The Money Master, Complete - Gilbert Parker
Jean Jacques had no elation as he took the Western trail; there was not
much hope in his voice; but there was purpose and there was a little
stream of peace flowing through his being--and also, mark, a stream of
anger tumbling over rough places. He had read two letters addressed to
Carmen by the man--Hugo Stolphe--who had left her to her fate; and there
was a grim devouring thing in him which would break loose, if ever the
man crossed his path. He would not go hunting him, but if he passed him
or met him on the way--! Still he would go hunting--to find his
Carmencita, his little Carmen, his Zoe whom he had unwittingly, God knew!
driven forth into the far world of the millions of acres--a wide, wide
hunting-ground in good sooth.
So he left his beloved province where he no longer had a home, and though
no letters came to him from St. Saviour's, from Vilray or the Manor
Cartier, yet he heard the bells of memory when the Hand Invisible
arrested his footsteps. One day these bells rang so loud that he would
have heard them were he sunk in the world's deepest well of shame; but,
as it was, he now marched on hills far higher than the passes through the
mountains which his patchwork philosophy had ever provided.
It was in the town of Shilah on the Watloon River that the bells boomed
out--not because he had encountered one he had ever known far down by the
Beau Cheval, or in his glorious province, not because he had found his
Zoe, but because a man, the man--not George Masson, but the other--met
him in the way.
Shilah was a place to which, almost unconsciously, he had deviated his
course, because once Virginie Poucette had read him a letter from there.
That was in the office of the little Clerk of the Court at Vilray. The
letter was from Virginie's sister at Shilah, and told him that Zoe and
her husband had gone away into farther fields of homelessness. Thus it
was that Shilah ever seemed to him, as he worked West, a goal in his
quest--not the last goal perhaps, but a goal.
He had been far past it by another route, up, up and out into the more
scattered settlements, and now at last he had come to it again, having
completed a kind of circle. As he entered it, the past crowded on to him
with a hundred pictures. Shilah--it was where Virginie Poucette's sister
lived; and Virginie had been a part of the great revelation of his life
at St. Saviour's.
As he was walking by the riverside at Shilah, a woman spoke to him,
touching his arm as she did so. He was in a deep dream as she spoke, but
there certainly was a look in her face that reminded him of someone
belonging to the old life. For an instant he could not remember. For a
moment he did not even realize that he was at Shilah. His meditation had
almost been a trance, and it took him time to adjust himself to the
knowledge of the conscious mind. His subconsciousness was very powerfully
alive in these days. There was not the same ceaselessly active eye, nor
the vibration of the impatient body which belonged to the money-master
and miller of the Manor Cartier. Yet the eye had more depth and force,
and the body was more powerful and vigorous than it had ever been. The
long tramping, the everlasting trail on false scents, the mental battling
with troubles past and present, had given a fortitude and vigour to the
body beyond what it had ever known. In spite of his homelessness and
pilgrim equipment he looked as though he had a home--far off. The eyes
did not smile; but the lips showed the goodness of his heart--and its
hardness too. Hardness had never been there in the old days. It was,
however, the hardness of resentment, and not of cruelty. It was not his
wife's or his daughter's flight that he resented, nor yet the loss of all
he had, nor the injury done him by Sebastian Dolores. No, his resentment
was against one he had never seen, but was now soon to see. As his mind
came back from the far places where it had been, and his eyes returned to
the concrete world, he saw what the woman recalled to him. It was--yes,
it was Virginie Poucette--the kind and beautiful Virginie--for her
goodness had made him remember her as beautiful, though indeed she was
but comely, like this woman who stayed him as he walked by the river.
"You are M'sieu' Jean Jacques Barbille?" she said questioningly.
"How did you know?" he asked. . . . "Is Virginie Poucette here?"
"Ah, you knew me from her?" she asked.
"There was something about her--and you have it also--and the look in the
eyes, and then the lips!" he replied.
Certainly they were quite wonderful, luxurious lips, and so shapely
too--like those of Virginie.
"But how did you know I was Jean Jacques Barbille?" he repeated.
"Well, then it is quite easy," she replied with a laugh almost like a
giggle, for she was quite as simple and primitive as her sister. "There
is a photographer at Vilray, and Virginie got one of your pictures there,
and sent, it to me. 'He may come your way,' said Virginie to me, 'and if
he does, do not forget that he is my friend.'"
"That she is my friend," corrected Jean Jacques. "And what a
friend--merci, what a friend!" Suddenly he caught the woman's arm. "You
once wrote to your sister about my Zoe, my daughter, that married and ran
away--"
"That ran away and got married," she interrupted.
"Is there any more news--tell me, do you know-?"
But Virginie's sister shook her head. "Only once since I wrote Virginie
have I heard, and then the two poor children--but how helpless they were,
clinging to each other so! Well, then, once I heard from Faragay, but
that was much more than a year ago. Nothing since, and they were going
on--on to Fort Providence to spend the winter--for his health--his
lungs."
"What to do--on what to live?" moaned Jean Jacques.
"His grandmother sent him a thousand dollars, so your Madame Zoe wrote
me."
