's dead."
+
+"Are you sure he's dead this time, count?"
+
+"A Kickapoo is carrying his scalp. Trust my runners. They have traced
+him so much for me they know the hair on his stubborn head. I must go
+where I can have amusement, Lazarre. This country is a young man's
+country. I'm getting old. Adieu. You're one of the young men."
+
+Some changes of light and darkness passed over me, and the great anguish
+of my wound increased until there was no rest. However, the next man who
+visited me stood forth at the side of the stretcher as Bellenger. I
+thought I dreamed him, being light-headed with fever. He was
+unaccountably weazened, robbed of juices, and powdering to dust on the
+surface. His mustache had grown again, and he carried it over his ears
+in the ridiculous manner affected when I saw him in the fog.
+
+"Where's your potter's wheel?" I inquired.
+
+"In the woods by Lake George, sire."
+
+"Do you still find clay that suits you?"
+
+"Yes, sire."
+
+"Have you made that vase yet?"
+
+"No, sire. I succeed in nothing."
+
+"You succeed in tracking me."
+
+He swam before my eyes, and I pointed to the surgeon's camp-chair.
+
+"Not in your presence, sire."
+
+"Have you lost your real dauphin?" I inquired.
+
+"I have the honor of standing before the real dauphin."
+
+"So you swore at Mittau!"
+
+"I perjured myself."
+
+"Well, what are you doing now?"
+
+"Sire, I am a man in failing health. Before the end I have come to tell
+you the truth."
+
+"Do you think you can do it?"
+
+"Sire"--said Bellenger.
+
+"Your king is Louis XVIII," I reminded him.
+
+"He is not my king."
+
+"Taken your pension away, has he?"
+
+"I no longer receive anything from that court."
+
+"And your dauphin?"
+
+"He was left in Europe."
+
+"Look here, Bellenger! Why did you treat me so? Dauphin or no dauphin,
+what harm was I doing you?"
+
+"I thought a strong party was behind you. And I knew there had been
+double dealing with me. You represented some invisible power tricking
+me. I was beside myself, and faced it out in Mittau. I have been used
+shamefully, and thrown aside when I am failing. Hiding out in the hills
+ruined my health."
+
+"Let us get to facts, if you have facts. Do you know anything about me,
+Bellenger?"
+
+"Yes, sire."
+
+"Who am I?"
+
+"Louis XVII of France."
+
+"What proof can you give me?"
+
+"First, sire, permit a man who has been made a wretched tool, to implore
+forgiveness of his rightful sovereign, and a little help to reach a
+warmer climate before the rigors of a northern winter begin."
+
+"Bellenger, you are entrancing," I said. "Why did I ever take you
+seriously? Ste. Pélagie was a grim joke, and tipping in the river merely
+your playfulness. You had better take yourself off now, and keep on
+walking until you come to a warmer climate."
+
+He wrung his hands with a gesture that touched my natural softness to my
+enemy.
+
+"Talk, then. Talk, man. What have you to say?"
+
+"This, first, sire. That was a splendid dash you made into France!"
+
+"And what a splendid dash I made out of it again, with a gendarme at my
+coat tails, and you behind the gendarme!"
+
+"But it was the wrong time. If you were there now;--the French people
+are so changeable--"
+
+"I shall never be there again. His Majesty the eighteenth Louis is
+welcome. What the blood stirs in me to know is, have I a right to the
+throne?"
+
+"Sire, the truth as I know it, I will tell you. You were the boy taken
+from the Temple prison."
+
+"Who did it?"
+
+"Agents of the royalist party whose names would mean nothing to you if I
+gave them."
+
+"I was placed in your hands?"
+
+"You were placed in my hands to be taken to America."
+
+"I was with you in London, where two royalists who knew me, recognized
+me?"
+
+"The two De Ferriers."
+
+"Did a woman named Madame Tank see me?"
+
+Bellenger was startled.
+
+"You were noticed on the ship by a court-lady of Holland; a very clever
+courtier. I had trouble in evading her. She suspected too much, and
+asked too many questions; and would have you to play with her baby on
+the deck, though at that time you noticed nothing."
+
+"But where does the idiot come into my story?"
+
+"Sire, you have been unfortunate, but I have been a victim. When we
+landed in New York I went directly and made myself known to the man who
+was to act as purveyor of your majesty's pension. He astonished me by
+declaring that the dauphin was already there, and had claimed the
+pension for that year. The country and the language were unknown to me.
+The agent spoke French, it is true, but we hardly understood each other.
+I supposed I had nothing to do but present my credentials. Here was
+another idiot--I crave your majesty's pardon--"
+
+"Quite right--at the time, Bellenger."
+
+--"drawing the annuity intended for the dauphin. I inquired into his
+rights. The agent showed me papers like my own. I asked who presented
+them. He knew no more of the man than he did of me. I demanded to face
+the man. No such person could be found. I demanded to see the idiot. He
+was shut in a room and fed by a hired keeper. I sat down and thought
+much. Clearly it was not the agent's affair. He followed instructions.
+Good! I would follow instructions also. Months would have been required
+to ask and receive explanations from the court of Monsieur. He had
+assumed the title of Louis XVIII, for the good of the royalist cause, as
+if there were no prince. I thought I saw what was expected of me."
+
+"And what did you see, you unspeakable scoundrel?"
+
+"I saw that there was a dauphin too many, hopelessly idiotic. But if he
+was the one to be guarded, I would guard him."
+
+"Who was that idiot?"
+
+"Some unknown pauper. No doubt of that."
+
+"And what did you do with me?"
+
+"A chief of the Iroquois Indians can tell you that."
+
+"This is a clumsy story, Bellenger. Try again."
+
+"Sire--"
+
+"If you knew so little of the country, how did you find an Iroquois
+chief?"
+
+"I met him in the woods when he was hunting. I offered to give you to
+him, pretending you had the annuity from Europe. Sire, I do not know why
+trickery was practiced on me, or who practiced it: why such pains were
+taken to mix the clues which led to the dauphin. But afterwards the same
+agent had orders to give you two-thirds and me only one-third of the
+yearly sum. I thought the court was in straits;--when both Russia and
+Spain supported it! I was nothing but a court painter. But when you went
+to France, I blocked your way with all the ingenuity I could bring."
+
+"I would like to ask you, Bellenger, what a man is called who attempts
+the life of his king?"
+
+"Sire, the tricks of royalists pitted us against each other."
+
+"That's enough, Bellenger. I don't believe a word you say, excepting
+that part of your story agreeing with Madame de Ferrier's. Put your hand
+under my pillow and find my wallet. Now help yourself, and never let me
+see you again."
+
+He helped himself to everything except a few shillings, weeping because
+his necessities were so great. But I told him I was used to being
+robbed, and he had done me all the harm he could; so his turn to pluck
+me naturally followed.
+
+Then I softened, as I always do towards the claimant of the other part,
+and added that we were on the same footing; I had been a pensioner
+myself.
+
+"Sire, I thank you," said Bellenger, having shaken the wallet and poked
+his fingers into the lining where an unheard-of gold piece could have
+lodged.
+
+"It tickles my vanity to be called sire."
+
+"You are a true prince," said Bellenger. "My life would be well spent if
+I could see you restored to your own."
+
+"So I infer, from the valuable days you have spent trying to bring that
+result about."
+
+"Your majesty is sure of finding support in France."
+
+"The last king liked to tinker with clocks. Perhaps I like to tinker
+with Indians."
+
+"Sire, it is due to your birth--"
+
+"Never mind my birth," I said. "I'm busy with my life."
+
+He bowed himself out of my presence without turning. This tribute to
+royalty should have touched me. He took a handsome adieu, and did not
+afterward seek further reward for his service. I heard in the course of
+years that he died in New Orleans, confessing much regarding myself to
+people who cared nothing about it, and thought him crazy. They doubtless
+had reason, so erratic was the wanderer whom I had first consciously
+seen through Lake George fog. His behavior was no more incredible than
+the behavior of other Frenchmen who put a hand to the earlier years of
+their prince's life.
+
+The third to appear at my tent door was Chief Williams, himself. The
+surgeon told him outside the tent that it was a dangerous wound. He had
+little hope for me, and I had indifferent hope myself, lying in torpor
+and finding it an effort to speak. But after several days of effort I
+did speak.
+
+The chief sat beside me, concerned and silent.
+
+"Father," I said.
+
+The chief harkened near to my lips.
+
+"Tell me," I begged, after resting, "who brought me to you."
+
+His dark sullen face became tender. "It was a Frenchman," he answered.
+"I was hunting and met him on the lake with two boys. He offered to give
+you to me. We had just lost a son."
+
+When I had rested again, I asked:
+
+"Do you know anything else about me?"
+
+"No."
+
+The subject was closed between us. And all subjects were closed betwixt
+the world and me, for my face turned the other way. The great void of
+which we know nothing, but which our faith teaches us to bridge, opened
+for me.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+But the chief's and Skenedonk's nursing and Indian remedies brought me
+face earthward again, reviving the surgeon's hope.
+
+When blood and life mounted, and my torn side sewed up its gap in a
+healthy scar, adding another to my collection, autumn was upon us. From
+the hunting lodges on Lake George, and the Williamses of Longmeadow, I
+went to the scorched capital of Washington. In the end the Government
+helped me with my Indian plan, though when Skenedonk and I pushed out
+toward Illinois Territory we had only my pay and a grant of land. Peace
+was not formally made until December, but the war ended that summer.
+
+Man's success in the world is proportioned to the number of forces he
+can draw around himself to work with him. I have been able to draw some
+forces; though in matters where most people protect themselves, I have a
+quality of asinine patience which the French would not have tolerated.
+
+The Oneidas were ready to follow wherever I led them. And so were many
+families of the Iroquois federation. But the Mohawk tribe held back.
+However, I felt confident of material for an Indian state when the
+foundation should be laid.
+
+We started lightly equipped upon the horse paths. The long journey by
+water and shore brought us in October to the head of Green Bay. We had
+seen Lake Michigan, of a light transparent blueness, with fire ripples
+chasing from the sunset. And we had rested at noon in plum groves on the
+vast prairies, oases of fertile deserts, where pink and white fruit
+drops, so ripe that the sun preserves it in its juice. The freshness of
+the new world continually flowed around us. We shot deer. Wolves sneaked
+upon our trail. We slept with our heels to the campfire, and our heads
+on our saddles. Sometimes we built a hunter's shed, open at front and
+sloping to ground at back. To find out how the wind blew, we stuck a
+finger in our mouths and held it up. The side which became cold first
+was the side of the wind.
+
+Physical life riots in the joy of its revival. I was so glad to be alive
+after touching death that I could think of Madame de Ferrier without
+pain, and say more confidently--"She is not dead," because resurrection
+was working in myself.
+
+Green Bay or La Baye, as the fur hunters called it, was a little post
+almost like a New England village among its elms: one street and a few
+outlying houses beside the Fox River. The open world had been our
+tavern; or any sod or log hut cast up like a burrow of human prairie
+dogs or moles. We did not expect to find a tavern in Green Bay. Yet such
+a place was pointed out to us near the Fur Company's block warehouse. It
+had no sign post, and the only visible stable was a pen of logs. Though
+negro slaves were owned in the Illinois Territory, we saw none when a
+red-headed man rushed forth shouting:
+
+"Sam, you lazy nigger, come here and take the gentleman's horses! Where
+is that Sam? Light down, sir, with your Indian, and I will lead your
+beasts to the hostler myself."
+
+In the same way our host provided a supper and bed with armies of
+invisible servants. Skenedonk climbed a ladder to the loft with our
+saddlebags.
+
+"Where is that chambermaid?" cried the tavern keeper.
+
+"Yes, where is she?" said a man who lounged on a bench by the entrance.
+"I've heard of her so often I would like to see her myself."
+
+The landlord, deaf to raillery, bustled about and spread our table in
+his public room.
+
+"Corn bread, hominy, side meat, ven'zin," he shouted in the kitchen.
+"Stir yourself, you black rascal, and dish up the gentleman's supper."
+
+Skenedonk walked boldly to the kitchen door and saw our landlord stewing
+and broiling, performing the offices of cook as he had performed those
+of stableman. He kept on scolding and harrying the people who should
+have been at his command:--"Step around lively, Sam. Tell the gentleman
+the black bottle is in the fireplace cupboard if he wants to sharpen his
+appetite. Where is that little nigger that picks up chips? Bring me some
+more wood from the wood-pile! I'll teach you to go to sleep behind the
+door!"
+
+Our host served us himself, running with sleeves turned back to admonish
+an imaginary cook. His tap-room was the fireplace cupboard, and it was
+visited while we ate our supper, by men in elkskin trousers, and caps
+and hooded capotes of blue cloth. These Canadians mixed their own drink,
+and made a cross-mark on the inside of the cupboard door, using a system
+of bookkeeping evidently agreed upon between themselves and the
+landlord. He shouted for the lazy barkeeper, who answered nothing out of
+nothingness.
+
+Nightfall was very clear and fair in this Northwestern territory. A man
+felt nearer to the sunset. The region took hold upon me: particularly
+when one who was neither a warehouseman nor a Canadian fur hunter,
+hurried in and took me by the hand.
+
+"I am Pierre Grignon," he said.
