The Money Master, Complete - Gilbert Parker
It had been the intention of some friends of Jean Jacques to give him a
cheer when he left, and even his sullen local creditors, now that the
worst had come, were disposed to give him a good send-off; but the
incident of the canary in its cage gave a turn to the feeling of the
crowd which could not be resisted. They were not a people who could cut
and dry their sentiments; they were all impulse and simplicity, with an
obvious cocksure shrewdness too, like that of Jean Jacques--of the old
Jean Jacques. He had been the epitome of all their faults and all their
virtues.
No one cheered. Only one person called, "Au 'voir, M'sieu' Jean Jacques!"
and no one followed him--a curious, assertive, feebly-brisk, shock-headed
figure in the brown velveteen jacket, which he had bought in Paris on his
Grand Tour.
"What a ridiculous little man!" said a woman from Chalfonte over the
water, who had been buying freely all day for her new "Manor," her
husband being a member of the provincial legislature.
The words were no sooner out of her mouth than two women faced her
threateningly.
"For two pins I'd slap your face," said old Mere Langlois, her great
breast heaving. "Popinjay--you, that ought to be in a cage like his
canary."
But Virginie Poucette also was there in front of the offender, and she
also had come from Chalfonte--was born in that parish; and she knew what
she was facing.
"Better carry a bird-cage and a book than carry swill to swine," she
said; and madame from Chalfonte turned white, for it had been said that
her father was once a swine-herd, and that she had tried her best to
forget it when, with her coarse beauty, she married the well-to-do farmer
who was now in the legislature.
"Hold your tongues, all of you, and look at that," said M. Manotel, who
had joined the agitated group. He was pointing towards the departing Jean
Jacques, who was now away upon his road.
Jean Jacques had raised the cage on a level with his face, and was
evidently speaking to the bird in the way birds love--that soft kissing
sound to which they reply with song.
Presently there came a chirp or two, and then the bird thrust up its
head, and out came the full blessedness of its song, exultant, home-like,
intimate.
Jean Jacques walked on, the bird singing by his side; and he did not look
back.
CHAPTER XXI
IF SHE HAD KNOWN IN TIME
Nothing stops when we stop for a time, or for all time, except ourselves.
Everything else goes on--not in the same way; but it does go on. Life did
not stop at St. Saviour's after Jean Jacques made his exit. Slowly the
ruined mill rose up again, and very slowly indeed the widow of Palass
Poucette recovered her spirits, though she remained a widow in spite of
all appeals; but M. Fille and his sister never were the same after they
lost their friend. They had great comfort in the dog which Jean Jacques
had given to them, and they roused themselves to a malicious pleasure
when Bobon, as he had been called by Zoe, rushed out at the heels of an
importunate local creditor who had greatly worried Jean Jacques at the
last. They waited in vain for a letter from Jean Jacques, but none came;
nor did they hear anything from him, or of him, for a long, long time.
Jean Jacques did not mean that they should. When he went away with his
book of philosophy and his canary he had but one thing in his mind, and
that was to find Zoe and make her understand that he knew he had been in
the wrong. He had illusions about starting life again, in which he
probably did not believe; but the make-believe was good for him. Long
before the crash came, in Zoe's name--not his own--he had bought from the
Government three hundred and twenty acres of land out near the Rockies
and had spent five hundred dollars in improvements on it.
There it was in the West, one remaining asset still his own--or rather
Zoe's--but worth little if he or she did not develop it. As he left St.
Saviour's, however, he kept fixing his mind on that "last domain," as he
called it to himself. If this was done intentionally, that he might be
saved from distraction and despair, it was well done; if it was a real
illusion--the old self-deception which had been his bane so often in the
past--it still could only do him good at the present. It prevented him
from noticing the attention he attracted on the railway journey from St.
Saviour's to Montreal, cherishing his canary and his book as he went.
He was not so self-conscious now as in the days when he was surprised
that Paris did not stop to say, "Bless us, here is that fine fellow, Jean
Jacques Barbille of St. Saviour's!" He could concentrate himself more now
on things that did not concern the impression he was making on the world.
At present he could only think of Zoe and of her future.
