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The Money Master, Complete

by Gilbert Parker · English · Gutenberg #6280 · 519,176 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Money Master, Complete

Author: Gilbert Parker


        
Release date: November 19, 2004 [eBook #6280]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6280

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MONEY MASTER, COMPLETE ***



Produced by David Widger





THE MONEY MASTER, Complete

By Gilbert Parker




CONTENTS

     EPOCH THE FIRST
     I.        THE GRAND TOUR OF JEAN JACQUES BARBILLE
     II.       THE REST OF THE STORY “TO-MORROW”
      III.      “TO-MORROW”

     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

     EPOCH THE THIRD
     XIII.     THE MAN FROM OUTSIDE
     XIV.      “I DO NOT WANT TO GO”
      XV.       BON MARCHE

     EPOCH THE FOURTH
     XVI.      MISFORTUNES COME NOT SINGLY
     XVII.     HIS GREATEST ASSET
     XVIII.    JEAN JACQUES HAS AN OFFER
     XIX.      SEBASTIAN DOLORES DOES NOT SLEEP
     XX.       “AU ‘VOIR, M’SIEU’ JEAN JACQUES”
      XXI.      IF SHE HAD KNOWN IN TIME

     EPOCH THE FIFTH
     XXII.     BELLS OF MEMORY
     XXIII.    JEAN JACQUES HAS WORK TO DO
     XXIV.     JEAN JACQUES ENCAMPED.
     XXV.      WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE
     EPILOGUE





INTRODUCTION

This book is in a place by itself among the novels I have written. Many
critics said that it was a welcome return to Canada, where I had made my
first success in the field of fiction. This statement was only meagrely
accurate, because since ‘The Right of Way’ was published in 1901 I had
written, and given to the public, ‘Northern Lights’, a book of short
stories, ‘You Never Know Your Luck’, a short novel, and ‘The World for
Sale’, though all of these dealt with life in Western Canada, and not
with the life of the French Canadians, in which field I had made my
first firm impression upon the public. In any case, The Money Master was
favourably received by the press and public both in England and America,
and my friends were justified in thinking, and in saying, that I was at
home in French Canada and gave the impression of mastery of my material.
If mastery of material means a knowledge of the life, and a sympathy
with it, then my friends are justified; for I have always had an intense
sympathy with, and admiration for, French Canadian life. I think the
French Canadian one of the most individual, original, and distinctive
beings of the modern world. He has kept his place, with his own
customs, his own Gallic views of life, and his religious habits, with an
assiduity and firmness none too common. He is essentially a man of
the home, of the soil, and of the stream; he has by nature instinctive
philosophy and temperamental logic. As a lover of the soil of Canada he
is not surpassed by any of the other citizens of the country, English or
otherwise.

It would almost seem as though the pageantry of past French Canadian
history, and the beauty and vigour of the topographical surroundings
of French Canadian life, had produced an hereditary pride and
exaltation--perhaps an excessive pride and a strenuous exaltation, but,
in any case, there it was, and is. The French Canadian lives a more
secluded life on the whole than any other citizen of Canada, though the
native, adventurous spirit has sent him to the Eastern States of
the American Union for work in the mills and factories, or up to the
farthest reaches of the St. Lawrence, Ottawa, and their tributaries in
the wood and timber trade.

Domestically he is perhaps the most productive son of the North American
continent. Families of twenty, or even twenty-five, are not unknown,
and, when a man has had more than one wife, it has even exceeded that.
Life itself is full of camaraderie and good spirit, marked by religious
traits and sacerdotal influence.

The French Canadian is on the whole sober and industrious; but when he
breaks away from sobriety and industry he becomes a vicious element
in the general organism. Yet his vices are of the surface, and do not
destroy the foundations of his social and domestic scheme. A French
Canadian pony used to be considered the most virile and lasting stock
on the continent, and it is fair to say that the French Canadians
themselves are genuinely hardy, long-lived, virile, and enduring.

It was among such people that the hero of The Money Master, Jean Jacques
Barbille, lived. He was the symbol or pattern of their virtues and
of their weaknesses. By nature a poet, a philosopher, a farmer and an
adventurer, his life was a sacrifice to prepossession and race instinct;
to temperament more powerful than logic or common sense, though he was
almost professionally the exponent of both.

There is no man so simply sincere, or so extraordinarily prejudiced as
the French Canadian. He is at once modest and vain; he is even lyrical
in his enthusiasms; he is a child in the intrigues and inventions
of life; but he has imagination, he has a heart, he has a love of
tradition, and is the slave of legend. To him domestic life is the
summum bonum of being. His four walls are the best thing which the world
has to offer, except the cheerful and sacred communion of the Mass, and
his dismissal from life itself under the blessing of his priest and with
the promise of a good immortality.

Jean Jacques Barbille had the French Canadian life of pageant, pomp, and
place extraordinarily developed. His love of history and tradition
was abnormal. A genius, he was, within an inch, a tragedy to the last
button. Probably the adventurous spirit of his forefathers played
a greater part in his development and in the story of his days than
anything else. He was wide-eyed, and he had a big soul. He trained
himself to believe in himself and to follow his own judgment; therefore,
he invited loss upon loss, he made mistake upon mistake, he heaped
financial adventure upon financial adventure, he ran great risks; and
it is possible that his vast belief in himself kept him going when other
men would have dropped by the wayside. He loved his wife and daughter,
and he lost them both. He loved his farms, his mills and his manor, and
they disappeared from his control.

It must be remembered that the story of The Money Master really runs for
a generation, and it says something for Jean Jacques Barbille that he
could travel through scenes, many of them depressing, for long years,
and still, in the end, provoke no disparagement, by marrying the
woman who had once out of the goodness of her heart offered him
everything--herself, her home, her honour; and it was to Jean Jacques’s
credit that he took neither until the death of his wife made him free;
but the tremendous gift offered him produced a powerful impression upon
his mind and heart.

One of the most distinguished men of the world to-day wrote me in praise
and protest concerning The Money Master. He declared that the first half
of the book was as good as anything that had been done by anybody,
and then he bemoaned the fact, which he believed, that the author had
sacrificed his two heroines without real cause and because he was tired
of them. There he was wrong. In the author’s mind the story was planned
exactly as it worked out. He was never tired; he was resolute. He was
intent to produce, if possible, a figure which would breed and develop
its own disasters, which would suffer profoundly for its own mistakes;
but which, in the end, would triumph over the disasters of life and
time. It was all deliberate in the main intention and plan. Any failures
that exist in the book are due to the faults of the author, and to
nothing else.

