Edwardian and Georgian Canadian Poets
1900-1930
 
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Canadian Houses
of Romance
by
Katherine Hale
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V
THE SEARCH FOR BELMONT
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NO one in Quebec seemed to have definite news of Belmont. But I was independent because of the happy find of an obscure number of one of Le Moine’s innumerable Maple Leaves. Also the porter at the Château had turned me over to the wisest of all his taxi drivers—and the oldest.
“He is a type of the old cocher. He knows the city. I have spoken to him of the place you require. He remembers it well. Trust all to him, madame, and you shall certainly arrive…Eh bien!…Henri!…Bonjour, madame….Merci.”
Henri seemed to me too frail to drive a car. But once on the way he was a shrill and spasmodic as the rest in his dealings with all forms of traffic that for a moment retarded our progress.
We were bound for the Ste. Foye Road and it is a pleasant drive along the Grande Alleé and past the Plains of Abraham north to what was a country road, and is now a straggling city, all strung out with churches and villas and rows of shops. The priceless Maple Leaf was in my hand and I read:
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This estate, which until lately consisted of four hundred and fifty acres, extending from the line of the Grande Alleé down to the Bijou wood, was conceded in 1649 by the Jesuit Fathers to [page 41] M. Godfroi. It was passed over in 1670 to the celebrated Intendant Talon, by Deed of Sale executed on the 28th September. 1670, before Romain Becquete, Notaire Royal…after the conquest it was sold for five hundred pounds to General James Murray, governor of Quebec…in 1775 we find that one of the first operations of the American General Montgomery was to take possession of Belmont.
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What cups of conquest passing from hand to hand in that old Château! Gay roysterers of times gone by…A fête champêtre of lively French officers from Quebec making merry over their Bordeaux or Burgundy, celebrating victories over the English at Fontenoy to the jocund sound of Vive la France! Vice le Maréchal Saxe!…Murray and his veterans, Guy Carlton, Hale, and Holland, giving Wolfe’s famous toast: “British colours on every French post and garrison in America.” ..Canadian Barons…And later the choice spirits who used to go to sip claret and have ices with Sir James Craig at Powell Place…Then Colonel Caldwell who had lived in such splendour at Belmont…
We still drove on and on.
“Where are we now?” I asked.
“Ste. Foye Road, Madame.”
The car stopped with a jerk. “I must tell you,” Henri volunteered in broken but admirable English, “that Monsieur Vakeem is no longer there.”
“But that is the wrong name,” I said. “I am going to a place called Belmont. It was once the home [page 42] of the Intendant Talon…very old…very historic. We should be coming close to the place now.”
“Non, madame,” Henri asserted, and his English disappeared in a torrent of French…There was no word about Talon or any of his successors in the stream of information which ensued.
I gave a brief survey, in careful French, of Belmont as I knew it. He shrugged his shoulders and repeated, “I know not. I will return and go backward if you desire.”
“Not at all,” said I. “Take me on then to the place of which you speak, the house of this monsieur.”
“But it is abandoned, madame.”
“No matter, I wish to see it!”
In the meantime it was softly, almost imperceptibly, beginning to rain and Henri could not get the top up. The more he struggled the more it refused. Deep in history, I had not watched the late afternoon grow so close and dark. The heat suddenly became terrific, the rain rushed on.
“Votre chapeau, madame!” said my cocher with sympathetic looks.
In Quebec one never expects to find a large house open during the summer, and we were now beyond the region of friendly shops. I could not allow my Ancient to drown before my eyes. At last a small [page 43] residence with a covered porch over the driveway appeared and we turned in. |
“Is anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door.
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How dark it had grown!..The rain seemed to slant persistently in our direction…My hat, and more than my hat, was now damp. Then, from some distance, I thought I heard the sound of voices.
“Demand of them the residence of Monsieur Vakeem,” admonished the dripping Henri.
I followed the voices around the gravel walk, and found two stout ladies seated on a back porch well out of the rain.
“Bon soir,” I remarked.
“Good evening,” they answered smartly.
I inquired for my house.
“An historic house near here? Are you sure it was on the Ste. Foye Road? A residence of Talon?…He was the old Intendant. He never lived out here, oh never! He had a house in town, in the old city,—”
I gave Sir James Le Moine as my authority.
“That is very singular,” said one of the ladies, “very singular indeed. Why, we have never even heard of Talon living in this direction, and we have been here for twenty-five years.”
“But this account was written fifty years ago—I mean Sir James’—and Belmont was deeded to Talon in—“ [page 44]
“Oh! Belmont did you say? That is different,” they fluttered, with amused smiles at one another, and after a gesture or two, “I suppose she means the Retreat.”
“Oh, no!” I protested.
“But yes, it must be Dr. Wakeham’s Asylum—the old Belmont.”
“Wakeham—Vakeem—so Henri’s name does come in,” I thought. “But how?” And I asked for information.
“Merely,” I was told, “that for years it was a maison santé for inebriates!” |
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The old ladies begged me not to proceed the half mile further on such a miserable evening. We became friends, and told each other news. In exchange for my picturesque history I got a delightfully gruesome story of decay, after Dr. Wakeham and his inebriates had departed. (“It was always too comfortable for drunkards. They actually kept up the grounds and the hedges.”) It seemed that now, although there was a sort of caretaker, the place was thought to be haunted, and was rumoured to be disreputable. The bones of an infant had been found in the furnace. “Anyway,” said the ladies, “we do not approve of your going there alone.” So, the rain being over, we set out forthwith and shortly came to stone pillars, set amid overhanging [page 45] shrubbery, and an iron gate with the word Belmont written thereon. The gate was locked. We went on beyond the high trees and hedges of an enormous garden to a small cottage where, my companions being respectfully recognized by the caretaker, we received a key and took our way over a long wet path through a small wood, choked with underbrush and tangled with fern. We came, finally, to a sweep of lawn beyond whose circular hedge there stood, palely, in the gathering twilight, the house for which I had searched for hours.
Belmont looked beautiful to me at first, coming upon it from the dusky wood path, seeing the tangle of outer garden and the deep semi-circle of hedge; like a place that Marjorie Pickthall might have described ‘with a fairy ring around it and an old thorn tree.’
But, as we went up and down the empty halls and corridors and the great echoing rooms, a sense of desolation so overcame us that we lost all desire to explore it farther. It was almost as if one could reach out and feel the dreadful hand of the Past; a soft hand, thickly padded, that can obliterate such a place with fatal ease, wipe it out indeed with a gesture—it and all its crowd of thoughts and memories.
“I really do not think that Canada was ever intended to become a place of mere ruins,” exclaimed one of the ladies. “We seem to have no respect for [page 46] them. Indeed, if you notice, they are often carted away at public expense even before they tumble down of themselves. Look at the walls of Quebec, for instance. Even the gates are disappearing one by one.”
There seemed no answer to this, especially as we ourselves were frankly glad of the excuse of coming darkness to turn the key again upon this particular ruin, and leave it before the twilight had thickened into night.
And the strange thing is that the old lady’s “feeling” has materialized, for, since our visit, Belmont has been burned to the ground. [page 47] |
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