When a patronizing and aggressive commercial traveller in the little
hotel on a side-street where he had taken a room in Montreal said to him,
"Bien, mon vieux" (which is to say, "Well, old cock"), "aren't you a long
way from home?" something of a new dignity came into Jean Jacques'
bearing, very different from the assurance of the old days, and in reply
he said:
"Not so far that I need be careless about my company." This made the
landlady of the little hotel laugh quite hard, for she did not like the
braggart "drummer" who had treated her with great condescension for a
number of years. Also Madame Glozel liked Jean Jacques because of his
canary. She thought there must be some sentimental reason for a man of
fifty or more carrying a bird about with him; and she did not rest until
she had drawn from Jean Jacques that he was taking the bird to his
daughter in the West. There, however, madame was stayed in her search for
information. Jean Jacques closed up, and did but smile when she adroitly
set traps for him, and at last asked him outright where his daughter was.
Why he waited in Montreal it would be hard to say, save that it was a
kind of middle place between the old life and the new, and also because
he must decide what was to be his plan of search. First the West--first
Winnipeg, but where after that? He had at last secured information of
where Zoe and Gerard Fynes had stayed while in Montreal; and now he
followed clues which would bring him in touch with folk who knew them. He
came to know one or two people who were with Zoe and Gerard in the last
days they spent in the metropolis, and he turned over and over in his
mind every word said about his girl, as a child turns a sweetmeat in its
mouth. This made him eager to be off; but on the very day he decided to
start at once for the West, something strange happened.
It was towards the late afternoon of a Saturday, when the streets were
full of people going to and from the shops in a marketing quarter, that
Madame Glozel came to him and said:
"M'sieu', I have an idea, and you will not think it strange, for you have
a kind heart. There is a woman--look you, it is a sad, sad story hers.
She is ill and dying in a room a little way down the street. But yes, I
am sure she is dying--of heart disease it is. She came here first when
the illness took her, but she could not afford to stay. She went to those
cheaper lodgings down the street. She used to be on the stage over in the
States, and then she came back here, and there was a man--married to him
or not I do not know, and I will not think. Well, the man--the brute--he
left her when she got ill--but yes, forsook her absolutely! He was a
land-agent or something like that, and all very fine to your face, to
promise and to pretend--just make-believe. When her sickness got worse,
off he went with 'Au revoir, my dear--I will be back to supper.' Supper!
If she'd waited for her supper till he came back, she'd have waited as
long as I've done for the fortune the gipsy promised me forty years ago.
Away he went, the rogue, without a thought of her, and with another
woman. That's what hurt her most of all. Straight from her that could
hardly drag herself about--ah, yes, and has been as handsome a woman as
ever was!--straight from her he went to a slut. She was a slut,
m'sieu'--did I not know her? Did Ma'm'selle Slut not wait at table in
this house and lead the men a dance here night and day-day and night till
I found it out! Well, off he went with the slut, and left the lady
behind. . . . You men, you treat women so."
Jean Jacques put out a hand as though to argue with her. "Sometimes it is
the other way," he retorted. "Most of us have seen it like that."
"Well, for sure, you're right enough there, m'sieu'," was the response.
"I've got nothing to say to that, except that it's a man that runs away
with a woman, or that gets her to leave her husband when she does go.
There's always a man that says, 'Come along, I'm the better chap for
you.'"
Jean Jacques wearily turned his head away towards the cage where his
canary was beginning to pipe its evening lay.
"It all comes to the same thing in the end," he said pensively; and then
he who had been so quiet since he came to the little hotel--Glozel's, it
was called--began to move about the room excitedly, running his fingers
through his still bushy hair, which, to his credit, was always as clean
as could be, burnished and shiny even at his mid-century period. He began
murmuring to himself, and a frown settled on his fore head. Mme. Glozel
saw that she had perturbed him, and that no doubt she had roused some
memories which made sombre the sunny little room where the canary sang;
where, to ravish the eyes of the pessimist, was a picture of Louis XVI.
going to heaven in the arms of St. Peter.
When started, however, the good woman could no more "slow down" than her
French pony would stop when its head was turned homewards from market. So
she kept on with the history of the woman down the street.
"Heart disease," she said, nodding with assurance and finality; "and we
know what that is--a start, a shock, a fall, a strain, and pht! off the
poor thing goes. Yes, heart disease, and sometimes with such awful pain.
But so; and yesterday she told me she had only a hundred dollars left.
