The Money Master, Complete - Gilbert Parker
The Big Financier laughed cheerfully. "It's an old way to
popularity--being generous with other people's money. That is why I am
here. The people that spend your Jean Jacques' money will be spending
mine too, if I don't take care."
M. Fille noted the hard look which now settled in M. Mornay's face, and
it disturbed him. He rose and leaned over the table towards his visitor
anxiously.
"Tell me, if you please, monsieur, is there any real and immediate danger
of the financial collapse of Jean Jacques?"
The other regarded M. Fille with a look of consideration. He liked this
Clerk of the Court, but he liked Jean Jacques for the matter of that, and
away now from the big financial arena where he usually worked, his
natural instincts had play. He had come to St. Saviour's with a bigger
thing in his mind than Jean Jacques and his affairs; he had come on the
matter of a railway, and had taken Jean Jacques on the way, as it were.
The scheme for the railway looked very promising to him, and he was in
good humour; so that all he said about Jean Jacques was free from that
general irritation of spirit which has sacrificed many a small man on a
big man's altar. He saw the agitation he had caused, and he almost
repented of what he had already said; yet he had acted with a view to
getting M. Fille to warn Jean Jacques.
"I repeat what I said," he now replied. "Monsieur Jean Jacques' affairs
are too nicely balanced. A little shove one way or another and over goes
the whole caboose. If anyone here has influence over him, it would be a
kindness to use it. That case before the Court of Appeal, for instance;
he'd be better advised to settle it, if there is still time. One or two
of the mortgages he holds ought to be foreclosed, so that he may get out
of them all the law will let him. He ought to pouch the money that's
owing him; he ought to shave away his insurance, his lightning-rod, and
his horsedealing business; and he ought to sell his farms and his store,
and concentrate on the flour-mill and the saw-mill. He has had his
warnings generally from my lawyers, but what he wants most is the gentle
hand to lead him; and I should think that yours, M. Fille, is the hand
the Almighty would choose if He was concerned with what happens at St.
Saviour's and wanted an agent."
The Clerk of the Court blushed greatly. This was a very big man indeed in
the great commercial world, and flattery from him had unusual
significance; but he threw out his hands with a gesture of helplessness,
and said: "Monsieur, if I could be of use I would; but he has ceased to
listen to me; he--"
He got no further, for there was a sharp knock at the street door of the
outer office, and M. Fille hastened to the other room. After a moment he
came back, a familiar voice following him.
"It is Monsieur Barbille, monsieur," M. Fille said quietly, but with
apprehensive eyes.
"Well--he wants to see me?" asked M. Mornay. "No, no, monsieur. It would
be better if he did not see you. He is in some agitation."
"Fille! Maitre Fille--be quick now," called Jean Jacques' voice from the
other room.
"What did I say, monsieur?" asked the Big Financier. "The mind that's
received a blow must be moving--moving; the man with the many irons must
be flying from bellows to bellows!"
"Come, come, there's no time to lose," came Jean Jacques' voice again,
and the handle of the door of their room turned.
M. Fille's hand caught the handle. "Excuse me, Monsieur Barbille,--a
minute please," he persisted almost querulously. "Be good enough to keep
your manners . . . monsieur!" he added to the Financier, "if you do not
wish to speak with him, there is a door"--he pointed--"which will let you
into the side-street."
"What is his trouble?" asked M. Mornay.
M. Fille hesitated, then said reflectively: "He has lost his case in the
Appeal Court, monsieur; also, his cousin, Auguste Charron, who has been
working the Latouche farm, has flitted, leaving--"
"Leaving Jean Jacques to pay unexpected debts?"
"So, monsieur."
"Then I can be of no use, I fear," remarked M. Mornay dryly.
"Fille! Fille!" came the voice of Jean Jacques insistently from the
room.
"And so I will say au revoir, Monsieur Fille," continued the Big
Financier.
A moment later the great man was gone, and M. Fille was alone with the
philosopher of the Manor Cartier.
"Well, well, why do you keep me waiting! Who was it in there--anyone
that's concerned with my affairs?" asked Jean Jacques.
In these days he was sensitive when there was no cause, and he was
credulous where he ought to be suspicious. The fact that the little man
had held the door against him made him sure that M. Fille had not wished
him to see the departed visitor.
"Come, out with it--who was it making fresh trouble for me?" persisted
Jean Jacques.
