The Money Master, Complete - Gilbert Parker
"Tut, tut," he had exclaimed, "an actor--an actor once a lawyer! That's
serious. She's at an age--and with a temperament like hers she'll believe
anything, if once her affections are roused. She has a flair for the
romantic, for the thing that's out of reach--the bird on the highest
branch, the bird in the sky beyond ours, the song that was lost before
time was, the light that never was on sea or land. Why, damn it, damn it
all, my Solon, here's the beginning of a case in Court unless we can lay
the fellow by the heels! How long is he here for?"
When M. Fille had told him that he would stay for another month for
certain, and no doubt much longer, if there seemed a prospect of winning
the heiress of the Manor Cartier, the Judge gave a groan.
"We must get him away, somehow," he said. "Where does he stay?"
"At the house of Louis Charron," was the reply. "Louis Charron--isn't he
the fellow that sells whisky without a license?"
"It is so, monsieur."
The Judge moved his head from side to side like a bear in a cage. "It is
that, is it, my Fille? By the thumb of the devil, isn't it time then that
Louis Charron was arrested for breaking the law? Also how do we know but
that the interloping fellow Fynes is an agent for a whisky firm perhaps?
Couldn't he, then, on suspicion, be arrested with--"
The Clerk of the Court shook his head mournfully. His Judge was surely
becoming childish in his old age. He looked again closely at the great
man, and saw a glimmer of moisture in the grey eyes. It was clear that
Judge Carcasson felt deeply the dangers of the crisis, and that the
futile outburst had merely been the agitated protest of the helpless.
"The man is what he says he is--an actor; and it would be folly to arrest
him. If our Zoe is really fond of him, it would only make a martyr of
him."
As he made this reply M. Fille looked furtively at the other--out of the
corner of his eye, as it were. The reply of the Judge was impatient,
almost peevish and rough. "Did you think I was in earnest, my
punchinello? Surely I don't look so young as all that. I am over
sixty-five, and am therefore mentally developed!"
M. Fille was exactly sixty-five years of age, and the blow was a shrewd
one. He drew himself up with rigid dignity.
"You must feel sorry sometimes for those who suffered when your mind was
undeveloped, monsieur," he answered. "You were a judge at forty-nine, and
you defended poor prisoners for twenty years before that."
The Judge was conquered, and he was never the man to pretend he was not
beaten when he was. He admired skill too much for that. He squeezed M.
Fille's arm and said:
"I've been quick with my tongue myself, but I feel sure now, that it's
through long and close association with my Clerk of the Court."
"Ah, monsieur, you are so difficult to understand!" was the reply. "I
have known you all these years, and yet--"
"And yet you did not know how much of the woman there was in me! . . .
But yes, it is that. It is that which I fear with our Zoe. Women break
out--they break out, and then there is the devil to pay. Look at her
mother. She broke out. It was not inevitable. It was the curse of
opportunity, the wrong thing popping up to drive her mad at the wrong
moment. Had the wrong thing come at the right time for her, when she was
quite sane, she would be yonder now with our philosopher. Perhaps she
would not be contented if she were there, but she would be there; and as
time goes on, to be where we were in all things which concern the
affections, that is the great matter."
"Ah, yes, ah, yes," was the bright-eyed reply of that Clerk, "there is no
doubt of that! My sister and I there, we are fifty years together, never
with the wrong thing at the wrong time, always the thing as it was,
always to be where we were."
The Judge shook his head. "There is an eternity of difference, Fille,
between the sister and brother and the husband and wife. The sacredness
of isolation is the thing which holds the brother and sister together.
The familiarity of--but never mind what it is that so often forces
husband and wife apart. It is there, and it breaks out in rebellion as it
did with the wife of Jean Jacques Barbille. As she was a strong woman in
her way, it spoiled her life, and his too when it broke out."
M. Fille's face lighted with memory and feeling. "Ah, a woman of powerful
emotions, monsieur, that is so! I think I never told you, but at the
last, in my office, when she went, she struck George Masson in the face.
It was a blow that--but there it was; I have never liked to think of it.
When I do, I shudder. She was a woman who might have been in other
circumstances--but there!"
The Judge suddenly stopped in his walk and faced round on his friend.