'Enough to last me through,' she said to me. Poor thing, she lifted up
her eyes with a way she has, as if looking for something she couldn't
find, and she says, as simple as though she was asking about the price of
a bed-tick, 'It won't cost more than fifty dollars to bury me, I s'pose?'
Well, that made me squeamish, for the poor dear's plight came home to me
so clear, and she young enough yet to get plenty out of life, if she had
the chance. So I asked her again about her people--whether I couldn't
send for someone belonging to her. 'There's none that belongs to me,' she
says, 'and there's no one I belong to.'
"I thought very likely she didn't want to tell me about herself; perhaps
because she had done wrong, and her family had not been good to her. Yet
it was right I should try and get her folks to come, if she had any
folks. So I said to her, 'Where was your home?' And now, what do you
think she answered, m'sieu'?' 'Look there,' she said to me, with her big
eyes standing out of her head almost--for that's what comes to her
sometimes when she is in pain, and she looks more handsome then than at
any other time--'Look there,' she said to me, 'it was in heaven, that's
where--my home was; but I didn't know it. I hadn't been taught to know
the place when I saw it.'
"Well, I felt my skin go goosey, for I saw what was going on in her mind,
and how she was remembering what had happened to her some time,
somewhere; but there wasn't a tear in her eyes, and I never saw her
cry-never once, m'sieu'--well, but as brave as brave. Her eyes are always
dry--burning. They're like two furnaces scorching up her face. So I never
found out her history, and she won't have the priest. I believe that's
because she wants to die unknown, and doesn't want to confess. I never
saw a woman I was sorrier for, though I think she wasn't married to the
man that left her. But whatever she was, there's good in her--I haven't
known hundreds of women and had seven sisters for nothing. Well, there
she is--not a friend near her at the last; for it's coming soon, the
end--no one to speak to her, except the woman she pays to come in and
look after her and nurse her a bit. Of course there's the landlady too,
Madame Popincourt, a kind enough little cricket of a woman, but with no
sense and no head for business. And so the poor sick thing has not a
single pleasure in the world. She can't read, because it makes her head
ache, she says; and she never writes to any one. One day she tried to
sing a little, but it seemed to hurt her, and she stopped before she had
begun almost. Yes, m'sieu', there she is without a single pleasure in the
long hours when she doesn't sleep."
"There's my canary--that would cheer her up," eagerly said Jean Jacques,
who, as the story of the chirruping landlady continued, became master of
his agitation, and listened as though to the tale of some life for which
he had concern. "Yes, take my canary to her, madame. It picked me up when
I was down. It'll help her--such a bird it is! It's the best singer in
the world. It's got in its throat the music of Malibran and Jenny Lind
and Grisi, and all the stars in heaven that sang together. Also, to be
sure, it doesn't charge anything, but just as long as there's daylight it
sings and sings, as you know."
"M'sieu'--oh, m'sieu', it was what I wanted to ask you, and I didn't
dare!" gushingly declared madame. "I never heard a bird sing like
that--just as if it knew how much good it was doing, and with all the
airs of a grand seigneur. It's a prince of birds, that. If you mean it,
m'sieu', you'll do as good a thing as you have ever done."
"It would have to be much better, or it wouldn't be any use," remarked
Jean Jacques.
The woman made a motion of friendliness with both hands. "I don't believe
that. You may be queer, but you've got a kind eye. It won't be for long
she'll need the canary, and it will cheer her. There certainly was never
a bird so little tied to one note. Now this note, now that, and so
amusing. At times it's as though he was laughing at you."
"That's because, with me for his master, he has had good reason to
laugh," remarked Jean Jacques, who had come at last to take a despondent
view of himself.
"That's bosh," rejoined Mme. Glozel; "I've seen several people odder than
you."
She went over to the cage eagerly, and was about to take it away. "Excuse
me," interposed Jean Jacques, "I will carry the cage to the house. Then
you will go in with the bird, and I'll wait outside and see if the little
rascal sings."
"This minute?" asked madame.
"For sure, this very minute. Why should the poor lady wait? It's a lonely
time of day, this, the evening, when the long night's ahead."
A moment later the two were walking along the street to the door of Mme.
Popincourt's lodgings, and people turned to look at the pair, one
carrying something covered with a white cloth, evidently a savoury dish
of some kind--the other with a cage in which a handsome canary hopped
about, well pleased with the world.
At Mme. Popincourt's door Mme. Glozel took the cage and went upstairs.
