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Title: The Money Master, Volume 2.
Author: Gilbert Parker
Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6276]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on November 28, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MONEY MASTER, PARKER, V2***
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THE MONEY MASTER
By Gilbert Parker
EPOCH THE SECOND
IV. THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER AND THE CLERK OF THE COURT TELLS A STORY
V. THE CLERK OF THE COURT ENDS HIS STORY
VI. JEAN JACQUES HAD HAD A GREAT DAY
VII. JEAN JACQUES AWAKES FROM SLEEP
VIII. THE GATE IN THE WALL
IX. "MOI-JE SUIS PHILOSOPHE"
X. "QUIEN SABE"--WHO KNOWS!
XI. THE CLERK OF THE COURT KEEPS A PROMISE
XII. THE MASTER-CARPENTER HAS A PROBLEM
CHAPTER IV
THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER AND THE CLERK OF THE COURT TELLS A STORY
It was hard to say which was the more important person in the parish, the
New Cure or M'sieu' Jean Jacques Barbille. When the Old Cure was alive
Jean Jacques was a lesser light, and he accepted his degree of
illumination with content. But when Pere Langon was gathered to his
fathers, and thousands had turned away from the graveyard, where he who
had baptised them, confirmed them, blessed them, comforted them, and
firmly led them was laid to rest, they did not turn at once to his
successor with confidence and affection. The new cure, M. Savry, was
young; the Old Cure had lived to be eighty-five, bearing wherever he went
a lamp of wisdom at which the people lighted their small souls. The New
Cure could command their obedience, but he could not command their love
and confidence until he had earned them.
So it was that, for a time, Jean Jacques took the place of the Old Cure
in the human side of the life of the district, though in a vastly lesser
degree. Up to the death of M. Langon, Jean Jacques had done very well
in life, as things go in out-of-the-way places of the world. His mill,
which ground good flour, brought him increasing pence; his saw-mill more
than paid its way; his farms made a small profit, in spite of a cousin
who worked one on halves, but who had a spendthrift wife; the ash-factory
which his own initiative had started made no money, but the loss was only
small; and he had even made profit out of his lime-kilns, although
Sebastian Dolores, Carmen's father, had at one time mismanaged them--but
of that anon. Jean Jacques himself managed the business of money-lending
and horse-dealing; and he also was agent for fire insurance and a dealer
in lightning rods.
In the thirteen years since he married he had been able to keep a good
many irons in the fire, and also keep them more or less hot. Many people
in his and neighbouring parishes were indebted to him, and it was worth
their while to stand well with him. If he insisted on debts being paid,
he was never exacting or cruel. If he lent money, he never demanded more
than eight per cent.; and he never pressed his debtors unduly. His
cheerfulness seldom deserted him, and he was notably kind to the poor.
Not seldom in the winter time a poor man, here and there in the parish,
would find dumped down outside his door in the early morning a half-cord
of wood or a bag of flour.
It could not be said that Jean Jacques did not enjoy his own generosity.
His vanity, however, did not come from an increasing admiration of his
own personal appearance, a weakness which often belongs to middle age;
but from the study of his so-called philosophy, which in time became an
obsession with him. In vain the occasional college professors, who spent
summer months at St. Saviour's, sought to interest him in science and
history, for his philosophy had large areas of boredom; but science
marched over too jagged a road for his tender intellectual feet; the
wild places where it led dismayed him. History also meant numberless
dates and facts. Perhaps he could have managed the dates, for he was
quick at figures, but the facts were like bees in their hive,--he could
scarcely tell one from another by looking at them.
So it was that Jean Jacques kept turning his eyes, as he thought, to the
everlasting meaning of things, to "the laws of Life and the decrees of
Destiny." He was one of those who had found, as he thought, what he
could do, and was sensible enough to do it. Let the poor fellows, who
gave themselves to science, trouble their twisted minds with trigonometry
and the formula of some grotesque chemical combination; let the dull
people rub their noses in the ink of Greek and Latin, which was no use
for everyday consumption; let the heads of historians ache with the
warring facts of the lives of nations; it all made for sleep. But
philosophy--ah, there was a field where a man could always use knowledge
got from books or sorted out of his own experiences!
It happened, therefore, that Jean Jacques, who not too vaguely realized
that there was reputation to be got from being thought a philosopher,
always carried about with him his little compendium from the quay at
Quebec, which he had brought ashore inside his redflannel shirt, with the
antique silver watch, when the Antoine went down.
Thus also it was that when a lawyer in court at Vilray, four miles from
St. Saviour's, asked him one day, when he stepped into the witness-box,
what he was, meaning what was his occupation, his reply was, "Moi-je suis
M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosophe--(Me--I am M'sieu' Jean Jacques,
philosopher)."
A little later outside the court-house, the Judge who had tried the case
--M. Carcasson--said to the Clerk of the Court:
"A curious, interesting little man, that Monsieur Jean Jacques. What's
his history?"
"A character, a character, monsieur le juge," was the reply of M. Amand
Fille. "His family has been here since Frontenac's time. He is a figure
in the district, with a hand in everything. He does enough foolish
things to ruin any man, yet swims along--swims along. He has many kinds
of business--mills, stores, farms, lime-kilns, and all that, and keeps
them all going; and as if he hadn't enough to do, and wasn't risking
enough, he's now organizing a cheese-factory on the co-operative
principle, as in Upper Canada among the English."
"He has a touch of originality, that's sure," was the reply of the Judge.
The Clerk of the Court nodded and sighed. "Monseigneur Giron of Laval,
the greatest scholar in Quebec, he said to me once that M'sieu' Jean
Jacques missed being a genius by an inch. But, monsieur le juge, not to
have that inch is worse than to be an ignoramus."
Judge Carcasson nodded. "Ah, surely! Your Jean Jacques lacks a balance-
wheel. He has brains, but not enough. He has vision, but it is not
steady; he has argument, but it breaks down just where it should be most
cohesive. He interested me. I took note of every turn of his mind as he
gave evidence. He will go on for a time, pulling his strings, doing this
and doing that, and then, all at once, when he has got a train of
complications, his brain will not be big enough to see the way out. Tell
me, has he a balance-wheel in his home--a sensible wife, perhaps?"
The Clerk of the Court shook his head mournfully and seemed to hesitate.
Then he said, "Comme ci, comme ca--but no, I will speak the truth about
it. She is a Spaniard--the Spanische she is called by the neighbours.
I will tell you all about that, and you will wonder that he has carried
on as well as he has, with his vanity and his philosophy."
"He'll have need of his philosophy before he's done, or I don't know
human nature; he'll get a bad fall one of these days," responded the
Judge. "'Moi-je suis M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosophe'--that is what he
said. Bumptious little man, and yet--and yet there's something in him.
There's a sense of things which everyone doesn't have--a glimmer of life
beyond his own orbit, a catching at the biggest elements of being,
a hovering on the confines of deep understanding, as it were. Somehow
I feel almost sorry for him, though he annoyed me while he was in the
witness-box, in spite of myself. He was as the English say, so 'damn
sure.'"
"So damn sure always," agreed the Clerk of the Court, with a sense of
pleasure that his great man, this wonderful aged little judge, should
have shown himself so human as to use such a phrase.
"But, no doubt, the sureness has been a good servant in his business,"
returned the Judge. "Confidence in a weak world gets unearned profit
often. But tell me about his wife--the Spanische. Tell me the how and
why, and everything. I'd like to trace our little money-man wise to his
source."
Again M. Fille was sensibly agitated. "She is handsome, and she has
great, good gifts when she likes to use them," he answered. "She can do
as much in an hour as most women can do in two; but then she will not
keep at it. Her life is but fits and starts. Yet she has a good head
for business, yes, very good. She can see through things. Still, there
it is--she will not hold fast from day to day."
"Yes, yes, but where did she come from? What was the field where she
grew?"
"To be sure, monsieur. It was like this," responded the other.
Thereupon M. Fille proceeded to tell the history, musical with legend,
of Jean Jacques' Grand Tour, of the wreck of the Antoine, of the marriage
of the "seigneur," the home-coming, and the life that followed, so far as
rumour, observation, and a mind with a gift for narrative, which was not
to be incomplete for lack of imagination, could make it. It was only
when he offered his own reflections on Carmen Dolores, now Carmen
Barbille, and on women generally, that Judge Carcasson pulled him up.
"So, so, I see. She has temperament and so on, but she's unsteady,
and regarded by her neighbours not quite as one that belongs. Bah,
the conceit of every race! They are all the same. The English are the
worst--as though the good God was English. But the child--so beautiful,
you say, and yet more like the father than the mother. He is not
handsome, that Jean Jacques, but I can understand that the little one
should be like him and yet beautiful too. I should like to see the
child."
Suddenly the Clerk of the Court stopped and touched the arm of his
distinguished friend and patron. "That is very easy, monsieur,"
he said eagerly, "for there she is in the red wagon yonder, waiting for
her father. She adores him, and that makes trouble sometimes. Then the
mother gets fits, and makes things hard at the Manor Cartier. It is not
all a bed of roses for our Jean Jacques. But there it is. He is very
busy all the time. Something doing always, never still, except when you
will find him by the road-side, or in a tavern with all the people round
him, talking, jesting, and he himself going into a trance with his book
of philosophy. It is very strange that everlasting going, going, going,
and yet that love of his book. I sometimes think it is all pretence, and
that he is all vanity--or almost so. Heaven forgive me for my want of
charity!"
The little round judge cocked his head astutely. "But you say he is kind
to the poor, that he does not treat men hardly who are in debt to him,
and that he will take his coat off his back to give to a tramp--is it
so?"
"As so, as so, monsieur."
"Then he is not all vanity, and because of that he will feel the blow
when it comes--alas, so much he will feel it!"
"What blow, monsieur le juge?--but ah, look, monsieur!" He pointed
eagerly. "There she is, going to the red wagon--Madame Jean Jacques.
Is she not a figure of a woman? See the walk of her--is it not
distinguished? She is half a hand-breadth taller than Jean Jacques. And
her face, most sure it is a face to see. If Jean Jacques was not so busy
with his farms and his mills and his kilns and his usury, he would see
what a woman he has got. It is his good fortune that she has such sense
in business. When Jean Jacques listens to her, he goes right. She
herself did not want her father to manage the lime-kilns--the old
Sebastian Dolores. She was for him staying at Mirimachi, where he kept
the books of the lumber firm. But no, Jean Jacques said that he could
make her happy by having her father near her, and he would not believe
she meant what she said. He does not understand her; that is the
trouble. He knows as much of women or men as I know of--"
"Of the law--hein?" laughed the great man.
"Monsieur--ah, that is your little joke! I laugh, yes, but I laugh,"
responded the Clerk of the Court a little uncertainly. "Now once when
she told him that the lime-kilns--"
The Judge, who had retraced his steps down the street of the town--it was
little more than a large village, but because it had a court-house and a
marketplace it was called a town--that he might have a good look at
Madame Jean Jacques and her child before he passed them, suddenly said:
"How is it you know so much about it all, Maitre Fille--as to what she
says and of the inner secrets of the household? Ah, ha, my little
Lothario, I have caught you--a bachelor too, with time on his hands,
and the right side of seventy as well! The evidence you have given of a
close knowledge of the household of our Jean Jacques does not have its
basis in hearsay, but in acute personal observation. Tut-tut! Fie-fie!
my little gay Clerk of the Court. Fie! Fie!"
M. Fille was greatly disconcerted. He had never been a Lothario.
In forty years he had never had an episode with one of "the other sex,"
but it was not because he was impervious to the softer emotions. An
intolerable shyness had ever possessed him when in the presence of women,
and even small girl children had frightened him, till he had made friends
with little Zoe Barbille, the daughter of Jean Jacques. Yet even with
Zoe, who was so simple and companionable and the very soul of childish
confidence, he used to blush and falter till she made him talk. Then he
became composed, and his tongue was like a running stream, and on that
stream any craft could sail. On it he became at ease with madame the
Spanische, and he even went so far as to look her full in the eyes on
more than one occasion.
"Answer me--ah, you cannot answer!" teasingly added the Judge, who loved
his Clerk of the Court, and had great amusement out of his discomfiture.
"You are convicted. At an age when a man should be settling down, you
are gallivanting with the wife of a philosopher."
"Monsieur--monsieur le juge!" protested M. Fille with slowly heightening
colour. "I am innocent, yes, altogether. There is nothing, believe me.
It is the child, the little Zoe--but a maid of charm and kindness. She
brings me cakes and the toffy made by her own hands; and if I go to the
Manor Cartier, as I often do, it is to be polite and neighbourly. If
Madame says things to me, and if I see what I see, and hear what I hear,
it is no crime; it is no misdemeanour; it is within the law--the perfect
law."
Suddenly the Judge linked his arm within that of the other, for he also
was little, and he was fat and round and ruddy, and even smaller than M.
Fille, who was thin, angular and pale.
"Ah, my little Confucius," he said gently, "have you seen and heard me so
seldom that you do not know me yet, or what I really think? Of course it
is within the law--the perfect law--to visit at m'sieu' the philosopher's
house and talk at length also to m'sieu' the philosopher's wife; while to
make the position regular by friendship with the philosopher's child is a
wisdom which I can only ascribe to"--his voice was charged with humour
and malicious badinage "to an extended acquaintance with the devices of
human nature, as seen in those episodes of the courts with which you have
been long familiar."
"Oh, monsieur, dear monsieur!" protested the Clerk of the Court, "you
always make me your butt."
"My friend," said the Judge, squeezing his arm, "if I could have you no
other way, I would make you my butler!"
Then they both laughed at the inexpensive joke, and the Clerk of the
Court was in high spirits, for on either side of the street were people
with whom he lived every day, and they could see the doyen of the Bench,
the great Judge Carcasson, who had refused to be knighted, arm in arm
with him. Aye, and better than all, and more than all, here was Zoe
Barbille drawing her mother's attention to him almost in the embrace of
the magnificent jurist.
The Judge, with his small, round, quizzical eyes which missed nothing,
saw too; and his attention was strangely arrested by the faces of both
the mother and the child. His first glance at the woman's face made him
flash an inward light on the memory of Jean Jacques' face in the witness-
box, and a look of reflective irony came into his own. The face of
Carmen Dolores, wife of the philosophic miller and money-master, did not
belong to the world where she was placed--not because she was so unlike
the habitant women, or even the wives of the big farmers, or the sister
of the Cure, or the ladies of the military and commercial exiles who
lived in that portion of the province; but because of an alien something
in her look--a lonely, distant sense of isolation, a something which
might hide a companionship and sympathy of a rare kind, or might be but
the mask of a furtive, soulless nature. In the child's face was nothing
of this. It was open as the day, bright with the cheerfulness of her
father's countenance, alive with a humour which that countenance did not
possess. The contour was like that of Jean Jacques, but with a fineness
and delicacy to its fulness absent from his own; and her eyes were a deep
and lustrous brown, under a forehead which had a boldness of gentle
dignity possessed by neither father nor mother. Her hair was thick,
brown and very full, like that of her father, and in all respects, save
one, she had an advantage over both her parents. Her mouth had a
sweetness which might not unfairly be called weakness, though that was
balanced by a chin of commendable strength.
But the Judge's eyes found at once this vulnerable point in her character
as he had found that of her mother. Delightful the child was, and alert
and companionable, with no remarkable gifts, but with a rare charm and
sympathy. Her face was the mirror of her mind, and it had no ulterior
thought. Her mother's face, the Judge had noted, was the foreground of a
landscape which had lonely shadows. It was a face of some distinction
and suited to surroundings more notable, though the rural life Carmen had
led since the Antoine went down and her fortunes came up, had coarsened
her beauty a very little.
"There's something stirring in the coverts," said the Judge to himself as
he was introduced to the mother and child. By a hasty gesture Zoe gave a
command to M. Fille to help her down. With a hand on his shoulder she
dropped to the ground. Her object was at once apparent. She made a
pretty old-fashioned curtsey to the Judge, then held out her hand, as
though to reassert her democratic equality.