"Did you ever know, my Solon," he said, "that it was not Jean Jacques who
saved Carmen at the wreck of the Antoine, but it was she who saved him;
and yet she never breathed of it in all the years. One who was saved from
the Antoine told me of it. Jean Jacques was going down. Carmen gave him
her piece of wreckage to hang on to, and swam ashore without help. He
never gave her the credit. There was something big in the woman, but it
did not come out right."
M. Fille threw up his hands. "Grace de Dieu, is it so that she saved Jean
Jacques? Then he would not be here if it had not been for her?"
"That is the obvious deduction, Maitre Fille," replied the Judge.
The Clerk of the Court seemed moved. "He did not treat her ill. I know
that he would take her back to-morrow if he could. He has never
forgotten. I saw him weeping one day--it was where she used to sing to
the flax-beaters by the Beau Cheval. I put my hand on his shoulder, and
said, 'I know, I comprehend; but be a philosopher, Jean Jacques.'"
"What did he say?" asked the Judge.
"He drew himself up. 'In my mind, in my soul, I am philosopher always,'
he said, 'but my eyes are the windows of my heart, m'sieu'. They look out
and see the sorrow of one I loved. It is for her sorrow that I weep, not
for my own. I have my child, I have money; the world says to me, "How
goes it, my friend?" I have a home--a home; but where is she, and what
does the world say to her?'"
The Judge shook his head sadly. "I used to think I knew life, but I come
to the belief in the end that I know nothing. Who could have guessed that
he would have spoken like that!"
"He forgave her, monsieur."
The Judge nodded mournfully. "Yes, yes, but I used to think it is such
men who forgive one day and kill the next. You never can tell where they
will explode, philosophy or no philosophy."
The Judge was right. After all the years that had passed since his wife
had left him, Jean Jacques did explode. It was the night of his birthday
party at which was present the Man from Outside. It was in the hour when
he first saw what the Clerk of the Court had seen some time before--the
understanding between Zoe and Gerard Fynes. It had never occurred to him
that there was any danger. Zoe had been so indifferent to the young men
of St. Saviour's and beyond, had always been so much his friend and the
friend of those much older than himself, like Judge Carcasson and M.
Fille, that he had not yet thought of her electing to go and leave him
alone.
To leave him alone! To be left alone--it had never become a possibility
to his mind. It did not break upon him with its full force all at once.
He first got the glimmer of it, then the glimmer grew to a glow, and the
glow to a great red light, in which his brain became drunk, and all his
philosophy was burned up like wood-shavings in a fiery furnace.
"Did you like it so much?" Zoe had asked when her song was finished, and
the Man from Outside had replied, "Ah, but splendid, splendid! It got
into every corner of every one of us."
"Into the senses--why not into the heart? Songs are meant for the heart,"
said Zoe.
"Yes, yes, certainly," was the young man's reply, "but it depends upon
the song whether it touches the heart more than the senses. Won't you
sing that perfect thing, 'La Claire Fontaine'?" he added, with eyes as
bright as passion and the hectic fires of his lung-trouble could make
them.
She nodded and was about to sing, for she loved the song, and it had been
ringing in her head all day; but at that point M. Fille rose, and with
his glass raised high--for at that moment Seraphe Corniche and another
carried round native wine and cider to the company--he said:
"To Monsieur Jean Jacques Barbille, and his fifty years, good
health--bonne sante! This is his birthday. To a hundred years for Jean
Jacques!"
Instantly everyone was up with glass raised, and Zoe ran and threw her
arms round her father's neck. "Kiss me before you drink," she said.
With a touch almost solemn in its tenderness Jean Jacques drew her head
to his shoulder and kissed her hair, then her forehead. "My blessed
one--my angel," he whispered; but there was a look in his eyes which only
M. Fille had seen there before. It was the look which had been in his
eyes at the flax-beaters' place by the river.
"Sing--father, you must sing," said Zoe, and motioned to the fiddler.
"Sing It's Fifty Years," she cried eagerly. They all repeated her
request, and he could but obey.
Jean Jacques' voice was rather rough, but he had some fine resonant notes
in it, and presently, with eyes fastened on the distance, and with free
gesture and much expression, he sang the first verse of the haunting
ballad of the man who had reached his fifty years:
"Wherefore these flowers?
This fete for me?
Ah, no, it is not fifty years,
Since in my eyes the light you see
First shone upon life's joys and tears!
How fast the heedless days have flown
Too late to wail the misspent hours,
To mourn the vanished friends I've known,
To kneel beside love's ruined bowers.
