Lazarre. Mary Hartwell Catherwood
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