"No one making trouble for you, my friend," answered the Clerk of the
Court, "but someone who was trying to do you a good turn."
"He must have been a stranger then," returned Jean Jacques bitterly. "Who
was it?"
M. Fille, after an instant's further hesitation, told him.
"Oh, him--M. Momay!" exclaimed Jean Jacques, with a look of relief, his
face lighting. "That's a big man with a most capable and far-reaching
mind. He takes a thing in as the ocean mouths a river. If I had had men
like that to deal with all my life, what a different ledger I'd be
balancing now! Descartes, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel--he has
an ear for them all. That is the intellectual side of him; and in
business"--he threw up a hand--"there he views the landscape from the
mountain-top. He has vision, strategy, executive. He is Napoleon and
Anacreon in one. He is of the builders on the one hand, of the Illuminati
and the Encyclopedistes on the other."
Even the Clerk of the Court, with his circumscribed range of thought and
experience, in that moment saw Jean Jacques as he really was. Here was a
man whose house of life was beginning to sway from an earthquake; who had
been smitten in several deadly ways, and was about to receive buffetings
beyond aught he had yet experienced, philosophizing on the
tight-rope--Blondin and Plato in one. Yet sardonically piteous as it was,
the incident had shown Jean Jacques with the germ of something big in
him. He had recognized in M. Mornay, who could level him to the dust
tomorrow financially, a master of the world's affairs, a prospector of
life's fields, who would march fearlessly beyond the farthest frontiers
into the unknown. Jean Jacques' admiration of the lion who could, and
would, slay him was the best tribute to his own character.
M. Fille's eyes moistened as he realized it; and he knew that nothing he
could say or do would make this man accommodate his actions to the hard
rules of the business of life; he must for ever be applying to them
conceptions of a half-developed mind.
"Quite so, quite so, Jean Jacques," M. Fille responded gently,
"but"--here came a firmer note to his voice, for he had taken to heart
the lesson M. Mornay had taught him, and he was determined to do his duty
now when the opportunity was in his hand--"but you have got to deal with
things as they are; not as they might have been. If you cannot have the
great men you have to deal with the little men like me. You have to prove
yourself bigger than the rest of us by doing things better. A man doesn't
fail only because of others, but also because of himself. You were warned
that the chances were all against you in the case that's just been
decided, yet you would go on; you were warned that your cousin, Auguste
Charron, was in debt, and that his wife was mad to get away from the farm
and go West, yet you would take no notice. Now he has gone, and you have
to pay, and your case has gone against you in the Appellate Court
besides. . . . I will tell you the truth, my friend, even if it cuts me
to the heart. You have not kept your judgment in hand; you have gone
ahead like a bull at a gate; and you pay the price. You listen to those
who flatter, and on those who would go through fire and water for you,
you turn your back--on those who would help you in your hour of trouble,
in your dark day."
Jean Jacques drew himself up with a gesture, impatient, masterful and
forbidding. "I have fought my fight alone in the dark day; I have not
asked for any one's help," he answered. "I have wept on no man's
shoulder. I have been mauled by the claws of injury and shame, and I have
not flinched. I have healed my own wounds, and I wear my scars without--"
He stopped, for there came a sharp rat-tat-tat at the door which opened
into the street. Somehow the commonplace, trivial interruption produced
on both a strange, even startling effect. It suddenly produced in their
minds a feeling of apprehension, as though there was whispered in their
ears, "Something is going to happen--beware!"
Rat-tat-tat! The two men looked at each other. The same thought was in
the mind of both. Jean Jacques clutched at his beard nervously, then with
an effort he controlled himself. He took off his hat as though he was
about to greet some important person, or to receive sentence in a court.
Instinctively he felt the little book of philosophy which he always
carried now in his breast-pocket, as a pietist would finger his beads in
moments of fear or anxiety. The Clerk of the Court passed his thin hand
over his hair, as he was wont to do in court when the Judge began his
charge to the Jury, and then with an action more impulsive than was usual
with him, he held out his hand, and Jean Jacques grasped it. Something
was bringing them together just when it seemed that, in the storm of Jean
Jacques' indignation, they were about to fall apart. M. Fille's eyes said
as plainly as words could do, "Courage, my friend!"
Rat-tat-tat! Rat-tat-tat! The knocking was sharp and imperative now. The
Clerk of the Court went quickly forward and threw open the door.