Ah, have I then seen fifty years,
With all their joys and hopes and fears!"
Through all the verses he ranged, his voice improving with each phrase,
growing more resonant, till at last it rang out with a ragged richness
which went home to the hearts of all. He was possessed. All at once he
was conscious that the beginning of the end of things was come for him;
and that now, at fifty, in no sphere had he absolutely "arrived," neither
in home nor fortune, nor--but yes, there was one sphere of success; there
was his fatherhood. There was his daughter, his wonderful Zoe. He drew
his eyes from the distance, and saw that her ardent look was not towards
him, but towards one whom she had known but a few weeks.
Suddenly he stopped in the middle of a verse, and broke forward with his
arms outstretched, laughing. He felt that he must laugh, or he would cry;
and that would be a humiliating thing to do.
"Come, come, my friends, my children, enough of that!" he cried. "We'll
have no more maundering. Fifty years--what are fifty years! Think of
Methuselah! It's summer in the world still, and it's only spring at St.
Saviour's. It's the time of the first flowers. Let's dance--no, no, never
mind the Cure to-night! He will not mind. I'll settle it with him. We'll
dance the gay quadrille."
He caught the hands of the two youngest girls present, and nodded at the
fiddler, who at once began to tune his violin afresh. One of the joyous
young girls, however, began to plead with him.
"Ah, no, let us dance, but at the last--not yet, M'sieu' Jean Jacques!
There is Zoe's song, we must have that, and then we must have charades.
Here is M'sieu' Fynes--he can make splendid charades for us. Then the
dance at the last--ah, yes, yes, M'sieu' Jean Jacques! Let it be like
that. We all planned it, and though it is your birthday, it's us are
making the fete."
"As you will then, as you will, little ones," Jean Jacques acquiesced
with a half-sigh; but he did not look at his daughter. Somehow, suddenly,
a strange constraint possessed him where Zoe was concerned. "Then let us
have Zoe's song; let us have 'La Claire Fontaine'," cried the black-eyed
young madcap who held Jean Jacques' arms.
But Zoe interrupted. "No, no," she protested, "the singing spell is
broken. We will have the song after the charades--after the charades."
"Good, good--after the charades!" they all cried, for there would be
charades like none which had ever been played before, with a real actor
to help them, to carry them through as they did on the stage. To them the
stage was compounded of mystery, gaiety and the forbidden.
So, for the next half-hour they were all at the disposal of the Man from
Outside, who worked as though it was a real stage, and they were real
players, and there were great audiences to see them. It was all quite
wonderful, and it involved certain posings, attitudes, mimicry and
pantomime, for they were really ingenious charades.
So it happened that Zoe's fingers often came in touch with those of the
stage-manager, that his hands touched her shoulders, that his cheek
brushed against her dark hair once, and that she had sensations never
experienced before. Why was it that she thrilled when she came near to
him, that her whole body throbbed and her heart fluttered when their
shoulders or arms touched? Her childlike nature, with all its warmth and
vibration of life, had never till now felt the stir of sex in its vital
sense. All men had in one way been the same to her; but now she realized
that there was a world-wide difference between her Judge Carcasson, her
little Clerk of the Court, and this young man whose eyes drank hers. She
had often been excited, even wildly agitated, had been like a sprite let
loose in quiet ways; but that was mere spirit. Here was body and senses
too; here was her whole being alive to a music, which had an aching
sweetness and a harmony coaxing every sense into delight.
"To-morrow evening, by the flume, where the beechtrees are--come--at six.
I want to speak with you. Will you come?"
Thus whispered the maker of this music of the senses, who directed the
charades, but who was also directing the course of another life than his
own.
"Yes, if I can," was Zoe's whispered reply, and the words shook as she
said them; for she felt that their meeting in the beech-trees by the
flume would be of consequence beyond imagination.
Judge Carcasson had always said that Zoe had judgment beyond her years;
M. Fille had remarked often that she had both prudence and shrewdness as
well as a sympathetic spirit; but M. Fille's little whispering sister,
who could never be tempted away from her home to any house, to whom the
market and the church were like pilgrimages to distant wilds, had said to
her brother:
"Wait, Armand--wait till Zoe is waked, and then prudence and wisdom will
be but accident. If all goes well, you will see prudence and wisdom; but
if it does not, you will see--ah, but just Zoe!"