+
+Indeed, if he had held his fiddle, and tuned it upon an arm not quite so
+stout, I should have known without being told that he was the man who
+had played in the Saint-Michel cabin while Annabel de Chaumont climbed
+the chimney.
+
+We sat and talked until the light faded. The landlord brought a candle,
+and yelled up the loft, where Skenedonk had already stretched himself in
+his blanket, as he loved to do:
+
+"Chambermaid, light up!"
+
+"You drive your slaves too hard, landlord," said Pierre Grignon.
+
+"You'd think I hadn't any, Mr. Grignon; for they're never in the way
+when they're wanted."
+
+"One industrious man you certainly have."
+
+"Yes, Sam is a good fellow; but I'll have to go out and wake him up and
+make him rub the horses down."
+
+"Never mind," said Pierre Grignon. "I'm going to take these travelers
+home with me."
+
+"Now I know how a tavern ought to be kept," said the landlord. "But
+what's the use of my keeping one if Pierre Grignon carries off all the
+guests?"
+
+"He is my old friend," I told the landlord.
+
+"He's old friend to everybody that comes to Green Bay. I'll never get so
+much as a sign painted to hang in front of the Palace Tavern."
+
+I gave him twice his charges and he said:
+
+"What a loss it was to enterprise in the Bay when Pierre Grignon came
+here and built for the whole United States!"
+
+The Grignon house, whether built for the whole United States or not, was
+the largest in Green Bay. Its lawn sloped down to the Fox River. It was
+a huge square of oak timbers, with a detached kitchen, sheltered by
+giant elms. To this day it stands defying time with its darkening frame
+like some massive rock, the fan windows in the gables keeping guard
+north and south.
+
+A hall divided the house through the center, and here Madame Grignon
+welcomed me as if I were a long-expected guest, for this was her custom;
+and as soon as she clearly remembered me, led me into a drawing-room
+where a stately old lady sat making lace.
+
+This was the grandmother of the house. Such a house would have been
+incomplete without a grandmother at the hearth.
+
+The furniture of this hall or family room had been brought from
+Montreal; spindle chairs and a pier table of mahogany; a Turkey carpet,
+laid smoothly on the polished floor to be spurned aside by young dancers
+there; some impossible sea pictures, with patron saints in the clouds
+over mariners; an immense stuffed sofa, with an arm dividing it across
+the center;--the very place for those head-to-head conversations with
+young men which the girls of the house called "twosing." It was, in
+fact, the favorite "twosing" spot of Green Bay.
+
+Stools there were for children, and armchairs for old people were not
+lacking. The small yellow spinning wheel of Madame Ursule, as I found
+afterwards Madame Grignon was commonly called, stood ready to revolve
+its golden disk wherever she sat.
+
+The servants were Pawnee Indians, moving about their duties almost with
+stealth.
+
+The little Grignon daughter who had stood lost in wonder at the dancing
+of Annabel de Chaumont, was now a turner of heads herself, all flaxen
+white, and contrasting with the darkness of Katarina Tank. Katarina was
+taken home to the Grignon's after her mother's death. Both girls had
+been educated in Montreal.
+
+The seigniorial state in which Pierre Grignon lived became at once
+evident. I found it was the custom during Advent for all the villagers
+to meet in his house and sing hymns. On Christmas day his tables were
+loaded for everybody who came. If any one died, he was brought to Pierre
+Grignon's for prayer, and after his burial, the mourners went back to
+Pierre Grignon's for supper. Pierre Grignon and his wife were god-father
+and god-mother to most of the children born at La Baye. If a child was
+left without father and mother, Pierre Grignon's house became its asylum
+until a home could be found for it. The few American officers stationed
+at the old stockade, nearly every evening met the beauties of Green Bay
+at Pierre Grignon's, and if he did not fiddle for them he led Madame in
+the dancing. The grandmother herself sometimes took her stick and
+stepped through a measure to please the young people. Laughter and the
+joy of life filled the house every waking hour of the twenty-four.
+Funerals were never horrible there. Instead, they seemed the mystic
+beginning of better things.
+
+"Poor Madame Tank! She would have been so much more comfortable in her
+death if she had relieved her mind," Madame Ursule said, the first
+evening, as we sat in a pause of the dancing. "She used to speak of you
+often, for seeing you made a great impression upon her, and she never
+let us forget you. I am sure she knew more about you than she ever told
+me. 'I have an important disclosure to make,' she says. 'Come around me,
+I want all of you to hear it!' Then she fell back and died without
+telling it."
+
+A touch of mystery was not lacking to the house. Several times I saw the
+tail of a gray gown disappear through an open door. Some woman half
+entered and drew back.
+
+"It's Madeleine Jordan," an inmate told me each time. "She avoids
+strangers."
+
+I asked if Madeleine Jordan was a relative.
+
+"Oh, no," Madame Ursule replied; "but the family who brought her here,
+went back to Canada, and of course they left her with us."
+
+Of course Madeleine Jordan, or anybody else who lacked a roof, would be
+left with the Grignons; but in that house a hermit seemed out of place,
+and I said so to Madame Ursule.
+
+"Poor child!" she responded. "I think she likes the bustle and noise.
+She is not a hermit. What difference can it make to her whether people
+are around her or not?"
+
+The subject of Madeleine Jordan was no doubt beyond a man's handling. I
+had other matters to think about, and directly plunged into them. First
+the Menominees and Winnebagoes must be assembled in council. They held
+all the desirable land.
+
+"We don't like your Indian scheme in Green Bay," said Pierre Grignon.
+"But if the tribes here are willing to sell their lands, other settlers
+can't prevent it."
+
+He went with me to meet the savages on the opposite side of the Fox near
+the stockade. There the talking and eating lasted two days. At the end
+of that time I had a footing for our Iroquois in the Wisconsin portion
+of the Illinois Territory; and the savages who granted it danced a war
+dance in our honor. Every brave shook over his head the scalps he had
+taken. I saw one cap of soft long brown hair.
+
+"Eh!" said Pierre Grignon, sitting beside me. "Their dirty trophies make
+you ghastly! Do your eastern tribes never dance war dances?"
+
+After the land was secured its boundaries had to be set. Then my own
+grant demanded attention; and last, I was anxious to put my castle on it
+before snow flew. Many of those late autumn nights Skenedonk and I spent
+camping. The outdoor life was a joy to me. Our land lay up the Fox River
+and away from the bay. But more than one stormy evening, when we came
+back to the bay for supplies, I plunged into the rolling water and swam
+breasting the waves. It is good to be hardy, and sane, and to take part
+in the visible world, whether you are great and have your heart's desire
+or not.
+
+When we had laid the foundation of the Indian settlement, I built my
+house with the help of skilled men. It was a spacious one of hewn logs,
+chinked with cat-and-clay plaster, showing its white ribs on the hill
+above the Fox. In time I meant to cover the ribs with perennial vines.
+There was a spring near the porches. The woods banked me on the rear,
+and an elm spread its colossal umbrella over the roof. Fertile fields
+stretched at my left, and on my right a deep ravine lined with white
+birches, carried a stream to the Fox.
+
+From my stronghold to the river was a long descent. The broadening and
+narrowing channel could be seen for miles. A bushy island, beloved of
+wild ducks, parted the water, lying as Moses hid in osiers, amidst tall
+growths of wild oats. Lily pads stretched their pavements in the oats.
+Beyond were rolling banks, and beyond those, wooded hills rising terrace
+over terrace to the dawn. Many a sunrise was to come to me over those
+hills. Oaks and pines and sumach gathered to my doorway.
+
+In my mind I saw the garden we afterward created; with many fruit trees,
+beds, and winding walks, trellised seats, squares of flaming tulips,
+phlox, hollyhocks, roses. It should reach down into the ravine, where
+humid ferns and rocks met plants that love darkling ground. Yet it
+should not be too dark. I would lop boughs rather than have a growing
+thing spindle as if rooted in Ste. Pélagie!--and no man who loves trees
+can do that without feeling the knife at his heart. What is long
+developing is precious like the immortal part of us.
+
+The stoicism that comes of endurance has something of death in it. I
+prepared a home without thought of putting any wife therein. I had grown
+used to being alone, with the exception of Skenedonk's taciturn company.
+The house was for castle and resting place after labor. I took
+satisfaction in the rude furniture we made for it. In after years it
+became filled with rich gifts from the other side of the world, and
+books that have gladdened my heart. Yet in its virginhood, before pain
+or joy or achievement had entered there, before spade struck the ground
+which was to send up food, my holding on the earth's surface made me
+feel prince of a principality.
+
+The men hewed a slab settle, and stationed it before the hearth, a thing
+of beauty in its rough and lichen-tinted barks, though you may not
+believe it. My floors I would have smooth and neatly joined, of hard
+woods which give forth a shining for wear and polish. Stools I had,
+easily made, and one large round of a tree for my table, like an Eastern
+tabouret.
+
+Before the river closed and winter shut in, Skenedonk and I went back to
+Green Bay. I did not know how to form my household, and had it in mind
+to consult Madame Ursule. Pawnees could be had: and many French
+landholders in the territory owned black slaves. Pierre Grignon himself
+kept one little negro like a monkey among the stately Indians.
+
+Dealing with acres, and with people wild as flocks, would have been
+worth while if nothing had resulted except our welcome back to Pierre
+Grignon's open house. The grandmother hobbled on her stick across the
+floor to give me her hand. Madame Ursule reproached me with delaying,
+and Pierre said it was high time to seek winter quarters. The girls
+recounted harvest reels and even weddings, with dances following, which
+I had lost while away from the center of festivity.
+
+The little negro carried my saddlebags to the guest room. Skenedonk was
+to sleep on the floor. Abundant preparations for the evening meal were
+going forward in the kitchen. As I mounted the stairway at Madame
+Ursule's direction, I heard a tinkle of china, her very best, which
+adorned racks and dressers. It was being set forth on the mahogany
+board.
+
+The upper floor of Pierre Grignon's house was divided by a hall similar
+to the one below. I ran upstairs and halted.
+
+Standing with her back to the fading light which came through one fan
+window at the hall end, was a woman's figure in a gray dress. I gripped
+the rail.
+
+My first thought was: "How shall I tell her about Paul?" My next was:
+"What is the matter with her?"
+
+She rippled from head to foot in the shiver of rapture peculiar to her,
+and stretched her arms to me crying:
+
+"Paul! Paul!"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+"Oh, Madame!" I said, bewildered, and sick as from a stab. It was no
+comfort that the high lady who scarcely allowed me to kiss her hand
+before we parted, clung around my neck. She trembled against me.
+
+"Have you come back to your mother, Paul?"
+
+"Eagle!" I pleaded. "Don't you know me? You surely know Lazarre!"
+
+She kissed me, pulling my head down in her arms, the velvet mouth like a
+baby's, and looked straight into my eyes.
+
+"Madame, try to understand! I am Louis! If you forget Lazarre, try to
+remember Louis!"
+
+She heard with attention, and smiled. The pressure of my arms spoke to
+her. A man's passion addressed itself to a little child. All other
+barriers which had stood between us were nothing to this. I held her,
+and she could never be mine. She was not ill in body; the contours of
+her upturned face were round and softened with much smiling. But
+mind-sickness robbed me of her in the moment of finding her.
+
+"She can't be insane!" I said aloud. "Oh, God, anything but that! She
+was not a woman that could be so wrecked."
+
+Like a fool I questioned, and tried to get some explanation.
+
+Eagle smoothed my arm, nested her hand in my neck.
+
+"My little boy! He has grown to be a man--while his mother has grown
+down to be a child! Do you know what I am now, Paul?"
+
+I choked a sob in my throat and told her I did not.
+
+"I am your Cloud-Mother. I live in a cloud. Do you love me while I am in
+the cloud?"
+
+I told her I loved her with all my strength, in the cloud or out of it.
+
+"Will you take care of me as I used to take care of you?"
+
+I swore to the Almighty that she should be my future care.
+
+"I need you so! I have watched for you in the woods and on the water,
+Paul! You have been long coming back to me."
+
+I heard Madame Ursule mounting the stairs to see if my room was in
+order.
+
+Who could understand the relation in which Eagle and I now stood, and
+the claim she made upon me? She clung to my arm when I took it away. I
+led her by the hand. Even this sight caused Madame Ursule a shock at the
+head of the stairs.
+
+"M's'r Williams!"
+
+My hostess paused and looked at us.
+
+"Did she come to you of her own accord?"
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"I never knew her to notice a stranger before."
+
+"Madame, do you know who this is?"
+
+"Madeleine Jordan."
+
+"It is the Marquise de Ferrier."
+
+"The Marquise de Ferrier?"
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"Did you know her?"
+
+"I have known her ever since I can remember."
+
+"The Marquise de Ferrier! But, M's'r Williams, did she know you?"
+
+"She knows me," I asserted. "But not as myself. I am sure she knows me!
+But she confuses me with the child she lost! I cannot explain to you,
+madame, how positive I am that she recognizes me; any more than I can
+explain why she will call me Paul. I think I ought to tell you, so you
+will see the position in which I am placed, that this lady is the lady I
+once hoped to marry."
+
+"Saints have pity, M's'r Williams!"
+
+"I want to ask you some questions."
+
+"Bring her down to the fire. Come, dear child," said Madame Ursule,
+coaxing Eagle. "Nobody is there. The bedrooms can never be so warm as
+the log fire; and this is a bitter evening."