There stepped inside the widow of Palass Poucette. She had a letter in
her hand. "M'sieu', pardon, if I intrude," she said to M. Fille; "but I
heard that M'sieu' Jean Jacques was here. I have news for him."
"News!" repeated Jean Jacques, and he looked like a man who was waiting
for what he feared to hear. "They told me at the post-office that you
were here. I got the letter only a quarter of an hour ago, and I thought
I would go at once to the Manor Cartier and tell M'sieu' Jean Jacques
what the letter says. I wanted to go to the Manor Cartier for something
else as well, but I will speak of that by and by. It is the letter now."
She pulled off first one glove and then the other, still holding the
letter, as though she was about to perform some ceremony. "It was a good
thing I found out that M'sieu' Jean Jacques was here. It saves a
four-mile drive," she remarked.
"The news--ah, nom de Dieu, the slowness of the woman--like a river going
uphill!" exclaimed Jean Jacques, who was finding it hard to still the
trembling of his limbs.
The widow of Palass Poucette flushed, but she had some sense in her head,
and she realized that Jean Jacques was a little unbalanced at the moment.
Indeed, Jean Jacques was not so old that she would have found it
difficult to take a well-defined and warm interest in him, were
circumstances propitious. She held out the letter to him at once. "It is
from my sister in the West--at Shilah," she explained. "There is nothing
in it you can't read, and most of it concerns you." Jean Jacques took the
letter, but he could not bring himself to read it, for Virginie
Poucette's manner was not suggestive of happy tidings. After an instant's
hesitation he handed the letter to M. Fille, who pressed his lips with an
air of determination, and put on his glasses.
Jean Jacques saw the face of the Clerk of the Court flush and then turn
pale as he read the letter. "There, be quick!" he said before M. Fille
had turned the first page.
Then the widow of Palass Poucette came to him and, in a simple harmless
way she had, free from coquetry or guile, stood beside him, took his hand
and held it. He seemed almost unconscious of her act, but his fingers
convulsively tightened on hers; while she reflected that here was one who
needed help sorely; here was a good, warm-hearted man on whom a woman
could empty out affection like rain and get a good harvest. She really
was as simple as a child, was Virginie Poucette, and even in her
acquaintance with Sebastian Dolores, there had only been working in her
the natural desire of a primitive woman to have a man saying that which
would keep alive in her the things that make her sing as she toils; and
certainly Virginie toiled late and early on her farm. She really was
concerned for Jean Jacques. Both wife and daughter had taken flight, and
he was alone and in trouble. At this moment she felt she would like to be
a sister to him--she was young enough to be his daughter almost. Her
heart was kind.
"Now!" said Jean Jacques at last, as the Clerk of the Court's eyes
reached the end of the last page. "Now, speak! It is--it is my Zoe?"
"It is our Zoe," answered M. Fille.
"Figure de Christ, what do you wait for--she is not dead?" exclaimed Jean
Jacques with a courage which made him set his feet squarely.
The Clerk of the Court shook his head and began. "She is alive. Madame
Poucette's sister saw her by chance. Zoe was on her way up the
Saskatchewan River to the Peace River country with her husband. Her
husband's health was bad. He had to leave the stage in the United States
where he had gone after Winnipeg. The doctors said he must live the
open-air life. He and Zoe were going north, to take a farm somewhere."
"Somewhere! Somewhere!" murmured Jean Jacques. "The farther away from
Jean Jacques the better--that is what she thinks."
"No, you are wrong, my friend," rejoined M. Fille. "She said to Madame
Poucette's sister"--he held up the letter--"that when they had proved
they could live without anybody's help they would come back to see you.
Zoe thought that, having taken her life in her own hands, she ought to
justify herself before she asked your forgiveness and a place at your
table. She felt that you could only love her and be glad of her, if her
man was independent of you. It is a proud and sensitive soul--but there
it is!"
"It is romance, it is quixotism--ah, heart of God, what quixotism!"
exclaimed Jean Jacques.
"She gets her romance and quixotism from Jean Jacques Barbille," retorted
the Clerk of the Court. "She does more feeling than thinking--like you."
Jean Jacques' heart was bleeding, but he drew himself up proudly, and
caught his hand away from the warm palm of Poucette's widow. As his
affairs crumbled his pride grew more insistent. M. Fille had challenged
his intellect--his intellect!
"My life has been a procession of practical things," he declared
oracularly. "I have been a man of business who designs. I am no dreamer.