As the Judge looked at Madame Barbille, he was involuntarily, but none
the less industriously, noting her characteristics; and the sum of his
reflections, after a few moments' talk, was that dangers he had seen
ahead of Jean Jacques, would not be averted by his wife, indeed might
easily have their origin in her.
"I wonder it has gone on as long as it has," he said to himself; though
it seemed unreasonable that his few moments with her, and the story told
him by the Clerk of the Court, should enable him to come to any definite
conclusion. But at eighty-odd Judge Carcasson was a Solon and a Solomon
in one. He had seen life from all angles, and he was not prepared to
give any virtue or the possession of any virtue too much rope; while
nothing in life surprised him.
"How would you like to be a judge?" he asked of Zoe, suddenly taking her
hand in his. A kinship had been at once established between them, so
little has age, position, and intellect to do with the natural
gravitations of human nature.
She did not answer direct, and that pleased him. "If I were a judge I
should have no jails," she said. "What would you do with the bad
people?" he asked.
"I would put them alone on a desert island, or out at sea in a little
boat, or out on the prairies without a horse, so that they'd have to work
for their lives."
"Oh, I see! If M. Fille here set fire to a house, you would drop him on
the prairie far away from everything and everybody and let him 'root hog
or die'?"
"Don't you think it would kill him or cure him?" she asked whimsically.
The Judge laughed, his eyes twinkling. "That's what they did when the
world was young, dear ma'm'selle. There was no time to build jails.
Alone on the prairie--a separate prairie for every criminal--that would
take a lot of space; but the idea is all right. It mightn't provide the
proper degree of punishment, however. But that is being too particular.
Alone on the prairie for punishment--well, I should like to see it
tried."
He remembered that saying of his long after, while yet he was alive,
and a tale came to him from the prairies which made his eyes turn
more intently towards a land that is far off, where the miserable
miscalculations and mistakes of this world are readjusted. Now he was
only conscious of a primitive imagination looking out of a young girl's
face, and making a bridge between her understanding and his own.
"What else would you do if you were a judge?" he asked presently.
"I would make my father be a miller," she replied. "But he is a miller,
I hear."
"But he is so many other things--so many. If he was only a miller we
should have more of him. He is at home only a little. If I get up early
enough in the morning, or if I am let stay up at night late enough, I see
him; but that is not enough--is it, mother?" she added with a sudden
sense that she had gone too far, that she ought not to say this perhaps.
The woman's face had darkened for an instant, and irritation showed in
her eyes, but by an effort of the will she controlled herself.
"Your father knows best what he can do and can't do," she said evenly.
"But you would not let a man judge for himself, would you, ma'm'selle?"
asked the old inquisitor. "You would judge for the man what was best for
him to do?"
"I would judge for my father," she replied. "He is too good a man to
judge for himself."
"Well, there's a lot of sense in that, ma'm'selle philosophe," answered
Judge Carcasson. "You would make the good idle, and make the bad work.
The good you would put in a mill to watch the stones grind, and the bad
you would put on a prairie alone to make the grist for the grinding.
Ma'm'selle, we must be friends--is it not so?"
"Haven't we always been friends?" the young girl asked with the look of
a visionary suddenly springing up in her eyes.
Here was temperament indeed. She pleased Judge Carcasson greatly. "But
yes, always, and always, and always," he replied. Inwardly he said to
himself, "I did not see that at first. It is her father in her.
"Zoe!" said her mother reprovingly.
CHAPTER V
THE CLERK OF THE COURT ENDS HIS STORY
A moment afterwards the Judge, as he walked down the street still arm in
arm with the Clerk of the Court, said: "That child must have good luck,
or she will not have her share of happiness. She has depths that are not
deep enough." Presently he added, "Tell me, my Clerk, the man--Jean
Jacques--he is so much away--has there never been any talk about--about."
"About--monsieur le juge?" asked M. Fille rather stiffly. "For instance
--about what?"
"For instance, about a man--not Jean Jacques."
The lips of the Clerk of the Court tightened. "Never at any time--till
now, monsieur le juge."
"Ah--till now!"
The Clerk of the Court blushed. What he was about to say was difficult,
but he alone of all the world guessed at the tragedy which was hovering
over Jean Jacques' home. By chance he had seen something on an afternoon
of three days before, and he had fled from it as a child would fly from a
demon. He was a purist at law, but he was a purist in life also, and not
because the flush of youth had gone and his feet were on the path which
leads into the autumn of a man's days. The thing he had seen had been
terribly on his mind, and he had felt that his own judgment was not
sufficient for the situation, that he ought to tell someone.
The Cure was the only person who had come to his mind when he became
troubled to the point of actual mental agony. But the new curb,
M. Savry, was not like the Old Cure, and, besides, was it not stepping
between the woman and her confessional? Yet he felt that something ought
to be done. It never occurred to him to speak to Jean Jacques. That
would have seemed so brutal to the woman. It came to him to speak to
Carmen, but he knew that he dared not do so. He could not say to a
woman that which must shame her before him, she who had kept her head
so arrogantly high--not so much to him, however, as to the rest of the
world. He had not the courage; and yet he had fear lest some awful thing
would at any moment now befall the Manor Cartier. If it did, he would
feel himself to blame had he done nothing to stay the peril. So far he
was the only person who could do so, for he was the only person who knew!
The Judge could feel his friend's arm tremble with emotion, and he said:
"Come, now, my Plato, what is it? A man has come to disturb the peace of
Jean Jacques, our philosophe, eh?"
"That is it, monsieur--a man of a kind."
"Oh, of course, my bambino, of course, a man 'of a kind,' or there would
be no peace disturbed. You want to tell me, I see. Proceed then; there
is no reason why you should not. I am secret. I have seen much. I have
no prejudices. As you will, however; but I can see it would relieve your
mind to tell me. In truth I felt there was something when I saw you look
at her first, when you spoke to her, when she talked with me. She is a
fine figure of a woman, and Jean Jacques, as you say, is much away from
home. In fact he neglects her--is it not so?"
"He means it not, but it is so. His life is full of--"
"Yes, yes, of stores and ash-factories and debtors and lightning-rods and
lime-kilns, and mortgaged farms, and the price of wheat--but certainly,
I understand it all, my Fille. She is too much alone, and if she has
travelled by the compass all these thirteen years without losing the
track, it is something to the credit of human nature."
"Ah, monsieur, a vow before the good God--!" The Judge interrupted
sharply. "Tut, tut--these vows! Do you not know that a vow may be a
thing that ruins past redemption? A vow is sacred. Well, a poor mortal
in one moment of weakness breaks it. Then there is a sense of awful
shame of being lost, of never being able to put right the breaking of the
vow, though the rest can be put right by sorrow and repentance! I would
have no vows. They haunt like ghosts when they are broken, they torture
like fire then. Don't talk to me of vows. It is not vows that keep the
world right, but the prayer of a man's soul from day to day."
The Judge's words sounded almost blasphemous to M. Fille. A vow not
keep the world right! Then why the vows of the Church at baptism,
at confirmation, at marriage? Why the vows of the priests, of the nuns,
of those who had given themselves to eternal service? Monsieur had
spoken terrible things. And yet he had said at the last: "It is not vows
that keep the world right, but the prayer of a man's soul from day to
day." That was not heretical, or atheistic, or blasphemous. It sounded
logical and true and good.
He was about to say that, to some people, vows were the only way of
keeping them to their duty--and especially women--but the Judge added
gently: "I would not for the world hurt your sensibilities, my little
Clerk, and we are not nearly so far apart as you think at the minute.
Thank God, I keep the faith that is behind all faith--the speech of a
man's soul with God. . . . But there, if you can, let us hear what
man it is who disturbs the home of the philosopher. It is not my Fille,
that's sure."
He could not resist teasing, this judge who had a mind of the most rare
uprightness; and he was not always sorry when his teasing hurt; for, to
his mind, men should be lashed into strength, when they drooped over the
tasks of life; and what so sharp a lash as ridicule or satire!
"Proceed, my friend," he urged brusquely, not waiting for the gasp of
pained surprise of the little Clerk to end. He was glad to see the
figure beside him presently straighten itself, as though to be braced for
a task of difficulty. Indignation and resentment were good things to
stiffen a man's back.
"It was three days ago," said M. Fille. "I saw it with my own eyes.
I had come to the Manor Cartier by the road, down the hill--Mont Violet--
behind the house. I could see into the windows of the house. There was
no reason why I should not see--there never has been a reason," he added,
as though to justify himself.
"Of course, of course, my friend. One's eyes are open, and one sees what
one sees, without looking for it. Proceed."
"As I looked down I saw Madame with a man's arms round her, and his lips
to hers. It was not Jean Jacques."
"Of course, of course. Proceed. What did you do?"
"I stopped. I fell back--"
"Of course. Behind a tree?"
"Behind some elderberry bushes."
"Of course. Elderberry bushes--that's better than a tree. I am very
fond of elderberry wine when it is new. Proceed."
The Clerk of the Court shrank. What did it matter whether or no the
Judge liked elderberry wine, when the world was falling down for Jean
Jacques and his Zoe--and his wife. But with a sigh he continued: "There
is nothing more. I stayed there for awhile, and then crept up the hill
again, and came back to my home and locked myself in."
"What had you done that you should lock yourself in?"
"Ah, monsieur, how can I explain such things? Perhaps I was ashamed that
I had seen things I should not have seen. I do not blush that I wept for
the child, who is--but you saw her, monsieur le juge."
"Yes, yes, the little Zoe, and the little philosopher. Proceed."
"What more is there to tell!"
"A trifle perhaps, as you will think," remarked the Judge ironically, but
as one who, finding a crime, must needs find the criminal too. "I must
ask you to inform the Court who was the too polite friend of Madame."
"Monsieur, pardon me. I forgot. It is essential, of course. You must
know that there is a flume, a great wooden channel--"
"Yes, yes. I comprehend. Once I had a case of a flume. It was fifteen
feet deep and it let in the water of the river to the mill-wheels. A
flume regulates, concentrates, and controls the water power. I
comprehend perfectly. Well?"
"So. This flume for Jean Jacques' mill was also fifteen feet deep or
more. It was out of repair, and Jean Jacques called in a master-
carpenter from Laplatte, Masson by name--George Masson--to put the flume
right."
"How long ago was that?"
"A month ago. But Masson was not here all the time. It was his workmen
who did the repairs, but he came over to see--to superintend. At first
he came twice in the week. Then he came every day."
"Ah, then he came every day! How do you know that?"
"It was my custom to walk to the mill every day--to watch the work on the
flume. It was only four miles away across the fields and through the
woods, making a walk of much charm--especially in the autumn, when the
colours of the foliage are so fine, and the air has a touch of
pensiveness, so that one is induced to reflection."
There was the slightest tinge of impatience in the Judge's response.
"Yes, yes, I understand. You walked to study life and to reflect and to
enjoy your intimacy with nature, but also to see our friend Zoe and her
home. And I do not wonder. She has a charm which makes me sad--
for her."
"So I have felt, so I have felt for her, monsieur. When she is gayest,
and when, as it might seem, I am quite happy, talking to her, or
picnicking, or idling on the river, or helping her with her lessons,
I have sadness, I know not why."
The Judge pressed his friend's arm firmly. His voice grew more
insistent. "Now, Maitre Fille, I think I understand the story, but there
are lacunee which you must fill. You say the thing happened three days
ago--now, when will the work be finished?"
"The work will be finished to-morrow, monsieur. Only one workman is
left, and he will be quit of his task to-night."
"So the thing--the comedy or tragedy will come to an end to-morrow?"
remarked the Judge seriously. "How did you find out that the workmen
go tomorrow, maitre?"
"Jean Jacques--he told me yesterday."
"Then it all ends to-morrow," responded the Judge.
The puzzled subordinate stood almost still, and looked at the Judge in
wonder. Why should it all end to-morrow simply because the work was
finished at the flume? At last he spoke.
"It is only twelve miles to Laplatte where George Masson lives, and he
has, besides, another contract near here, but three miles from the Manor
Cartier. Also besides, how can we know what she will do--Jean Jacques'
wife. How can we tell but that she will perhaps go and leave the beloved
Zoe alone!"
"And leave our little philosopher--miller also alone?" remarked the
Judge quizzically, yet with solemnity. M. Fille was agitated; he made
a protesting gesture. "Jean Jacques can find comfort, but the child--ah,
no, it is too terrible! Someone should speak. I tried to do it--to
Madame Carmen, to Jean Jacques; but it was no use. How could I betray
her to him, how could I tell her that I knew her shame!"
The Judge turned brusquely and caught his friend by the shoulders,
fastening him with the eyes which had made many a witness forget to lie.
"If you were an avocat in practice I would ruin your reputation, Fille,"
he said. "A fool would tell Jean Jacques, or speak to the woman, and
spoil all; for women go mad when they are in danger, and they do the
impossible things. But did it not occur to you that the one person to
have in a quiet room with the doors shut, with the light of the sun in
his face, with the book of the law open on your desk and the damages to
be got by an injured husband, in a Catholic province with a Catholic
Judge, written down on a piece of paper, to hand over at the right
moment--did it not strike you that that person was your George Masson?"
M. Fille's head dropped before the disdainful eyes of M. Carcasson. He
who prided himself in keeping the court right on points of procedure, who
was looked upon almost with the respect given the position of the Judge
himself, that he should fail in thinking of the obvious thing was
humiliating, and alas! so disconcerting.
"I am a fool, an imbecile," he responded, in great dejection.
"This much must be said, my imbecile, that every man some time or other
makes just such a fool of his intelligence," was the soft reply.
A thin hand made a gesture of dissent. "Not you, monsieur. Never!"
"If it is any comfort to you, know then, my Solon, that I have done so
publicly in my time, while you have only done it privately. But let us
see. That Masson must be struck of a heap. What sort of a man is he to
look at? Apart from his morals, what class of creature is he?"
"He is a man of strength, of force in his way, monsieur. He made himself
from an apprentice without a cent, and he has now thirty men at work."
"Then he does not drink or gamble?"
"Neither, monsieur."
"Has he a family?"
"No, monsieur."
"How old is he?"
"Forty or thereabouts, monsieur."
The Judge cogitated for a moment, then said: "Ah, that's bad--unmarried
and forty, and no vices except this. It gives him few escape-valves. Is
he good-looking? What is his appearance?"
"Nor short, nor tall, and square shoulders. His face like the yellow
brown of a peach, hair that curls close to his head, blue eyes that see
everything, and a big hand that knows what it is doing."
The Judge nodded. "Ah, you have watched him, maitre. . . . When?
Since then?"
"No, no, monsieur, not since. If I had watched him since, I should
perhaps have thought of the right thing to do. But I did not. I used to
study him while the work was going on, when he first came, but I have
known him some time from a distance. If a man makes himself what he is,
you look at him, of course."
"Truly. His temper--his disposition, what is it?" M. Fille was very
much alive now. He replied briskly. "Like the snap of a whip. He flies
into anger and flies out. He has a laugh that makes men say, 'How he
enjoys himself !' and his mind is very quick and sure."
The Judge nodded with satisfaction. "Well done! Well done! I have got
him in my eye. He will not be so easy to handle; but, if he has brains,
he will see that you have the right end of the stick; and he will kiss
and ride away. It will not be easy, but the game is in your hands, my
Fille. In a quiet room, with the book of the law open, and figures of
damages given by a Catholic court and Judge--I think that will do it; and
then the course of true philosophy will not long be interrupted in the
house of Jean Jacques Barbille."
"Monsieur--monsieur le juge, you mean that I shall do this, shall see
George Masson and warn him--me?"
"Who else? You are a friend of the family. You are a public officer, to
whom the good name of your parish is dear. As all are aware, no doubt,
you are the trusted ancient comrade of the daughter of the woman--I speak
legally--Carmen Barbille nee Dolores, a name of charm to the ear. Who
but you then to do it?"
