"Said he liked the name Shag," replied Cop. "'Then I'm Shag to you, sir,
and the others here,' speaks up his Indian nibs. Then he and I struck
for the tubs, then they took him to get his room, and I came up here."
As Cop finished speaking the chapel bell sounded and all four boys
scrambled down to prayers. As they entered the little sanctuary, one
of the masters standing irresolute near the door, beckoned to Cop.
"Billings," he whispered, "Will you please go and ask Larocque if he
cares to come to prayers? He's in room 17; you met him this morning,
I believe."
"Certainly, sir," replied Cop, dashing up the nearest stairway.
"Entrez," replied an even voice to Cop's unusually respectful knock.
Then the voice rapidly corrected itself, "Enter, come in," it said in
English.
"How about prayers?" asked Cop. "Perhaps you're tired and don't care to
come?"
"I'll go," replied the Indian, and followed noiselessly where Billings
led.
They entered just as Professor Warwick was beginning prayers, and
although the eighty or so boys present were fairly exemplary, none could
resist furtive looks at the newcomer, who walked up the little aisle
beside Billings with a peculiarly silent dignity and half-indifference
that could not possibly be assumed. How most of them envied him that
manner! They recalled their own shyness and strangeness on the first
day of their arrival; how they stumbled over their own feet that first
morning at prayers; how they hated being stared at and spoken of as "the
new boy." How could this Indian come among them as if he had been born
and bred in their midst? But they never knew that Larocque's wonderful
self-possession was the outcome of his momentary real indifference; his
thoughts were far away from the little college chapel, for the last
time he had knelt in a sanctuary was at the old, old cathedral at St.
Boniface, whose twin towers arose under the blue of a Manitoba sky,
whose foundations stood where the historic Red and Assiniboine Rivers
meet, about whose bells one of America's sweetest singers, Whittier, had
written lines that have endeared his name to every worshipper that bends
the knee in that prairie sanctuary. The lines were drifting through his
mind now. They were the first words of English poetry he had learned to
memorize:
"Is it the clang of the wild geese?
Is it the Indian's yell,
That lends to the call of the north wind
The tones of a far-off bell?
"The voyageur smiles as he listens
To the sound that grows apace.
Well he knows the vesper ringing
Of the bells of St. Boniface.
"The bells of the Roman mission--
That call from their turrets twain
To the boatman on the river,
To the hunter on the plain."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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