The now alert Jean Jacques had seen the whispering of the two, though he
did not know what had been said. It was, however, something secret, and
if it was secret, then it was--yes, it was love; and love between his
daughter and that waif of the world--the world of the stage--in which men
and women were only grown-up children, and bad grown-up children at
that--it was not to be endured. One thing was sure, the man should come
to the Manor Cartier no more. He would see to that to-morrow. There would
be no faltering or paltering on his part. His home had been shaken to its
foundations once, and he was determined that it should not fall about his
ears a second time. An Englishman, an actor, a Protestant, and a renegade
lawyer! It was not to be endured.
The charade now being played was the best of the evening. One of the
madcap friends of Zoe was to be a singing-girl. She was supposed to carry
a tambourine. When her turn to enter came, with a look of mischief and a
gay dancing step, she ran into the room. In her hands was a guitar, not a
tambourine. When Zoe saw the guitar she gave a cry.
"Where did you get that?" she asked in a low, shocked, indignant voice.
"In your room--your bedroom," was the half-frightened answer. "I saw it
on the dresser, and I took it."
"Come, come, let's get on with the charade," urged the Man from Outside.
On the instant's pause, in which Zoe looked at her lover almost
involuntarily, and without fully understanding what he said, someone else
started forward with a smothered exclamation--of anger, of horror, of
dismay. It was Jean Jacques. He was suddenly transformed.
His eyes were darkened by hideous memory, his face alight with passion.
He caught from the girl's hands the guitar--Carmen's forgotten guitar
which he had not seen for seven years--how well he knew it! With both
hands he broke it across his knee. The strings, as they snapped, gave a
shrill, wailing cry, like a voice stopped suddenly by death. Stepping
jerkily to the fireplace he thrust it into the flame.
"Ah, there!" he said savagely. "There--there!" When he turned round
slowly again, his face--which he had never sought to control before he
had his great Accident seven years ago--was under his command. A strange,
ironic-almost sardonic-smile was on his lips.
"It's in the play," he said.
"No, it's not in the charade, Monsieur Barbille," said the Man from
Outside fretfully.
"That is the way I read it, m'sieu'," retorted Jean Jacques, and he made
a motion to the fiddler.
"The dance! The dance!" he exclaimed.
But yet he looked little like a man who wished to dance, save upon a
grave.
CHAPTER XIV
"I DO NOT WANT TO GO"
It is a bad thing to call down a crisis in the night-time. A "scene" at
midnight is a savage enemy of ultimate understanding, and that Devil,
called Estrangement, laughs as he observes the objects of his attention
in conflict when the midnight candle burns.
He should have been seized with a fit of remorse, however, at the sight
he saw in the Manor Cartier at midnight of the day when Jean Jacques
Barbille had reached his fiftieth year. There is nothing which, for
pathos and for tragedy, can compare with a struggle between the young and
the old.
The Devil of Estrangement when he sees it, may go away and indulge
himself in sleep; for there will be no sleep for those who, one young and
the other old, break their hearts on each other's anvils, when the lights
are low and it is long till morning.
When Jean Jacques had broken the forgotten guitar which his daughter had
retrieved from her mother's life at the Manor Cartier (all else he had
had packed and stored away in the flour-mill out of sight) and thrown it
in the fire, there had begun a revolt in the girl's heart, founded on a
sense of injustice, but which itself became injustice also; and that is a
dark thing to come between those who love--even as parent and child.
After her first exclamation of dismay and pain, Zoe had regained her
composure, and during the rest of the evening she was full of feverish
gaiety. Indeed her spirits and playful hospitality made the evening a
success in spite of the skeleton at the feast. Jean Jacques had also
roused himself, and, when the dance began, he joined in with spirit,
though his face was worn and haggard even when lighted by his smile. But
though the evening came to the conventional height of hilarity, there was
a note running through it which made even the youngest look at each
other, as though to say, "Now, what's going to happen next!"
Three people at any rate knew that something was going to happen. They
were Zoe, the Man from Outside and M. Fille. Zoe had had more than one
revelation that night, and she felt again as she did one day, seven years
before, when, coming home from over the hills, she had stepped into a
house where Horror brooded as palpably as though it sat beside the fire,
or hung above the family table. She had felt something as soon as she had
entered the door that far-off day, though the house seemed empty. It was
an emptiness which was filled with a torturing presence or torturing
presenes. It had stilled her young heart. What was it? She had learned
the truth soon enough. Out of the sunset had come her father with a face
twisted with misery, and as she ran to him, he had caught her by both
shoulders, looked through her eyes to something far beyond, and hoarsely
said: "She is gone--gone from us! She has run away from home! Curse her
baptism--curse it, curse it!"