Jean Jacques, left behind, paced backwards and forwards in front of the
house waiting and looking up, for Mme. Glozel had said that behind the
front window on the third floor was where the sick woman lived. He had
not long to wait. The setting sun shining full on the window had roused
the bird, and he began to pour out a flood of delicious melody which
flowed on and on, causing the people in the street to stay their steps
and look up. Jean Jacques' face, as he listened, had something very like
a smile. There was that in the smile belonging to the old pride, which in
days gone by had made him say when he looked at his domains at the Manor
Cartier--his houses, his mills, his store, his buildings and his
lands--"It is all mine. It all belongs to Jean Jacques Barbille."
Suddenly, however, there came a sharp pause in the singing, and after
that a cry--a faint, startled cry. Then Mme. Glozel's head was thrust out
of the window three floors up, and she called to Jean Jacques to come
quickly. As she bade him come, some strange premonition flashed to Jean
Jacques, and with thumping heart he hastened up the staircase. Outside a
bedroom door, Mme. Glozel met him. She was so excited she could only
whisper.
"Be very quiet," she said. "There is something strange. When the bird
sang as it did--you heard it--she sat like one in a trance. Then her face
took on a look glad and frightened too, and she stared hard at the cage.
'Bring that cage to me,' she said. I brought it. She looked sharp at it,
then she gave a cry and fell back. As I took the cage away I saw what she
had been looking at--a writing at the bottom of the cage. It was the name
Carmen."
With a stifled cry Jean Jacques pushed her aside and entered the room. As
he did so, the sick woman in the big armchair, so pale yet so splendid in
her death-beauty, raised herself up. With eyes that Francesca might have
turned to the vision of her fate, she looked at the opening door, as
though to learn if he who came was one she had wished to see through
long, relentless days.
"Jean Jacques--ah, my beautiful Jean Jacques!" she cried out presently in
a voice like a wisp of sound, for she had little breath; and then with a
smile she sank back, too late to hear, but not too late to know, what
Jean Jacques said to her.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Being generous with other people's money
I had to listen to him, and he had to pay me for listening
Law. It is expensive whether you win or lose
Protest that it is right when it knows that it is wrong
THE MONEY MASTER
By Gilbert Parker
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
CHAPTER XXII
BELLS OF MEMORY
However far Jean Jacques went, however long the day since leaving the
Manor Cartier, he could not escape the signals from his past. He heard
more than once the bells of memory ringing at the touch of the invisible
hand of Destiny which accepts no philosophy save its own. At Montreal,
for one hallowed instant, he had regained his lost Carmen, but he had
turned from her grave--the only mourners being himself, Mme. Glozel and
Mme. Popincourt, together with a barber who had coiffed her wonderful
hair once a week--with a strange burning at his heart. That iceberg which
most mourners carry in their breasts was not his, as he walked down the
mountainside from Carmen's grave. Behind him trotted Mme. Glozel and Mme.
Popincourt, like little magpies, attendants on this eagle of sorrow whose
life-love had been laid to rest, her heart-troubles over. Passion or
ennui would no more vex her.
She had had a soul, had Carmen Dolores, though she had never known it
till her days closed in on her, and from the dusk she looked out of the
casements of life to such a glowing as Jean Jacques had seen when his
burning mill beatified the evening sky. She had known passion and vivid
life in the days when she went hand-in-hand with Carvillho Gonzales
through the gardens of Granada; she had known the smothering
home-sickness which does not alone mean being sick for a distant home,
but a sickness of the home that is; and she had known what George Masson
gave her for one thrilling hour, and then--then the man who left her in
her death-year, taking not only the last thread of hope which held her to
life. This vulture had taken also little things dear to her daily life,
such as the ring Carvillho Gonzales had given her long ago in Cadiz, also
another ring, a gift of Jean Jacques, and things less valuable to her,
such as money, for which she knew surely she would have no long use.
As she lay waiting for the day when she must go from the garish scene,
she unconsciously took stock of life in her own way. There intruded on
her sight the stages of the theatres where she had played and danced, and
she heard again the music of the paloma and those other Spanish airs
which had made the world dance under her girl's feet long ago. At first
she kept seeing the faces of thousands looking up at her from the stalls,
down at her from the gallery, over at her from the boxes; and the hot
breath of that excitement smote her face with a drunken odour that sent
her mad. Then, alas! somehow, as disease took hold of her, there were the
colder lights, the colder breath from the few who applauded so little.