Some critics have been good enough to call ‘The Money Master’ a
beautiful book, and there are many who said that it was real, true, and
faithful. Personally I think it is real and true, and as time goes on,
and we get older, that is what seems to matter to those who love life
and wish to see it well harvested.

I do not know what the future of the book may be; what the future of
any work of mine will be; but I can say this, that no one has had the
pleasure in reading my books which I have had in making them. They have
been ground out of the raw material of the soul. I have a hope that they
will outlast my brief day, but, in any case, it will not matter. They
have given me a chance of showing to the world life as I have seen it,
and indirectly, and perhaps indistinctly, my own ideas of that life.
‘The Money Master’ is a vivid and somewhat emotional part of it.




EPOCH THE FIRST




CHAPTER I. THE GRAND TOUR OF JEAN JACQUES BARBILLE

“Peace and plenty, peace and plenty”--that was the phrase M. Jean
Jacques Barbille, miller and moneymaster, applied to his home-scene,
when he was at the height of his career. Both winter and summer the
place had a look of content and comfort, even a kind of opulence. There
is nothing like a grove of pines to give a sense of warmth in winter
and an air of coolness in summer, so does the slightest breeze make the
pine-needles swish like the freshening sea. But to this scene, where
pines made a friendly background, there were added oak, ash, and hickory
trees, though in less quantity on the side of the river where were
Jean Jacques Barbille’s house and mills. They flourished chiefly on the
opposite side of the Beau Cheval, whose waters flowed so waywardly--now
with a rush, now silently away through long reaches of country. Here
the land was rugged and bold, while farther on it became gentle and
spacious, and was flecked or striped with farms on which low, white
houses with dormer-windows and big stoops flashed to the passer-by the
message of the pioneer, “It is mine. I triumph.”

At the Manor Cartier, not far from the town of Vilray, where Jean
Jacques was master, and above it and below it, there had been battles
and the ravages of war. At the time of the Conquest the stubborn
habitants, refusing to accept the yielding of Quebec as the end of
French power in their proud province, had remained in arms and active,
and had only yielded when the musket and the torch had done their work,
and smoking ruins marked the places where homes had been. They took
their fortune with something of the heroic calm of men to whom an
idea was more than aught else. Jean Jacques’ father, grandfather, and
great-great-grandfather had lived here, no one of them rising far, but
none worthless or unnoticeable. They all had had “a way of their own,”
 as their neighbours said, and had been provident on the whole. Thus it
was that when Jean Jacques’ father died, and he came into his own, he
found himself at thirty a man of substance, unmarried, who “could
have had the pick of the province.” This was what the Old Cure said in
despair, when Jean Jacques did the incomprehensible thing, and married
l’Espagnole, or “the Spanische,” as the lady was always called in the
English of the habitant.

When she came it was spring-time, and all the world was budding, exuding
joy and hope, with the sun dancing over all. It was the time between
the sowing and the hay-time, and there was a feeling of alertness in
everything that had life, while even the rocks and solid earth seemed to
stir. The air was filled with the long happy drone of the mill-stones as
they ground the grain; and from farther away came the soft, stinging
cry of a saw-mill. Its keen buzzing complaint was harmonious with the
grumble of the mill-stones, as though a supreme maker of music had tuned
it. So said a master-musician and his friend, a philosopher from Nantes,
who came to St. Saviour’s in the summer just before the marriage, and
lodged with Jean Jacques. Jean Jacques, having spent a year at Laval
University at Quebec, had almost a gift of thought, or thinking; and he
never ceased to ply the visiting philosopher and musician with questions
which he proceeded to answer himself before they could do so; his
quaint, sentimental, meretricious observations on life saddening while
they amused his guests. They saddened the musician more than the other
because he knew life, while the philosopher only thought it and saw it.

But even the musician would probably have smiled in hope that day
when the young “Spanische” came driving up the river-road from the
steamboat-landing miles away. She arrived just when the clock struck
noon in the big living-room of the Manor. As she reached the open
doorway and the wide windows of the house which gaped with shady
coolness, she heard the bell summoning the workers in the mills and on
the farm--yes, M. Barbille was a farmer, too--for the welcome home to
“M’sieu’ Jean Jacques,” as he was called by everyone.

That the wedding had taken place far down in Gaspe and not in St.
Saviour’s was a reproach and almost a scandal; and certainly it was
unpatriotic. It was bad enough to marry the Spanische, but to marry
outside one’s own parish, and so deprive that parish and its young
people of the week’s gaiety, which a wedding and the consequent
procession and tour through the parish brings, was little less than
treason. But there it was; and Jean Jacques was a man who had power to
hurt, to hinder, or to help; for the miller and the baker are nearer to
the hearthstone of every man than any other, and credit is a good thing
when the oven is empty and hard times are abroad. The wedding in Gaspe
had not been attended by the usual functions, for it had all been
hurriedly arranged, as the romantic circumstances of the wooing
required. Romance indeed it was; so remarkable that the master-musician
might easily have found a theme for a comedy--or tragedy--and the
philosopher would have shaken his head at the defiance it offered to the
logic of things.

Now this is the true narrative, though in the parish of St. Saviour’s it
is more highly decorated and has many legends hanging to it like tassels
to a curtain. Even the Cure of to-day, who ought to know all the truth,
finds it hard to present it in its bare elements; for the history
of Jean Jacques Barbille affected the history of many a man in St.
Saviour’s; and all that befel him, whether of good or evil, ran through
the parish in a thousand invisible threads.

       .......................

What had happened was this. After the visit of the musician and the
philosopher, Jean Jacques, to sustain his reputation and to increase it,
had decided to visit that Normandy from which his people had come at the
time of Frontenac. He set forth with much ‘eclat’ and a little innocent
posturing and ritual, in which a cornet and a violin figured, together
with a farewell oration by the Cure.

In Paris Jean Jacques had found himself bewildered and engulfed. He had
no idea that life could be so overbearing, and he was inclined to resent
his own insignificance. However, in Normandy, when he read the names on
the tombstones and saw the records in the baptismal register of other
Jean Jacques Barbilles, who had come and gone generations before, his
self-respect was somewhat restored. This pleasure was dashed, however,
by the quizzical attitude of the natives of his ancestral parish,
who walked round about inspecting him as though he were a zoological
specimen, and who criticized his accent--he who had been at Laval for
one whole term; who had had special instruction before that time from
the Old Cure and a Jesuit brother; and who had been the friend of
musicians and philosophers!