"There is yourself, monsieur."
"Dismiss me from your mind. I go to Quebec to-night, as you know, and
there is not time; but even if there were, I should not be the best
person to do this. I am known to few; you are known to all. I have no
locus standi. You have. No, no, it would not be for me."
Suddenly, in his desperation, the Clerk of the Court sought release for
himself from this solemn and frightening duty.
"Monsieur," he said eagerly, "there is another. I had forgotten. It is
Madame Carmen's father, Sebastian Dolores."
"Ah, a father! Yes, I had forgotten to ask about him; so we are one in
our imbecility, my little Aristotle. This Sebastian Dolores, where is
he?"
"In the next parish, Beauharnais, keeping books for a lumber-firm. Ah,
monsieur, that is the way to deal with the matter--through Sebastian
Dolores, her father!"
"What sort is he?"
The other shook his head and did not answer. "Ah, not of the best?
Drinks?"
M. Fille nodded.
"Has a weak character?"
Again M. Fille nodded.
"Has no good reputation hereabouts?"
The nod was repeated. "He has never been steady He goes here and there,
but always he comes back to get Jean Jacques' help. He and his daughter
are not close friends, and yet he likes to be near her. She can endure
him at least. He can command her interest. He is a stranger in a
strange land, and he drifts back to where she is always. But that is
all."
"Then he is out of the question, and he would be always out of the
question except as a last resort; for sooner or later he would tell his
daughter, and challenge our George Masson too; and that is what you do
not wish, eh?"
"Precisely so," remarked M. Fille, dropping back again into gloom. "To
be quite honest, monsieur, even though it gives me a task which I abhor,
I do not think that M. Dolores could do what is needed without mistakes
which could not be mended. At least I can--" He stopped.
The Judge interposed at once, well pleased with the way things were going
for this "case." "Assuredly. You can as can no other, my Solon. The
secret of success in such things is a good heart, a right mind, a clear
intelligence and some astuteness, and you have it all. It is your task
and yours only."
The little man's self-respect seemed restored. He preened himself
somewhat and bowed to the Judge. "I take your commands, monsieur, to
obey them as heaven gives me power so to do. Shall it be tomorrow?"
The Judge reflected a moment, then said: "Tonight would be better, but--"
"I can do it better to-morrow morning," interposed M. Fille, "for George
Masson has a meeting here at Vilray with the avocat Prideaux at ten
o'clock to sign a contract, and I can ask him to step into my office on a
little affair of business. He will not guess, and I shall be armed"--the
Judge frowned--"with the book of the law on such misdemeanours, and the
figures of the damages,"--the Judge smiled--"and I think perhaps I can
frighten him as he has never been frightened before."
A courage and confidence had now taken possession of the Clerk in strange
contrast to his timidity and childlike manner of a few minutes before.
He was now as he appeared in court, clothed with an austere authority
which gave him a vicarious strength and dignity. The Judge had done his
work well, and he was of those folk in the world who are not content to
do even the smallest thing ill.
Arm in arm they passed into the garden which fronted the vine-covered
house, where Maitre Fille lived alone with his sister, a tiny edition of
himself, who whispered and smiled her way through life.
She smiled and whispered now in welcome to the Judge; and as she did so,
the three saw Jean Jacques, laughing, and cracking his whip, drive past
with his daughter beside him, chirruping to the horses; while, moody and
abstracted, his wife sat silent on the backseat of the red wagon.
CHAPTER VI
JEAN JACQUES HAD HAD A GREAT DAY
Jean Jacques was in great good humour as he drove away to the Manor
Cartier. The day, which was not yet aged, had been satisfactory from
every point of view. He had impressed the Court, he had got a chance to
pose in the witness-box; he had been able to repeat in evidence the
numerous businesses in which he was engaged; had referred to his
acquaintance with the Lieutenant-Governor and a Cardinal; to his Grand
Tour (this had been hard to do in the cross-examination to which he was
subjected, but he had done it); and had been able to say at the very
start in reply as to what was his occupation--"Moi je suis M'sieu' Jean
Jacques, philosophe."
Also he had, during the day, collected a debt long since wiped off his
books; he had traded a poor horse for a good cow; he had bought all the
wheat of a Vilray farmer below market-price, because the poor fellow
needed ready money; he had issued an insurance policy; his wife and
daughter had conversed in the public streets with the great judge who was
the doyen of the provincial Bench; and his daughter had been kissed by
the same judge in the presence of at least a dozen people. He was, in
fact, very proud of his Carmen and his Carmencita, as he called the two
who sat in the red wagon sharing his glory--so proud that he did not
extol them to others; and he was quite sure they were both very proud of
him. The world saw what his prizes of life were, and there was no need
to praise or brag. Dignity and pride were both sustained by silence and
a wave of the hand, which in fact said to the world, "Look you, my
masters, they belong to Jean Jacques. Take heed."
There his domestic scheme practically ended. He was so busy that he took
his joys by snatches, in moments of suspension of actual life, as it
were. His real life was in the eddy of his many interests, in the field
of his superficial culture, in the eyes of the world. The worst of him
was on the surface. He showed what other men hid, that was all. Their
vanity was concealed, he wore it in his cap. They put on a manner as
they put on their clothes, and wore it out in the world, or took it off
in their own homes-behind the door of life; but he was the same vain,
frank, cocksure fellow in his home as in the street. There was no
difference at all. He was vain, but he had no conceit; and therefore he
did not deceive, and was not tyrannous or dictatorial; in truth, if you
but estimated him at his own value, he was the least insistent man alive.
Many a debtor knew this; and, by asking Jean Jacques' advice, making an
appeal to his logic, as it were--and it was always worth listening to,
even when wrong or sadly obvious, because of the glow with which he
declared things this or that--found his situation immediately eased.
Many a hard-up countryman, casting about for a five-dollar bill, could
get it of Jean Jacques by telling him what agreeable thing some important
person had said about him; or by writing to a great newspaper in Montreal
a letter, saying that the next candidate for the provincial legislature
should be M. Jean Jacques Barbille, of St. Saviour's. This never failed
to draw a substantial "bill" from the wad which Jean Jacques always
carried in his pocket-loose, not tied up in a leather roll, as so many
lesser men freighted the burdens of their wealth.
He had changed since the day he left Bordeaux on the Antoine; since he
had first caught the flash of interest in Carmen Dolores' eyes--an
interest roused from his likeness to a conspirator who had been shot for
his country's good. He was no stouter in body, for he was of the kind
that wear away the flesh by much doing and thinking; but there were
occasional streaks of grey in his bushy hair, and his eye roamed less
than it did once. In the days when he first brought Carmen home, his eye
was like a bead of brown light on a swivel. It flickered and flamed; it
saw here, saw there; it twinkled, and it pierced into life's mysteries;
and all the while it was a good eye. Its whites never showed, as it
were. As an animal, his eye showed a nature free from vice. In some
respects he was easy to live with, for he never found fault with what
was given him to eat, or the way the house was managed; and he never
interfered with the "kitchen people," or refused a dollar or ten dollars
to Carmen for finery. In fact, he was in a sense too lavish, for he used
at one time to bring her home presents of silks and clothes and toilet
things and stockings and hats, which were not in accord with her taste,
and only vexed her. Indeed, she resented wearing them, and could hardly
bring herself to thank him for them. At last, however, she induced him
to let her buy what she wanted with the presents of money which he might
give her.
On the whole Carmen fared pretty well, for he would sometimes give her a
handful of bills from his pocket, bidding her take ten dollars, and she
would coolly take twenty, while he shrugged his shoulders and declared
she would be his ruin. He had never repented of marrying her, in spite
of the fact that she did not always keep house as his mother and
grandmother had kept it; that she was gravely remiss in going to mass;
and that she quarrelled with more than one of her neighbours, who had an
idea that Spain was an inferior country because it was south of France,
just as the habitants regarded the United States as a low and inferior
country because it was south of Quebec. You went north towards heaven
and south towards hell, in their view; but when they went so far as to
patronize or slander Carmen, she drove her verbal stilettos home without
a button; so that on one occasion there would have been a law-suit for
libel if the Old Cure had not intervened. To Jean Jacques' credit,
be it said, he took his wife's part on this occasion, though in his
heart he knew that she was in the wrong.
He certainly was not always in the right himself. If he had been told
that he neglected his wife he would have been justly indignant. Also, it
never occurred to him that a woman did not always want to talk philosophy
or discuss the price of wheat or the cost of flour-barrels; and that for
a man to be stupidly and foolishly fond was dearer to a woman than
anything else. How should he know--yet he ought to have done so, if he
really was a philosopher--that a woman would want the cleverest man in
the world to be a boy and play the fool sometimes; that she would rather,
if she was a healthy woman, go to a circus than to a revelation of the
mysteries of the mind from an altar of culture, if her own beloved man
was with her.
Carmen had been left too much alone, as M. Fille had said to Judge
Carcasson. Her spirits had moments of great dullness, when she was ready
to fling herself into the river--or the arms of the schoolmaster or the
farrier. When she first came to St. Saviour's, the necessity of adapting
herself to the new conditions, of keeping faith with herself, which she
had planned on the Antoine, and making a good wife to the man who was to
solve all her problems for her, prevailed. She did not at first miss so
much the life of excitement, of danger, of intrigue, of romance, of
colour and variety, which she had left behind in Spain. When her child
was born, she became passionately fond of it; her maternal spirit
smothered it. It gave the needed excitement in the routine of life at
St. Saviour's.
Yet the interest was not permanent. There came a time when she resented
the fact that Jean Jacques made more of the child than he did of herself.
That was a bad day for all concerned, for dissimulation presently became
necessary, and the home of Jean Jacques was a home of mystery which no
philosophy could interpret. There had never been but the one child. She
was not less handsome than when Jean Jacques married her and brought her
home, though the bloom of maiden youthfulness was no longer there; and
she certainly was a cut far above the habitant women or even the others
of a higher social class, in a circle which had an area equal to a
principality in Europe.
The old cure, M. Langon, had had much influence over her, for few could
resist the amazing personal influence which his rare pure soul secured
over the worst. It was a sad day to her when he went to his long home;
and inwardly she felt a greater loss than she had ever felt, save that
once when her Carvillho Gonzales went the way of the traitor. Memories
of her past life far behind in Madrid did not grow fainter; indeed, they
grew more distinct as the years went on. They seemed to vivify, as her
discontent and restlessness grew.
Once, when there had come to St. Saviour's a middle-aged baron from Paris
who had heard the fishing was good at St. Saviour's, and talked to her of
Madrid and Barcelona, of Cordova and Toledo, as one who had seen and
known and (he declared) loved them; who painted for her in splashing
impressionist pictures the life that still eddied in the plazas and
dreamed in the patios, she had been almost carried off her feet with
longing; and she nearly gave that longing an expression which would have
brought a tragedy, while still her Zoe was only eight years old. But
M. Langon, the wise priest whose eyes saw and whose heart understood,
had intervened in time; and she never knew that the sudden disappearance
of the Baron, who still owed fifty dollars to Jean Jacques, was due to
the practical wisdom of a great soul which had worked out its own destiny
in a little back garden of the world.
When this good priest was alive she felt she had a friend who was as
large of heart as he was just, and who would not scorn the fool according
to his folly, or chastise the erring after his deserts. In his greatness
of soul Pere Langon had shut his eyes to things that pained him more
than they shocked him, for he had seen life in its most various and
demoralized forms, and indeed had had his own temptations when he lived
in Belgium and France, before he had finally decided to become a priest.
He had protected Carmen with a quiet persistency since her first day in
the parish, and had had a saving influence over her. Pere Langon
reproved those who criticized her and even slandered her, for it was
evident to all that she would rather have men talk to her than women;
and any summer visitor who came to fish, gave her an attention never
given even to the youngest and brightest in the district; and the eyes
of the habitant lass can be very bright at twenty. Yet whatever Carmen's
coquetry and her sport with fire had been, her own emotions had never
been really involved till now.
The new cure, M. Savry, would have said they were involved now because
she never came to confession, and indeed, since the Old Cure died, she
had seldom gone to mass. Yet when, with accumulated reproof on his
tongue, M. Savry did come to the Manor Cartier, he felt the inherent
supremacy of beauty, not the less commanding because it had not the
refinement of the duchess or the margravine.
Once M. Savry ventured to do what the Old Cure would never have done--he
spoke to Jean Jacques concerning Carmen's neglect of mass and confession,
and he received a rebuff which was almost au seigneur; for in Jean
Jacques' eyes he was now the figure in St. Saviour's; and this was an
occasion when he could assert his position as premier of the secular
world outside the walls of the parish church. He did it in good style
for a man who had had no particular training in the social arts.
This is how he did it and what he said:
"There have been times when I myself have thought it would be a good
thing to have a rest from the duties of a Catholic, m'sieu' le cure," he
remarked to M. Savry, when the latter had ended his criticism. He said
it with an air of conflict, and with full intent to make his supremacy
complete.
"No Catholic should speak like that," returned the shocked priest.
"No priest should speak to me as you have done," rejoined Jean Jacques.
"What do you know of the reasons for the abstention of madame? The soul
must enjoy rest as well as the body, and madame has a--mind which can
judge for itself. I have a body that is always going, and it gets too
little rest, and that keeps my soul in a flutter too. It must be getting
to mass and getting to confession, and saying aves and doing penance,
it is such a busy little soul of mine; but we are not all alike, and
madame's body goes in a more stately way. I am like a comet, she is
like the sun steady, steady, round and round, with plenty of sleep and
the comfortable darkness. Sometimes madame goes hard; so does the sun
in summer-shines, shines, shines like a furnace. Madame's body goes like
that--at the dairy, in the garden, with the loom, among the fowls,
growing her strawberries, keeping the women at the beating of the flax;
and then again it is all still and idle like the sun on a cloudy day;
and it rests. So it is with the human soul--I am a philosopher--I think
the soul goes hard the same as the body, churning, churning away in the
heat of the sun; and then it gets quiet and goes to sleep in the cloudy
day, when the body is sick of its bouncing, and it has a rest--the soul
has a rest, which is good for it, m'sieu'. I have worked it all out so.
Besides, the soul of madame is her own. I have not made any claim upon
it, and I will not expect you to do more, m'sieu' le cure."
"It is my duty to speak," protested the good priest. "Her soul is God's,
and I am God's vicar--"
Jean Jacques waved a hand. "T'sh, you are not the Pope. You are not
even an abbe. You were only a deacon a few years ago. You did not know
how to hold a baby for the christening when you came to St. Saviour's
first. For the mass, you have some right to speak; it is your duty
perhaps; but the confession, that is another thing; that is the will of
every soul to do or not to do. What do you know of a woman's soul-well,
perhaps, you know what they have told you; but madame's soul--"
"Madame has never been to confession to me," interjected M. Savry
indignantly. Jean Jacques chuckled. He had his New Cure now for sure.
"Confession is for those who have sinned. Is it that you say one must go
to confession, and in order to go to confession it is needful to sin?"
M. Savry shivered with pious indignation. He had a sudden desire to rend
this philosophic Catholic--to put him under the thumb-screw for the glory
of the Lord, and to justify the Church; but the little Catholic miller-
magnate gave freely to St. Saviour's; he was popular; he had a position;
he was good to the poor; and every Christmas-time he sent a half-dozen
bags of flour to the presbytery!
All Pere Savry ventured to say in reply was: "Upon your head be it,
M. Jean Jacques. I have done my duty. I shall hope to see madame at
mass next Sunday."
Jean Jacques had chuckled over that episode, for he had conquered;
he had shown M. Savry that he was master in his own household and outside
it. That much his philosophy had done for him. No other man in the
parish would have dared to speak to the Cure like that. He had never
scolded Carmen when she had not gone to church. Besides, there was
Carmen's little daughter always at his side at mass; and Carmen always
insisted on Zoe going with him, and even seemed anxious for them to be
off at the first sound of the bells of St. Saviour's. Their souls were
busy, hers wanted rest; that was clear. He was glad he had worked it out
so cleverly to the Cure--and to his own mind. His philosophy surely had
vindicated itself.