+
+The family room was unlighted by candles, as often happened. For such an
+illumination in the chimney must have quenched any paler glare. We had a
+few moments of brief privacy from the swarming life which constantly
+passed in and out.
+
+I placed Eagle by the fire and she sat there obediently, while I talked
+to Madame Ursule apart.
+
+"Was her mind in this state when she came to you?"
+
+"She was even a little wilder than she is now. The girls have been a
+benefit to her."
+
+"They were not afraid of her?"
+
+"Who could be afraid of the dear child? She is a lady--that's plain. Ah,
+M's'r Williams, what she must have gone through!"
+
+"Yet see how happy she looks!"
+
+"She always seemed happy enough. She would come to this house. So when
+the Jordans went to Canada, Pierre and I both said, 'Let her stay.'"
+
+"Who were the Jordans?"
+
+"The only family that escaped with their lives from the massacre when
+she lost her family. Madame Jordan told me the whole story. They had
+friends among the Winnebagoes who protected them."
+
+"Did they give her their name?"
+
+"No, the people in La Baye did that. We knew she had another name. But I
+think it very likely her title was not used in the settlement where they
+lived. Titles are no help in pioneering."
+
+"Did they call her Madeleine?"
+
+"She calls herself Madeleine."
+
+"How long has she been with your family?"
+
+"Nearly a year."
+
+"Did the Jordans tell you when this change came over her?"
+
+"Yes. It was during the attack when her child was taken from her. She
+saw other children killed. The Indians were afraid of her. They respect
+demented people; not a bit of harm was done to her. They let her alone,
+and the Jordans took care of her."
+
+The daughter and adopted daughter of the house came in with a rush of
+outdoor air, and seeing Eagle first, ran to kiss her on the cheek one
+after the other.
+
+"Madeleine has come down!" said Marie.
+
+"I thought we should coax her in here sometime," said Katarina.
+
+Between them, standing slim and tall, their equal in height, she was yet
+like a little sister. Though their faces were unlined, hers held a
+divine youth.
+
+To see her stricken with mind-sickness, and the two girls who had done
+neither good nor evil, existing like plants in sunshine, healthy and
+sound, seemed an iniquitous contrast.
+
+If ever woman was made for living and dying in one ancestral home, she
+was that woman. Yet she stood on the border of civilization, without a
+foothold to call her own. If ever woman was made for one knightly love
+which would set her in high places, she was that woman. Yet here she
+stood, her very name lost, no man so humble as to do her reverence.
+
+"Paul has come," Eagle told Katarina and Marie. Holding their hands, she
+walked between them toward me, and bade them notice my height. "I am
+his Cloud-Mother," she said. "How droll it is that parents grow down
+little, while their children grow up big!"
+
+Madame Ursule shook her head pitifully. But the girls really saw the
+droll side and laughed with my Cloud-Mother.
+
+Separated from me by an impassable barrier, she touched me more deeply
+than when I sued her most. The undulating ripple which was her peculiar
+expression of joy was more than I could bear. I left the room and was
+flinging myself from the house to walk in the chill wind; but she caught
+me.
+
+"I will be good!" pleaded my Cloud-Mother, her face in my breast.
+
+Her son who had grown up big, while she grew down little, went back to
+the family room with her.
+
+My Cloud-Mother sat beside me at table, and insisted on cutting up my
+food for me. While I tried to eat, she asked Marie and Katarina and
+Pierre Grignon and Madame Ursule to notice how well I behaved. The
+tender hearted host wiped his eyes.
+
+I understood why she had kept such hold upon me through years of
+separateness. A nameless personal charm, which must be a gift of the
+spirit, survived all wreck and change. It drew me, and must draw me
+forever, whether she knew me again or not. One meets and wakes you to
+vivid life in an immortal hour. Thousands could not do it through
+eternity.
+
+The river piled hillocks of water in a strong north wind, and no officer
+crossed from the stockade. Neither did any neighbor leave his own fire.
+It seldom happened that the Grignons were left with inmates alone. Eagle
+sat by me and watched the blaze streaming up the chimney.
+
+If she was not a unit in the family group and had no part there, they
+were most kind to her.
+
+"Take care!" the grandmother cried with swift forethought when Marie and
+Katarina marshaled in a hopping object from the kitchen. "It might
+frighten Madeleine."
+
+Pierre Grignon stopped in the middle of a bear hunt. Eagle was not
+frightened. She clapped her hands.
+
+"This is a pouched turkey!" Marie announced, leaning against the wall,
+while Katarina chased the fowl. It was the little negro, his arms and
+feet thrust into the legs of a pair of Pierre Grignon's trousers, and
+the capacious open top fastened upon his back. Doubled over, he waddled
+and hopped as well as he could. A feather duster was stuck in for a
+tail, and his woolly head gave him the uncanny look of a black harpy. To
+see him was to shed tears of laughter. The pouched turkey enjoyed being
+a pouched turkey. He strutted and gobbled, and ran at the girls; tried
+to pick up corn from the floor with his thick lips, tumbling down and
+rolling over in the effort; for a pouched turkey has no wings with which
+to balance himself. So much hilarity in the family room drew the Pawnee
+servants. I saw their small dark eyes in a mere line of open door,
+gazing solemnly.
+
+When the turkey was relieved from his pouching and sent to bed, Pierre
+Grignon took his violin. The girls answered with jigs that ended a reel,
+when couples left the general figure to jig it off.
+
+When Eagle had watched them awhile she started up, spread her skirts in
+a sweeping courtesy, and began to dance a gavotte. The fiddler changed
+his tune, and the girls rested and watched her. Alternately swift and
+languid, with the changes of the movement, she saluted backward to the
+floor, or spun on the tips of rapid feet. I had seen her dance many
+times, but never with such abandon of joy.
+
+Our singular relationship was established in the house, where
+hospitality made room and apology for all human weakness.
+
+Nobody of that region, except the infirm, stayed indoors to shiver by a
+fire. Eagle and the girls in their warm capotes breasted with me the
+coldest winter days. She was as happy as they were; her cheeks tingled
+as pink as theirs. Sometimes I thought her eyes must answer me with her
+old self-command; their bright grayness was so natural.
+
+I believed if her delusions were humored, they would unwind from her
+like the cloud which she felt them to be. The family had long fallen
+into the habit of treating her as a child, playing some imaginary
+character. She seemed less demented than walking in a dream, her
+faculties asleep. It was somnambulism rather than madness. She had not
+the expression of insane people, the shifty eyes, the cunning and
+perverseness, the animal and torpid presence.
+
+If I called her Madame de Ferrier instead of my Cloud-Mother, a strained
+and puzzled look replaced her usual satisfaction. I did not often use
+the name, nor did I try to make her repeat my own. It was my daily
+effort to fall in with her happiness, for if she saw any anxiety she was
+quick to plead:
+
+"Don't you like me any more, Paul? Are you tired of me, because I am a
+Cloud-Mother?"
+
+"No," I would answer. "Lazarre will never be tired of you."
+
+"Do you think I am growing smaller? Will you love me if I shrink to a
+baby?"
+
+"I will love you."
+
+"I used to love you when you were so tiny, Paul, before you knew how to
+love me back. If I forget how"--she clutched the lapels of my
+coat--"will you leave me then?"
+
+"Eagle, say this: 'Lazarre cannot leave me.'"
+
+"Lazarre cannot leave me."
+
+I heard her repeating this at her sewing. She boasted to Marie
+Grignon--"Lazarre cannot leave me!--Paul taught me that."
+
+My Cloud-Mother asked me to tell her the stories she used to tell me.
+She had forgotten them.
+
+"I am the child now," she would say. "Tell me the stories."
+
+I repeated mythical tribe legends, gathered from Skenedonk on our long
+rides, making them as eloquent as I could. She listened, holding her
+breath, or sighing with contentment.
+
+If any one in the household smiled when she led me about by the hand,
+there was a tear behind the smile.
+
+She kept herself in perfection, bestowing unceasing care upon her dress,
+which was always gray.
+
+"I have to wear gray; I am in a cloud," she had said to the family.
+
+"We have used fine gray stuff brought from Holland, and wools that
+Mother Ursule got from Montreal," Katarina told me. "The Pawnees dye
+with vegetable colors. But they cannot make the pale gray she loves."
+
+Eagle watched me with maternal care. If a hair dropped on my collar she
+brushed it away, and smoothed and settled my cravat. The touch of my
+Cloud-Mother, familiar and tender, like the touch of a wife, charged
+through me with torture, because she was herself so unconscious of it.
+
+Before I had been in the house a week she made a little pair of trousers
+a span long, and gave them to me. Marie and Katarina turned their faces
+to laugh. My Cloud-Mother held the garment up for their inspection, and
+was not at all sensitive to the giggles it provoked.
+
+"I made over an old pair of his father's," she said.
+
+The discarded breeches used by the pouched turkey had been devoted to
+her whim. Every stitch was neatly set. I praised her beautiful
+needlework, and she said she would make me a coat.
+
+Skenedonk was not often in the house. He took to the winter hunting and
+snow-shoeing with vigor. Whenever he came indoors I used to see him
+watching Madame de Ferrier with saturnine wistfulness. She paid no
+attention to him. He would stand gazing at her while she sewed; being
+privileged as an educated Indian and my attendant, to enter the family
+room where the Pawnees came only to serve. They had the ample kitchen
+and its log fire to themselves. I wondered what was working in
+Skenedonk's mind, and if he repented calling one so buffeted, a
+sorceress.
+
+Kindly ridicule excited by the incongruous things she did, passed over
+without touching her. She was enveloped in a cloud, a thick case
+guarding overtaxed mind and body, and shutting them in its pellucid
+chrysalis. The Almighty arms were resting her on a mountain of vision.
+She had forgot how to weep. She was remembering how to laugh.
+
+The more I thought about it the less endurable it became to have her
+dependent upon the Grignons. My business affairs with Pierre Grignon
+made it possible to transfer her obligations to my account. The
+hospitable man and his wife objected, but when they saw how I took it to
+heart, gave me my way. I told them I wished her to be regarded as my
+wife, for I should never have another; and while it might remain
+impossible for her to marry me, on my part I was bound to her.
+
+"You are young, M's'r Williams," said Madame Ursule. "You have a long
+life before you. A man wants comfort in his house. And if he makes
+wealth, he needs a hand that knows how to distribute and how to save.
+She could never go to your home as she is."
+
+"I know it, madame."
+
+"You will change your mind about a wife."
+
+"Madame, I have not changed my mind since I first wanted her. It is not
+a mind that changes."
+
+"Well, that's unusual. Young men are often fickle. You never made
+proposals for her?"
+
+"I did, madame, after her husband died."
+
+"But she was still a wife--the wife of an old man--in the Pigeon Roost
+settlement."
+
+"Her father married her to a cousin nearly as old as himself, when she
+was a child. Her husband was reported dead while he was in hiding. She
+herself thought, and so did her friends, that he was dead."
+
+"I see. Eh! these girls married to old men! Madame Jordan told me
+Madeleine's husband was very fretful. He kept himself like silk, and
+scarcely let the wind blow upon him for fear of injuring his health.
+When other men were out toiling at the clearings, he sat in his house to
+avoid getting chills and fever in the sun. It was well for her that she
+had a faithful servant. Madeleine and the servant kept the family with
+their garden and corn field. They never tasted wild meat unless the
+other settlers brought them venison. Madame Jordan said they always
+returned a present of herbs and vegetables from their garden. It grew
+for them better than any other garden in the settlement. Once the old
+man did go out with a hunting party, and got lost. The men searched for
+him three days, and found him curled up in a hollow tree, waiting to be
+brought in. They carried him home on a litter and he popped his head
+into the door and said: 'Here I am, child! You can't kill me!'"
+
+"What did Madame de Ferrier say?"
+
+"Nothing. She made a child of him, as if he were her son. He was in his
+second childhood, no doubt. And Madame Jordan said she appeared to hold
+herself accountable for the losses and crosses that made him so fretful.
+The children of the emigration were brought up to hardship, and accepted
+everything as their elders could not do."
+
+"I thought the Marquis de Ferrier a courteous gentleman."
+
+"Did you ever see him?"
+
+"Twice only."
+
+"He used to tell his wife he intended to live a hundred years. And I
+suppose he would have done it, if he had not been tomahawked and
+scalped. 'You'll never get De Chaumont,' he used to say to her. 'I'll
+see that he never gets you!' I remember the name very well, because it
+was the name of that pretty creature who danced for us in the cabin on
+Lake George."
+
+"De Chaumont was her father," I said. "He would have married Madame de
+Ferrier, and restored her estate, if she had accepted him, and the
+marquis had not come back."
+
+"Saints have pity!" said Madame Ursule. "And the poor old man must make
+everybody and himself so uncomfortable!"
+
+"But how could he help living?"
+
+"True enough. God'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 attitude 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
+passed 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 muffled in robes, with Madame
+Ursule and the girls, flew over it in a French train; a sliding box with
+two or three horses hitched 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 passion. 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 glass; 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. God 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We are in a ship going to the side of the world where you are. Except
+that we are going towards you, it is like being pushed off a cliff. All
+my faith in the appearances of things is at an end. I have been juggled
+with. I have misjudged.
+
+I could have insisted that we hold Mont-Louis as tenants. The count is
+our friend. It is not a strong man's fault that a weak man is weak and
+unfortunate. Yet seeing Cousin Philippe wince, I could not put the daily
+humiliation upon him. He is like my father come back, broken, helpless.
