Lazarre

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.

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."

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.

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.