Lazarre

Lazarre, by Mary Hartwell
Catherwood,

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Title: Lazarre
Author: Mary Hartwell Catherwood
Release Date: February 19, 2005 [eBook #15108]
Language: English
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LAZARRE***
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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