But Jean Jacques was far from thinking of these things as he drove back
from Vilray and from his episode in Court to the Manor Cartier. He was
indeed just praising himself, his wife, his child, and everything that
belonged to him. He was planning, planning, as he talked, the new things
to do--the cheese-factory, the purchase of a steam-plough and a steam-
thresher which he could hire out to his neighbours. Only once during the
drive did he turn round to Carmen, and then it was to ask her if she had
seen her father of late.
"Not for ten months," was her reply. "Why do you ask?"
"Wouldn't he like to be nearer you and Zoe? It's twelve miles to
Beauharnais," he replied.
"Are you thinking of offering him another place at the Manor?" she asked
sharply.
"Well, there is the new cheese-factory--not to manage, but to keep the
books! He's doing them all right for the lumber-firm. I hear that he--"
"I don't want it. No good comes from relatives working together. Look
at the Latouche farm where your cousin makes his mess. My father is well
enough where he is."
"But you'd like to see him oftener--I was only thinking of that," said
Jean Jacques in a mollifying voice. It was the kind of thing in which he
showed at once the weakness and the kindness of his nature. He was in
fact not a philosopher, but a sentimentalist.
"If mother doesn't think it's sensible, why do it, father?" asked Zoe
anxiously, looking up into her father's face.
She had seen the look in her mother's eyes, and also she had no love for
her grandfather. Her instinct had at one time wavered regarding him; but
she had seen an incident with a vanished female cook, and though she had
not understood, a prejudice had been created in her mind. She was always
contrasting him with M. Fille, who, to her mind, was what a grandfather
ought to be.
"I won't have him beholden to you," said Carmen, almost passionately.
"He is of my family," said Jean Jacques firmly and chivalrously. "There
is no question of being beholden."
"Let well enough alone," was the gloomy reply. With a sigh, Jean Jacques
turned back to the study of the road before him, to gossip with Zoe, and
to keep on planning subconsciously the new things he must do.
Carmen sighed too, or rather she gave a gasp of agitation and annoyance.
Her father? She had lost whatever illusion once existed regarding him.
For years he had clung to her--to her pocket. He was given to drinking
in past years, and he still had his sprees. Like the rest of the world,
she had not in earlier years seen the furtiveness in his handsome face;
but at last, as his natural viciousness became stereotyped, and bad
habits matured and emphasized, she saw beneath his mask of low-class
comeliness. When at last she had found it necessary to dismiss the best
cook she ever had, because of him, they saw little of each other. This
was coincident with his failure at the ash-factory, where he mismanaged
and even robbed Jean Jacques right and left; and she had firmly insisted
on Jean Jacques evicting him, on the ground that it was not Sebastian
Dolores' bent to manage a business.
This little episode, as they drove home from Vilray, had an unreasonable
effect upon her.
It was like the touch of a finger which launches a boat balancing in the
ways onto the deep. It tossed her on a sea of agitation. She was swept
away on a flood of morbid reflection.
Her husband and her daughter, laughing and talking in the front seat of
the red wagon, seemed quite oblivious of her, and if ever there was a
time when their influence was needed it was now. George Masson was
coming over late this afternoon to inspect the work he had been doing;
and she was trembling with an agitation which, however, did not show upon
the surface. She had not seen him for two days--since the day after the
Clerk of the Court had discovered her in the arms of a man who was not
her husband; but he was coming this evening, and he was coming to-morrow
for the last time; for the repair work on the flume of the dam would all
be finished then.
But would the work he had been doing all be finished then? As she
thought of that incident of three days ago and of its repetition on the
following day, she remembered what he had said to her as she snatched
herself almost violently from his arms, in a sudden access of remorse.
He had said that it had to be, that there was no escape now; and at his
words she had felt every pulse in her body throbbing, every vein
expanding with a hot life which thrilled and tortured her. Life had been
so meagre and so dull, and the man who had worshipped her on the Antoine
now worshipped himself only, and also Zoe, the child, maybe; or so she
thought; while the man who had once possessed her whole mind and whole
heart, and never her body, back there in Spain, he, Carvillho Gonzales,
would have loved her to the end, in scenes where life had colour and
passion and danger and delightful movement.
She was one of those happy mortals who believe that the dead and gone
lover was perfect, and that in losing him she was losing all that life
had in store; but the bare, hard truth was that her Gonzales could have
been true neither to her nor to any woman in the world for longer than
one lingering year, perhaps one lunar month. It did not console her--
she did not think of it-that the little man on the seat of the red wagon,
chirruping with their daughter, had been, would always be, true to her.
Of what good was fidelity if he that was faithful desired no longer as
he once did?
A keen observer would have seen in the glowing, unrestful look, in the
hot cheek, in the interlacing fingers, that a contest was going on in the
woman's soul, as she drove homeward with all that was her own in the
world. The laughter of her husband and child grated painfully on her
ears. Why should they be mirthful while her life was being swept by a
storm of doubt, temptation, and dark passion? Why was it?
Yet she smiled at Jean Jacques when he lifted her down from the red wagon
at the door of the Manor Cartier, even though he lifted his daughter down
first.
Did she smile at Jean Jacques because, as they came toward the Manor,
she saw George Masson in the distance by the flume, and in that moment
decided to keep her promise and meet him at a secluded point on the
river-bank at sunset after supper?
CHAPTER VII
JEAN JACQUES AWAKES FROM SLEEP
The pensiveness of a summer evening on the Beau Cheval was like a veil
hung over all the world. While yet the sun was shining, there was the
tremor of life in the sadness; but when the last glint of amethyst and
gold died away behind Mont Violet, and the melancholy swish of the river
against the osiered banks rose out of the windless dusk, all the region
around Manor Cartier, with its cypresses, its firs, its beeches, and its
elms, became gently triste. Even the weather-vane on the Manor--the gold
Cock of Beaugard, as it was called--did not move; and the stamping of a
horse in the stable was like the thunderous knock of a traveller from
Beyond. The white mill and the grey manor stood out with ghostly
vividness in the light of the rising moon. Yet there were times
innumerable when they looked like cool retreats for those who wanted
rest; when, in the summer solstice, they offered the pleasant peace of
the happy fireside. How often had Jean Jacques stood off from it all of
a summer night and said to himself: "Look at that, my Jean Jacques. It
is all yours, Manor and mills and farms and factory--all."
"Growing, growing, fattening, while I drone in my feather bed," he had
as often said, with the delighted observation of the philosopher. "And
me but a young man yet--but a mere boy," he would add. "I have piled it
up--I have piled it up, and it keeps on growing, first one thing and then
another."
Could such a man be unhappy? Finding within himself his satisfaction,
his fountain of appeasement, why should not his days be days of
pleasantness and peace? So it appeared to him during that summer, just
passed, when he had surveyed the World and his world within the World,
and it seemed to his innocent mind that he himself had made it all.
There he was, not far beyond forty, and eligible to become a member
of Parliament, or even a count of the Holy Roman Empire! He had thought
of both these honours, but there was so much to occupy him--he never had
a moment to himself, except at night; and then there was planning and
accounting to do, his foremen to see, or some knotty thing to
disentangle. But when the big clock in the Manor struck ten, and he took
out his great antique silver watch, to see if the two marched to the
second, he would go to the door, look out into the night, say, "All's
well, thank the good God," and would go to bed, very often forgetting to
kiss Carmen, and even forgetting his darling little Zoe.
After all, a mind has to be very big and to have very many tentacles to
hold so many things all at once, and also to remember to do the right
thing at the right moment every time. He would even forget to ask Carmen
to play on the guitar, which in the first days of their married life was
the recreation of every evening. Seldom with the later years had he
asked her to sing, because he was so busy; and somehow his ear had not
that keenness of sound once belonging to it. There was a time when he
himself was wont to sing, when he taught his little Zoe the tunes of the
Chansons Canadiennes; but even that had dropped away, except at rare
intervals, when he would sing Le Petit Roger Bontemps, with Petite Fleur
de Bois, and a dozen others; but most he would sing--indeed there was
never a sing-song in the Manor Cartier but he would burst forth with A la
Claire Fontaine and its haunting refrain:
"Il y a longtemps que je t'aime,
Jamais je ne t'oublierai."
But this very summer, when he had sung it on the birthday of the little
Zoe, his voice had seemed out of tune. At first he had thought that
Carmen was playing his accompaniment badly on the guitar, but she had
sharply protested against that, and had appealed to M. Fille, who was
present at the pretty festivity. He had told the truth, as a Clerk of
the Court should. He said that Jean Jacques' voice was not as he had so
often heard it; but he would also frankly admit that he did not think
madame played the song as he had heard her play it aforetime, and that
covered indeed twelve years or more--in fact, since the birth of the
renowned Zoe.
M. Fille had wondered much that night of June at the listless manner and
listless playing of Carmen Barbille. For a woman of such spirit and fire
it would seem as though she must be in ill-health to play like that. Yet
when he looked at her he saw only the comeliness of a woman whom the life
of the haut habitant had not destroyed or, indeed, dimmed. Her skin was
smooth, she had no wrinkles, and her neck was a pillar of softly moulded
white flesh, around which a man might well string unset jewels, if he had
them; for the tint and purity of her skin would be a better setting than
platinum or fine gold. But the Clerk of the Court was really
unsophisticated, or he would have seen that Carmen played the guitar
badly because she was not interested in Jean Jacques' singing. He would
have known that she had come to that stage in her married life when the
tenure is pitifully insecure. He would have seen that the crisis was
near. If he had had any real observation he would have noticed that
Carmen's eyes at once kindled, and that the guitar became a different
thing, when M. Colombin, the young schoolmaster, one of the guests,
caught up the refrain of A la Claire Fontaine, and in a soft tenor voice
sang it with Jean Jacques to the end, and then sang it again with Zoe.
Then Carmen's dark eyes deepened with the gathering light in them, her
body seemed to vibrate and thrill with emotion; and when M. Colombin and
Zoe ceased, with her eyes fixed on the distance, and as though
unconscious of them all, she began to sing a song of Cadiz which she had
not sung since boarding the Antoine at Bordeaux. Her mind had, suddenly
flown back out of her dark discontent to the days when all life was
before her, and, with her Gonzales, she had moved in an atmosphere of
romance, adventure and passion.
In a second she was transformed from the wife of the brown money-master
to the girl she was when she came to St. Saviour's from the plaza, where
her Carvillho Gonzales was shot, with love behind her and memory blazoned
in the red of martyrdom. She sang now as she had not sung for some
years. Her guitar seemed to leap into life, her face shone with the hot
passion of memory, her voice rang with the pain of a disappointed life:
"Granada, Granada, thy gardens are gay,
And bright are thy stars, the high stars above;
But as flowers that fade and are gray,
But as dusk at the end of the day,
Are ye to the light in the eyes of my love
In the eyes, in the soul, of my love.
"Granada, Granada, oh, when shall I see
My love in thy gardens, there waiting for me?
"Beloved, beloved, have pity, and make
Not the sun shut its eyes, its hot, envious eyes,
And the world in the darkness of night
Be debtor to thee for its light.
Turn thy face, turn thy face from the skies
To the love, to the pain in my eyes.
"Granada, Granada, oh, when shall I see
My love in thy gardens, there waiting for me!"
From that night forward she had been restless and petulant and like one
watching and waiting. It seemed to her that she must fly from the life
which was choking her. It was all so petty and so small. People went
about sneaking into other people's homes like detectives; they turned
yellow and grew scrofulous from too much salt pork, green tea, native
tobacco, and the heat of feather beds. The making of a rag carpet was an
event, the birth of a baby every year till the woman was forty-five was a
commonplace; but the exit of a youth to a seminary to become a priest, or
the entrance to the novitiate of a young girl, were matters as important
as a battle to Napoleon the Great.
How had she gone through it all so long, she asked herself? The presence
of Jean Jacques had become almost unbearable when, the day done, he
retired to the feather bed which she loathed, though he would have looked
upon discarding it like the abdication of his social position. A feather
bed was a sign of social position; it was as much the dais to his honour
as is the woolsack to the Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords.
She was waiting for something. There was a restless, vagrant spirit
alive in her now. She had been so long inactive, tied by the leg,
with wings clipped; now her mind roamed into pleasant places of the
imagination where life had freedom, where she could renew the impulses
of youth. A true philosopher-a man of the world-would have known for
what she was waiting with that vague, disordered expectancy and yearning;
but there was no man of the world to watch and guide her this fateful
summer, when things began to go irretrievably wrong.
Then George Masson came. He was a man of the world in his way; he saw
and knew better than the philosopher of the Manor Cartier. He grasped
the situation with the mind of an artist in his own sphere, and with the
knowledge got by experience. Thus there had been the thing which the
Clerk of the Court saw from Mont Violet behind the Manor; and so it was
that as Jean Jacques helped Carmen down from the red wagon on their
return from Vilray, she gave him a smile which was meant to deceive; for
though given to him it was really given to another man in her mind's eye.
At sunset she gave it again to George Masson on the river-bank, only
warmer and brighter still, with eyes that were burning, with hands that
trembled, and with an agitated bosom more delicately ample than it was on
the day the Antoine was wrecked.
Neither of these two adventurers into a wild world of feeling noticed
that a man was sitting on a little knoll under a tree, not far away from
their meeting-place, busy with pencil and paper.
It was Jean Jacques, who had also come to the river-bank to work out a
business problem which must be settled on the morrow. He had stolen out
immediately after supper from neighbours who wished to see him, and had
come here by a roundabout way, because he wished to be alone.
George Masson and Carmen were together for a few moments only, but Jean
Jacques heard his wife say, "Yes, to-morrow--for sure," and then he saw
her kiss the master-carpenter--kiss him twice, thrice. After which they
vanished, she in one direction, and the invader and marauder in another.
If either of these two had seen the face of the man with a pencil
and paper under the spreading beechtree, they would not have been so
impatient for tomorrow, and Carmen would not have said "for sure."
Jean Jacques was awake at last, man as well as philosopher.
CHAPTER VIII
THE GATE IN THE WALL
Jean Jacques was not without originality of a kind, and not without
initiative; but there were also the elements of the very old Adam in him,
and the strain of the obvious. If he had been a real genius, rather than
a mere lively variation of the commonplace--a chicken that could never
burst its shell, a bird which could not quite break into song--he might
have made his biographer guess hard and futilely, as to what he would do
after having seen his wife's arms around the neck of another man than
himself--a man little more than a manual labourer, while he, Jean Jacques
Barbille, had come of the people of the Old Regime. As it was, this
magnate of St. Saviour's, who yesterday posed so sympathetically and
effectively in the Court at Vilray as a figure of note, did the quite
obvious thing: he determined to kill the master-carpenter from Laplatte.
There was no genius in that. When, from under the spreading beech-tree,
Jean Jacques saw his wife footing it back to her house with a light,
wayward step; when he watched the master-carpenter vault over a stone
fence five feet high with a smile of triumph mingled with doubt on his
face, he was too stunned at first to move or speak. If a sledge-hammer
strikes you on the skull, though your skull is of such a hardness that it
does not break, still the shock numbs activity for awhile, at any rate.
The sledge-hammer had descended on Jean Jacques' head, and also had
struck him between the eyes; and it is in the credit balance of his
ledger of life, that he refrained from useless outcry at the moment.
Such a stroke kills some men, either at once, or by lengthened torture;
others it sends mad, so that they make a clamour which draws the
attention of the astonished and not sympathetic world; but it only
paralysed Jean Jacques. For a time he sat fascinated by the ferocity
of the event, his eyes following the hurrying wife and the jaunty,
swaggering master-carpenter with a strange, animal-like dismay and
apprehension. They remained fixed with a kind of blank horror and
distraction on the landscape for some time after both had disappeared.
At last, however, he seemed to recover his senses, and to come back from
the place where he had been struck by the hammer of treachery. He seemed
to realize again that he was still a part of the common world, not a
human being swung through the universe on his heart-strings by a Gorgon.