+And Paul and I, who are young, must take care of him where he will be
+least humbled.
+
+I was over-pampered in Mont-Louis and Paris. I like easy living,
+carriages, long-tailed gowns, jewels, trained servants, music, and
+spectacles on the stage; a park and wide lands all my own; seclusion
+from people who do not interest me; idleness in enjoyment.
+
+I am the devil of vanity. Annabel has not half the points I have. When
+the men are around her I laugh to think I shall be fine and firm as a
+statue when she is a mass of wrinkles and a wisp of fuzz. When she is a
+mass of wrinkles and a wisp of fuzz she will be riper and tenderer
+inside. But will the men see that? No. They will be off after a fresher
+Annabel. So much for men. On the other hand, I had but a few months of
+luxury, and may count on the hardness that comes of endurance; for I was
+an exile from childhood. There is strength in doing the right thing. If
+there were no God, if Christ had never died on the cross, I should have
+to do the right thing because it is right.
+
+Why should we lay up grievances against one another? They must
+disappear, and they only burn our hearts.
+
+Sometimes I put my arms around Ernestine, and rest her old head against
+me. She revolts. People incline to doubt the superiority of a person who
+will associate with them. But the closer our poverty rubs us the more
+Ernestine insists upon class differences.
+
+There should be a colossal mother going about the world to turn men over
+her lap and give them the slipper. They pine for it.
+
+Am I helping forward the general good, or am I only suffering Nature's
+punishment?
+
+A woman can fasten the bonds of habit on a man, giving him food from her
+table, hourly strengthening his care for her. By merely putting herself
+before him every day she makes him think of her. What chance has an
+exiled woman against the fearful odds of daily life?
+
+Yet sometimes I think I can wait a thousand years. In sun and snow, in
+wind and dust, a woman waits. If she stretched her hand and said "Come,"
+who could despise her so much as she would despise herself?
+
+What is so cruel as a man? Hour after hour, day after day, year after
+year, he presses the iron spike of silence in.
+
+Coward!--to let me suffer such anguish!
+
+Is it because I kissed you? That was the highest act of my life! I
+groped down the black stairs of the Tuileries blinded by light. Why are
+the natural things called wrong, and the unnatural ones just?
+
+Is it because I said I would come to you sometime? This is what I meant:
+that it should give me no jealous pang to think of another woman's head
+on your breast; that there is a wedlock which appearances cannot touch.
+
+No, I never would--I never would seek you; though sometimes the horror
+of doing without you turns into reproach. What is he doing? He may need
+me--and I am letting his life slip away. Am I cheating us both of what
+could have harmed no one?
+
+It is not that usage is broken off.
+
+Yet if you were to come, I would punish you for coming!
+
+Fine heroic days I tell myself we are marching to meet each other. If
+the day has been particularly hard, I say, "Perhaps I have carried his
+load too, and he marches lighter."
+
+You have faults, no doubt, but the only one I could not pardon would be
+your saying, "I repent!"
+
+The instinct to conceal defeat and pain is so strong in me that I would
+have my heart cut out rather than own it ached. Yet many women carry all
+before them by a little judicious whining and rebellion.
+
+I never believe in your unfaith. If you brought a wife and showed her to
+me I should be sorry for her, and still not believe in your unfaith.
+
+Louis, I have been falling down flat and crawling the ground. Now I am
+up again. It didn't hurt.
+
+It is the old German fairy story. Every day gold must be spun out of
+straw. How big the pile of straw looks every morning, and how little the
+handful of gold every night!
+
+This prairie in the Indiana Territory that I dreaded as a black gulf, is
+a grassy valley.
+
+I love the garden; and I love to hoe the Indian corn. It springs so
+clean from the sod, and is a miracle of growth. After the stalks are
+around my knees, they are soon around my shoulders. The broad leaves
+have a fragrance, and the silk is sweet as violets.
+
+We wash our clothes in the river. Women who hoe corn, dig in a garden,
+and wash clothes, earn the wholesome bread of life.
+
+To-day Paul brought the first bluebells of spring, and put them in water
+for me. They were buds; and when they bloomed out he said, "God has
+blessed these flowers."
+
+We have to nurse the sick. The goodness of these pioneer women is
+unfailing. It is like the great and kind friendship of the Du Chaumonts.
+They help me take care of Cousin Philippe.
+
+Paul meditated to-day, "I don't want to hurt the Father's feelings. I
+don't want to say He was greedy and made a better place for Himself in
+heaven than He made for us down here. Is it nicer just because He is
+there?"
+
+His prayer: "God bless my father and mother and Ernestine. God keep my
+father and mother and Ernestine. And keep my mother with me day and
+night, dressed and undressed! God keep together all that love each
+other."
+
+When he is a man I am going to tell him, and say: "But I have built my
+house, not wrecked it, I have been yours, not love's."
+
+He tells me such stories as this: "Once upon a time there was such a
+loving angel came down. And they ran a string through his stomach and
+hung him on the wall. He never whined a bit."
+
+The people in this country, which is called free, are nearly all bound.
+Those who lack money as we do cannot go where they please, or live as
+they would live. Is that freedom?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On a cool autumn night, when the fire crackles, the ten children of the
+settlement, fighting or agreeing, come running from their houses like
+hens. We sit on the floor in front of the hearth, and I suffer the
+often-repeated martyrdom of the "Fire Pig." This tale, invented once as
+fast as I could talk, I have been doomed to repeat until I dread the
+shades of evening.
+
+The children bunch their heads together; their lips part, as soon as I
+begin to say:
+
+Do you see that glowing spot in the heart of the coals? That is the
+house of the Fire Pig. One day the Fire Pig found he had no more corn,
+and he was very hungry. So he jumped out of his house and ran down the
+road till he came to a farmer's field.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Farmer," said the little pig. "Have you any corn for
+me to-day?"
+
+"Why, who are you?" said the farmer.
+
+"I'm a little Fire Pig."
+
+"No, I haven't any corn for a Fire Pig."
+
+The pig ran on till he came to another farmer's field.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Farmer, have you any corn for me to-day?"
+
+"Who are you?" said the farmer.
+
+"Oh, I'm the little Fire Pig."
+
+"I don't know," said the farmer. "I would give you a great bagful if you
+could kill the snake which comes every night and steals my cattle."
+
+The pig thought, "How can I kill that snake?" but he was so hungry he
+knew he should starve without corn, so he said he would try. The farmer
+told him to go down in the field, where the snake came gliding at night
+with its head reared high in air. The pig went down in the meadow, and
+the first creature he saw was a sheep.
+
+"Baa!" said the sheep. That was its way of saying "How do you do?" "Who
+are you?"
+
+"I'm the little Fire Pig."
+
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"I've come to kill the great snake that eats the farmer's cattle."
+
+"I'm very glad," said the sheep, "for it takes my lambs. How are you
+going to kill it?"
+
+"I don't know," said the pig; "can't you help me?"
+
+"I'll give you some of my wool."
+
+The pig thanked the sheep, and went a little farther and met a horse.
+"He-ee-ee!" said the horse. That was his way of saying "How do you do?"
+"Who are you?"
+
+"I am the little Fire Pig."
+
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"I've come to kill the great snake that eats the farmer's cattle."
+
+"I'm glad of that," said the horse; "for it steals my colts. How are you
+going to do it?"
+
+"I don't know," said the pig. "Can't you help me?"
+
+"I'll give you some of the long hairs from my tail," said the horse.
+
+The pig took them and thanked the horse. And when he went a little
+farther he met a cow.
+
+"Moo!" said the cow. That was her way of saying "How do you do?" "Who
+are you?"
+
+"I'm the little Fire Pig."
+
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"I've come to kill the great snake that eats the farmer's cattle."
+
+"I am glad of that, for it steals my calves. How are you going to do
+it?"
+
+"I don't know. Can't you help me?"
+
+"I'll give you one of my sharp horns," said the cow.
+
+So the pig took it and thanked her. Then he spun and he twisted, and he
+spun and he twisted, and made a strong woolen cord of the sheep's wool.
+And he wove and he braided, and he wove and he braided, and made a
+cunning snare of the horse's tail. And he whetted and sharpened, and he
+whetted and sharpened, and made a keen dart of the cow's horn.
+
+--Now when the little pig has all his materials ready, and sees the
+great snake come gliding, gliding--I turn the situation over to the
+children. What did he do with the rope, the snare and the horn? They
+work it out each in his own way. There is a mighty wrangling all around
+the hearth.
+
+One day is never really like another, though it seems so.
+
+Perhaps being used to the sight of the Iroquois at Lake George, makes it
+impossible for me to imagine what the settlers dread, and that is an
+attack. We are shut around by forests. In primitive life so much time
+and strength go to the getting of food that we can think of little else.
+
+It is as bad to slave at work as to slave at pleasure. But God may
+forgive what people cannot help.
+
+There is a very old woman among the settlers whom they call Granny. We
+often sit together. She cannot get a gourd edge betwixt her nose and
+chin when she drinks, and has forgotten she ever had teeth. She does not
+expect much; but there is one right she contends for, and that is the
+right of ironing her cap by stretching it over her knee. When I have
+lived in this settlement long enough, my nose and chin may come
+together, and I shall forget my teeth. But this much I will exact of
+fate. My cap shall be ironed. I will not--I will not iron it by
+stretching it over my knee!
+
+Count du Chaumont would be angry if he saw me learning to weave, for
+instance. You would not be angry. That makes a difference between you
+as men which I feel but cannot explain.
+
+We speak English with our neighbors. Paul, who is to be an American,
+must learn his language well. I have taught him to read and write. I
+have taught him the history of his family and of his father's country.
+His head is as high as my breast. When will my head be as high as his
+breast?
+
+Skenedonk loves you as a young superior brother. I have often wondered
+what he thought about when he went quietly around at your heels. You
+told me he had killed and scalped, and in spite of education, was as
+ready to kill and scalp again as any white man is for war.
+
+I dread him like a toad, and wish him to keep on his side of the walk.
+He is always with you, and no doubt silently urges, "Come back to the
+wigwams that nourished you!"
+
+Am I mistaken? Are we moving farther and farther apart instead of
+approaching each other? Oh, Louis, does this road lead to nothing?
+
+I am glad I gave you that key. It was given thoughtlessly, when I was in
+a bubble of joy. But if you have kept it, it speaks to you every day.
+
+Sophie Saint-Michel told me man sometimes piles all his tokens in a
+retrospective heap, and says, "Who the deuce gave me this or that?"
+
+Sophie's father used to be so enraged at his wife and daughter because
+he could not restore their lost comforts. But this is really a better
+disposition than a mean subservience to misfortune.
+
+The children love to have me dance gavottes for them. Some of their
+mothers consider it levity. Still they feel the need of a little levity
+themselves.
+
+We had a great festival when the wild roses were fully in bloom. The
+prairie is called a mile square, and wherever a plow has not struck,
+acres of wild roses grow. They hedge us from the woods like a parapet
+edging a court. These volunteers are very thorny, bearing tender claws
+to protect themselves with. But I am nimble with my scissors.
+
+We took the Jordan oxen, a meek pair that have broken sod for the
+colony, and twined them with garlands of wild roses. Around and around
+their horns, and around and around their bodies the long ropes were
+wound, their master standing by with his goad. That we wound also, and
+covered his hat with roses. The huge oxen swayed aside, looking ashamed
+of themselves. And when their tails were ornamented with a bunch at the
+tip, they switched these pathetically. Still even an ox loves festivity,
+whether he owns to it or not. We made a procession, child behind child,
+each bearing on his head all the roses he could carry, the two oxen
+walking tandem, led by their master in front. Everybody came out and
+laughed. It was a beautiful sight, and cheered us, though we gave it no
+name except the Procession of Roses.
+
+Often when I open my eyes at dawn I hear music far off that makes my
+heart swell. It is the waking dream of a king marching with drums and
+bugles. While I am dressing I hum, "Oh, Richard, O my king!"
+
+Louis! Louis! Louis!
+
+I cannot--I cannot keep it down! How can I hold still that righteousness
+may be done through me, when I love--love--love--when I clench my fists
+and walk on my knees--
+
+I am a wicked woman! What is all this sweet pretense of duty! It covers
+the hypocrite that loves--that starves--that cries, My king!--my king!
+
+Strike me!--drive me within bounds! This long repression--years, years
+of waiting--for what?--for more waiting!--it is driving me mad!
+
+You have the key.
+
+I have nothing!
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+My God! What had she seen in me to love? I sat up and held the book
+against my bosom. Its cry out of her past filled the world from horizon
+to horizon. The ox that she had wreathed in roses would have heard it
+through her silence. But the brutal, slow Bourbon had gone his way,
+turning his stupid head from side to side, leaving her to perish.
+
+Punctuated by years, bursting from eternities of suppression, it brought
+an accumulated force that swept the soul out of my body.
+
+All that had not been written in the book was as easily read as what was
+set down. I saw the monotony of her life, and her gilding of its
+rudeness, the pastimes she thought out for children; I saw her nursing
+the helplessness which leaned upon her, and turning aside the contempt
+of pioneer women who passionately admired strong men. I saw her eyes
+waiting on the distant laggard who stupidly pursued his own affairs
+until it was too late to protect her. I read the entries over and over.