I think. I act. I suffer. I have been the victim of romance, not its
interpreter. Mercy of God, what has broken my life, what but
romance--romance, first with one and then with another! More feeling than
thinking, Maitre Fille--you say that? Why the Barbilles have ever in the
past built up life on a basis of thought and action, and I have added
philosophy--the science of thought and act. Jean Jacques Barbille has
been the man of design and the man of action also. Don Quixote was a
fool, a dreamer, but Jean Jacques is no Don Quixote. He is a man who has
done things, but also he is a man who has been broken on the wheel of
life. He is a man whose heart-strings have been torn--"
He had worked himself up into a fit of eloquence and revolt. He was
touched by the rod of desperation, which makes the soul protest that it
is right when it knows that it is wrong.
Suddenly, breaking off his speech, he threw up his hands and made for the
door.
"I will fight it out alone!" he declared with rough emotion, and at the
door he turned towards them again. He looked at them both as though he
would dare them to contradict him. The restless fire of his eyes seemed
to dart from one to the other.
"That's the way it is," said the widow of Palass Poucette coming quickly
forward to him. "It's always the way. We must fight our battles alone,
but we don't have to bear the wounds alone. In the battle you are alone,
but the hand to heal the wounds may be another's. You are a
philosopher--well, what I speak is true, isn't it?"
Virginie had said the one thing which could have stayed the tide of Jean
Jacques' pessimism and broken his cloud of gloom. She appealed to him in
the tune of an old song. The years and the curses of years had not
dispelled the illusion that he was a philosopher. He stopped with his
hand on the door.
"That's so, without doubt that's so," he said. "You have stumbled on a
truth of life, madame."
Suddenly there came into his look something of the yearning and hunger
which the lonely and forsaken feel when they are not on the full tide of
doing. It was as though he must have companionship, in spite of his brave
announcement that he must fight his fight alone. He had been wounded in
the battle, and here was one who held out the hand of healing to him.
Never since his wife had left him the long lonely years ago had a woman
meant anything to him except as one of a race; but in this moment here a
woman had held his hand, and he could feel still the warm palm which had
comforted his own agitated fingers.
Virginie Poucette saw, and she understood what was passing in his mind.
Yet she did not see and understand all by any means; and it is hard to
tell what further show of fire there might have been, but that the Clerk
of the Court was there, saying harshly under his breath, "The huzzy! The
crafty huzzy!"
The Clerk of the Court was wrong. Virginie was merely sentimental, not
intriguing or deceitful; for Jean Jacques was not a widower--and she was
an honest woman and genuinely tender-hearted.
"I'm coming to the Manor Cartier to-morrow," Virginie continued. "I have
a rug of yours. By mistake it was left at my house by M'sieu' Dolores."
"You needn't do that. I will call at your place tomorrow for it," replied
Jean Jacques almost eagerly. "I told M'sieu' Dolores to-day never to
enter my house again. I didn't know it was your rug. It was giving away
your property, not his own," she hurriedly explained, and her face
flushed.
"That is the Spanish of it," said Jean Jacques bitterly. His eyes were
being opened in many directions to-day.
M. Fille was in distress. Jean Jacques had had a warning about Sebastian
Dolores, but here was another pit into which he might fall, the pit
digged by a widow, who, no doubt, would not hesitate to marry a divorced
Catholic philosopher, if he could get a divorce by hook or by crook. Jean
Jacques had said that he was going to Virginie Poucette's place the next
day. That was as bad as it could be; yet there was this to the good, that
it was to-morrow and not to-day; and who could tell what might happen
between to-day and to-morrow!
A moment later the three were standing outside the office in the street.
As Jean Jacques climbed into his red wagon, Virginie Poucette's eyes were
attracted to the northern sky where a reddish glow appeared, and she gave
an exclamation of surprise.
"That must be a fire," she said, pointing.
"A bit of pine-land probably," said M. Fille--with anxiety, however, for
the red glow lay in the direction of St. Saviour's where were the Manor
Cartier and Jean Jacques' mills. Maitre Fille was possessed of a
superstition that all the things which threaten a man's life to wreck it,
operate awhile in their many fields before they converge like an army in
one field to deliver the last attack on their victim. It would not have
seemed strange to him, if out of the night a voice of the unseen had said
that the glow in the sky came from the Manor Cartier. This very day three
things had smitten Jean Jacques, and, if three, why not four or five, or
fifty!
With a strange fascination Jean Jacques' eyes were fastened on the glow.