The paper and pencil in his hand brought him back from the far Gehenna
where he had been, to the world again--how stony and stormy a world it
was, with the air gone as heavy as lead, with his feet so loaded down
with chains that he could not stir! He had had great joy of this his
world; he had found it a place where every day were problems to be solved
by an astute mind, problems which gave way before the master-thinker.
There was of course unhappiness in his world. There was death, there was
accident occasionally--had his own people not gone down under the scythe
of time? But in going they had left behind in real estate and other
things good compensation for their loss. There was occasional suffering
and poverty and trouble in his little kingdom; but a cord of wood here, a
barrel of flour there, a side of beef elsewhere, a little debt remitted,
a bag of dried apples, or an Indian blanket--these he gave, and had great
pleasure in giving; and so the world was not a place where men should
hang their heads, but a place where the busy man got more than the worth
of his money.
It had never occurred to him that he was ever translating the world into
terms of himself, that he went on his way saying in effect, "I am coming.
I am Jean Jacques Barbille. You have heard of me. You know me. Wave a
hand to me, duck your head to me, crack the whip or nod when I pass. I
am M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosopher."
And all the while he had only been vaguely, not really, conscious of his
wife and child. He did not know that he had only made of his wife an
incident in his life, in spite of the fact that he thought he loved her;
that he had been proud of her splendid personality; and that, with
passionate chivalry, he had resented any criticism of her.
He thought still, as he did on the Antoine, that Carmen's figure had the
lines of the Venus of Milo, that her head would have been a model either
for a Madonna, or for Joan of Arc, or the famous Isabella of Aragon.
Having visited the Louvre and the Luxembourg all in one day, he felt he
was entitled to make such comparisons, and that in making them he was on
sure ground. He had loved to kiss Carmen in the neck, it was so full and
soft and round; and when she went about the garden with her dress
shortened, and he saw her ankles, even after he had been married thirteen
years, and she was thirty-four, he still admired, he still thought that
the world was a good place when it produced such a woman. And even when
she had lashed him with her tongue, as she did sometimes, he still
laughed--after the smart was over--because he liked spirit. He would
never have a horse that had not some blood, and he had never driven a
sluggard in his life more than once. But wife and child and world, and
all that therein was, existed largely because they were necessary to Jean
Jacques.
That is the way it had been; and it was as though the firmament had been
rolled up before his eyes, exposing the everlasting mysteries, when he
saw his wife in the arms of the master-carpenter. It was like some
frightening dream.
The paper and pencil waked him to reality. He looked towards his house,
he looked the way George Masson had gone, and he knew that what he had
seen was real life and not a dream. The paper fell from his hand. He
did not pick it up. Its fall represented the tumbling walls of life, was
the earthquake which shook his world into chaos. He ground the sheet
into the gravel with his heel. There would be no cheese-factory built at
St. Saviour's for many a year to come. The man of initiative, the man of
the hundred irons would not have the hundred and one, or keep the hundred
hot any more; because he would be so busy with the iron which had entered
into his soul.
When the paper had been made one with the earth, a problem buried for
ever, Jean Jacques pulled himself up to his full height, as though facing
a great thing which he must do.
"Well, of course!" he said firmly.
That was what his honour, Judge Carcasson, had said a few hours before,
when the little Clerk of the Court had remarked an obvious thing about
the case of Jean Jacques.
And Jean Jacques said only the obvious thing when he made up his mind to
do the obvious thing--to kill George Masson, the master-carpenter.
This was evidence that he was no genius. Anybody could think of killing
a man who had injured him, as the master-carpenter had done Jean Jacques.
It is the solution of the problem of the Patagonian. It is old as
Rameses.
Yet in his own way Jean Jacques did what he felt he had to do. The thing
he was going to do was hopelessly obvious, but the doing of it was Jean
Jacques' own; and it was not obvious; and that perhaps was genius after
all. There are certain inevitable things to do, and for all men to do;
and they have been doing them from the beginning of time; but the way it
is done--is not that genius? There is no new story in the world; all the
things that happen have happened for untold centuries; but the man who
tells the story in a new way, that is genius, so the great men say. If,
then, Jean Jacques did the thing he had to do with a turn of his own, he
would justify to some degree the opinion he had formed of himself.
As he walked back to his desecrated home he set himself to think. How
should it be done? There was the rifle with which he had killed deer in
the woods beyond the Saguenay and bear beyond the Chicoutimi. That was
simple--and it was obvious; and it could be done at once. He could soon
overtake the man who had spoiled the world for him.
Yet he was a Norman, and the Norman thinks before he acts. He is the
soul of caution; he wants to get the best he can out of his bargain. He
will throw nothing away that is to his advantage. There should be other
ways than the gun with which to take a man's life--ways which might give
a Norman a chance to sacrifice only one life; to secure punishment where
it was due, but also escape from punishment for doing the obvious thing.
Poison? That was too stupid even to think of once. A pitch-fork and a
dung-heap? That had its merits; but again there was the risk of more
than one life.
All the way to his house, Jean Jacques, with something of the rage of
passion and the glaze of horror gone from his eyes, and his face not now
so ghastly, still brooded over how, after he had had his say, he was to
put George Masson out of the world. But it did not come at once. All
makers of life-stories find their difficulty at times. Tirelessly they
grope along a wall, day in, day out, and then suddenly a great gate
swings open, as though to the touch of a spring, and the whole way is
clear to the goal.
Jean Jacques went on thinking in a strange, new, intense abstraction.
His restless eyes were steadier than they had ever been; his wife noticed
that as he entered the house after the Revelation. She noticed also his
paleness and his abstraction. For an instant she was frightened; but no,
Jean Jacques could not know anything. Yet--yet he had come from the
direction of the river!
"What is it, Jean Jacques?" she asked. "Aren't you well?"
He put his hand to his head, but did not look her in the eyes. His
gesture helped him to avoid that. "I have a head--la, such a head!
I have been thinking, thinking-it is my hobby. I have been planning
the cheese-factory, and all at once it comes on-the ache in my head.
I will go to bed. Yes, I will go at once." Suddenly he turned at the
door leading to the bedroom. "The little Zoe--is she well?"
"Of course. Why should she not be well? She has gone to the top of the
hill. Of course, she's well, Jean Jacques."
"Good-good!" he remarked. Somehow it seemed strange to him that Zoe
should be well. Was there not a terrible sickness in his house, and had
not that woman, his wife, her mother, brought the infection? Was he
himself not stricken by it?
Carmen was calm enough again. "Go to bed, Jean Jacques," she said, "and
I'll bring you a sleeping posset. I know those headaches. You had one
when the ash-factory was burned."
He nodded without looking at her, and closed the door behind him.
When she came to the bedroom a half-hour later, his face was turned to
the wall. She spoke, but he did not answer. She thought he was asleep.
He was not asleep. He was only thinking how to do the thing which was
not obvious, which was also safe for himself. That should be his
triumph, if he could but achieve it.
When she came to bed he did not stir, and he did not answer her when she
spoke.
"The poor Jean Jacques!" he heard her say, and if there had not been
on him the same courage that possessed him the night when the Antoine
was wrecked, he would have sobbed.
He did not stir. He kept thinking; and all the time her words, "The poor
Jean Jacques!" kept weaving themselves through his vague designs. Why
had she said that--she who had deceived, betrayed him? Had he then seen
what he had seen?
She did not sleep for a long time, and when she did it was uneasily. But
the bed was an immense one, and she was not near him. There was no sleep
for him--not even for an hour. Once, in exhaustion, he almost rolled
over into the poppies of unconsciousness; but he came back with a start
and a groan to sentient life again, and kept feeling, feeling along the
wall of purpose for a masterly way to kill.
At dawn it came, suddenly spreading out before him like a picture. He
saw himself standing at the head of the flume out there by the Mill
Cartier with his hand on the lever. Below him in the empty flume was the
master-carpenter giving a last inspection to the repairs. Beyond the
master-carpenter--far beyond--was the great mill-wheel! Behind himself,
Jean Jacques, was the river held back by the dam; and if the lever was
opened,--the river would sweep through the raised gates down the flume to
the millwheel--with the man. And then the wheel would turn and turn, and
the man would be in the wheel.
It was not obvious; it was original; and it looked safe for Jean Jacques.
How easily could such an "accident" occur!
CHAPTER IX
"MOI-JE SUIS PHILOSOPHE"
The air was like a mellow wine, and the light on the landscape was full
of wistfulness. It was a thing so exquisite that a man of sentiment like
Jean Jacques in his younger days would have wept to see. And the feeling
was as palpable as the seeing; as in the early spring the new life which
is being born in the year, produces a febrile kind of sorrow in the mind.
But the glow of Indian summer, that compromise, that after-thought of
real summer, which brings her back for another good-bye ere she vanishes
for ever--its sadness is of a different kind. Its longing has a sharper
edge; there stir in it the pangs of discontent; and the mind and body
yearn for solace. It is a dangerous time, even more dangerous than
spring for those who have passed the days of youth.
It had proved dangerous to Carmen Barbille. The melancholy of the
gorgeously tinted trees, the flights of the birds to the south, the smell
of the fallow field, the wind with the touch of the coming rains--these
had given to a growing discontent with her monotonous life the desire
born of self-pity. In spite of all she could do she was turning to the
life she had left behind in Cadiz long ago.
It seemed to her that Jean Jacques had ceased to care for the charms
which once he had so proudly proclaimed. There was in her the strain of
the religion of Epicurus. She desired always that her visible corporeal
self should be admired and desired, that men should say, "What a splendid
creature!" It was in her veins, an undefined philosophy of life; and she
had ever measured the love of Jean Jacques by his caresses. She had no
other vital standard. This she could measure, she could grasp it and
say, "Here I have a hold; it is so much harvested." But if some one had
written her a poem a thousand verses long, she would have said, "Yes, all
very fine, but let me see what it means; let me feel that it is so."
She had an inherent love of luxury and pleasure, which was far more
active in her now than when she married Jean Jacques. For a Spanish
woman she had matured late; and that was because, in her youth, she had
been active and athletic, unlike most Spanish girls; and the microbes of
a sensuous life, or what might have become a sensual life, had not good
chance to breed.
It all came, however, in the dullness of the winter days and nights, in
the time of deep snows, when they could go abroad but very little. Then
her body and her mind seemed to long for the indolent sun-spaces of
Spain. The artificial heat of the big stoves in the rooms with the low
ceilings only irritated her, and she felt herself growing more ample from
lassitude of the flesh. This particular autumn it seemed to her that she
could not get through another winter without something going wrong,
without a crisis of some sort. She felt the need of excitement, of
change. She had the desire for pleasures undefined.
Then George Masson came, and the undefined took form almost at once.
It was no case of the hunter pursuing his prey with all the craft and
subtlety of his trade. She had answered his look with spontaneity, due
to the fact that she had been surprised into the candour of her feelings
by the appearance of one who had the boldness of a brigand, the health of
a Hercules, and the intelligence of a primitive Jesuit. He had not
hesitated; he had yielded himself to the sumptuous attraction, and the
fire in his eyes was only the window of the furnace within him. He had
gone headlong to the conquest, and by sheer force of temperament and
weight of passion he had swept her off her feet.
He had now come to the last day of his duty at the Mill Cartier, when all
he had to do was to inspect the work done, give assurance and guarantee
that it was all right, and receive his cheque from Jean Jacques. He had
come early, because he had been unable to sleep well, and also he had
much to do before keeping his tryst with Carmen Barbille in the
afternoon.
As he passed the Manor Cartier this fateful morning, he saw her at the
window, and he waved his hat at her with a cheery salutation which she
did not hear. He knew that she did not hear or see. "My beauty !" he
said aloud. "My splendid girl, my charmer of Cadiz! My wonder of the
Alhambra, my Moorish maid! My bird of freedom--hand of Charlemagne, your
lips are sweet, yes, sweet as one-and-twenty!"
His lips grew redder at the thought of the kisses he had taken, his
cheek flushed with the thought of those he meant to take; and he laughed
greedily as he lowered himself into the flume by a ladder, just under the
lever that opened the gates, to begin his inspection.
It was not a perfunctory inspection, for he was a good craftsman, and he
had pride in what his workmen did.
"Ah!"
It was a sound of dumbfounded amazement, a hoarse cry of horror which was
not in tune with the beauty of the morning.
"Ah!"
It came from his throat like the groan of a trapped and wounded lion.
George Masson had almost finished his inspection, when he heard a noise
behind him. He turned and looked back. There stood Jean Jacques with
his hand on the lever. The noise he had heard was the fourteen-foot
ladder being dropped, after Jean Jacques had drawn it up softly out of
the flume.
"Ah! Nom de Dieu!" George Masson exclaimed again in helpless fury and
with horror in his eyes.
By instinct he understood that Carmen's husband knew all. He realized
what Jean Jacques meant to do. He knew that the lever locking the mill-
wheel had been opened, and that Jean Jacques had his hand on the lever
which raised the gate of the flume.
By instinct--for there was no time for thought--he did the only thing
which could help him, he made a swift gesture to Jean Jacques, a gesture
that bade him wait. Time was his only friend in this--one minute, two
minutes, three minutes, anything. For if the gates were opened, he would
be swept into the millwheel, and there would be the end--the everlasting
end.
"Wait!" he called out after his gesture. "One second!"
He ran forward till he was about thirty feet from Jean Jacques standing
there above him, with the set face and the dark malicious, half-insane
eyes. Even in his fear and ghastly anxiety, the subconscious mind of
George Masson was saying, "He looks like the Baron of Beaugard--like the
Baron of Beaugard that killed the man who abused his wife."
It was so. Great-great-grand-nephew of the Baron of Beaugard as he was,
Jean Jacques looked like the portrait of him which hung in the Manor
Cartier. "Wait--but wait one minute!" exclaimed George Masson; and now,
all at once, he had grown cool and determined, and his brain was at work
again with an activity and a clearness it had never known. He had gained
one minute of time, he might be able to gain more. In any case, no one
could save him except himself. There was Jean Jacques with his hand on
the lever--one turn and the thing was done for ever. If a rescuer was
even within one foot of Jean Jacques, the deed could still be done. It
was so much easier opening than shutting the gates of the flume!
"Why should I wait, devil and rogue?" The words came from Jean Jacques'
lips with a snarl. "I am going to kill you. It will do you no good to
whine--cochon!"
To call a man a pig is the worst insult which could be offered by one man
to another in the parish of St. Saviour's. To be called a pig as you are
going to die, is an offensive business indeed.
"I know you are going to kill me--that you can kill me, and I can do
nothing," was the master-carpenter's reply. "There it is--a turn of the
lever, and I am done. Bien sur, I know how easy! I do not want to die,
but I will not squeal even if I am a pig. One can only die once. And
once is enough . . . No, don't--not yet ! Give me a minute till I
tell you something; then you can open the gates. You will have a long
time to live--yes, yes, you are the kind that live long. Well, a minute
or two is not much to ask. If you want to murder, you will open the
gates at once; but if it is punishment, if you are an executioner, you
will give me time to pray."
Jean Jacques did not soften. His voice was harsh and grim. "Well, get
on with your praying, but don't talk. You are going to die," he added,
his hands gripping the lever tighter.
The master-carpenter had had the true inspiration in his hour of danger.
He had touched his appeal with logic, he had offered an argument. Jean
Jacques was a logician, a philosopher! That point made about the
difference between a murder and an execution was a good one. Beside it
was an acknowledgment, by inference, from his victim, that he was getting
what he deserved.
"Pray quick and have it over, pig of an adulterer!" added Jean Jacques.
The master-carpenter raised a protesting hand. "There you are
mistaken; but it is no matter. At the end of to-day I would have been
an adulterer, if you hadn't found out. I don't complain of the word.