+When day broke it seemed to me the morning after my own death, such
+knowing and experiencing had passed through me. I could not see her
+again until I had command of myself.
+
+So I dressed and went silently down stairs. The Pawnees were stirring
+in the kitchen. I got some bread and meat from them, and also some grain
+for the horse; then mounted and rode to the river.
+
+The ferryman lived near the old stockade. Some time always passed after
+he saw the signals before the deliberate Frenchman responded. I led my
+horse upon the unwieldly craft propelled by two huge oars, which the
+ferryman managed, running from one to another according to the swing of
+the current. It was broad day when we reached the other shore; one of
+those days, gray overhead, when moisture breaks upward through the
+ground, instead of descending. Many light clouds flitted under the
+grayness. The grass showed with a kind of green blush through its old
+brown fleece.
+
+I saw the first sailing vessel of spring coming to anchor, from the
+straits of the great lakes. Once I would have hailed that vessel as
+possible bearer of news. Now it could bring me nothing of any
+importance.
+
+The trail along the Fox river led over rolling land, dipping into coves
+and rising over hills. The Fox, steel blue in the shade, becomes tawny
+as its namesake when its fur of rough waves is combed to redness in the
+sunlight. Under grayness, with a soft wind blowing, the Fox showed his
+blue coat.
+
+The prospect was so large, with a ridge running along in the distance,
+and open country spreading away on the other side, that I often turned
+in my saddle and looked back over the half-wooded trail. I thought I saw
+a figure walking a long way behind me, and being alone, tried to
+discern what it was. But under that gray sky nothing was sharply
+defined. I rode on thinking of the book in the breast of my coat.
+
+It was certain I was not to marry. And being without breakfast and
+unstimulated by the sky, I began to think also what unstable material I
+had taken in hand when I undertook to work with Indians. Instinctively I
+knew then what a young southern statesman named Jefferson Davis whom I
+first met as a commandant of the fort at Green Bay--afterwards told me
+in Washington: "No commonwealth in a republic will stand with interests
+apart from the federated whole." White men, who have exclaimed from the
+beginning against the injustice done the red man, and who keep on
+pitying and exterminating him, made a federated whole with interests
+apart from his.
+
+Again when I looked back I saw the figure, but it was afoot, and I soon
+lost it in a cove.
+
+My house had been left undisturbed by hunters and Indians through the
+winter. I tied the horse to a gallery post and unfastened the door. A
+pile of refuse timbers offered wood for a fire, and I carried in several
+loads of it, and lighted the virgin chimney. Then I brought water from
+the spring and ate breakfast, sitting before the fire and thinking a
+little wearily and bitterly of my prospect in life.
+
+Having fed my horse, I covered the fire, leaving a good store of fuel by
+the hearth, and rode away toward the Menominee and Winnebago lands.
+
+The day was a hard one, and when I came back towards nightfall I was
+glad to stop with the officers of the stockade and share their mess.
+
+"You looked fagged," said one of them.
+
+"The horse paths are heavy," I answered, "and I have been as far as the
+Indian lands."
+
+I had been as far as that remote time when Eagle was not a Cloud-Mother.
+To cross the river and see her smiling in meaningless happiness seemed
+more than I could do.
+
+Yet she might notice my absence. We had been housed together ever since
+she had discovered me. Our walks and rides, our fireside talks and
+evening diversions were never separate. At Pierre Grignon's the family
+flocked in companies. When the padlocked book sent me out of the house I
+forgot that she was used to my presence and might be disturbed by an
+absence no one could explain.
+
+"The first sailing vessel is in from the straits," said the lieutenant.
+
+"Yes, I saw her come to anchor as I rode out this morning."
+
+"She brought a passenger."
+
+"Anybody of importance?"
+
+"At first blush, no. At second blush, yes."
+
+"Why 'no' at first blush?"
+
+"Because he is only a priest."
+
+"Only a priest, haughty officer! Are civilians and churchmen dirt under
+army feet?"
+
+The lieutenant grinned.
+
+"When you see a missionary priest landing to confess a lot of
+Canadians, he doesn't seem quite so important, as a prelate from Ghent,
+for instance."
+
+"Is this passenger a prelate from Ghent?"
+
+"That is where the second blush comes in. He is."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"I saw him, and talked with him."
+
+"What is he doing in Green Bay?"
+
+"Looking at the country. He was inquiring for you."
+
+"For me!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What could a prelate from Ghent want with me?"
+
+"Says he wants to make inquiries about the native tribes."
+
+"Oh! Did you recommend me as an expert in native tribes?"
+
+"Naturally. But not until he asked if you were here."
+
+"He mentioned my name?"
+
+"Yes. He wanted to see you. You'll not have to step out of your way to
+gratify him."
+
+"From that I infer there is a new face at Pierre Grignon's."
+
+"Your inference is correct. The Grignons always lodge the priests, and a
+great man like this one will be certainly quartered with them."
+
+"What is he like?"
+
+"A smooth and easy gentleman."
+
+"In a cassock?"
+
+"Tell a poor post lieutenant what a cassock is."
+
+"The long-skirted black coat reaching to the heels."
+
+"Our missionary priests don't wear it here. He has the bands and broad
+hat and general appearance of a priest, but his coat isn't very long."
+
+"Then he has laid aside the cassock while traveling through this
+country."
+
+The prelate from Ghent, no doubt a common priest, that the lieutenant
+undertook to dignify, slipped directly out of my mind.
+
+Madame Ursule was waiting for me, on the gallery with fluted pillars at
+the front of the house.
+
+"M's'r Williams, where is Madeleine?"
+
+Her anxiety vibrated through the darkness.
+
+"Isn't she here, madame?"
+
+"She has not been seen to-day."
+
+We stood in silence, then began to speak together.
+
+"But, madame--"
+
+"M's'r Williams--"
+
+"I went away early--"
+
+"When I heard from the Pawnees that you had gone off on horseback so
+early I thought it possible you might have taken her with you."
+
+"Madame, how could I do that?"
+
+"Of course you wouldn't have done that. But we can't find her. We've
+inquired all over La Baye. She left the house when no one saw her. She
+was never out after nightfall before."
+
+"But, madame, she must be here!"
+
+"Oh, m's'r, my hope was that you knew where she is--she has followed you
+about so! The poor child may be at the bottom of the river!"
+
+"She can't be at the bottom of the river!" I retorted.
+
+The girls ran out. They were dressed for a dance, and drew gauzy scarfs
+around their anxious faces. The house had been searched from ground to
+attic more than once. They were sure she must be hiding from them.
+
+I remembered the figure that appeared to me on the trail. My heart
+stopped. I could not humiliate my Cloud-Mother by placing her before
+them in the act of tracking me like a dog. I could not tell any one
+about it, but asked for Skenedonk.
+
+The Indian had been out on the river in a canoe. He came silently, and
+stood near me. The book was between us. I had it in the breast of my
+coat, and he had it on his conscience.
+
+"Bring out your horse and get me a fresh one," I said.
+
+"Where shall I find one?"
+
+"Pierre will give you one of ours," said Madame Ursule. "But you must
+eat."
+
+"I had my supper with the officers of the fort, madame. I would have
+made a briefer stay if I had known what had happened on this side of the
+river."
+
+"I forgot to tell you, M's'r Williams, there is an abbé here from
+Europe. He asked for you."
+
+"I cannot see him to-night."
+
+Skenedonk drew near me to speak, but I was impatient of any delay. We
+went into the house, and Madame Ursule said she would bring a blanket
+and some food to strap behind my saddle. The girls helped her. There was
+a hush through the jolly house. The master bustled out of the family
+room. I saw behind him, standing as he had stood at Mittau, a priest of
+fine and sweet presence, waiting for Pierre Grignon to speak the words
+of introduction.
+
+"It is like seeing France again!" exclaimed the master of the house.
+"Abbé Edgeworth, this is M's'r Williams."
+
+"Monsieur," said the abbé to me with perfect courtesy, "believe me, I am
+glad to see you."
+
+"Monsieur," I answered, giving him as brief notice as he had given me in
+Mittau, yet without rancor;--there was no room in me for that. "You have
+unerringly found the best house in the Illinois Territory, and I leave
+you to the enjoyment of it."
+
+"You are leaving the house, monsieur?"
+
+"I find I am obliged to make a short journey."
+
+"I have made a long one, monsieur. It may be best to tell you that I
+come charged with a message for you."
+
+I thought of Madame d'Angoulęme. The sister who had been mine for a few
+minutes, and from whom this priest had cast me out, declaring that God
+had smitten the pretender when my eclipse laid me at his
+feet--remembered me in her second exile, perhaps believed in me still.
+Women put wonderful restraints upon themselves.
+
+Abbé Edgeworth and I looked steadily at each other.
+
+"I hope Madame d'Angoulęme is well?"
+
+"She is well, and is still the comforter of his Majesty's misfortune."
+
+"Monsieur the Abbé, a message would need to be very urgent to be
+listened to to-night. I will give you audience in the morning, or when I
+return."
+
+We both bowed again. I took Pierre Grignon into the hall for counsel.
+
+In the end he rode with me, for we concluded to send Skenedonk with a
+party along the east shore.
+
+Though searching for the lost is an experience old as the world, its
+poignancy was new to me. I saw Eagle tangled in the wild oats of the
+river. I saw her treacherously dealt with by Indians who called
+themselves at peace. I saw her wandering out and out, mile beyond mile,
+to undwelt-in places, and the tender mercy of wolves.
+
+We crossed the ferry and took to the trail, Pierre Grignon talking
+cheerfully.
+
+"Nothing has happened to her, M's'r Williams," he insisted. "No Indian
+about La Baye would hurt her, and the child is not so crazy as to hurt
+herself."
+
+It was a starless night, muffled overhead as the day had been, but
+without rain or mist. He had a lantern hanging at his saddle bow, ready
+to light. In the open lands we rode side by side, but through growths
+along the Fox first one and then the other led the way.
+
+We found my door unfastened. I remembered for the first time I had not
+locked it. Some one had been in the house. A low fire burned in the
+chimney. We stirred it and lighted the lantern. Footprints not our own
+had dried white upon the smooth dark floor.
+
+They pointed to the fireplace and out again. They had been made by a
+woman's feet.
+
+We descended the hill to the river, and tossed our light through every
+bush, the lantern blinking in the wind. We explored the ravine, the
+light stealing over white birches that glistened like alabaster. It was
+no use to call her name. She might be hidden behind a rock laughing at
+us. We had to surprise her to recover her. Skenedonk would have traced
+her where we lost the trail.
+
+When we went back to the house, dejected with physical weariness, I
+unstrapped the blanket and the food which Madame Ursule had sent, and
+brought them to Pierre Grignon. He threw the blanket on the settee, laid
+out bread and meat on the table, and ate, both of us blaming ourselves
+for sending the Indian on the other side of the river.
+
+We traced the hard route which I had followed the day before, and
+reached Green Bay about dawn. Pierre Grignon went to bed exhausted. I
+had some breakfast and waited for Skenedonk. He had not returned, but
+had sent one man back to say there was no clue. The meal was like a
+passover eaten in haste. I could not wait, but set out again, with a
+pillion which I had carried uselessly in the night strapped again upon
+the horse for her seat, in case I found her; and leaving word for the
+Oneida to follow.
+
+I had forgotten there was such a person as Abbé Edgeworth, when he led a
+horse upon the ferry boat.
+
+"You ride early as well as late. May I join you?"
+
+"I ride on a search which cannot interest you, monsieur."
+
+"You are mistaken. I understand what has disturbed the house, and I want
+to ride with you."
+
+"It will be hard for a horseman accustomed to avenues."
+
+"It will suit me perfectly."
+
+It did not suit me at all, but he took my coldness with entire courtesy.
+
+"Have you breakfasted, monsieur?"
+
+"I had my usual slice of bread and cup of water before rising," he
+answered.
+
+Again I led on the weary trail to my house. Abbé Edgeworth galloped
+well, keeping beside me where there was room, or riding behind where
+there was not. The air blew soft, and great shadow clouds ran in an
+upper current across the deepest blueness I had seen in many a day. The
+sun showed beyond rows of hills.
+
+I bethought myself to ask the priest if he knew anything about Count de
+Chaumont. He answered very simply and directly that he did; that I might
+remember Count de Chaumont was mentioned in Mittau. The count, he said,
+according to common report, had retired with his daughter and his
+son-in-law to Blois, where he was vigorously rebuilding his ruined
+chateau of Chaumont.
+
+If my mind had been upon the priest, I should have wondered what he came
+for. He did not press his message.
+
+"The court is again in exile?" I said, when we could ride abreast.
+
+"At Ghent."
+
+"Bellenger visited me last September. He was without a dauphin."
+
+"We could supply the deficiency," Abbé Edgeworth pleasantly replied.
+
+"With the boy he left in Europe?"
+
+"Oh, dear no. With royal dukes. You observed his majesty could not
+pension a helpless idiot without encouraging dauphins. These dauphins
+are thicker than blackberries. The dauphin myth has become so common
+that whenever we see a beggar approaching, we say, 'There comes another
+dauphin.' One of them is a fellow who calls himself the Duke of
+Richemont. He has followers who believe absolutely in him. Somebody,
+seeing him asleep, declared it was the face of the dead king!"