Zoe could never forget these last words she had ever heard her father
speak of Carmen. They were words which would make any Catholic shudder to
hear. It was a pity he had used them, for they made her think at last
that her mother had been treated with injustice. This, in spite of the
fact that in the days, now so far away, when her mother was with them she
had ever been nearer to her father, and that, after first childhood, she
and her mother were not so close as they had been, when she went to sleep
to the humming of a chanson of Cadiz. Her own latent motherhood, however,
kept stealing up out of the dim distances of childhood's ignorance and,
with modesty and allusiveness, whispering knowledge in her ear. So it was
that now she looked back pensively to the years she had spent within
sight and sound of her handsome mother, and out of the hunger of her own
spirit she had come to idealize her memory. It was good to have a loving
father; but he was a man, and he was so busy just when she wanted--when
she wanted she knew not what, but at least to go and lay her head on a
heart that would understand what was her sorrow, her joy, or her longing.
And now here at last was come Crisis, which showed its thunderous head in
the gay dance, and shook his war-locks in the fire, where her mother's
guitar had shrieked in its last agony.
When all the guests had gone, when the bolts had been shot home, and old
Seraphe Corniche had gone to bed, father and daughter came face to face.
There was a moment's pause, as the two looked at each other, and then Zoe
came up to Jean Jacques to kiss him good-night. It was her way of facing
the issue. Instinctively she knew that he would draw back, and that the
struggle would begin. It might almost seem that she had invited it; for
she had let the Man from Outside hold her hand for far longer than
courtesy required, while her father looked on with fretful eyes--even
with a murmuring which was not a benediction. Indeed, he had evaded
shaking hands with his hated visitor by suddenly offering him a cigar,
and then in the doorway itself handing a lighted match.
"His eminence, Cardinal Christophe, gave these cigars to me when he
passed through St. Saviour's five years ago," Jean Jacques had remarked
loftily, "and I always smoke one on my birthday. I am a good Catholic,
and his eminence rested here for a whole day."
He had had a grim pleasure in avoiding the handshake, and in having the
Protestant outsider smoke the Catholic cigar! In his anger it seemed to
him that he had done something worthy almost of the Vatican, indeed of
the great Cardinal Christophe himself. Even in his moments of crisis, in
his hours of real tragedy, in the times when he was shaken to the centre,
Jean Jacques fancied himself more than a little. It was as the
master-carpenter had remarked seven years before, he was always
involuntarily saying, "Here I come--look at me. I am Jean Jacques
Barbille!"
When Zoe reached out a hand to touch his arm, and raised her face as
though to kiss him good-night, Jean Jacques drew back.
"Not yet, Zoe," he said. "There are some things--What is all this between
you and that man? . . . I have seen. You must not forget who you are--the
daughter of Jean Jacques Barbille, of the Manor Cartier, whose name is
known in the whole province, who was asked to stand for the legislature.
You are Zoe Barbille--Mademoiselle Zoe Barbille. We do not put on airs.
We are kind to our neighbours, but I am descended from the Baron of
Beaugard. I have a place--yes, a place in society; and it is for you to
respect it. You comprehend?"
Zoe flushed, but there was no hesitation whatever in her reply. "I am
what I have always been, and it is not my fault that I am the daughter of
M. Jean Jacques Barbille! I have never done anything which was not good
enough for the Manor Cartier." She held her head firmly as she said it.
Now Jean Jacques flushed, and he did hesitate in his reply. He hated
irony in anyone else, though he loved it in himself, when heaven gave him
inspiration thereto. He was in a state of tension, and was ready to break
out, to be a force let loose--that is the way he would have expressed it;
and he was faced by a new spirit in his daughter which would surely
spring the mine, unless he secured peace by strategy. He had sense enough
to feel the danger.
He did not see, however, any course for diplomacy here, for she had given
him his cue in her last words. As a pure logician he was bound to take
it, though it might lead to drama of a kind painful to them both.
"It is not good enough for the Manor Cartier that you go falling in love
with a nobody from nowhere," he responded.
"I am not falling in love," she rejoined.