His cheerful, kindly self-assurance stood the test with difficulty, but
it became a kind of ceremonial with him, whenever he was discomfited, to
read some pages of a little dun-coloured book of philosophy, picked up
on the quay at Quebec just before he sailed, and called, “Meditations in
Philosophy.” He had been warned by the bookseller that the Church had no
love for philosophy; but while at Laval he had met the independent minds
that, at eighteen to twenty-two, frequent academic groves; and he
was not to be put off by the pious bookseller--had he not also had a
philosopher in his house the year before, and was he not going to Nantes
to see this same savant before returning to his beloved St. Saviour’s
parish.

But Paris and Nantes and Rouen and Havre abashed and discomfited him,
played havoc with his self-esteem, confused his brain, and vexed him
by formality, and, more than all, by their indifference to himself. He
admired, yet he wished to be admired; he was humble, but he wished all
people and things to be humble with him. When he halted he wanted the
world to halt; when he entered a cathedral--Notre Dame or any other; or
a great building--the Law Courts at Rouen or any other; he simply
wanted people to say, wanted the cathedral, or at least the cloister, to
whisper to itself, “Here comes Jean Jacques Barbille.”

That was all he wanted, and that would have sufficed. He would not have
had them whisper about his philosophy and his intellect, or the mills
and the ash-factory which he meant to build, the lime-kilns he had
started even before he left, and the general store he intended to open
when he returned to St. Saviour’s. Not even his modesty was recognized;
and, in his grand tour, no one was impressed by all that he was, except
once. An ancestor, a grandmother of his, had come from the Basque
country; and so down to St. Jean Pied de Port he went; for he came of a
race who set great store by mothers and grandmothers. At St. Jean Pied
de Port he was more at home. He was, in a sense, a foreigner among
foreigners there, and the people were not quizzical, since he was
an outsider in any case and not a native returned, as he had been in
Normandy. He learned to play pelota, the Basque game taken from the
Spaniards, and he even allowed himself a little of that oratory which,
as they say, has its habitat chiefly in Gascony. And because he had
found an audience at last, he became a liberal host, and spent freely
of his dollars, as he had never done either in Normandy, Paris, or
elsewhere. So freely did he spend, that when he again embarked at
Bordeaux for Quebec, he had only enough cash left to see him through the
remainder of his journey in the great world. Yet he left France with
his self-respect restored, and he even waved her a fond adieu, as the
creaking Antoine broke heavily into the waters of the Bay of Biscay,
while he cried:

             “My little ship,
             It bears me far
             From lights of home
             To alien star.
             O vierge Marie,
             Pour moi priez Dieu!
             Adieu, dear land,
             Provence, adieu.”

Then a further wave of sentiment swept over him, and he was vaguely
conscious of a desire to share the pains of parting which he saw in
labour around him--children from parents, lovers from loved. He could
not imagine the parting from a parent, for both of his were in the bosom
of heaven, having followed his five brothers, all of whom had died in
infancy, to his good fortune, for otherwise his estate would now be only
one-sixth of what it was. But he could imagine a parting with some sweet
daughter of France, and he added another verse to the thrilling of the
heart of Casimir Delavigne:

             “Beloved Isaure,
             Her hand makes sign--
             No more, no more,
             To rest in mine.
             O vierge Marie,
             Pour moi priez Dieu!
             Adieu, dear land,
             Isaure, adieu!”

As he murmured with limpid eye the last words, he saw in the forecastle
not far from him a girl looking at him. There was unmistakable sadness
in her glance of interest. In truth she was thinking of just such a man
as Jean Jacques, whom she could never see any more, for he had paid with
his life the penalty of the conspiracy in which her father, standing now
behind her on the leaky Antoine, had been a tool, and an evil tool. Here
in Jean Jacques was the same ruddy brown face, black restless eye,
and young, silken, brown beard. Also there was an air of certainty and
universal comprehension, and though assertion and vanity were apparent,
there was no self-consciousness. The girl’s dead and gone conspirator
had not the same honesty of face, the same curve of the ideal in the
broad forehead, the same poetry of rich wavy brown hair, the same
goodness of mind and body so characteristic of Jean Jacques--he was but
Jean Jacques gone wrong at the start; but the girl was of a nature
that could see little difference between things which were alike
superficially, and in the young provincial she only saw one who looked
like the man she had loved. True, his moustaches did not curl upwards at
the ends as did those of Carvillho Gonzales, and he did not look out of
the corner of his eyes and smoke black cigarettes; but there he was, her
Carvillho with a difference--only such a difference that made him to her
Carvillho II., and not the ghost of Carvillho I.

She was a maiden who might have been as good as need be for all life,
so far as appearances went. She had a wonderful skin, a smooth, velvety
cheek, where faint red roses came and went, as it might seem at will;
with a deep brown eye; and eh, but she was grandly tall--so Jean Jacques
thought, while he drew himself up to his full five feet, six and a half
with a determined air. Even at his best, however, Jean Jacques could not
reach within three inches of her height.

Yet he did not regard her as at all overdone because of that. He thought
her hair very fine, as it waved away from her low forehead in a grace
which reminded him of the pictures of the Empress Eugenie, and of the
sister of that monsieur le duc who had come fishing to St. Saviour’s
a few years before. He thought that if her hair was let down it would
probably reach to her waist, and maybe to her ankles. She had none of
the plump, mellow softness of the beauties he had seen in the Basque
country. She was a slim and long limbed Diana, with fine lines and a
bosom of extreme youth, though she must have been twenty-one her last
birthday. The gown she wore was a dark green well-worn velvet, which
seemed of too good a make and quality for her class; and there was no
decoration about her anywhere, save at the ears, where two drops of gold
hung on little links an inch and a half long.

Jean Jacques Barbille’s eyes took it all in with that observation of
which he was so proud and confident, and rested finally on the drops of
gold at her ears. Instinctively he fingered the heavy gold watch-chain
he had bought in Paris to replace the silver chain with a little
crucifix dangling, which his father and even his great-grandfather had
worn before him. He had kept the watch, however--the great fat-bellied
thing which had never run down in a hundred years. It was his mascot.
To lose that watch would be like losing his share in the promises of the
Church. So his fingers ran along the new gold-fourteen-carat-chain, to
the watch at the end of it; and he took it out a little ostentatiously,
since he saw that the eyes of the girl were on him. Involuntarily he
wished to impress her.