But see, as a philosopher"--Jean Jacques jerked a haughty assent--"as a
philosopher you will want to know how and why it is. Carmen will never
tell you--a woman never tells the truth about such things, because she
does not know how. She does not know the truth ever, exactly, about
anything. It is because she is a woman. But I would like to tell you
the exact truth; and I can, because I am a man. For what she did you
are as much to blame as she . . . no, no--not yet!"
Jean Jacques' hand had spasmodically tightened on the lever as though he
would wrench the gates open, and a snarl came from his lips.
"Figure de Christ, but it is true, as true as death! Listen, M'sieu'
Jean Jacques. You are going to kill me, but listen so that you will know
how to speak to her afterwards, understanding what I said as I died."
"Get on--quick!" growled Jean Jacques with white wrinkled lips and the
sun in his agonized eyes. George Masson continued his pleading. "You
were always a man of mind"--Jean Jacques' fierce agitation visibly
subsided, and a surly sort of vanity crept into his face--"and you
married a girl who cared more for what you did than what you thought--
that is sure, for I know women. I am not married, and I have had much
to do with many of them. I will tell you the truth. I left the West
because of a woman--of two women. I had a good business, but I could
not keep out of trouble with women. They made it too easy for me."
"Peacock-pig!" exclaimed Jean Jacques with an ugly sneer.
"Let a man when he is dying tell all the truth, to ease his mind," said
the master-carpenter with a machiavellian pretence and cunning. "It was
vanity, it was, as you say; it was the peacock in me made me be the
friend of many women and not the husband of one. I came down here to
Quebec from the Far West to get away from consequences. It was
expensive. I had to sacrifice. Well, here I am in trouble again--my
last trouble, and with the wife of a man that I respect and admire, not
enough to keep my hands off his wife, but still that I admire. It is my
weakness that I could not be, as a man, honourable to Jean Jacques
Barbille. And so I pay the price; so I have to go without time to make
my will. Bless heaven above, I have no wife--"
"If you had a wife you would not be dying now. You would not then meddle
with the home of Jean Jacques Barbille," sneered Jean Jacques. The note
was savage yet.
"Ah, for sure, for sure! It is so. And if I lived I would marry at
once."
Desperate as his condition was, the master-carpenter could almost have
laughed at the idea of marriage preventing him from following the bent of
his nature. He was the born lover. If he had been as high as the Czar,
or as low as the ditcher, he would have been the same; but it would be
madness to admit that to Jean Jacques now.
"But, as you say, let me get on. My time has come--"
Jean Jacques jerked his head angrily. "Enough of this. You keep on
saying 'Wait a little,' but your time has come. Now take it so, and
don't repeat."
"A man must get used to the idea of dying, or he will die hard," replied
the master-carpenter, for he saw that Jean Jacques' hands were not so
tightly clenched on the lever now; and time was everything. He had
already been near five minutes, and every minute was a step to a chance
of escape--somehow.
"I said you were to blame," he continued. "Listen, Jean Jacques
Barbille. You, a man of mind, married a girl who cared more for a touch
of your hand than a bucketful of your knowledge, which every man in the
province knows is great. At first you were almost always thinking of her
and what a fine woman she was, and because everyone admired her, you
played the peacock, too. I am not the only peacock. You are a good man
--no one ever said anything against your character. But always, always,
you think most of yourself. It is everywhere you go as if you say, 'Look
out. I am coming. I am Jean Jacques Barbille.
"'Make way for Jean Jacques. I am from the Manor Cartier. You have heard
of me.' . . . That is the way you say things in your mind. But all
the time the people say, 'That is Jean Jacques Barbille, but you should
see his wife. She is a wonder. She is at home at the Manor with the
cows and the geese. Jean Jacques travels alone through the parish to
Quebec, to Three Rivers, to Tadousac, to the great exhibition at
Montreal, but madame, she stays at home. M'sieu' Jean Jacques is nothing
beside her'--that is what the people say. They admire you for your
brains, but they would have fallen down before your wife, if you had
given her half a chance."
"Ah, that's bosh--what do you know!" exclaimed Jean Jacques fiercely,
but he was fascinated too by the argument of the man whose life he was
going to take.
"I know the truth, my money-man. Do you think she'd have looked at me if
you'd been to her what she thought I might be? No, bien sur! Did you
take her where she could see the world? No. Did you bring her presents?
No. Did you say, 'Come along, we will make a little journey to see the
world?' No. Do you think that a woman can sit and darn your socks, and
tidy your room, and bake you pancakes in the morning while you roast your
toes, and be satisfied with just that, and not long for something
outside?"
Jean Jacques was silent. He did not move. He was being hypnotized by a
mind of subtle strength, by the logic of which he was so great a lover.
The master-carpenter pressed his logic home. "No, she must sit in your
shadow always. She must wait till you come. And when you come, it was
'Here am I, your Jean Jacques. Fall down and worship me. I am your
husband.' Did you ever say, 'Heavens, there you are, the woman of all
the world, the rising and the setting sun, the star that shines, the
garden where all the flowers of love grow'? Did you ever do that? But
no, there was only one person in the world--there was only you, Jean
Jacques. You were the only pig in the sty."
It was a bold stroke, but if Jean Jacques could stand that, he could
stand anything. There was a savage start on the part of Jean Jacques,
and the lever almost moved.
"Stop one second!" cried the master-carpenter, sharply now, for in spite
of the sudden savagery on Jean Jacques' part, he felt he had an
advantage, and now he would play his biggest card.
"You can kill me. It is there in your hand. No one can stop you. But
will that give you anything? What is my life? If you take it away, will
you be happier? It is happiness you want. Your wife--she will love you,
if you give her a chance. If you kill me, I will have my revenge in
death, for it is the end of all things for you. You lose your wife for
ever. You need not do so. She would have gone with me, not because of
me, but because I was a man who she thought would treat her like a
friend, like a comrade; who would love her--sacre, what husband could
help make love to such a woman, unless he was in love with himself
instead of her!"
Jean Jacques rocked to and fro over the lever in his agitation, yet he
made no motion to move it. He was under a spell.
Straight home drove the master-carpenter's reasoning now. "Kill me, and
you lose her for ever. Kill me, and she will hate you. You think she
will not find out? Then see: as I die I will shriek out so loud that she
can hear me, and she will understand. She will go mad, and give you over
to the law. And then--and then! Did you ever think what will become of
your child, of your Zoe, if you go to the gallows? That would be your
legacy and your blessing to her--the death of a murderer; and she would
be left alone with the woman that would hate you in death! Voila--do you
not see?"
Jean Jacques saw. The terrific logic of the thing smote him. His wife
hating him, himself on the scaffold, his little Zoe disgraced and
dishonoured all her life; and himself out of it all, unable to help her,
and bringing irremediable trouble on her! As a chemical clears a muddy
liquid, leaving it pure and atomless, so there seemed to pass over Jean
Jacques' face a thought like a revelation.
He took his hand from the lever. For a moment he stood like one awakened
out of a sleep. He put his hands to his eyes, then shook his head as
though to free it of some hateful burden. An instant later he stooped,
lifted up the ladder beside him, and let it down to the floor of the
flume.
"There, go--for ever," he said.
Then he turned away with bowed head. He staggered as he stepped down
from the bridge of the flume, where the lever was. He swayed from side
to side. Then he raised his head and looked towards his house. His
child lived there--his Zoe.
"Moi je suis philosophe !" he said brokenly.
After a moment or two, as he stumbled on, he said it again--"Me, I am a
philosopher!"
CHAPTER X
"QUIEN SABE"--WHO KNOWS!
This much must be said for George Masson, that after the terrible
incident at the flume he would have gone straight to the Manor Cartier
to warn Carmen, if it had been possible, though perhaps she already knew.
But there was Jean Jacques on his way back to the Manor, and nothing
remained but to proceed to Laplatte, and give the woman up for ever. He
had no wish to pull up stakes again and begin life afresh, though he was
only forty, and he had plenty of initiative left. But if he had to go,
he would want to go alone, as he had done before. Yes, he would have
liked to tell Carmen that Jean Jacques knew everything; but it was
impossible. She would have to face the full shock from Jean Jacques'
own battery. But then again perhaps she knew already. He hoped she did.
At the very moment that Masson was thinking this, while he went to the
main road where he had left his horse and buggy tied up, Carmen came to
know.
Carmen had not seen her husband that morning until now. She had waked
late, and when she was dressed and went into the dining-room to look for
him, with an apprehension which was the reflection of the bad dreams of
the night, she found that he had had his breakfast earlier than usual and
had gone to the mill. She also learned that he had eaten very little,
and that he had sent a man into Vilray for something or other. Try as
she would to stifle her anxiety, it obtruded itself, and she could eat no
breakfast. She kept her eyes on the door and the window, watching for
Jean Jacques.
Yet she reproved herself for her stupid concern, for Jean Jacques would
have spoken last night, if he had discovered anything. He was not the
man to hold his tongue when he had a chance of talking. He would be sure
to make the most of any opportunity for display of intellectual emotion,
and he would have burst his buttons if he had known. That was the way
she put it in a vernacular which was not Andalusian. Such men love a
grievance, because it gives them an opportunity to talk--with a good case
and to some point, not into the air at imaginary things, as she had so
often seen Jean Jacques do. She knew her Jean Jacques. That is, she
thought she knew her Jean Jacques after living with him for over thirteen
years; but hers was a very common mistake. It is not time which gives
revelation, or which turns a character inside out, and exposes a new and
amazing, maybe revolting side to it. She had never really seen Jean
Jacques, and he had never really seen himself, as he was, but only as
circumstances made him seem to be. What he had showed of his nature all
these forty odd years was only the ferment of a more or less shallow
life, in spite of its many interests: but here now at last was life, with
the crust broken over a deep well of experience and tragedy. She knew as
little what he would do in such a case as he himself knew beforehand. As
the incident of the flume just now showed, he knew little indeed, for he
had done exactly the opposite of what he meant to do. It was possible
that Carmen would also do exactly the opposite of what she meant to do
in her own crisis.
Her test was to come. Would she, after all, go off with the master-
carpenter, leaving behind her the pretty, clever, volatile Zoe. . . .
Zoe--ah, where was Zoe? Carmen became anxious about Zoe, she knew not
why. Was it the revival of the maternal instinct?
She was told that Zoe had gone off on her pony to take a basket of good
things to a poor old woman down the river three miles away. She would be
gone all morning. By so much, fate was favouring her; for the child's
presence would but heighten the emotion of her exit from that place where
her youth had been wasted. Already the few things she had meant to take
away were secreted in a safe place some distance from the house, beside
the path she meant to take when she left Jean Jacques for ever. George
Masson wanted her, they were to meet to-day, and she was going--going
somewhere out of this intolerable dullness and discontent.
When she pushed her coffee-cup aside and rose from the table without
eating, she went straight to her looking-glass and surveyed herself with
a searching eye. Certainly she was young enough (she said to herself) to
draw the eyes of those who cared for youth and beauty. There was not a
grey hair in the dark brown of her head, there was not a wrinkle--yes,
there were two at the corners of her mouth, which told the story of her
restlessness, of her hunger for the excitement of which she had been
deprived all these years. To go back to Cadiz?--oh, anywhere, anywhere,
so that her blood could beat faster; so that she could feel the stir of
life which had made her spirit flourish even in the dangers of the far-
off day when Gonzales was by her side.
She looked at her guitar. She was sorry she could not take that away
with her. But Jean Jacques would, no doubt, send it after her with his
curse. She would love to play it once again with the old thrill; with
the thrill she had felt on the night of Zoe's birthday a little while
ago, when she was back again with her lover and the birds in the gardens
of Granada. She would sing to someone who cared to hear her, and to
someone who would make her care to sing, which was far more important.
She would sing to the master-carpenter. Though he had not asked her to
go with him--only to meet in a secret place in the hills--she meant to do
so, just as she once meant to marry Jean Jacques, and had done so. It
was true she would probably not have married Jean Jacques, if it had not
been for the wreck of the Antoine; but the wreck had occurred, and she
had married him, and that was done and over so far as she was concerned.
She had determined to go away with the master-carpenter, and though he
might feel the same hesitation as that which Jean Jacques had shown--she
had read her Norman aright aboard the Antoine--yet, still, George Masson
should take her away. A catastrophe had thrown Jean Jacques into her
arms; it would not be a catastrophe which would throw the master-
carpenter into her arms. It would be that they wanted each other.
The mirror gave her a look of dominance--was it her regular features and
her classic head? Does beauty in itself express authority, just because
it has the transcendent thing in it? Does the perfect form convey
something of the same thing that physical force--an army in arms, a
battleship--conveys? In any case it was there, that inherent
masterfulness, though not in its highest form. She was not an
aristocrat, she was no daughter of kings, no duchess of Castile, no
dona of Segovia; and her beauty belonged to more primary manifestations;
but it was above the lower forms, even if it did not reach to the
highest. "A handsome even splendid woman of her class" would have been
the judgment of the connoisseur.
As she looked in the glass at her clear skin, at the wonderful throat
showing so soft and palpable and tower-like under the black velvet ribbon
brightened by a paste ornament; as she saw the smooth breadth of brow,
the fulness of the lips, the limpid lustre of the large eyes, the well-
curved ear, so small and so like ivory, it came home to her, as it had
never done before, that she was wasted in this obscure parish of St.
Saviour's.
There was not a more restless soul or body in all the hemisphere than the
soul and body of Carmen Barbille, as she went from this to that on the
morning when Jean Jacques had refrained from killing the soul-disturber,
the master-carpenter, who had with such skill destroyed the walls and
foundations of his home. Carmen was pointlessly busy as she watched for
the return of Jean Jacques.
At last she saw him coming from the flume of the mill! She saw that he
stumbled as he walked, and that, every now and then, he lifted his head
with an effort and threw it back, and threw his shoulders back also, as
though to assert his physical manhood. He wore no hat, his hands were
making involuntary gestures of helplessness. But presently he seemed to
assert authority over his fumbling body and to come erect. His hands
clenched at his sides, his head came up stiffly and stayed, and with
quickened footsteps he marched rigidly forward towards the Manor.
Then she guessed at the truth, and as soon as she saw his face she was
sure beyond peradventure that he knew.
His figure darkened the doorway. Her first thought was to turn and flee,
not because she was frightened of what he would do, but because she did
not wish to hear what he would say. She shrank from the uprolling of the
curtain of the last thirteen years, from the grim exposure of the
nakedness of their life together. Her indolent nature in repose wanted
the dust of existence swept into a corner out of sight; yet when she was
roused, and there were no corners into which the dust could be swept,
she could be as bold as any better woman.
She hesitated till it was too late to go, and then as he entered the
house from the staring sunlight and the peace of the morning, she
straightened herself, and a sulky, stubborn look came into her eyes.
He might try to kill her, but she had seen death in many forms far away
in Spain, and she would not be afraid till there was cause. Imagination
would not take away her courage. She picked up a half-knitted stocking
which lay upon the table, and standing there, while he came into the
middle of the room, she began to ply the needles.
He stood still. Her face was bent over her knitting. She did not look
at him.
"Well, why don't you look at me?" he asked in a voice husky with
passion.
She raised her head and looked straight into his dark, distracted eyes.
"Good morning," she said calmly.
A kind of snarling laugh came to his lips. "I said good morning to my
wife yesterday, but I will not say it to-day. What is the use of saying
good morning, when the morning is not good!"
"That's logical, anyhow," she said, her needles going faster now. She
was getting control of them--and of herself.
"Why isn't the morning good? Speak. Why isn't it good, Carmen?"
"Quien sabe--who knows!" she replied with exasperating coolness.
"I know--I know all; and it is enough for a lifetime," he challenged.
"What do you know--what is the 'all'?" Her voice had lost timbre. It
was suddenly weak, but from suspense and excitement rather than from
fear.
"I saw you last night with him, by the river. I saw what you did. I
heard you say, 'Yes, to-morrow, for sure.' I saw what you did."
Her eyes were busy with the knitting now. She did not know what to say.
Then, he had known all since the night before! He knew it when he
pretended that his head ached--knew it as he lay by her side all night.
