CHAPTER VI.
D'HABERVILLE MANOR HOUSE.
Je bénis le soleil, je bénis la lune et les astres qui étoilent le ciel. Je bénis aussi les petits oiseaux qui gazouillent dans l'air.
Henri Heine.
D'haberville Manor House was situated at the foot of a bluff which covered about nine acres of the seigniory, on the south side of the highway. This bluff was about a hundred feet high and very picturesque. Its summit was clothed with pines and firs, whose perpetual green formed a cheerful contrast with the desolation of the winter landscape. Jules D'Haberville used to compare these trees, triumphing on their height and flaunting their fadeless green in the face of the harshest seasons, to the mighty ones of the earth whose strength and happiness are beyond the reach of vicissitude, however much the poor may shiver at their feet.
One might well believe that the brush of a Claude Lorraine had exercised itself in adorning the flanks and base of this hill, so endless was the variety of the trees which had gathered thither from all the neighboring woodlands. Elm, maple, birch, and beech, red thorn, cherry, ash, and cedar, sumach, and all the other native trees which are the glory of our forests, combined to throw a cloak of all imaginable greens over the rugged outlines of the bluff.
A wood of ancient maples covered the space between the foot of the bluff and the highway, which was bordered with hedges of hazel and cinnamon rose.
The first object to attract the eye on approaching the manor house was a brook, which, falling through the trees in a succession of foamy cascades down the southwest slope of the hill, mingled its clear current with that of a fountain which burst forth some distance below. After winding and loitering through a breadth of meadow country, the wedded streams slipped reluctantly into the St. Lawrence.
The spring, bubbling from the very heart of the hill into a basin cut from the living rock, preserves its icy coolness, its crystal purity, through the fiercest heats of summer. It was inclosed in those days in a little white-washed pavilion, thick shaded by a group of ancient trees. The seats arranged within and without this cool retreat, the cone-shaped drinking-cups of birch bark hanging on the wall, served as so many invitations from the nymph of the fount to wayfarers oppressed by the dog-star.
Fresh as of old, to this day the hill-top keeps its crown of emerald, the slope preserves its varied verdure; but of the ancient grove there remain but five gnarled maples. These trees, decaying little by little beneath the touch of time, like the closing years of the master of the domain, appear almost like a visible and ceaseless prophecy that his life will fade out with that of the last veteran of the grove. When the last log shall have been consumed in warming the old man's frozen limbs, its ashes will mingle with his own—a grim admonition, like that of the priest on Ash Wednesday: "Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, ut in pulverem reverteris."
The manor house, situated between the river St. Lawrence and the bluff, was divided from the water only by the highway, the grove, and a spacious yard. It was a one-storied structure with high gables, about a hundred feet long, with two wings of fifty feet. A bake-house, built into the northeast corner of the kitchen, served also the purpose of a laundry. A small attachment, adjoining the great drawing-room on the southwest, gave symmetry to the proportions of this piece of early Canadian architecture.
Two other small buildings at the southeast served, the one for a dairy, the other for a second wash-house. This wash-house stood over a well, which was connected by a long trough with the kitchen of the main building. Coach-houses, barns, stables, five small sheds (three of them standing in the grove), a kitchen garden to the southwest of the manor house, two orchards on the north and northeast, respectively—all these went to make up the establishment of one of the old French Canadian seigneurs. The habitants called the establishment "le village D'Haberville."