+
+I felt stung, remembering the Marquis du Plessy's words.
+
+"Oh, yes, yes," said Abbé Edgeworth. "He has visions too. Half memories,
+when the face of his mother comes back to him!"
+
+"What about his scars?" I asked hardily.
+
+"Scars! yes, I am told he has the proper stigmata of the dauphin. He was
+taken out of the Temple prison; a dying boy being substituted for him
+there. We all know the dauphin's physician died suddenly; some say he
+was poisoned; and a new physician attended the boy who died in the
+Temple. Of course the priest who received the child's confession should
+have known a dauphin when he saw one. But that's neither here nor there.
+We lived then in surprising times."
+
+"Madame d'Angoulęme would recognize him as her brother if she saw him?"
+I suggested.
+
+"I think she is not so open to tokens as at one time. Women's hearts are
+tender. The Duchess d'Angoulęme could never be convinced that her
+brother died."
+
+"But others, including her uncle, were convinced?"
+
+"The Duke of Richemont was not. What do you yourself think, Monsieur
+Williams?"
+
+"I think that the man who is out is an infinite joke. He tickles the
+whole world. People have a right to laugh at a man who cannot prove he
+is what he says he is. The difference between a pretender and a usurper
+is the difference between the top of the hill and the bottom."
+
+The morning sun showed the white mortar ribs of my homestead clean and
+fair betwixt hewed logs; and brightened the inside of the entrance or
+hall room. For I saw the door stood open. It had been left unfastened
+but not ajar. Somebody was in the house.
+
+I told Abbé Edgeworth we would dismount and tie our horses a little
+distance away. And I asked him to wait outside and let me enter alone.
+
+He obligingly sauntered on the hill overlooking the Fox; I stepped upon
+the gallery and looked in.
+
+The sweep of a gray dress showed in front of the settle. Eagle was
+there. I stood still.
+
+She had put on more wood. Fire crackled in the chimney. I saw, and
+seemed to have known all night, that she had taken pieces of unbroken
+bread and meat left by Pierre Grignon on my table; that her shoes were
+cleaned and drying in front of the fire; that she must have carried her
+dress above contact with the soft ground.
+
+When I asked Abbé Edgeworth not to come in, her dread of strangers
+influenced me less than a desire to protect her from his eyes, haggard
+and draggled as she probably was. The instinct which made her keep her
+body like a temple had not failed under the strong excitement that drove
+her out. Whether she slept under a bush, or not at all, or took to the
+house after Pierre Grignon and I left it, she was resting quietly on the
+settle before the fireplace, without a stain of mud upon her.
+
+I could see nothing but the foot of her dress. Had any change passed
+over her face? Or had the undisturbed smile of my Cloud-Mother followed
+me on the road?
+
+Perhaps the cloud had thickened. Perhaps thunders and lightnings moved
+within it. Sane people sometimes turn wild after being lost, running
+from their friends, and fighting against being restrained and brought
+home.
+
+The gray dress in front of my hearth I could not see without a heaving
+of the breast.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+How a man's life is drawn, turned, shaped, by a woman! He may deny it.
+He may swagger and lie about it. Heredity, ambition, lust, noble
+aspirations, weak self-indulgence, power, failure, success, have their
+turns with him. But the woman he desires above all others, whose breast
+is his true home, makes him, mars him.
+
+Had she cast herself on the settle exhausted and ill after exposure?
+Should I find her muttering and helpless? Worse than all, had the night
+made her forget that she was a Cloud-Mother?
+
+I drew my breath with an audible sound in the throat. Her dress stirred.
+She leaned around the edge of the settle.
+
+Eagle de Ferrier, not my Cloud-Mother, looked at me. Her features were
+pinched from exposure, but flooded themselves instantly with a blush.
+She snatched her shoes from the hearth and drew them on.
+
+I was taken with such a trembling that I held to a gallery post.
+
+Suppose this glimpse of herself had been given to me only to be
+withdrawn! I was afraid to speak, and waited.
+
+She stood up facing me.
+
+"Louis!"
+
+"Madame!"
+
+"What is the matter, sire?"
+
+"Nothing, madame, nothing."
+
+"Where is Paul?"
+
+I did not know what to do, and looked at her completely helpless; for if
+I told her Paul was dead, she might relapse; and evasions must be
+temporary.
+
+"The Indian took him," she cried.
+
+"But the Indian didn't kill him, Eagle."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"Because Paul came to me."
+
+"He came to you? Where?"
+
+"At Fort Stephenson."
+
+"Where is my child?"
+
+"He is at Fort Stephenson."
+
+"Bring him to me!"
+
+"I can't bring him, Eagle."
+
+"Then let me go to him."
+
+I did not know what to say to her.
+
+"And there were Cousin Philippe and Ernestine lying across the step. I
+have been thinking all night. Do you understand it?"
+
+"Yes, I understand it, Eagle."
+
+By the time I had come into the house her mind leaped forward in
+comprehension. The blanket she had held on her shoulders fell around her
+feet. It was a striped gay Indian blanket.
+
+"You were attacked, and the settlement was burned."
+
+"But whose house is this?"
+
+"This is my house."
+
+"Did you bring me to your house?"
+
+"I wasn't there."
+
+"No, I remember. You were not there. I saw you the last time at the
+Tuileries."
+
+"When did you come to yourself, madame?"
+
+"I have been sick, haven't I? But I have been sitting by this fire
+nearly all night, trying to understand. I knew I was alone, because
+Cousin Philippe and Ernestine--I want Paul!"
+
+I looked at the floor, and must have appeared miserable. She passed her
+hands back over her forehead many times as if brushing something away.
+"If he died, tell me."
+
+"I held him, Eagle."
+
+"They didn't kill him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Or scalp him?"
+
+"The knife never touched him."
+
+"But--"
+
+"It was in battle."
+
+"My child died in battle? How long have I been ill?"
+
+"More than a year, Eagle."
+
+"And he died in battle?"
+
+"He had a wound in his side. He was brought into the fort, and I took
+care of him."
+
+She burst out weeping, and laughed and wept, the tears running down her
+face and wetting her bosom.
+
+"My boy! My little son! You held him! He died like a man!"
+
+I put her on the settle, and all the cloud left her in that tempest of
+rain. Afterwards I wiped her face with my handkerchief and she sat erect
+and still.
+
+A noise of many birds came from the ravine, and winged bodies darted
+past the door uttering the cries of spring. Abbé Edgeworth sauntered by
+and she saw him, and was startled.
+
+"Who is that?"
+
+"A priest."
+
+"When did he come?"
+
+"He rode here with me this morning."
+
+"Louis," she asked, leaning back, "who took care of me?"
+
+"You have been with the Grignons since you came to the Illinois
+Territory."
+
+"Am I in the Illinois Territory?"
+
+"Yes, I found you with the Grignons."
+
+"They must be kind people!"
+
+"They are; the earth's salt."
+
+"But who brought me to the Illinois Territory?"
+
+"A family named Jordan."
+
+"The Indians didn't kill them?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Why wasn't I killed?"
+
+"The Indians regarded you with superstition."
+
+"What have I said and done?"
+
+"Nothing, madame, that need give you any uneasiness."
+
+"But what did I say?" she insisted.
+
+"You thought you were a Cloud-Mother."
+
+"A Cloud-Mother!" She was astonished and asked, "What is a
+Cloud-Mother?"
+
+"You thought I was Paul, and you were my Cloud-Mother."
+
+"Did I say such a foolish thing as that?"
+
+"Don't call it foolish, madame."
+
+"I hope you will forget it."
+
+"I don't want to forget it."
+
+"But why are you in Illinois Territory, sire?"
+
+"I came to find land for the Iroquois. I intend to make a state with the
+tribe."
+
+"But what of France?"
+
+"Oh, France is over supplied with men who want to make a state of her.
+Louis XVIII has been on the throne eleven months, and was recently
+chased off by Napoleon.
+
+"Louis XVIII on the throne? Did true loyalists suffer that?"
+
+"Evidently."
+
+"Sire, what became of Napoleon?"
+
+"He was beaten by the allies and sent to Elba. Louis XVIII was brought
+in with processions. But in about eleven months Napoleon made a dash
+across France--"
+
+"Tell me slowly. You say I have been ill more than a year. I know
+nothing of what has happened."
+
+"Napoleon escaped from Elba, made a dash across France, and incidentally
+swept the Bourbon off the throne. The last news from Europe shows him
+gathering armies to meet the allies."
+
+"Oh, sire, you should have been there!"
+
+"Abbé Edgeworth suggests that France is well supplied with dauphins
+also. Turning off dauphins has been a pastime at court."
+
+"Abbé Edgeworth? You do not mean the priest you saw at Mittau?
+
+"Confessor and almoner to his majesty. The same man."
+
+"Is he here?"
+
+"You saw him pass the door."
+
+"Why has he come to America?"
+
+"I have not inquired."
+
+"Why is he here with you?"
+
+"Because it pleases him, not me."
+
+"He brings you some message?"
+
+"So he says."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I have not had time to ask."
+
+She stood up. As she became more herself and the spirit rushed forward
+in her face, I saw how her beauty had ripened. Hoeing corn and washing
+in the river does not coarsen well-born women. I knew I should feel the
+sweetness of her presence stinging through me and following me wherever
+I went in the world.
+
+"Call the priest in, sire. I am afraid I have hindered the interview."
+
+"I did not meet him with my arms open, madame."
+
+"But you would have heard what he had to say, if I had not been in your
+house. Why am I in your house?"
+
+"You came here."
+
+"Was I wandering about by myself?"
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"I thought I must have been walking. When I came to myself I was so
+tired, and my shoes were muddy. If you want to see the priest I will go
+into another room."
+
+"No, I will bring him in and let him give his message in your presence."
+
+When Abbé Edgeworth was presented to her, he slightly raised his
+eyebrows, but expressed no astonishment at meeting her lucid eyes. Nor
+did I explain--"God has given her back her senses in a night."
+
+The position in which she found herself was trying. She made him a grave
+courtesy. My house might have been the chateau in which she was born, so
+undisturbed was her manner. Her night wandering and mind-sickness were
+simply put behind us in the past, with her having taken refuge in my
+house, as matters which need not concern Abbé Edgeworth. He did not
+concern himself with them, but bent before her as if he had no doubt of
+her sanity.
+
+I asked her to resume her place on the settle. There was a stool for the
+abbé and one for myself. We could see the river glinting in its valley,
+and the windrows of heights beyond it. A wild bee darted into the room,
+droning, and out again, the sun upon its back.
+
+"Monsieur," I said to Abbé Edgeworth, "I am ready now to hear the
+message which you mentioned to me last night."
+
+"If madame will pardon me," he answered, "I will ask you to take me
+where we can confer alone."
+
+"It is not necessary, monsieur. Madame de Ferrier knows my whole story."
+
+But the priest moved his shoulders.
+
+"I followed you in this remote place, monsieur, that we might talk
+together without interruption, unembarrassed by any witness."
+
+Madame de Ferrier rose. I put her into her seat again with authority.
+
+"It is my wish, madame, to have at least one witness with Abbé Edgeworth
+and myself."
+
+"I hope," he protested, "that madame will believe there can be no
+objection to her presence. I am simply following instructions. I was
+instructed to deliver my message in private."
+
+"Monsieur," Eagle answered, "I would gladly withdraw to another room."
+
+"I forbid it, madame," I said to her.
+
+"Very well," yielded Abbé Edgeworth.
+
+He took a folded paper from his bosom, and spoke to me with startling
+sharpness.
+
+"You think I should address you as Monseigneur, as the dauphin of France
+should be addressed?"
+
+"I do not press my rights. If I did, monsieur the abbé, you would not
+have the right to sit in my presence."
+
+"Suppose we humor your fancy. I will address you as Monseigneur. Let us
+even go a little farther and assume that you are known to be the dauphin
+of France by witnesses who have never lost track of you. In that case,
+Monseigneur, would you put your name to a paper resigning all claim upon
+the throne?"
+
+"Is this your message?"
+
+"We have not yet come to the message."
+
+"Let us first come to the dauphin. When dauphins are as plentiful as
+blackberries in France and the court never sees a beggar appear without
+exclaiming: 'Here comes another dauphin!'--why, may I ask, is Abbé
+Edgeworth sent so far to seek one?"
+
+He smiled.
+
+"We are supposing that Monseigneur, in whose presence I have the honor
+to be, is the true dauphin."
+
+"That being the case, how are we to account for the true dauphin's
+reception at Mittau?"
+
+"The gross stupidity and many blunders of agents that the court was
+obliged to employ, need hardly be assumed."
+
+"Poor Bellenger! He has to take abuse from both sides in order that we
+may be polite to each other."
+
+"As Monseigneur suggests, we will not go into that matter."
+
+Eagle sat as erect as a statue and as white.
+
+I felt an instant's anxiety. Yet she had herself entirely at command.
+
+"We have now arrived at the paper, I trust," said the priest.
+
+"The message?"
+
+"Oh, no. The paper in which you resign all claim to the throne of
+France, and which may give you the price of a principality in this
+country."
+
+"I do not sign any such paper."
+
+"Not at all?"
+
+"Not at all."
+
+"You are determined to hold to your rights?"
+
+"I am determined not to part with my rights."
+
+"Inducements large enough might be offered." He paused suggestively.