He clucked to his horses, and they started jerkily away. M. Fille and the
widow Poucette said good-bye to him, but he did not hear, or if he heard,
he did not heed. His look was set upon the red reflection which widened
in the sky and seemed to grow nearer and nearer. The horses quickened
their pace. He touched them with the whip, and they went faster. The glow
increased as he left Vilray behind. He gave the horses the whip again
sharply, and they broke into a gallop. Yet his eyes scarcely left the
sky. The crimson glow drew him, held him, till his brain was afire also.
Jean Jacques had a premonition and a conviction which was even deeper
than the imagination of M. Fille.
In Vilray, behind him, the telegraph clerk was in the street shouting to
someone to summon the local fire-brigade to go to St. Saviour's.
"What is it--what is it?" asked M. Fille of the telegraph clerk in marked
agitation.
"It's M'sieu' Jean Jacques' flour-mill," was the reply.
Wagons and buggies and carts began to take the road to the Manor Cartier;
and Maitre Fille went also with the widow of Palass Poucette.
CHAPTER XVII
HIS GREATEST ASSET
Jean Jacques did not go to the house of the widow of Palass Poucette
"next day" as he had proposed: and she did not expect him. She had seen
his flour-mill burned to the ground on the-evening when they met in the
office of the Clerk of the evening Court, when Jean Jacques had learned
that his Zoe had gone into farther and farther places away from him.
Perhaps Virginie Poucette never had shed as many tears in any whole year
of her life as she did that night, not excepting the year Palass Poucette
died, and left her his farm and seven horses, more or less sound, and a
threshing-machine in good condition. The woman had a rare heart and there
was that about Jean Jacques which made her want to help him. She had no
clear idea as to how that could be done, but she had held his hand at any
rate, and he had seemed the better for it. Virginie had only an objective
view of things; and if she was not material, still she could best express
herself through the medium of the senses.
There were others besides her who shed tears also--those who saw Jean
Jacques' chief asset suddenly disappear in flame and smoke and all his
other assets become thereby liabilities of a kind; and there were many
who would be the poorer in the end because of it. If Jean Jacques went
down, he probably would not go alone. Jean Jacques had done a good
fire-insurance business over a course of years, but somehow he had not
insured himself as heavily as he ought to have done; and in any case the
fire-policy for the mill was not in his own hands. It was in the
safe-keeping of M. Mornay at Montreal, who had warned M. Fille of the
crisis in the money-master's affairs on the very day that the crisis
came.
No one ever knew how it was that the mill took fire, but there was one
man who had more than a shrewd suspicion, though there was no occasion
for mentioning it. This was Sebastian Dolores. He had not set the mill
afire. That would have been profitable from no standpoint, and he had no
grudge against Jean Jacques. Why should he have a grudge? Jean Jacques'
good fortune, as things were, made his own good fortune; for he ate and
drank and slept and was clothed at his son-in-law's expense. But he
guessed accurately who had set the mill on fire, and that it was done
accidentally. He remembered that a man who smoked bad tobacco which had
to be lighted over and over again, threw a burning match down after
applying it to his pipe. He remembered that there was a heap of
flour-bags near where the man stood when the match was thrown down; and
that some loose strings for tying were also in a pile beside the bags. So
it was easy for the thing to have happened if the man did not turn round
after he threw the match down, but went swaying on out of the mill, and
over to the Manor Cartier, and up staggering to bed; for he had been
drinking potato-brandy, and he had been brought up on the mild wines of
Spain! In other words, the man who threw down the lighted match which did
the mischief was Sebastian Dolores himself.
He regretted it quite as much as he had ever regretted anything; and on
the night of the fire there were tears in his large brown eyes which
deceived the New Cure and others; though they did not deceive the widow
of Palass Poucette, who had found him out, and who now had no pleasure at
all in his aged gallantries. But the regret Dolores experienced would not
prevent him from doing Jean Jacques still greater injury if, and when,
the chance occurred, should it be to his own advantage.
Jean Jacques shed no tears on the night that his beloved flour-mill
became a blackened ruin, and his saw-mill had a narrow escape. He was
like one in a dream, scarcely realizing that men were saying kind things
to him; that the New Cure held his hand and spoke to him more like a
brother than one whose profession it was to be good to those who
suffered. In his eyes was the same half-rapt, intense, distant look which
came into them when, at Vilray, he saw that red reflection in the sky
over against St. Saviour's, and urged his horses onward.