He knew it, and said nothing! But what had he done--what had he done?
She waited for she knew not what. George Masson was to come and inspect
the flume early that morning. Had he come? She had not seen him. But
the river was flowing through the flume: she could hear the mill-wheel
turning--she could hear the mill-wheel turning!
As she did not speak, with a curious husky shrillness to his voice he
said: "There he was down in the flume, there was I at the lever above,
there was the mill-wheel unlocked. There it was. I gripped the lever,
and--"
Her great eyes stared with horror. The knitting-needles stopped;
a pallor swept across her face. She felt as she did when she heard the
court-martial sentence Carvillho Gonzales to death.
The mill-wheel sounded louder and louder in her ears.
"You let in the river!" she cried. "You drove him into the wheel--you
killed him!"
"What else was there to do?" he demanded. "It had to be done, and it
was the safest way. It would be an accident. Such a thing might easily
happen."
"You have murdered him!" she gasped with a wild look.
"To call it murder!" he sneered. "Surely my wife would not call it
murder."
"Fiend--not to have the courage to fight him!" she flung back at him.
"To crawl like a snake and let loose a river on a man! In any other
country, he'd have been given a chance."
This was his act in a new light. He had had only one idea in his mind
when he planned the act, and that was punishment. What rights had a man
who had stolen what was nearer and dearer than a man's own flesh, and for
which he would have given his own flesh fifty times? Was it that Carmen
would now have him believe he ought to have fought the man, who had
spoiled his life and ruined a woman's whole existence.
"What chance had I when he robbed me in the dark of what is worth fifty
times my own life to me?" he asked savagely.
"Murderer--murderer!" she cried hoarsely. "You shall pay for this."
"You will tell--you will give me up?"
Her eyes were on the mill and the river . . . "Where--where is he?
Has he gone down the river? Did you kill him and let him go--like that!"
She made a flinging gesture, as one would toss a stone.
He stared at her. He had never seen her face like that--so strained and
haggard. George Masson was right when he said that she would give him
up; that his life would be in danger, and that his child's life would be
spoiled.
"Murderer!" she repeated. "And when you go to the gallows, your child's
life--you did not think of that, eh? To have your revenge on the man who
was no more to blame than I, thinking only of yourself, you killed him;
but you did not think of your child."
Ah, yes, surely George Masson was right! That was what he had said about
his child, Zoe. What a good thing it was he had not killed the ravager
of his home!
But suddenly his logic came to his aid. In terrible misery as he was, he
was almost pleased that he could reason. "And you would give me over to
the law? You would send me to the gallows--and spoil your child's life?"
he retorted.
She threw the knitting down and flung her hands up. "I have no husband.
I have no child. Take your life. Take it. I will go and find his
body," she said, and she moved swiftly towards the door. "He has gone
down the river--I will find him!"
"He has gone up the river," he exclaimed. "Up the river, I say!"
She stopped short and looked at him blankly. Then his meaning became
clear to her.
"You did not kill him?" she asked scarce above a whisper.
"I let him go," he replied.
"You did not fight him--why?" There was scorn in her tone.
"And if I had killed him that way?" he asked with terrible logic, as he
thought.
"There was little chance of that," she replied scornfully, and steadied
herself against a chair; for, now that the suspense was over, she felt as
though she had been passed between stones which ground the strength out
of her.
A flush of fierce resentment crossed over his face. "It is not
everything to be big," he rejoined. "The greatest men in the world have
been small like me, but they have brought the giant things to their
feet."
She waved a hand disdainfully. "What are you going to do now?" she
asked.
He drew himself up. He seemed to rearrange the motions of his mind
with a little of the old vanity, which was at once grotesque and piteous.
"I am going to forgive you and to try to put things right," he said.
"I have had my faults. You were not to blame altogether. I have left
you too much alone. I did not understand everything all through. I had
never studied women. If I had I should have done the right thing always.
I must begin to study women." The drawn look was going a little from his
face, the ghastly pain was fading from his eyes; his heart was speaking
for her, while his vain intellect hunted the solution of his problem.
She could scarcely believe her ears. No Spaniard would ever have acted
as this man was doing. She had come from a land of No Forgiveness.
Carvillho Gonzales would have killed her, if she had been untrue to him;
and she would have expected it and understood it.
But Jean Jacques was going to forgive her--going to study women, and so
understand her and understand women, as he understood philosophy! This
was too fantastic for human reason. She stared at him, unable to say a
word, and the distracted look in her face did not lessen. Forgiveness
did not solve her problem.
"I am going to take you to Montreal--and then out to Winnipeg, when I've
got the cheese-factory going," he said with a wise look in his face, and
with tenderness even coming into his eyes. "I know what mistakes I've
made"--had not George Masson the despoiler told him of them?--"and I know
what a scoundrel that fellow is, and what tricks of the tongue he has.
Also he is as sleek to look at as a bull, and so he got a hold on you.
I grasp things now. Soon we will start away together again as we did at
Gaspe."
He came close to her. "Carmen!" he said, and made as though he would
embrace her.
"Wait--wait a little. Give me time to think," she said with dry lips,
her heart beating hard. Then she added with a flattery which she knew
would tell, "I cannot think quick as you do. I am slow. I must have
time. I want to work it all out. Wait till to-night," she urged.
"Then we can--"
"Good, we will make it all up to-night," he said, and he patted her
shoulder as one would that of a child. It had the slight flavour of the
superior and the paternal.
She almost shrank from his touch. If he had kissed her she would have
felt that she must push him away; and yet she also knew how good a man he
was.
CHAPTER XI
THE CLERK OF THE COURT KEEPS A PROMISE
"Well, what is it, M'sieu' Fille? What do you want with me? I've got a
lot to do before sundown, and it isn't far off. Out with it."
George Masson was in no good humour; from the look on the face of the
little Clerk of the Court he had no idea that he would disclose any good
news. It was probably some stupid business about "money not being paid
into the Court," which had been left over from cases tried and lost;
and he had had a number of cases that summer. His head was not so clear
to-day as usual, but he had had little difficulties with M'sieu' Fille
before, and he was sure that there was something wrong now.
"Do you want to make me a present?" he added with humorous impatience,
for though he was not in a good temper, he liked the Clerk of the Court,
who was such a figure at Vilray.
The opening for his purpose did not escape M. Fille. He had been at a
loss to begin, but here was a natural opportunity for him.
"Well, good advice is not always a present, but I should like mine to be
taken as such, monsieur," he said a little oracularly.
"Oh, advice--to give me advice--that's why you've brought me in here,
when I've so much to do I can't breathe! Time is money with me, old
'un."
"Mine is advice which may be money in your pocket, monsieur," remarked
the Clerk of the Court with meaning. "Money saved is money earned."
"How do you mean to save me money--by getting the Judge to give decisions
in my favour? That would be money in my pocket for sure. The Court has
been running against my interests this year. When I think I was never so
right in my life--bang goes the judgment of the Court against me, and
into my pocket goes my hand. I don't only need to save money, I need to
make it; so if you can help me in that way I'm your man, M'sieu' la
Fillette?"
The little man bristled at the misuse of his name, and he flushed
slightly also; but there was always something engaging in the pleasure-
loving master-carpenter. He had such an eloquent and warm temperament,
the atmosphere of his personality was so genial, that his impertinence
was insulated. Certainly the master-carpenter was not unpopular, and
people could not easily resist the grip of his physical influence, while
mentally he was far indeed from being deficient. He looked as little
like a villain as a man could, and yet--and yet--a nature like that of
George Masson (even the little Clerk could see that) was not capable of
being true beyond the minute in which he took his oath of fidelity.
While the fit of willingness was on him he would be true; yet in reality
there was no truth at all--only self-indulgence unmarked by duty or
honour.
"Give me a judgment for defamation of character. Give me a thousand
dollars or so for that, m'sieu', and you'll do a good turn to a deserving
fellow-citizen and admirer--one little thousand, that's all, m'sieu'.
Then I'll dance at your wedding and weep at your tomb--so there!"
How easy he made the way for the little Clerk of the Court! "Defamation
of character"--could there possibly be a better opening for what he had
promised Judge Carcasson he would say!
"Ah, Monsieur Masson," very officially and decorously replied M. Fille,
"but is it defamation of character? If the thing is true, then what is
the judgment? It goes against you--so there!" There was irony in the
last words.
"If what thing is true?" sharply asked the mastercarpenter, catching at
the fringe of the idea in M. Fille's mind. "What thing?"
"Ah, but it is true, for I saw it! Yes, alas! I saw it with my own
eyes. By accident of course; but there it was--absolute, uncompromising,
deadly and complete."
It was a happy moment for the little Clerk of the Court when he could, in
such an impromptu way, coin a phrase, or a set of adjectives, which would
bear inspection of purists of the language. He loved to talk, though he
did not talk a great deal, but he made innumerable conversations in his
mind, and that gave him facility when he did speak. He had made
conversations with George Masson in his mind since yesterday, when he
gave his promise to Judge Carcasson; but none of them was like the real
conversation now taking place. It was all the impression of the moment,
while the phrases in his mind had been wonderfully logical things which,
from an intellectual standpoint, would have delighted the man whose cause
he was now engaged in defending.
"You saw what, M'sieu' la Fillette? Out with it, and don't use such big
adjectives. I'm only a carpenter. 'Absolute, uncompromising, deadly,
complete'--that's a mouthful of grammar, my lords! Come, my sprig of
jurisprudence, tell us what you saw." There was an apparent nervousness
in Masson's manner now. Indeed he showed more agitation than when, a few
hours before, Jean Jacques had stood with his hand on the lever of the
gates of the flume, and the life of the master-carpenter at his feet, to
be kicked into eternity.
"Four days ago at five o'clock in the afternoon"--in a voice formal and
exact, the little Clerk of the Court seemed to be reading from a paper,
since he kept his eyes fixed on the blotter before him, as he did in
Court--"I was coming down the hill behind the Manor Cartier, when my
attention--by accident--was drawn to a scene below me in the Manor. I
stopped short, of course, and--"
"Diable! You stopped short 'of course' before what you saw! Spit it
out--what did you see?" George Masson had had a trying day, and there
was danger of losing control of himself. There was a whiteness growing
round the eyes, and eating up the warmth of the cheek; his admirably
smooth brow was contracted into heavy wrinkles, and a foot shifted
uneasily on the floor with a scraping sole. This drew the attention of
M. Fille, who raised his head reprovingly--he could not get rid of the
feeling that he was in court, and that a case was being tried; and the
severity of a Judge is naught compared with the severity of a Clerk of
the Court, particularly if he is small and unmarried, and has no one to
beat him into manageable humanity.
M. Fille's voice was almost querulous.
"If you will but be patient, monsieur! I saw a man with a woman in his
arms, and I fear that I must mention the name of the man. It is not
necessary to give the name of the woman, but I have it written here"--
he tapped the paper--"and there is no mistake in the identity. The man's
name is George Masson, master-carpenter, of the town of Laplatte in the
province of Quebec."
George Masson was as one hit between the eyes. He made a motion as
though to ward off a blow. "Name of Peter, old cock!" he exclaimed
abruptly. "You saw enough certainly, if you saw that, and you needn't
mention the lady's name, as you say. The evidence is not merely
circumstantial. You saw it with your own eyes, and you are an official
of the Court, and have the ear of the Judge, and you look like a saint to
a jury. Well for sure, I can't prove defamation of character, as you
say. But what then--what do you want?"
"What I want I hope you may be able to grant without demur, monsieur.
I want you to give your pledge on the Book"--he laid his hand on a
Testament lying on the table--"that you will hold no further
communication with the lady."
"Where do you come inhere? What's your standing in the business?"
Masson jerked out his words now. The Clerk of the Court made a reproving
gesture. "Knowing what I did, what I had seen, it was clear that I must
approach one or other of the parties concerned. Out of regard for the
lady I could not approach her husband, and so betray her; out of regard
for the husband I could not approach himself and destroy his peace; out
of regard for all concerned I could not approach the lady's father, for
then--"
Masson interrupted with an oath.
"That old reprobate of Cadiz--well no, bagosh!
"And so you whisked me into your office with the talk of urgent business
and--"
"Is not the business urgent, monsieur?"
"Not at all," was the sharp reply of the culprit.
"Monsieur, you shock me. Do you consider that your conduct is not
criminal? I have here"--he placed his hand on a book--"the Statutes of
Victoria, and it lays down with wholesome severity the law concerning the
theft of the affection of a wife, with the accompanying penalty, going as
high as twenty thousand dollars."
George Masson gasped. Here was a new turn of affairs. But he set his
teeth.
"Twenty thousand dollars--think of that!" he sneered angrily.
"That is what I said, monsieur. I said I could save you money, and money
saved is money earned. I am your benefactor, if you will but permit me
to be so, monsieur. I would save you from the law, and from the damages
which the law gives. Can you not guess what would be given in a court of
the Catholic province of Quebec, against the violation of a good man's
home? Do you not see that the business is urgent?"
"Not at all," curtly replied the master-carpenter. M. Fille bridled up,
and his spare figure seemed to gain courage and dignity.
"If you think I will hold my peace unless you give your sacred pledge,
you are mistaken, monsieur. I am no meddler, but I have had much
kindness at the hands of Monsieur and Madame Barbille, and I will do what
I can to protect them and their daughter--that good and sweet daughter,
from the machinations, corruptions and malfeasance--"
"Three damn good words for the Court, bagosh!" exclaimed Masson with a
jeer.
"No, with a man devoid of honour, I shall not hesitate, for the Manor
Cartier has been the home of domestic peace, and madame, who came to us a
stranger, deserves well of the people of that ancient abode of chivalry-
the chivalry of France."
"When we are wound up, what a humming we can make!" laughed George
Masson sourly. "Have you quite finished, m'sieu'?"
"The matter is urgent, you will admit, monsieur?" again demanded M.
Fille with austerity.
"Not at all."
The master-carpenter was defiant and insolent, yet there was a devilish
kind of humour in his tone as in his attitude.
"You will not heed the warning I give?" The little Clerk pointed to the
open page of the Victorian statutes before him.
"Not at all."
"Then I shall, with profound regret--"
Suddenly George Masson thrust his face forward near that of M. Fille, who
did not draw back.
"You will inform the Court that the prisoner refuses to incriminate
himself, eh?" he interjected.
"No, monsieur, I will inform Monsieur Barbille of what I saw. I will do
this without delay. It is the one thing left me to do."
In quite a grand kind of way he stood up and bowed, as though to dismiss
his visitor.
As George Masson did not move, the other went to the door and opened it.
"It is the only thing left to do," he repeated, as he made a gentle
gesture of dismissal.
"Not at all, my legal bombardier. Not at all, I say. All you know Jean
Jacques knows, and a good deal more--what he has seen with his own eyes,
and understood with his own mind, without legal help. So, you see,
you've kept me here talking when there's no need and while my business
waits. It is urgent, M'sieu' la Fillette--your business is stale. It
belongs to last session of the Court." He laughed at his joke. "M'sieu'
Jean Jacques and I understand each other." He laughed grimly now. "We
know each other like a book, and the Clerk of the Court couldn't get in
an adjective that would make the sense of it all clearer."
Slowly M. Fille shut the door, and very slowly he came back. Almost
blindly, as it might seem, and with a moan, he dropped into his chair.
His eyes fixed themselves on George Masson.
"Ah--that!" he said helplessly. "That! The little Zoe--dear God, the
little Zoe, and the poor madame!" His voice was aching with pain and
repugnance.
"If you were not such an icicle naturally, I'd be thinking your interest
in the child was paternal," said the master-carpenter roughly, for the
virtuous horror of the other's face annoyed him. He had had a vexing
day.
The Clerk of the Court was on his feet in a second. "Monsieur, you
dare!" he exclaimed. "You dare to multiply your crimes in that shameless
way. Begone! There are those who can make you respect decency. I am
not without my friends, and we all stand by each other in our love of
home--of sacred home, monsieur."