He might have saved himself the trouble. She was impressed. It was quite
another matter however, whether he would have been pleased to know that
the impression was due to his resemblance to a Spanish conspirator,
whose object was to destroy the Monarchy and the Church, as had been the
object of the middle-aged conspirator--the girl’s father--who had the
good fortune to escape from justice. It is probable that if Jean Jacques
had known these facts, his story would never have been written, and he
would have died in course of time with twenty children and a seat in the
legislature; for, in spite of his ardent devotion to philosophy and its
accompanying rationalism, he was a devout monarchist and a child of the
Church.

Sad enough it was that, as he shifted his glance from the watch, which
ticked loud enough to wake a farmhand in the middle of the day, he found
those Spanish eyes which had been so lost in studying him. In the glow
and glisten of the evening sun setting on the shores of Bordeaux, and
flashing reflected golden light to the girl’s face, he saw that they
were shining with tears, and though looking at him, appeared not to
see him. In that moment the scrutiny of the little man’s mind was
volatilized, and the Spanische, as she was ultimately called, began her
career in the life of the money-master of St. Saviour’s.

It began by his immediately resenting the fact that she should be
travelling in the forecastle. His mind imagined misfortune and a lost
home through political troubles, for he quickly came to know that the
girl and her father were Spanish; and to him, Spain was a place of
martyrs and criminals. Criminals these could not be--one had but to look
at the girl’s face; while the face of her worthless father might have
been that of a friend of Philip IV. in the Escorial, so quiet and
oppressed it seemed. Nobility was written on the placid, apathetic
countenance, except when it was not under observation, and then the look
of Cain took its place. Jean Jacques, however, was not likely to see
that look; since Sebastian Dolores--that was his name--had observed from
the first how the master-miller was impressed by his daughter, and he
was set to turn it to account.

Not that the father entered into an understanding with the girl. He knew
her too well for that. He had a wholesome respect, not to say fear,
of her; for when all else had failed, it was she who had arranged his
escape from Spain, and who almost saved Carvillho Gonzales from being
shot. She could have saved Gonzales, might have saved him, would
have saved him, had she not been obliged to save her father. In the
circumstances she could not save both.

Before the week was out Jean Jacques was possessed of as fine a tale
of political persecution as mind could conceive, and, told as it was by
Sebastian Dolores, his daughter did not seek to alter it, for she had
her own purposes, and they were mixed. These refugees needed a friend,
for they would land in Canada with only a few dollars, and Carmen
Dolores loved her father well enough not to wish to see him again in
such distress as he had endured in Cadiz. Also, Jean Jacques, the
young, verdant, impressionable French Catholic, was like her Carvillho
Gonzales, and she had loved her Carvillho in her own way very
passionately, and--this much to her credit--quite chastely. So that she
had no compunction in drawing the young money-master to her side, and
keeping him there by such arts as such a woman possesses. These are
remarkable after their kind. They are combined of a frankness as to the
emotions, and such outer concessions to physical sensations, as make a
painful combination against a mere man’s caution; even when that caution
has a Norman origin.

More than once Jean Jacques was moved to tears, as the Ananias of Cadiz
told his stories of persecution.

So that one day, in sudden generosity, he paid the captain the necessary
sum to transfer the refugees from the forecastle to his own select
portion of the steamer, where he was so conspicuous a figure among a
handful of lower-level merchant folk and others of little mark who were
going to Quebec. To these latter Jean Jacques was a gift of heaven, for
he knew so much, and seemed to know so much more, and could give them
the information they desired. His importance lured him to pose as a
seigneur, though he had no claim to the title. He did not call himself
Seigneur in so many words, but when others referred to him as the
Seigneur, and it came to his ears, he did not correct it; and when he
was addressed as such he did not reprove.

Thus, when he brought the two refugees from the forecastle and assured
his fellow-passengers that they were Spanish folk of good family exiled
by persecution, his generosity was acclaimed, even while all saw he was
enamoured of Carmen. Once among the first-class passengers, father and
daughter maintained reserve, and though there were a few who saw that
they were not very far removed above peasants, still the dress of
the girl, which was good--she had been a maid in a great nobleman’s
family--was evidence in favour of the father’s story. Sebastian Dolores
explained his own workman’s dress as having been necessary for his
escape.

Only one person gave Jean Jacques any warning. This was the captain
of the Antoine. He was a Basque, he knew the Spanish people well--the
types, the character, the idiosyncrasies; and he was sure that Sebastian
Dolores and his daughter belonged to the lower clerical or higher
working class, and he greatly inclined towards the former. In that he
was right, because Dolores, and his father before him, had been employed
in the office of a great commercial firm in Cadiz, and had repaid much
consideration by stirring up strife and disloyalty in the establishment.
But before the anarchist subtracted himself from his occupation, he had
appropriated certain sums of money, and these had helped to carry him
on, when he attached himself to the revolutionaries. It was on his
daughter’s savings that he was now travelling, with the only thing he
had saved from the downfall, which was his head. It was of sufficient
personal value to make him quite cheerful as the Antoine plunged and
shivered on her way to the country where he could have no steady work as
a revolutionist.

With reserve and caution the Basque captain felt it his duty to tell
Jean Jacques of his suspicions, warning him that the Spaniards were the
choicest liars in the world, and were not ashamed of it; but had
the same pride in it as had their greatest rivals, the Arabs and the
Egyptians.

His discreet confidences, however, were of no avail; he was not discreet
enough. If he had challenged the bona fides of Sebastian Dolores only,
he might have been convincing, but he used the word “they” constantly,
and that roused the chivalry of Jean Jacques. That the comely, careful
Carmen should be party to an imposture was intolerable. Everything about
her gave it the lie. Her body was so perfect and complete, so finely
contrived and balanced, so cunningly curved with every line filled in;
her eye was so full of lustre and half-melancholy too; her voice had
such a melodious monotone; her mouth was so ripe and yet so distant in
its luxury, that imposture was out of the question.