And always the man who had left her in her day of direst need; who had
had the last warm fires of her life, the last brief outrush of her soul,
eager as it was for a joy which would prove she had not lost all when she
fled from the Manor Cartier--a joy which would make her forget!
What she really did feel in this last adventure of passion only made her
remember the more when she was alone now, her life at the Manor Cartier.
She was wont to wake up suddenly in the morning--the very early
morning--with the imagined sound of the gold Cock of Beaugard crowing in
her ears. Memory, memory, memory--yet never a word, and never a hearsay
of what had happened at the Manor Cartier since she had left it! Then
there came a time when she longed intensely to see Jean Jacques before
she died, though she could not bring herself to send word to him. She
dreaded what the answer might be--not Jean Jacques' answer, but the answer
of Life. Jean Jacques and her child, her Zoe--more his than hers in years
gone by--one or both might be dead! She dared not write, but she
cherished a desire long denied. Then one day she saw everything in her
life more clearly than she had ever done. She found an old book of French
verse, once belonging to Mme. Popincourt's husband, who had been a
professor. Some lines therein opened up a chamber of her being never
before unlocked. At first only the feeling of the thing came, then slowly
the spiritual meaning possessed her. She learnt it by heart and let it
sing to her as she lay half-sleeping and half-waking, half-living and
half-dying:
"There is a World; men compass it through tears,
Dare doom for joy of it; it called me o'er the foam;
I found it down the track of sundering years,
Beyond the long island where the sea steals home.
"A land that triumphs over shame and pain,
Penitence and passion and the parting breath,
Over the former and the latter rain,
The birth-morn fire and the frost of death.
"From its safe shores the white boats ride away,
Salving the wreckage of the portless ships
The light desires of the amorous day,
The wayward, wanton wastage of the lips.
"Star-mist and music and the pensive moon
These when I harboured at that perfumed shore;
And then, how soon! the radiance of noon,
And faces of dear children at the door.
"Land of the Greater Love--men call it this;
No light-o'-love sets here an ambuscade;
No tender torture of the secret kiss
Makes sick the spirit and the soul afraid.
"Bright bowers and the anthems of the free,
The lovers absolute--ah, hear the call!
Beyond the long island and the sheltering sea,
That World I found which holds my world in thrall.
"There is a World; men compass it through tears,
Dare doom for joy of it; it called me o'er the foam;
I found it down the track of sundering years,
Beyond the long island where the sea steals home."
At last the inner thought of it got into her heart, and then it was in
reply to Mme. Glozel, who asked her where her home was, she said: "In
Heaven, but I did not know it!" And thus it was, too, that at the very
last, when Jean Jacques followed the singing bird into her death-chamber,
she cried out, "Ah, my beautiful Jean Jacques!"
And because Jean Jacques knew that, at the last, she had been his, soul
and body, he went down from the mountain-side, the two black magpies
fluttering mournfully and yet hopefully behind him, with more warmth at
his heart than he had known for years. It never occurred to him that the
two elderly magpies would jointly or severally have given the rest of
their lives and their scant fortunes to have him with them either as
husband, or as one who honourably hires a home at so much a day.
Though Jean Jacques did not know this last fact, when he fared forth
again he left behind his canary with Mme. Glozel; also all Carmen's
clothes, except the dress she died in, he gave to Mme. Popincourt, on
condition that she did not wear them till he had gone. The dress in which
Carmen died he wrapped up carefully, with her few jewels and her
wedding-ring, and gave the parcel to Mme. Glozel to care for till he
should send for it or come again.
"The bird--take him on my birthday to sing at her grave," he said to Mme.
Glozel just before he went West. "It is in summer, my birthday, and you
shall hear how he will sing there," he added in a low voice at the very
door. Then he took out a ten-dollar bill, and would have given it to her
to do this thing for him; but she would have none of his money. She only
wiped her eyes and deplored his going, and said that if ever he wanted a
home, and she was alive, he would know where to find it. It sounded and
looked sentimental, yet Jean Jacques was never less sentimental in a very
sentimental life. This particular morning he was very quiet and grave,
and not in the least agitated; he spoke like one from a friendly,
sun-bright distance to Mme. Glozel, and also to Mme. Popincourt as he
passed her at the door of her house.