There was something right in the master-carpenter at the bottom, with all
his villainy. It was not alone that he knew there were fifty men in the
Parish of St. Saviour's who would man-handle him for such a suggestion,
and for what he had done at the Manor Cartier, if they were roused; but
he also had a sudden remorse for insulting the man who, after all, had
tried to do him a service. His amende was instant.
"I take it back with humble apology--all I can hold in both hands,
m'sieu'," he said at once. "I would not insult you so, much less Madame
Barbille. If she'd been like what I've hinted at, I wouldn't have gone
her way, for the promiscuous is not for me. I'll tell you the whole
truth of what happened to-day this morning. Last night I met her at the
river, and--"Then briefly he told all that had happened to the moment
when Jean Jacques had left him at the flume with the words, "Moi, je suis
philosophe!" And at the last he said:
"I give you my word--my oath on this"--he laid his hand on the Testament
on the table--"that beyond what you saw, and what Jean Jacques saw, there
has been nothing." He held up a hand as though taking an oath.
"Name of God, is it not enough what there has been?" whispered the
little Clerk.
"Oh, as you think, and as you say! It is quite enough for me after to-
day. I'm a teetotaller, but I'm not so fond of water as to want to take
my eternal bath in it." He shuddered slightly. "Bien sur, I've had my
fill of the Manor Cartier for one day, my Clerk of the Court."
"Bien sur, it was enough to set you thinking, monsieur," was the dry
comment of M. Fille, who was now recovering his composure.
At that moment there came a knock at the door, and another followed
quickly; then there entered without waiting for a reply--Carmen Barbille.
CHAPTER XII
THE MASTER-CARPENTER HAS A PROBLEM
The Clerk of the Court came to his feet with a startled "Merci!" and the
master-carpenter fell back with a smothered exclamation. Both men stared
confusedly at the woman as she shut the door slowly and, as it might
seem, carefully, before she faced them.
"Here I am, George," she said, her face alive with vital adventure.
His face was instantly swept by a storm of feeling for her, his nature
responded to the sound of her voice and the passion of her face.
"Carmen--ah !" he said, and took a step forward, then stopped. The
hoarse feeling in his voice made her eyes flash gratitude and triumph,
and she waited for him to take her in his arms; but she suddenly
remembered M. Fille. She turned to him.
"I am sorry to intrude, m'sieu'," she said. "I beg your pardon. They
told me at the office of avocat Prideaux that M'sieu' Masson was here.
So I came; but be sure I would not interrupt you if there was not cause."
M. Fille came forward and took her hand respectfully. "Madame, it is the
first time you have honoured me here. I am very glad to receive you.
Monsieur and Mademoiselle Zoe, they are with you? They will also come in
perhaps?"
M. Fille was courteous and kind, yet he felt that a duty was devolving on
him, imposed by his superior officer, Judge Carcasson, and by his own
conscience, and with courage he faced the field of trouble which his
simple question opened up. George Masson had but now said there had been
nothing more than he himself had seen from the hill behind the Manor; and
he had further said, in effect, that all was ended between Carmen
Barbille and himself; yet here they were together, when they ought to be
a hundred miles apart for many a day. Besides, there was the look in the
woman's face, and that intense look also in the face of the master-
carpenter! The Clerk of the Court, from sheer habit of his profession,
watched human faces as other people watch the weather, or the rise or
fall in the price of wheat and potatoes. He was an archaic little
official, and apparently quite unsophisticated; yet there was hidden
behind his ascetic face a quiet astuteness which would have been a
valuable asset to a worldly-minded and ambitious man. Besides, affection
sharpens the wits. Through it the hovering, protecting sense becomes
instinctive, and prescience takes on uncanny certainty. He had a real
and deep affection for Jean Jacques and his Carmen, and a deeper one
still for the child Zoe; and the danger to the home at the Manor Cartier
now became again as sharp as the knife of the guillotine. His eyes ran
from the woman to the man, and back again, and then with great courage he
repeated his question:
"Monsieur and mademoiselle, they are well--they are with you, I hope,
madame?"
She looked at him in the eyes without flinching, and on the instant she
was aware that he knew all, and that there had been talk with George
Masson. She knew the little man to be as good as ever can be, but she
resented the fact that he knew. It was clear George Masson had told him
--else how could he know; unless, perhaps, all the world knew!
"You know well enough that I have come alone, my friend," she answered.
"It is no place for Zoe; and it is no place for my husband and him
together "she made a motion of the head towards the mastercarpenter.
"Santa Maria, you know it very well indeed!"
The Clerk of the Court bowed, but made no reply. What was there to say
to a remark like that! It was clear that the problem must be worked out
alone between these two people, though he was not quite sure what the
problem was. The man had said the thing was over; but the woman had
come, and the look of both showed that it was not all over.
What would the man do? What was it the woman wished to do? The master-
carpenter had said that Jean Jacques had spared him, and meant to forgive
his wife. No doubt he had done so, for Jean Jacques was a man of
sentiment and chivalry, and there was no proof that there had been
anything more than a few mad caresses between the two misdemeanants; yet
here was the woman with the man for whom she had imperilled her future
and that of her husband and child!
As though Carmen understood what was going on in his mind, she said:
"Since you know everything, you can understand that I want a few words
with M'sieu' George here alone."
"Madame, I beg of you," the Clerk of the Court answered instantly, his
voice trembling a little--"I beg that you will not be alone with him. As
I believe, your husband is willing to let bygones be bygones, and to
begin to-morrow as though there was no to-day. In such case you should
not see Monsieur Masson here alone. It is bad enough to see him here in
the office of the Clerk of the Court, but to see him alone--what would
Monsieur Jean Jacques say? Also, outside there in the street, if our
neighbours should come to know of the trouble, what would they say? I
wish not to be tiresome, but as a friend, a true friend of your whole
family, madame--yes, in spite of all, your whole family--I hope you will
realize that I must remain here. I owe it to a past made happy by
kindness which is to me like life itself. Monsieur Masson, is it not
so?" he added, turning to the master-carpenter. More flushed and
agitated than when he had faced Jean Jacques in the flume, the master-
carpenter said: "If she wants a few words-of farewell--alone with me, she
must have it, M'sieu' Fille. The other room--eh? Outside there"--he
jerked a finger towards the street--"they won't know that you are not
with us; and as for Jean Jacques, isn't it possible for a Clerk of the
Court to stretch the truth a little? Isn't the Clerk of the Court a man
as well as a mummy? I'd do as much for you, little lawyer, any time. A
word to say farewell, you understand!" He looked M. Fille squarely in
the eye.
"If I had to answer M. Jean Jacques on such a matter--and so much at
stake--"
Masson interrupted. "Well, if you like we'll bind your eyes and put wads
in your ears, and you can stay, so that you'll have been in the room all
the time, and yet have heard and seen nothing at all. How is that,
m'sieu'? It's all right, isn't it?"
M. Fille stood petrified for a moment at the audacity of the proposition.
For him, the Clerk of the Court, to be blinded and made ridiculous with
wads in his ears-impossible!
"Grace of Heaven, I would prefer to lie!" he answered quickly. "I will
go into the next room, but I beg that you be brief, monsieur and madame.
You owe it to yourselves and to the situation to be brief, and, if I may
say so, you owe it to me. I am not a practised Ananias."
"As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, m'sieu'," returned Masson.
"I must beg that you will make your farewells of a minute and no more,"
replied the Clerk of the Court firmly. He took out his watch. "It is
six o'clock. I will come again at three minutes past six. That is long
enough for any farewell--even on the gallows."
Not daring to look at the face of the woman, he softly disappeared into
the other room, and shut the door without a sound.
"Too good for this world," remarked the master-carpenter when the door
closed tight. He said it after the disappearing figure and not to
Carmen. "I don't suppose he ever kissed a real grown-up woman in his
life. It would have shattered his frail little carcass if, if"--he
turned to his companion--"if you had kissed him, Carmen. He's made of
tissue-paper,--not tissue--and apple-jelly. Yes, but a stiff little
backbone, too, or he'd not have faced me down."
Masson talked as though he were trying to gain time. "He said three
minutes," she returned with a look of death in her face. As George
Masson had talked with the Clerk of the Court, she had come to see, in so
far as agitation would permit, that he was not the same as when he left
her by the river the evening before.
"There's no time to waste," she continued. "You spoke of farewells--
twice you spoke, and three times he spoke of farewells between us.
Farewells--farewells--George--!"
With sudden emotion she held out her arms, and her face flushed with
passion and longing.
The tempest which shook her shook him also, and he swayed from side to
side like an animal uncertain if the moment had come to try its strength
with its foe; and in truth the man was fighting with himself. His
moments with Jean Jacques at the flume had expanded him in a curious kind
of way. His own arguments while he was fighting for his life had, in a
way, convinced himself. She was a rare creature, and she was alluring--
more alluring than she had ever been; for a tragic sense had made her
thinner, had refined the boldness of her beauty, had given a wonderful
lustre to her eyes; and suffering has its own attraction to the
degenerate. But he, George Masson, had had a great shock, and he had
come out of the jaws of death by the skin of his teeth. It had been the
nearest thing he had ever known; for though once he had had a pistol
pointed at him, there was the chance that it might miss at half-a-dozen
yards, while there was no chance of the lever of the flume going wrong;
and water and a mill-wheel were as absolute as the rope of the gallows.
In a sense he had saved himself by his cleverness, but if Jean Jacques
had not been just the man he was, he could not have saved himself. It
did not occur to him that Jean Jacques had acted weakly. He would not
have done what Jean Jacques had done, had Jean Jacques spoiled his home.
He would have sprung the lever; but he was not so mean as to despise Jean
Jacques because he had foregone his revenge. This master-carpenter had
certain gifts, or he could not have caused so much trouble in the world.
There is a kind of subtlety necessary to allure or delude even the
humblest of women, if she is not naturally bad; and Masson had had
experiences with the humblest, and also with those a little higher up.
This much had to be said for him, that he did not think Jean Jacques
contemptible because he had been merciful, or degraded because he had
chosen to forgive his wife.
The sight of the woman, as she stood with arms outstretched, had made his
pulses pound in his veins, but the heat was suddenly chilled by the wave
of tragedy which had passed over him. When he had climbed out of the
flume, and opened the lever for the river to rush through, he had felt as
though ice--cold liquid flowed in his veins, not blood; and all day he
had been like that. He had moved much as one in a dream, and he had felt
for the first time in his life that he was not ready to bluff creation.
He had always faced things down, as long as it could be done; and when it
could not, he had retreated, with the comment that no man was wise who
took gruel when he needn't. He was now face to face with his greatest
problem. One thing was clear--they must either part for ever, or go
together, and part no more. There could be no half measures. She was
a remarkable woman in her way, with a will of her own, and a kind of
madness in her; and there could be no backing and filling. They only
had three minutes to talk together alone, and two of them were up.
Her arms were held out to him, but he stood still, and before the fire of
her eyes his own eyes dropped. "No, not yet!" he exclaimed. "It's been
a day--heaven and hell, what a day it's been! He had me like that!" He
opened and shut his hand with fierce, spasmodic strength. "And he let me
go--oh, let me go like a fox out of a trap! I've had enough for one day
--blood of St. Peter, enough, enough!"
The flame of desire in her eyes suddenly turned to fury. "It is
farewell, then, that you wish," she said hoarsely. "It is no more and
farewell then? You said it to him"--she pointed to the other room--"you
said it to Jean Jacques, and you say it to me--to me that's given you all
I have. Ah, what a beast you are, George Masson!"
"No, Carmen, you have not given me all. If you had, there would be no
farewell. I would stand by you to the end of life, if I had taken all."
He lied, but that does not matter here.
"All--all!" she cried. "What is all? Is it but the one thing that the
world says must part husband and wife? Caramba! Is that all? I have
given everything--I have had your arms around me--"
"Yes, the Clerk of the Court saw that," he interrupted. "He saw from the
hill behind the Manor on Tuesday last."
There was a tap at the door of the other room; it slowly opened, and the
figure of the Clerk appeared. "Two minutes--just two minutes more, old
trump!" said the master-carpenter, stretching out a hand. "One minute
will be enough," said Carmen, who was suffering the greatest humiliation
which can come to a woman.
The Clerk looked at them both, and he was content. He saw that one
minute would certainly be enough. "Very well, monsieur and madame," he
said, and closed the door again.
Carmen turned fiercely on the man. "M. Fille saw, did he, from Mont
Violet? Well, when I came here I did not care who saw. I only thought
of you--that you wanted me, and that I wanted you. What the world
thought was nothing, if you were as when we parted last night. . . .
I could not face Jean Jacques' forgiveness. To stay there, feeling that
I must be always grateful, that I must be humble, that I must pretend,
that I must kiss Jean Jacques, and lie in his arms, and go to mass and to
confession, and--"
"There is the child, there is Zoe--"
"Oh, it is you that preaches now--you that tempted me, that said I was
wasted at the Manor; that the parish did not understand me; that Jean
Jacques did not know a jewel of price when he saw it--little did you
think of Zoe then!"
He made a protesting gesture. "Maybe so, Carmen, but I think now before
it is too late."
"The child loves her father as she never loved me," she declared. "She
is twelve years old. She will soon be old enough to keep house for him,
and then to marry--ah, before there is time to think she will marry!"
"It would be better then for you to wait till she marries before--
before--"
"Before I go away with you!" She gave a shrill, agonized laugh. "So
that is the end of it all! What did you think of my child when you
forced your way into my life, when you made me think of you--ah, quel
bete--what a coward and beast you are!"
"No, I am not all coward, though I may be a beast," he answered.
"I didn't think of your child when I began to talk to you as I did. I
was out for all I could get. I was the hunter. And you were the finest
woman that I'd ever met and talked with; you--"
"Oh, stop lying!" she cried with a face suddenly grown white and cold.
"It isn't lying. You're the sort of woman to drive men mad. I went mad,
and I didn't think of your child. But this morning in the flume I saved
my life by thinking of her, and I saved your life, too, maybe, by
thinking of her; and I owe her something. I'm going to try to pay back
by letting her keep her mother. I never felt towards a woman as I've
felt towards you; and that's why I want to make things not so bad for you
as they might be."
In her bitter eagerness she took a step nearer to him. "As things might
be, if you were the man you were yesterday, willing to throw up
everything for me?"
"Like that--if you put it so," he answered.
She walked slowly up to him, looking as though she would plunge a knife
into his heart. "I wish Jean Jacques had opened the gates," she said.
"It would have saved the hangman trouble."
Then suddenly, and with a cry, she raised her hand and struck him full in
the face with her fist. At that instant came a tap at the door of the
other room, and the Clerk of the Court appeared. He saw the blow, and
drew back with an exclamation.
Carmen turned to him. "Farewell has been said, M'sieu' Fille," she
remarked in a voice sombre with rage and despair, and she went to the
door leading to the street.
Masson had winced at the blow, but he remained silent. He knew not what
to say or do.
M. Fille hastily followed Carmen to the door. "You are going home,
dear madame? Permit me to accompany you," he said gently. "I have to
do business with Jean Jacques."
A hand upon his chest, she pushed him back. "Where I go I'm going
alone," she said. Opening the door she went out, but turning back again
she gave George Masson a look that he never forgot. Then the door
closed.
"Grace of God, she is not going home!" brokenly murmured the Clerk of
the Court.
With a groan the master-carpenter started forward towards the door, but
M. Fille stepped between, laid a hand on his arm, and stopped him.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Confidence in a weak world gets unearned profit often
Enjoy his own generosity
Had the slight flavour of the superior and the paternal
He had only made of his wife an incident in his life
He was in fact not a philosopher, but a sentimentalist
He was not always sorry when his teasing hurt
Lacks a balance-wheel. He has brains, but not enough
Man who tells the story in a new way, that is genius
Missed being a genius by an inch
Not content to do even the smallest thing ill
You went north towards heaven and south towards hell
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MONEY MASTER, PARKER, V2 ***
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