Ah, but Jean Jacques was a champion worth while! He did nothing
by halves. He was of the breed of men who grow more intense, more
convinced, more thorough, as they talk. One adjective begets another,
one warm allusion gives birth to a warmer, one flashing impulse evokes a
brighter confidence, till the atmosphere is flaming with conviction. If
Jean Jacques started with faint doubt regarding anything, and allowed
himself betimes the flush of a declaration of belief, there could be but
one end. He gathered fire as he moved, impulse expanded into momentum,
and momentum became an Ariel fleeing before the dark. He would start
by offering a finger to be pricked, and would end by presenting his own
head on a charger. He was of those who hypnotize themselves, who glow
with self-creation, who flower and bloom without pollen.

His rejection of the captain’s confidence even had a dignity. He
took out his watch which represented so many laborious hours of other
Barbilles, and with a decision in which the strong pulse of chivalry was
beating hard, he said:

“I can never speak well till I have ate. That is my hobby. Well, so
it is. And I like good company. So that is why I sit beside Senor and
Senorita Dolores at table--the one on the right, the other on the left,
myself between, like this, like that. It is dinner-time now here, and
my friends--my dear friends of Cadiz--they wait me. Have you heard
the Senorita sing the song of Spain, m’sieu’? What it must be with the
guitar, I know not; but with voice alone it is ravishing. I have learned
it also. The Senorita has taught me. It is a song of Aragon. It is sung
in high places. It belongs to the nobility. Ah, then, you have not heard
it--but it is not too late! The Senorita, the unhappy ma’m’selle, driven
from her ancestral home by persecution, she will sing it to you as she
has sung it to me. It is your due. You are the master of the ship. But,
yes, she shall of her kindness and of her grace sing it to you. You do
not know how it runs? Well, it is like this--listen and tell me if it
does not speak of things that belong to the old regime, the ancient
noblesse--listen, m’sieu’ le captainne, how it runs:

       “Have you not heard of mad Murcie?
        Granada gay and And’lousie?
        There’s where you’ll see the joyous rout,
        When patios pour their beauties out;
        Come, children, come, the night gains fast,
        And Time’s a jade too fair to last.
        My flower of Spain, my Juanetta,
        Away, away to gay Jota!
        Come forth, my sweet, away, my queen,
        Though daybreak scorns, the night’s between.
        The Fete’s afoot--ah! ah! ah! ah!
        De la Jota Ar’gonesa.
        Ah!  ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah!
        De la Jota Ar’gonesa.”

Before he had finished, the captain was more than ready to go, for he
had no patience with such credulity, simplicity and sentimentalism. He
was Basque, and to be Basque is to lack sentiment and feel none, to play
ever for the safe thing, to get without giving, and to mind your own
business. It had only been an excessive sense of duty which had made the
captain move in this, for he liked Jean Jacques as everyone aboard his
Antoine did; and he was convinced that the Spaniards would play the
“Seigneur” to the brink of disaster at least, though it would have been
hard to detect any element of intrigue or coquetry in Carmen Dolores.

That was due partly to the fact that she was still in grief for her
Gonzales, whose heart had been perforated by almost as many bullets
as the arrows of Cupid had perforated it in his short, gay life of
adventure and anarchy; also partly because there was no coquetry needed
to interest Jean Jacques. If he was interested it was not necessary to
interest anyone else, nor was it expedient to do so, for the biggest
fish in the net on the Antoine was the money-master of St. Saviour’s.

Carmen had made up her mind from the first to marry Jean Jacques, and
she deported herself accordingly--with modesty, circumspection and
skill. It would be the easiest way out of all their difficulties. Since
her heart, such as it was, fluttered, a mournful ghost, over the Place
d’Armes, where her Gonzales was shot, it might better go to Jean Jacques
than anyone else; for he was a man of parts, of money, and of looks, and
she loved these all; and to her credit she loved his looks better
than all the rest. She had no real cupidity, and she was not greatly
enamoured of brains. She had some real philosophy of life learned in a
hard school; and it was infinitely better founded than the smattering of
conventional philosophy got by Jean Jacques from his compendium picked
up on the quay at Quebec.

Yet Jean Jacques’ cruiser of life was not wholly unarmed. From his
Norman forebears he had, beneath all, a shrewdness and an elementary
alertness not submerged by his vain, kind nature. He was quite a good
business man, and had proved himself so before his father died--very
quick to see a chance, and even quicker to see where the distant, sharp
corners in the road were; though not so quick to see the pitfalls, for
his head was ever in the air. And here on the Antoine, there crossed his
mind often the vision of Carmen Dolores and himself in the parish of St.
Saviour’s, with the daily life of the Beau Cheval revolving about him.
Flashes of danger warned him now and then, just at the beginning of the
journey, as it were; just before he had found it necessary to become
her champion against the captain and his calumnies; but they were of the
instant only. But champion as he became, and worshipping as his manner
seemed, it all might easily have been put down to a warm, chivalrous,
and spontaneous nature, which had not been bitted or bridled, and he
might have landed at Quebec without committing himself, were it not for
the fact that he was not to land at Quebec.

That was the fact which controlled his destiny. He had spent many, many
hours with the Dona Dolores, talking, talking, as he loved to talk, and
only saving himself from the betise of boring her by the fact that his
enthusiasm had in it so fresh a quality, and because he was so like
her Gonzales that she could always endure him. Besides, quick of
intelligence as she was, she was by nature more material than she
looked, and there was certainly something physically attractive in
him--some curious magnetism. She had a well of sensuousness which might
one day become sensuality; she had a richness of feeling and a contour
in harmony with it, which might expand into voluptuousness, if given
too much sun, or if untamed by the normal restraints of a happy married
life. There was an earthquake zone in her being which might shake down
the whole structure of her existence. She was unsafe, not because she
was deceiving Jean Jacques now as to her origin and as to her feelings
for him; she was unsafe because of the natural strain of the light of
love in her, joined to a passion for comfort and warmth and to a natural
self-indulgence. She was determined to make Jean Jacques offer himself
before they landed at Quebec.

But they did not land at Quebec.




CHAPTER II. “THE REST OF THE STORY TO-MORROW”

The journey wore on to the coast of Canada. Gaspe was not far off when,
still held back by the constitutional tendency of the Norman not to
close a bargain till compelled to do so, Jean Jacques sat with Carmen
far forward on the deck, where the groaning Antoine broke the waters
into sullen foam. There they silently watched the sunset, golden, purple
and splendid--and ominous, as the captain knew.

“Look, the end of life--like that!” said Jean Jacques oratorically with
a wave of the hand towards the prismatic radiance.

