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Lawrence as they bore the family of the Lady de Tilly and Pierre Philibert with a train of censitaires back to the old Manor House. The broad river was flooded with sunshine as it rolled majestically between the high banks crowned with green fields and woods in full leaf of summer.
"There are reports to-day of Iroquois on the upper Chaudiere, and her censitaires are eager to return to guard their homes from the prowling savages; and what is more, you and Colonel Philibert are ordered to go to Tilly to look after the defence of the Seigniory." Le Gardeur sat bolt upright. His military knowledge could not comprehend an apparently useless order.
But it was a very small band who now held the last point to which they could retreat. Only nine of them remained, the seigneur, Du Lhut, the two Americans, the friar, De Catinat, Theuriet the major-domo, and two of the censitaires.
It would have suited the seigneurs to have their holdings converted into freehold, for then they could have held the unsettled land as their own property instead of being under obligation to grant it for a nominal rental to censitaires. But to make this conversion would have been too kind to the seigneurs; so the matter dragged on for a long time.
The din within the stockade was infernal, the shouts and cries of the French, the whooping of the savages, and the terrified screaming of the frightened women blending into one dreadful uproar, above which could be heard the high shrill voice of the old seigneur imploring his censitaires to stand fast.
Denis!" gaily exclaimed the Governor to a tall, courtly gentleman, who was super-intending the labor of a body of his censitaires from Beauport. "'Many hands make light work, says the proverb. That splendid battery you are just finishing deserves to be called Beauport. What say you, my Lord Bishop?" turning to the smiling ecclesiastic. "Is it not worthy of baptism?"
Most of the censitaires were old soldiers and trappers who had served in many Indian wars, and whose swarthy faces and bold bearing told their own story.
Some of the seigneurs were as poor as their own censitaires and, like them, toiled with their hands. But usually there was a social gulf between the cottage and the manor house. Even the Church marked this.
Naught but ancient tribal jealousies held the savages apart. With these tribesmen were many prisoners, captives taken in raids all along the thin and straggling frontier; farmers and artisans, peasants and soldiers, women raped from the farms of the Richelieu censitaires, and wood-rangers now grown savage as their captors and loth to leave the wild life into which they had so naturally grown.
The Lady de Tilly duly appreciated this compliment of her faithful censitaires, and would sooner have stripped her park of half its live trees than have removed that dead pole, with its withered crown, from the place of honor in front of her mansion. The revels of May in New France, the king and queen of St.
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