The Money Master, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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.