“All the way round, the whole circle--no, it would be too much,” Carmen
replied sadly. “Better to go at noon--or soon after. Then the only
memory of life would be of the gallop. No crawling into the night for
me, if I can help it. Mother of Heaven, no! Let me go at the top of the
flight.”

“It is all the same to me,” responded Jean Jacques, “I want to know it
all--to gallop, to trot, to walk, to crawl. Me, I’m a philosopher. I
wait.”

“But I thought you were a Catholic,” she replied, with a kindly, lurking
smile, which might easily have hardened into scoffing.

“First and last,” he answered firmly.

“A Catholic and a philosopher--together in one?” She shrugged a shoulder
to incite him to argument, for he was interesting when excited;
when spurting out little geysers of other people’s cheap wisdom and
philosophy, poured through the kind distortion of his own intelligence.

He gave a toss of his head. “Ah, that is my hobby--I reconcile, I unite,
I adapt! It is all the nature of the mind, the far-look, the all-round
sight of the man. I have it all. I see.”

He gazed eloquently into the sunset, he swept the horizon with his hand.
“I have the all-round look. I say the Man of Calvary, He is before all,
the sun; but I say Socrates, Plato, Jean Jacques--that is my name, and
it is not for nothing, that--Jean Jacques Rousseau, Descartes, Locke,
they are stars that go round the sun. It is the same light, but not the
same sound. I reconcile. In me all comes together like the spokes to
the hub of a wheel. Me--I am a Christian, I am philosophe, also. In St.
Saviour’s, my home in Quebec, if the crops are good, what do men say?
‘C’est le bon Dieu--it is the good God,’ that is what they say. If the
crops are bad, what do they say? ‘It is the good God’--that is what they
say. It is the good God that makes crops good or bad, and it is the
good God that makes men say, ‘C’est le bon Dieu.’ The good God makes the
philosophy. It is all one.”

She appeared to grow agitated, and her voice shook as she spoke. “Tsh,
it is only a fool that says the good God does it, when the thing that is
done breaks you or that which you love all to pieces. No, no, no, it is
not religion, it is not philosophy that makes one raise the head when
the heart is bowed down, when everything is snatched away that was all
in all. That the good God does it is a lie. Santa Maria, what a lie!”

“Why ‘Santa Maria,’ then, if it is a lie?” he asked triumphantly. He did
not observe how her breast was heaving, how her hands were clenched; for
she was really busy with thoughts of her dead Carvillho Gonzales; but
for the moment he could only see the point of an argument.

She made a gesture of despair. “So--that’s it. Habit in us is so strong.
It comes through the veins of our mothers to us. We say that God is
a lie one minute, and then the next minute we say, ‘God guard you!’
Always--always calling to something, for something outside ourselves.
That is why I said Santa Maria, why I ask her to pray for the soul of
my friend, to pray to the God that breaks me and mine, and sends us over
the seas, beggars without a home.”

Now she had him back out of the vanities of his philosophy. He was up,
inflamed, looking at her with an excitement on which she depended for
her future. She knew the caution of his nature, she realized how he
would take one step forward and another step back, and maybe get nowhere
in the end, and she wanted him--for a home, for her father’s sake, for
what he could do for them both. She had no compunctions. She thought
herself too good for him, in a way, for in her day men of place and mark
had taken notice of her; and if it had not been for her Gonzales she
would no doubt have listened to one of them sometime or another. She
knew she had ability, even though she was indolent, and she thought she
could do as much for him as any other girl. If she gave him a handsome
wife and handsome children, and made men envious of him, and filled him
with good things, for she could cook more than tortillas-she felt he
would have no right to complain. She meant him to marry her--and Quebec
was very near!

“A beggar in a strange land, without a home, without a friend--oh, my
broken life!” she whispered wistfully to the sunset.

It was not all acting, for the past reached out and swept over her,
throwing waves of its troubles upon the future. She was that saddest of
human beings, a victim of dual forces which so fought for mastery
with each other that, while the struggle went on, the soul had no firm
foothold anywhere. That, indeed, was why her Carvillho Gonzales, who
also had been dual in nature, said to himself so often, “I am a devil,”
 and nearly as often, “I have the heart of an angel.”

“Tell me all about your life, my friend,” Jean Jacques said eagerly.
Now his eyes no longer hurried here and there, but fastened on hers and
stayed thereabouts--ah, her face surely was like pictures he had seen in
the Louvre that day when he had ambled through the aisles of great men’s
glories with the feeling that he could not see too much for nothing in
an hour.

“My life? Ah, m’sieu’, has not my father told you of it?” she asked.

He waved a hand in explanation, he cocked his head quizzically.
“Scraps--like the buttons on a coat here and there--that’s all,”
 he answered. “Born in Andalusia, lived in Cadiz, plenty of money,
a beautiful home,”--Carmen’s eyes drooped, and her face flushed
slightly--“no brothers or sisters--visits to Madrid on political
business--you at school--then the going of your mother, and you at home
at the head of the house. So much on the young shoulders, the kitchen,
the parlour, the market, the shop, society--and so on. That is the way
it was, so he said, except in the last sad times, when your father, for
the sake of Don Carlos and his rights, near lost his life--ah, I can
understand that: to stand by the thing you have sworn to! France is a
republic, but I would give my life to put a Napoleon or a Bourbon on the
throne. It is my hobby to stand by the old ship, not sign on to a new
captain every port.”

She raised her head and looked at him calmly now. The flush had gone
from her face, and a light of determination was in her eyes. To that was
added suddenly a certain tinge of recklessness and abandon in carriage
and manner, as one flings the body loose from the restraints of clothes,
and it expands in a free, careless, defiant joy.

Jean Jacques’ recital of her father’s tale had confused her for a
moment, it was so true yet so untrue, so full of lies and yet so
solid in fact. “The head of the house--visits to Madrid on political
business--the parlour, the market, society--all that!” It suggested the
picture of the life of a child of a great house; it made her a lady,
and not a superior servant as she had been; it adorned her with a credit
which was not hers; and for a moment she was ashamed. Yet from the first
she had lent herself to the general imposture that they had fled from
Spain for political reasons, having lost all and suffered greatly; and
it was true while yet it was a lie. She had suffered, both her father
and herself had suffered; she had been in danger, in agony, in sorrow,
in despair--it was only untrue that they were of good birth and blood,
and had had position and comfort and much money. Well, what harm did
that do anybody? What harm did it do this little brown seigneur from
Quebec? Perhaps he too had made himself out to be more than he was.
Perhaps he was no seigneur at all, she thought. When one is in distant
seas and in danger of his life, one will hoist any flag, sail to any
port, pay homage to any king. So would she. Anyhow, she was as good as
this provincial, with his ancient silver watch, his plump little hands,
and his book of philosophy.

