The Young Seigneur | Page 6

grandmother; and
with the last of his two or three sentences, "I don't destine him for a

Thibetan prayer-mill," (she had fondly intended me for the priesthood)
he sat down to a letter, the result of which was that I found myself in a
week at the Royal Grammar School at Montreal. Here, where the great
city appeared a wilderness of palaces and the large School an almost
universe of youthful Crichtons whose superiorities seemed to me the
greater because I knew little of their English tongue, the contrasts with
my rural Dormillière were so striking and continual that I was set
thinking by almost every occurrence.
A French boy is nothing if not imaginative. The time seemed to me a
momentous epoch big with the question: "What path shall I follow?"
I admired the prize boys who were so clever and famous. I took a prize
myself, and felt heaven in the clapping.
I admired those equally who were skilled at athletics. I saw a
tournament of sports and envied the sparkling cups and medals.
These,--to be a brilliant man of learning and an athlete--seemed to me
the two great careers of existence!
The first step, out of a number that were to come, towards a great
discovery, was thus unconsciously by me taken. What is greater than
Life? what discovery is more momentous than of its profound meaning?
Anything I am or may do is the outcome of this one discovery I later
made, which seems to me the very Secret of the World.
* * * * *
But hold:--there is a memory in my earlier recollection, more fixed than
the trees--they were poplars--of the Friars' School playground. I leaped
into a seat beside my father in the carriage one day, and we drove back
far into the country. Green and pleasant all the landscape we passed. Or
did it pass us, I was thinking in my weird little mind? We arrived at
length at wide gates and drove up an avenue, lined by stately trees and
running between broad grain fields, which led to a court shaded with
leafy giants of elms and cobbled in an antique fashion; and under the
woof of boughs and leaves overhead ran a very long old country-house,

cottage-built. Surpassingly peaceful, and secluded was its air. It had
oblique-angle-faced, shingled gables, and many windows with
thin-ribbed blinds; and a high bit of gallery. On one hand near it, under
the hugest of the trees was a cool, white, well-house of stone, like a
little tower. I remember vividly the red-stained door of that. On the
other hand, a short distance off, commenced the capacious pile of the
barns. Close at the back of the house ran a long wooded hill.
It was the ancient Manoir of Esneval--the Maison Blanche.--one of the
relics of a feudal time. As we drove in and our wheels stopped, a little
exquisite girl stood on the gallery, looking. Her child's face eyed us
with wonder but courage for a few moments; then she ran within and,
to the pang and regret of my heart, she appeared no more.
The little, brave face of the Manoir d'Esneval haunted me, child as I
was, for years.
CHAPTER V.
CONFRERIE.
McGill University sits among her grounds upon the beginning of the
slope of Mount Royal which lifts its foliage-foaming crest above it like
an immense surge just about to break and bury the grey halls, the
verdant Campus and the lovely secluded corner of brookside park. It
owes its foundation to a public-spirited gentleman merchant of other
days, the Honorable James McGill, whose portrait, in queue and ruffles,
is brought forth in state at Founder's Festival, and who in the days of
the Honorable Hudson's Bay Co.'s prime, stored his merchandize in the
stout old blue warehouses[D] by the Place Jacques-Cartier, and thought
out his far-sighted gifts to the country in the retirement of this pretty
manor by the Mountain.
[Footnote D: NOTE--Now turned into the restaurant called the
"Chateau de Ramezay," and soon probably to be demolished.]
To that little corner of brookside park it was often my custom to
withdraw in the evenings. The trees, little and great, were my

companions, and the sky looked down like a friend, between their
leaves. One night, at summer's close, when the dark blue of the sky was
unusually deep and luminous, and the moon only a tender crescent of
light, I lay on the grass in the darkness, under my favorite tree, an oak,
among whose boughs the almost imperceptible moonbeams rioted. I
was hidden by the shadows of a little grove just in front of me. The
path passed between, about a couple of yards away. Every stroller
seemed to have gone, and I had, I thought, the peace of the