+
+"The only man in France," I said, "empowered to treat for abdication of
+the throne at present, is Napoleon Bonaparte. Did you bring a message
+from him?"
+
+Abbé Edgeworth winced, but laughed.
+
+"Napoleon Bonaparte will not last. All Europe is against him. I see we
+have arrived at the message."
+
+He rose and handed me the paper he held in his hand. I rose and received
+it, and read it standing.
+
+It was one brief line:--
+
+     "Louis: You are recalled.
+                  Marie-Therese."
+
+The blood must have rushed over my face. I had a submerged feeling,
+looking out of it at the priest.
+
+"Well, Monseigneur?"
+
+"It is like her heavenly goodness."
+
+"Do you see nothing but her heavenly goodness in it?"
+
+"This is the message?"
+
+"It is a message I crossed the ocean to bring."
+
+"With the consent of her uncle?"
+
+"Madame d'Angoulęme never expresses a wish contrary to the wishes of his
+majesty."
+
+"We are then to suppose that Louis XVIII offers me, through you,
+monsieur, the opportunity to sign away my rights, and failing that, the
+opportunity of taking them?"
+
+"Supposing you are Monseigneur the dauphin, we will let our supposition
+run as far as this."
+
+I saw distinctly the position of Louis XVIII. Marquis du Plessy had told
+me he was a mass of superstition. No doubt he had behaved, as Bellenger
+said, for the good of the royalist cause. But the sanction of heaven was
+not on his behavior. Bonaparte was let loose on him like the dragon from
+the pit. And Frenchmen, after yawning eleven months or so in the king's
+august face, threw up their hats for the dragon. In his second exile the
+inner shadow and the shadow of age combined against him. He had tasted
+royalty. It was not as good as he had once thought. Beside him always,
+he saw the face of Marie-Therese. She never forgot the hushed mystery of
+her brother. Her silence and obedience to the crown, her loyalty to
+juggling and evasion, were more powerful than resistance.
+
+A young man, brought suddenly before the jaded nation and proclaimed at
+an opportune moment, might be a successful toy. The sore old king would
+oil more than the royalist cause, and the blessing of heaven would
+descend on one who restored the veritable dauphin.
+
+I never have seen the most stupid man doubt his power to ride if
+somebody hoists him into the saddle.
+
+"Let us go farther with our suppositions," I said. "Suppose I decline?"
+
+I heard Madame de Ferrier gasp.
+
+The priest raised his eyebrows.
+
+"In that case you will be quite willing to give me a signed paper
+declaring your reasons."
+
+"I sign no paper."
+
+"Let me suggest that Monseigneur is not consistent. He neither resigns
+his supposed rights nor will he exercise them."
+
+"I will neither resign them nor exercise them."
+
+"This is virtually resigning them."
+
+"The abbé will pardon me for saying it is not. My rights are mine,
+whether I use them or not."
+
+"Monseigneur understands that opportunity is a visitor that comes but
+once."
+
+"I understand that the most extraordinary thing has happened to-day that
+will ever go unrecorded in history. One Bourbon offers to give away a
+throne he has lost and another Bourbon refuses it."
+
+"You may well say it will go unrecorded in history. Excepting this
+lady,"--the abbé bowed toward Eagle,--"there is no witness."
+
+"Wise precautions have been taken," I agreed. "This scrap of paper may
+mean anything or nothing."
+
+"You decline?" he repeated.
+
+"I think France is done with the Bourbons, monsieur the abbé. A fine
+spectacle they have made of themselves, cooling their heels all over
+Europe, waiting for Napoleon's shoes! Will I go sneaking and trembling
+to range myself among impotent kings and wrangle over a country that
+wants none of us? No, I never will! I see where my father slipped. I see
+where the eighteenth Louis slipped. I am a man tenacious beyond belief.
+You cannot loose my grip when I take hold. But I never have taken hold,
+I never will take hold--of my native country, struggling as she is to
+throw off hereditary rule!"
+
+"You are an American!" said Abbé Edgeworth contemptuously.
+
+"If France called to me out of need, I would fight for her. A lifetime
+of peaceful years I would toss away in a minute to die in one achieving
+battle for her. But she neither calls me nor needs me. A king is not
+simply an appearance--a continuation of hereditary rights!"
+
+"Your position is incredible," said the priest.
+
+"I do not belittle the prospect you open before me. I see the practical
+difficulties, but I see well the magnificence beyond them."
+
+"Then why do you hesitate?"
+
+"I don't hesitate. A man is contemptible who stands shivering and
+longing outside of what he dare not attempt. I would dare if I longed.
+But I don't long."
+
+"Monseigneur believes there will be complications?"
+
+"I know my own obstinacy. A man who tried to work me with strings behind
+a throne, would think he was struck by lightning."
+
+"Sire," Madame de Ferrier spoke out, "this is the hour of your life.
+Take your kingdom."
+
+"I should have to take it, madame, if I got it. My uncle of Provence has
+nothing to give me. He merely says--'My dear dauphin, if Europe knocks
+Napoleon down, will you kindly take hold of a crank which is too heavy
+for me, and turn it for the good of the Bourbons? We may thus keep the
+royal machine in the family!'"
+
+"You have given no adequate reason for declining this offer," said the
+priest.
+
+"I will give no reason. I simply decline."
+
+"Is this the explanation that I shall make to Madame d'Angoulęme? Think
+of the tender sister who says--'Louis, you are recalled!"
+
+"I do think of her. God bless her!"
+
+"Must I tell her that Monseigneur planted his feet like one of these
+wild cattle, and wheeled, and fled from the contemplation of a throne?"
+
+"You will dress it up in your own felicitous way, monsieur."
+
+"What do you wish me to say?"
+
+"That I decline. I have not pressed the embarrassing question of why I
+was not recalled long ago. I reserve to myself the privilege of
+declining without saying why I decline."
+
+"He must be made to change his mind, monsieur!" Madame de Ferrier
+exclaimed.
+
+"I am not a man that changes his mind every time the clock strikes."
+
+I took the padlocked book out of my breast and laid it upon the table. I
+looked at the priest, not at her. The padlocked book seemed to have no
+more to do with the conversation, than a hat or a pair of gloves.
+
+I saw, as one sees from the side of the eye, the scarlet rush of blood
+and the snow-white rush of pallor which covered her one after the other.
+The moment was too strenuous. I could not spare her. She had to bear it
+with me.
+
+She set her clenched hands on her knees.
+
+"Sire!"
+
+I faced her. The coldest look I ever saw in her gray eyes repelled me,
+as she deliberately said--
+
+"You are not such a fool!"
+
+I stared back as coldly and sternly, and deliberately answered--
+
+"I am--just--such a fool!"
+
+"Consider how any person who might be to blame for your decision, would
+despise you for it afterwards!"
+
+"A boy in the first flush of his youth," Abbé Edgeworth said, his fine
+jaws squared with a grin, "might throw away a kingdom for some woman who
+took his fancy, and whom he could not have perhaps, unless he did throw
+his kingdom away. And after he had done it he would hate the woman. But
+a young man in his strength doesn't do such things!"
+
+"A king who hasn't spirit to be a king!" Madame de Ferrier mocked.
+
+I mercilessly faced her down.
+
+"What is there about me? Sum me up. I am robbed on every side by any one
+who cares to fleece me. Whenever I am about to accomplish anything I
+fall down as if knocked on the head!"
+
+She rose from her seat.
+
+"You let yourself be robbed because you are princely! You have plainly
+left behind you every weakness of your childhood. Look at him in his
+strength, Monsieur Abbé! He has sucked in the vigor of a new country!
+The failing power of an old line of kings is renewed in him! You could
+not have nourished such a dauphin for France in your exiled court!
+Burying in the American soil has developed what you see for
+yourself--the king!"
+
+"He is a handsome man," Abbé Edgeworth quietly admitted.
+
+"Oh, let his beauty alone! Look at his manhood--his kinghood!"
+
+"Of what use is his kinghood if he will not exercise it?"
+
+"He must!"
+
+She turned upon me fiercely.
+
+"Have you no ambition?"
+
+"Yes, madame. But there are several kinds of ambition, as there are
+several kinds of success. You have to knock people down with each kind,
+if you want it acknowledged. As I told you awhile ago, I am tenacious
+beyond belief, and shall succeed in what I undertake."
+
+"What are you undertaking?"
+
+"I am not undertaking to mount a throne."
+
+"I cannot believe it! Where is there a man who would turn from what is
+offered you? Consider the life before you in this country. Compare it
+with the life you are throwing away." She joined her hands. "Sire, the
+men of my house who fought for the kings of yours, plead through me that
+you will take your inheritance."
+
+I kept my eyes on Abbé Edgeworth. He considered the padlocked book as an
+object directly in his line of vision. Its wooden covers and small metal
+padlock attracted the secondary attention we bestow on trifles when we
+are at great issues.
+
+I answered her,
+
+"The men of your house--and the women of your house, madame--cannot
+dictate what kings of my house should do in this day."
+
+"Well as you appear to know him, madame," said Abbé Edgeworth, "and
+loyally as you urge him, your efforts are wasted."
+
+She next accused me--
+
+"You hesitate on account of the Indians!"
+
+"If there were no Indians in America, I should do just as I am doing."
+
+"All men," the abbé noted, "hold in contempt a man who will not grasp
+power when he can."
+
+"Why should I grasp power? I have it in myself. I am using it."
+
+"Using it to ruin yourself!" she cried.
+
+"Monseigneur!" The abbé rose. We stood eye to eye. "I was at the side of
+the king your father upon the scaffold. My hand held to his lips the
+crucifix of our Lord Jesus Christ. In his death no word of bitterness
+escaped him. True son of St. Louis, he supremely loved France. Upon you
+he laid injunction to leave to God alone the punishment of regicides,
+and to devote your life to the welfare of all Frenchmen. Monseigneur!
+are you deaf to this call of sacred duty? The voice of your father from
+the scaffold, in this hour when the fortunes of your house are lowest,
+bids you take your rightful place and rid your people of the usurper who
+grinds France and Europe into the blood-stained earth!"
+
+I wheeled and walked across the floor from Abbé Edgeworth, and turned
+again and faced him.
+
+"Monsieur, you have put a dart through me. If anything in the universe
+could move me from my position, what you have said would do it. But my
+father's blood cries through me to-day--'Shall the son of Louis XVI be
+forced down the unwilling throats of his countrymen by foreign
+bayonets?--Russians--Germans--English!--Shall the dauphin of France be
+hoisted to place by the alien?'--My father would forbid it! . . . You
+appeal to my family love. I bear about with me everywhere the pictured
+faces of my family. The father whose name you invoke, is always close to
+my heart. That royal duchess, whom you are privileged to see daily,
+monsieur, and I--never--is so dear and sacred to me that I think of her
+with a prayer. . . . But my life is here. . . . Monsieur, in this new
+world, no man can say to me--'Come,' or 'Go.' I am as free as the Indian.
+But the pretender to the throne of France, the puppet of Russia, of
+England, of the enemies of my country,--a slave to policy and intrigue--a
+chained wanderer about Europe--O my God! to be such a pretender--gasping
+for air--for light--as I gasped in Ste. Pélagie!--O let me be a free
+man--a free man!"
+
+The old churchman whispered over and over--
+
+"My royal son!"
+
+My arms dropped relaxed.
+
+There was another reason. I did not give it. I would not give it.
+
+We heard the spring wind following the river channel--and a far faint
+call that I knew so well--the triangular wild flock in the upper air,
+flying north.
+
+"Honk! honk!" It was the jubilant cry of freedom!
+
+"Madame," said Abbé Edgeworth, resting his head on his hands, "I have
+seen many stubborn Bourbons, but he is the most obstinate of them all.
+We do not make as much impression on him as that little padlocked book."
+
+Her terrified eyes darted at him--and hid their panic.
+
+"Monsieur Abbé," she exclaimed piercingly, "tell him no woman will love
+him for throwing away a kingdom!"
+
+The priest began once more.
+
+"You will not resign your rights?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You will not exercise them?"
+
+"No."
+
+"If I postpone my departure from to-day until to-morrow, or next week,
+or next month, is there any possibility of your reconsidering this
+decision?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Monseigneur, must I leave you with this answer?"
+
+"Your staying cannot alter it, Monsieur Abbé."
+
+"You understand this ends all overtures from France?"
+
+"I understand."
+
+"Is there nothing that you would ask?"
+
+"I would ask Madame d'Angoulęme to remember me."
+
+[Illustration: "Louis! You are a king! You are a king!"]
+
+He came forward like a courtier, lifted my hand to his lips, and kissed
+it.
+
+"With your permission, Monseigneur, I will now retire and ride slowly
+back along the river until you overtake me. I should like to have some
+time for solitary thought."
+
+"You have my permission, Monsieur Abbé."
+
+He bowed to Madame de Ferrier, and so moving to the door, he bowed again
+to me, and took his leave.
+
+His horse's impatient start, and his remonstrance as he mounted, came
+plainly to our ears. The regular beat of hoofs upon the sward followed;
+then an alternating tap-tap of horse's feet diminished down the trail.
+
+Eagle and I avoided looking at each other.
+
+A bird inquired through the door with inquisitive chirp, and was away.
+
+Volcanoes, and whirlwinds, fire, and all force, held themselves
+condensed and quiescent in the still room.
+
+I moved first, laying Marie-Therese's message on the padlocked book.