What did it matter, so all came right in the end! She would justify
herself, if she had the chance. She was sick of conspiracy, and danger,
and chicanery--and blood. She wanted her chance. She had been badly
shaken in the last days in Spain, and she shrank from more worry and
misery. She wanted to have a home and not to wander. And here was a
chance--how good a chance she was not sure; but it was a chance. She
would not hesitate to make it hers. After all, self-preservation was the
thing which mattered. She wanted a bright fire, a good table, a horse,
a cow, and all such simple things. She wanted a roof over her and a warm
bed at night. She wanted a warm bed at night--but a warm bed at night
alone. It was the price she would have to pay for her imposture, that if
she had all these things, she could not be alone in the sleep-time. She
had not thought of this in the days when she looked forward to a home
with her Gonzales. To be near him was everything; but that was all
dead and done for; and now--it was at this point that, shrinking, she
suddenly threw off all restraining thoughts. With abandon of the
mind came a recklessness of body, which gave her, all at once, a
voluptuousness more in keeping with the typical maid of Andalusia. It
got into the eyes and senses of Jean Jacques, in a way which had nothing
to do with the philosophy of Descartes, or Kant, or Aristotle, or Hegel.

“It was beautiful in much--my childhood,” she said in a low voice,
dropping her eyes before his ardent gaze, “as my father said. My mother
was lovely to see, but not bigger than I was at twelve--so petite, and
yet so perfect in form--like a lark or a canary. Yes, and she could
sing--anything. Not like me with a voice which has the note of a drum or
an organ--”

“Of a flute, bright Senorita,” interposed Jean Jacques.

“But high, and with the trills in the skies, and all like a laugh with a
tear in it. When she went to the river to wash--”

She was going to say “wash the clothes,” but she stopped in time and
said instead, “wash her spaniel and her pony”--her face was flushed
again with shame, for to lie about one’s mother is a sickening thing,
and her mother never had a spaniel or a pony--“the women on the shore
wringing their clothes, used to beg her to sing. To the hum of the river
she would make the music which they loved--”

“La Manola and such?” interjected Jean Jacques eagerly. “That’s a fine
song as you sing it.”

“Not La Manola, but others of a different sort--The Love of Isabella,
The Flight of Bobadil, Saragosse, My Little Banderillero, and so on, and
all so sweet that the women used to cry. Always, always she was singing
till the time when my father became a rebel. Then she used to cry too;
and she would sing no more; and when my father was put against a wall to
be shot, and fell in the dust when the rifles rang out, she came at the
moment, and seeing him lying there, she threw up her hands, and fell
down beside him dead--”

“The poor little senora, dead too--”

“Not dead too--that was the pity of it. You see my father was not dead.
The officer”--she did not say sergeant--“who commanded the firing squad,
he was what is called a compadre of my father--”

“Yes, I understand--a made-brother, sealed with an oath, which binds
closer than a blood-brother. It is that, is it not?”

“So--like that. Well, the compadre had put blank cartridges in their
rifles, and my father pretended to fall dead; and the soldiers were
marched away; and my father, with my mother, was carried to his home,
still pretending to be dead. It had been all arranged except the awful
thing, my mother’s death. Who could foresee that? She ought to have been
told; but who could guess that she would hear of it all, and come at the
moment like that? So, that was the way she went, and I was left alone
with my father.” She had told the truth in all, except in conveying that
her mother was not of the lower orders, and that she went to the river
to wash her spaniel and her pony instead of her clothes.

“Your father--did they not arrest him again? Did they not know?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “That is not the way in Spain. He was shot,
as the orders were, with his back to the wall by a squad of soldiers
with regulation bullets. If he chose to come to life again, that was
his own affair. The Government would take no notice of him after he was
dead. He could bury himself, or he could come alive--it was all the same
to them. So he came alive again.”

“That is a story which would make a man’s name if he wrote it down,”
 said Jean Jacques eloquently. “And the poor little senora, but my heart
bleeds for her! To go like that in such pain, and not to know--If she
had been my wife I think I would have gone after her to tell her it was
all right, and to be with her--”

He paused confused, for that seemed like a reflection on her father’s
chivalry, and for a man who had risked his life for his banished
king--what would he have thought if he had been told that Sebastian
Dolores was an anarchist who loathed kings!--it was an insult to suggest
that he did not know the right thing to do, or, knowing, had not done
it.

She saw the weakness of his case at once. “There was his duty to the
living,” she said indignantly.

“Ah, forgive me--what a fool I am!” Jean Jacques said repentantly at
once. “There was his little girl, his beloved child, his Carmen Dolores,
so beautiful, with the voice like a flute, and--”

He drew nearer to her, his hand was outstretched to take hers; his eyes
were full of the passion of the moment; pity was drowning all caution,
all the Norman shrewdness in him, when the Antoine suddenly stopped
almost dead with a sudden jolt and shock, then plunged sideways, jerked,
and trembled.

“We’ve struck a sunk iceberg--the rest of the story to-morrow,
Senorita,” he cried, as they both sprang to their feet.

“The rest of the story to-morrow,” she repeated, angry at the stroke
of fate which had so interrupted the course of her fortune. She said it
with a voice also charged with fear; for she was by nature a landfarer,
not a sea-farer, though on the rivers of Spain she had lived almost as
much as on land, and she was a good swimmer.

“The rest to-morrow,” she repeated, controlling herself.




CHAPTER III. “TO-MORROW”

The rest came to-morrow. When the Antoine struck the sunken iceberg she
was not more than one hundred and twenty miles from the coast of Gaspe.
She had not struck it full on, or she would have crumpled up, but had
struck and glanced, mounting the berg, and sliding away with a small
gaping wound in her side, broken internally where she had been weakest.
Her condition was one of extreme danger, and the captain was by no means
sure that he could make the land. If a storm or a heavy sea came on,
they were doomed.

As it was, with all hands at the pumps the water gained on her, and she
moaned and creaked and ached her way into the night with no surety that
she would show a funnel to the light of another day. Passengers and crew
alike worked, and the few boats were got ready to lower away when
the worst should come to the worst. Below, with the crew, the little
moneymaster of St. Saviour’s worked with an energy which had behind it
some generations of hardy qualities; and all the time he refused to be
downcast. There was something in his nature or in his philosophy after
all. He had not much of a voice, but it was lusty and full of good
feeling; and when cursing began, when a sailor even dared to curse his
baptism--the crime of crimes to a Catholic mind--Jean Jacques began to
sing a cheery song with which the habitants make vocal their labours or
their playtimes:

          “A Saint-Malo, beau port de mer,
          Trois gros navir’s sont arrives,
          Trois gros navir’s sont arrives
          Charges d’avoin’, charges de ble.
          Charges d’avoin’, charges de ble:
          Trois dam’s s’en vont les marchander.”

And so on through many verses, with a heartiness that was a good
antidote to melancholy, even though it was no specific for a shipwreck.
It played its part, however; and when Jean Jacques finished it, he
plunged into that other outburst of the habitant’s gay spirits, ‘Bal
chez Boule’:

       “Bal chez Boule, bal chez Boule,
        The vespers o’er, we’ll away to that;
        With our hearts so light, and our feet so gay,
        We’ll dance to the tune of ‘The Cardinal’s Hat’
        The better the deed, the better the day
        Bal chez Boule, bal chez Boule!”

And while Jean Jacques worked “like a little French pony,” as they say
in Canada of every man with the courage to do hard things in him, he
did not stop to think that the scanty life-belts had all been taken,
and that he was a very poor swimmer indeed: for, as a child, he had been
subject to cramp, and so had made the Beau Cheval River less his friend
than would have been useful now.

He realized it, however, soon after daybreak, when, within a few hundred
yards of the shores of Gaspe, to which the good Basque captain had been
slowly driving the Antoine all night, there came the cry, “All hands
on deck!” and “Lower the boats!” for the Antoine’s time had come, and
within a hand-reach of shore almost she found the end of her rickety
life. Not more than three-fourths of the passengers and crew were got
into the boats. Jean Jacques was not one of these; but he saw Carmen
Dolores and her father safely bestowed, though in different boats. To
the girl’s appeal to him to come he gave a nod of assent, and said he
would get in at the last moment; but this he did not do, pushing into
the boat instead a crying lad of fifteen, who said he was afraid to die.

So it was that Jean Jacques took to the water side by side with the
Basque captain, when the Antoine groaned and shook, and then grew still,
and presently, with some dignity, dipped her nose into the shallow sea
and went down.

“The rest of the story to-morrow,” Jean Jacques had said when the vessel
struck the iceberg the night before; and so it was.

The boat in which Carmen had been placed was swamped not far from shore,
but she managed to lay hold of a piece of drifting wreckage, and began
to fight steadily and easily landward. Presently she was aware, however,
of a man struggling hard some little distance away to the left of her,
and from the tousled hair shaking in the water she was sure that it was
Jean Jacques.

So it proved to be; and thus it was that, at his last gasp almost, when
he felt he could keep up no longer, the wooden seat to which Carmen
clung came to his hand, and a word of cheer from her drew his head up
with what was almost a laugh.

“To think of this!” he said presently when he was safe, with her
swimming beside him without support, for the wooden seat would not
sustain the weight of two. “To think that it is you who saves me!” he
again declared eloquently, as they made the shore in comparative ease,
for she was a fine swimmer.

“It is the rest of the story,” he said with great cheerfulness and
aplomb as they stood on the shore in the morning sun, shoeless,
coatless, but safe: and she understood.

There was nothing else for him to do. The usual process of romance had
been reversed. He had not saved her life, she had saved his. The least
that he could do was to give her shelter at the Manor Cartier yonder
at St. Saviour’s, her and, if need be, her father. Human gratitude
must have play. It was so strong in this case that it alone could have
overcome the Norman caution of Jean Jacques, and all his worldly wisdom
(so much in his own eyes). Added thereto was the thing which had been
greatly stirred in him at the instant the Antoine struck; and now he
kept picturing Carmen in the big living-room and the big bedroom of the
house by the mill, where was the comfortable four-poster which had come
from the mansion of the last Baron of Beaugard down by St. Laurent.

Three days after the shipwreck of the Antoine, and as soon as sufficient
finery could be got in Quebec, it was accomplished, the fate of Jean
Jacques. How proud he was to open his cheque-book before the young
Spanish maid, and write in cramped, characteristic hand a cheque for
a hundred dollars or so at a time! A moiety of this money was given
to Sebastian Dolores, who could scarcely believe his good fortune. A
situation was got for him by the help of a good abbe at Quebec, who
was touched by the tale of the wreck of the Antoine, and by the no less
wonderful tale of the refugees of Spain, who naturally belonged to the
true faith which “feared God and honoured the King.” Sebastian Dolores
was grateful for the post offered him, though he would rather have gone
to St. Saviour’s with his daughter, for he had lost the gift of work,
and he desired peace after war. In other words, he had that fatal trait
of those who strive to make the world better by talk and violence, the
vice of indolence.

But when Jean Jacques and his handsome bride started for St. Saviour’s,
the new father-in-law did not despair of following soon. He would
greatly have enjoyed the festivities which, after all, did follow the
home-coming of Jean Jacques Barbille and his Spanische; for while they
lacked enthusiasm because Carmen was a foreigner, the romance of the
story gave the whole proceedings a spirit and interest which spread into
adjoining parishes: so that people came to mass from forty miles away to
see the pair who had been saved from the sea.

And when the Quebec newspapers found their way into the parish, with a
thrilling account of the last hours of the Antoine; and of Jean Jacques’
chivalrous act in refusing to enter a boat to save himself, though he
was such a bad swimmer and was in danger of cramp; and how he sang Bal
chez Boule while the men worked at the pumps; they permitted the apres
noces of M’sieu’ and Madame Jean Jacques Barbille to be as brilliant
as could be, with the help of lively improvisation. Even speech-making
occurred again in an address of welcome some days later. This was
followed by a feast of Spanish cakes and meats made by the hands of
Carmen Dolores, “the lady saved from the sea”--as they called her; not
knowing that she had saved herself, and saved Jean Jacques as well. It
was not quite to Jean Jacques’ credit that he did not set this error
right, and tell the world the whole exact truth.




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

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