+Standing with folded arms I faced Eagle, and she as stonily faced me. It
+was a stare of unspeakable love that counts a thousand years as a day.
+
+She shuddered from head to foot. Thus a soul might ripple in passing
+from its body.
+
+"I am not worth a kingdom!" her voice wailed through the room.
+
+I opened my arms and took her. Volcanoes and whirlwinds, fire, and all
+force, were under our feet. We trod them breast to breast.
+
+She held my head between her hands. The tears streamed down her face.
+
+"Louis!--you are a king!--you are a king!"
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+A LIST OF RECENT FICTION OF THE BOWEN-MERRILL COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER
+
+Over one-quarter of a million copies have been sold of this great
+historical love-story of Princess Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII.
+Price, $1.50
+
+ASK YOUR BOOKSELLER FOR IT
+
+
+
+
+A VIVACIOUS ROMANCE OF REVOLUTIONARY DAYS
+
+ALICE _of_ OLD VINCENNES
+
+By MAURICE THOMPSON
+
+_The Atlanta Constitution says_:
+
+"Mr. Thompson, whose delightful writings in prose and verse have made
+his reputation national, has achieved his master stroke of genius in
+this historical novel of revolutionary days in the West."
+
+_The Denver Daily News says_:
+
+"There are three great chapters of fiction: Scott's tournament on Ashby
+field, General Wallace's chariot race, and now Maurice Thompson's duel
+scene and the raising of Alice's flag over old Fort Vincennes."
+
+_The Chicago Times-Herald says_:
+
+"More original than 'Richard Carvel,' more cohesive than 'To Have and To
+Hold,' more vital than 'Janice Meredith,' such is Maurice Thompson's
+superb American romance, 'Alice of Old Vincennes.' It is, in addition,
+more artistic and spontaneous than any of its rivals."
+
+12mo, with five illustrations and a frontispiece in color, all drawn by
+Mr. F.C. Yohn
+
+Price, $1.50
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+
+"A NOVEL THAT'S WORTH WHILE"
+
+_The_ REDEMPTION _of_ DAVID CORSON
+
+By CHARLES FREDERIC GOSS
+
+A Mid-century American Novel of Intense Power and Interest
+
+_The Interior says:_
+
+"This is a book that is worth while. Though it tells of weakness and
+wickedness, of love and license, of revenge and remorse in an intensely
+interesting way, yet it is above all else a clean and pure story. No one
+can read it and honestly ask 'what's the use.'"
+
+_Newell Dwight Hillis, Pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, says:_
+
+"'The Redemption of David Corson' strikes a strong, healthy, buoyant
+note.'"
+
+_Dr. F.W. Gunsaulus, President Armour Institute, says:_
+
+"Mr. Goss writes with the truthfulness of light. He has told a story in
+which the fact of sin is illuminated with the utmost truthfulness and
+the fact of redemption is portrayed with extraordinary power. There are
+lines of greatness in the book which I shall never forget."
+
+_President M.W. Stryker, Hamilton College, says:_
+
+"It is a victory in writing for one whose head seems at last to have
+matched his big human heart. There is ten times as much of reality in it
+as there is in 'David Harum,' which does not value lightly that
+admirable charcoal sketch."
+
+Price, $1.50
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+
+"AS CRISP AND CLEAN CUT AS A NEW MINTAGE."
+
+THE PUPPET CROWN
+
+BY HAROLD MACGRATH
+
+A princess rarely beautiful; a duchess magnificent and heartless; a
+villain revengeful and courageous; a hero youthful, humorous, fearless
+and truly American;--such are the principal characters of this
+delightful story.--_Syracuse Post-Standard_.
+
+Harold MacGrath has attained the highest point achievable in recent
+fiction. We have the climax of romance and adventure in "The Puppet
+Crown."--_The Philadelphia North American_.
+
+Superior to most of the great successes.--_St. Paul Pioneer Press_.
+
+"The Puppet Crown" is a profusion of cleverness.--_Baltimore American_.
+
+Challenges comparison with authors whose names have become
+immortal--_Chicago American_.
+
+Latest entry in the list of winners.--_Cleveland World_.
+
+With illustrations by R. Martine Reay
+
+12mo. Price, $1.50.
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+
+FULL _of_ INCIDENT, ACTION & COLOR
+
+LIKE ANOTHER HELEN
+
+By GEORGE HORTON
+
+Mr. Horton's powerful romance stands in a new field and brings an almost
+unknown world in reality before the reader--the world of conflict
+between Greek and Turk.
+
+The island of Crete seems real and genuine after reading this book; not
+a mere spot on the map. The tragic and pathetic troubles of this people
+are told with sympathetic force.
+
+Mr. Horton employs a vivid style that keeps the interest alive and many
+passages are filled with delicate poetic feeling.
+
+Things happen and the story moves. The characters are well conceived and
+are human and convincing. Beyond question Mr. Horton's fine story is
+destined to take high rank among the books of the day.
+
+With illustrations by C.M. Relyea
+
+12mo, Cloth bound
+
+Price, $1.50
+
+_The Chicago Times-Herald says:_
+
+"Here are chapters that are Stephen Crane plus sympathy; chapters of
+illuminated description fragrant with the atmosphere of art."
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+
+ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL HISTORICAL NOVEL
+
+THE BLACK WOLF'S BREED
+
+By HARRIS DICKSON
+
+_From the Boston Globe:_
+
+"A vigorous tale of France in the old and new world during the reign of
+Louis XIV."
+
+_From the Philadelphia Press:_
+
+"As delightfully seductive as certain mint-flavored beverages they make
+down South."
+
+_From the Los Angeles Herald:_
+
+"The sword-play is great, even finer than the pictures in 'To Have and
+To Hold.'"
+
+_From the San Francisco Chronicle:_
+
+"As fine a piece of sustained adventure as has appeared in recent
+fiction."
+
+_From the St. Louis Globe-Democrat:_
+
+"There is action, vivid description and intensely dramatic situations."
+
+_From the Indianapolis News:_
+
+"So full of tender love-making, of gallant fighting, that one regrets
+it's no longer."
+
+Illustrated by C.M. Relyea. Price $1.50
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+
+A FINE STORY OF THE COWBOY AT HIS BEST
+
+WITH HOOPS _of_ STEEL
+
+By FLORENCE FINCH KELLY
+
+     "The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
+     Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_From the San Francisco Chronicle:_
+
+"Western men and women will read it because it paints faithfully the
+life which they know so well, and because it gives us three big, manly
+fellows, fine types of the cowboy at his best. Eastern readers will be
+attracted by its splendid realism."
+
+_From Julian Hawthorne:_
+
+"For my own part, I finished it all in one day, and dreamt it over again
+that night. And I am an old hand, heaven knows"
+
+_From the Denver Times:_
+
+"Mrs. Kelly's character stands out from the background of the New
+Mexican plains, desert and mountain with all the distinctness of a
+Remington sketch."
+
+With six illustrations, in color, by Dan Smith
+
+Price, $1.50
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+
+A NOVEL OF EARLY NEW YORK
+
+PATROON VAN VOLKENBERG
+
+By HENRY THEW STEPHENSON
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_From the New York Press:_
+
+"Many will compare 'Patroon Van Volkenberg,' with its dash, style and
+virility, with 'Richard Carvel,' and in that respect they will be right,
+as one would compare the strong, sturdy and spreading elm with a slender
+sapling."
+
+
+The action of this stirring story begins when New York was a little city
+of less than 5,000 inhabitants.
+
+The Governor has forbidden the port to the free traders or pirate ships,
+which sailed boldly under their own flag; while the Patroon and his
+merchant colleagues not only traded openly with the buccaneers, but
+owned and managed such illicit craft. The story of the clash of these
+conflicting interests and the resulting exciting happenings is
+absorbing.
+
+The atmosphere of the tale is fresh in fiction, the plot is stirring and
+well knit, and the author is possessed of the ability to write forceful,
+fragrant English.
+
+
+_From the Brooklyn Standard-Union:_
+
+"The tale is one of vibrant quality. It can not be read at a leisurely
+pace. It bears the reader through piratical seas and buccaneering
+adventures, through storm and stress of many sorts, but it lands him
+safely, and leads him to peace."
+
+12mo,
+
+Illustrated in color by C.M. Relyea
+
+Price, $1.50
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+
+A STORY OF THE MORGAN RAID, DURING THE WAR _of the_ REBELLION
+
+THE LEGIONARIES
+
+By HENRY SCOTT CLARK
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Memphis Commercial-appeal says:_
+
+"The backbone of the story is Morgan's great raid--one of the most
+romantic and reckless pieces of adventure ever attempted in the history
+of the world. Mr. Clark's description of the Ride of the Three Thousand
+is a piece of literature that deserves to live; and is as fine in its
+way as the chariot race from 'Ben Hur.'"
+
+_The Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune says:_
+
+"'The Legionaries' is pervaded with what seems to be the true spirit of
+artistic impartiality. The author is simply a narrator. He stands aside,
+regarding with equal eye all the issues involved and the scales dip not
+in his hands. To sum up, the first romance of the new day on the Ohio is
+an eminently readable one--a good yarn well spun."
+
+_The Rochester Herald says:_
+
+"The appearance of a new novel in the West marks an epoch in fiction
+relating to the war between the sections for the preservation of the
+Union. 'The Legionaries' is a remarkable book, and we can scarcely
+credit the assurance that it is the work of a new writer."
+
+12mo, illustrated Price, $1.50
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF AN AMERICAN CRUCIFIXION
+
+THE PENITENTES
+
+By LOUIS HOW
+
+_The Chicago Record says:_
+
+"To describe the customs of this band of intensely religious people, to
+retain all the color and picturesqueness of the original scene without
+excess, was the difficult task which Mr. How has done well."
+
+_The Brooklyn Eagle says:_
+
+"The author has been fortunate enough to unearth a colossal American
+tragedy."
+
+_The Chicago Tribune says:_
+
+"'The Penitentes' abounds in dramatic possibilities. It is full of
+action, warm color and variety. The denouement at the little church of
+San Rafael, when the soldiers surprise the Penitentes at mass in the
+early dawn of their fete day, will appeal strongly to the dramatizer."
+
+_The Interior says:_
+
+"Mr. How has done a truly remarkable piece of work . . . any hand,
+however practiced, might well be proud of the marvelously good
+descriptions, the dramatic, highly unusual story, the able
+characterizations."
+
+12mo, Cloth, Ornamental
+
+Price, $1.50
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+
+THE SUBTLE SPIRIT OF THE SEA
+
+SWEEPERS OF THE SEA
+
+The Story of a Strange Navy
+
+By CLAUDE H. WETMORE
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_From the St. Louis Mirror:_
+
+"The recital of the deeds of the 'Sweepers of the Sea' is a breathless
+one. The romance is heightened by the realism of the technique of naval
+warfare, by the sureness and voluminosity of nautical knowledge."
+
+_From the Buffalo Review:_
+
+"It rivals Stevenson in its ingenuity of plot and dramatic interest."
+
+_From the Albany Journal:_
+
+"There rings the exultant note of tossing billows and a crashing ship."
+
+_From the Minneapolis Times:_
+
+"Mr. Wetmore has the genius of Jules Verne and can make the improbable
+seem the actual. In fact, 'Sweepers of the Sea' comes into the class of
+important fiction, and as such will be received and read by a
+discriminating public."
+
+Illustrated Price, $1.50
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+
+A STORY TOLD BY A REAL STORYTELLER
+
+A SON OF AUSTERITY
+
+By GEORGE KNIGHT
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Knight has created a real atmosphere for his men and women to
+breathe, and his men and women take deep breaths. They are alive, they
+are human, they are real.
+
+He has a delightful story to tell and knows how to tell it. It is a
+story of human life, of possible people in possible situations, living
+out their little span of life in that state in which it has pleased God
+to call them.
+
+The reader realizes at once that Mr. Knight is a man who served his
+seven years of apprenticeship before opening a shop on his own account.
+
+The deftness and charm of his literary style, combined with the
+absorbing interest of the story, can not but prove a delight to every
+reader.
+
+With a frontispiece by Harrison Fisher
+
+12mo, Cloth. Price, $1.50
+
+_The Liverpool Mercury says:_
+
+"This is a book far removed from the ordinary mass of featureless
+fiction. There is no gainsaying the strength of characterization and the
+command of English language."
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+
+VIGOROUS, ELEMENTAL, DRAMATIC
+
+A HEART OF FLAME
+
+The story of a Master Passion
+
+BY CHARLES FLEMING EMBREE
+
+Author of "A Dream of a Throne."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The men and women in this story are children of the soil. Their strength
+is in their nearness to nature. Their minds are vigorous, their bodies
+powerful, their passions elemental, their courage sublime. They are
+loyal in friendship, persistent in enmity, determined in purpose.
+
+The story is a story of great wrongs and of supreme love. It is done in
+black and white, with few strokes, but they are masterly. The shadows at
+the back are sombre but the value of contrast is appreciated for the
+vivid high light in the foreground.
+
+It is a work of art--powerful, convincing and abiding. Powerful, because
+true to life; convincing, for it has the saving touch of humor; and
+abiding because love, like "A Heart of Flame," prevails in the end.
+
+With illustrations by Dan Smith
+
+12mo. cloth. Price, $1.50.
+
+The Bowen-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAZARRE***
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