Jean Jacques raised a hand with a gesture of emotion. "Ah, the blessed
woman! May there be no purgatory for her, but Heaven at once and always!"
"Come home with me--where are your things?" she asked.
"I have only a knapsack," he replied. "It is not far from here. But I
cannot stay with you. I have no claim. No, I will not, for--"
"As to that, we keep a tavern," she returned. "You can come the same as
the rest of the world. The company is mixed, but there it is. You needn't
eat off the same plate, as they say in Quebec."
Quebec! He looked at her with the face of one who saw a vision. How like
Virginie Poucette--the brave, generous Virginie--how like she was!
In silence now he went with her, and seeing his mood she did not talk to
him. People stared as they walked along, for his dress was curious and
his head was bare, and his hair like the coat of a young lion. Besides,
this woman was, in her way, as brave and as generous as Virginie
Poucette. In the very doorway of the tavern by the river a man jostled
them. He did not apologize. He only leered. It made his foreign-looking,
coarsely handsome face detestable.
"Pig!" exclaimed Virginie Poucette's sister. "That's a man--well, look
out! There's trouble brewing for him. If he only knew! If suspicion comes
out right and it's proved--well, there, he'll jostle the door-jamb of a
jail."
Jean Jacques stared after the man, and somehow every nerve in his body
became angry. He had all at once a sense of hatred. He shook the shoulder
against which the man had collided. He remembered the leer on the
insolent, handsome face.
"I'd like to see him thrown into the river," said Virginie Poucette's
sister. "We have a nice girl here--come from Ireland--as good as can be.
Well, last night--but there, she oughtn't to have let him speak to her.
'A kiss is nothing,' he said. Well, if he kissed me I would kill him--if
I didn't vomit myself to death first. He's a mongrel--a South American
mongrel with nigger blood."
Jean Jacques kept looking after the man. "Why don't you turn him out?" he
asked sharply.
"He's going away to-morrow anyhow," she replied. "Besides, the girl,
she's so ashamed--and she doesn't want anyone to know. 'Who'd want to
kiss me after him' she said, and so he stays till to-morrow. He's not in
the tavern itself, but in the little annex next door-there, where he's
going now. He's only had his meals here, though the annex belongs to us
as well. He's alone there on his dung-hill."
She brought Jean Jacques into a room that overlooked the river--which,
indeed, hung on its very brink. From the steps at its river-door, a
little ferry-boat took people to the other side of the Watloon, and very
near--just a few hand-breadths away--was the annex where was the man who
had jostled Jean Jacques.
CHAPTER XXIII
JEAN JACQUES HAS WORK TO DO
A single lighted lamp, turned low, was suspended from the ceiling of the
raftered room, and through the open doorway which gave on to a little
wooden piazza with a slight railing and small, shaky gate came the swish
of the Watloon River. No moon was visible, but the stars were radiant and
alive--trembling with life. There was something soothing, something
endlessly soothing in the sound of the river. It suggested the ceaseless
movement of life to the final fulness thereof.
So still was the room that it might have seemed to be without life, were
it not for a faint sound of breathing. The bed, however, was empty, and
no chair was occupied; but on a settle in a corner beside an unused
fireplace sat a man, now with hands clasped between his knees, again with
arms folded across his breast; but with his head always in a listening
attitude. The whole figure suggested suspense, vigilance and
preparedness. The man had taken off his boots and stockings, and his bare
feet seemed to grip the floor; also the sleeves of his jacket were rolled
up a little. It was not a figure you would wish to see in your room at
midnight unasked. Once or twice he sighed heavily, as he listened to the
river slishing past and looked out to the sparkle of the skies. It was as
though the infinite had drawn near to the man, or else that the man had
drawn near to the infinite. Now and again he brought his fists down on
his knees with a savage, though noiseless, force. The peace of the river
and the night could not contend successfully against a dark spirit
working in him. When, during his vigil, he shook his shaggy head and his
lips opened on his set teeth, he seemed like one who would take toll at a
gateway of forbidden things.
He started to his feet at last, hearing footsteps outside upon the
stairs. Then he settled back again, drawing near to the chimney-wall, so
that he should not be easily seen by anyone entering. Presently there was
the click of a latch, then the door opened and shut, and cigar-smoke
invaded the room. An instant later a hand went up to the suspended
oil-lamp and twisted the wick into brighter flame. As it did so, there
was a slight noise, then the click of a lock. Turning sharply, the man
under the lamp saw at the door the man who had been sitting in the
corner. The man had a key in his hand. Exit now could only be had through
the door opening on to the river.
"Who are you? What the hell do you want here?" asked the fellow under the
lamp, his swarthy face drawn with fear and yet frowning with anger.
"Me--I am Jean Jacques Barbille," said the other in French, putting the
key of the door in his pocket. The other replied in French, with a
Spanish-English accent. "Barbille--Carmen's husband! Well, who would have
thought--!"
He ended with a laugh not pleasant to hear, for it was coarse with
sardonic mirth; yet it had also an unreasonable apprehension; for why
should he fear the husband of the woman who had done that husband such an
injury!
"She treated you pretty bad, didn't she--not much heart, had Carmen!" he
added.
"Sit down. I want to talk to you," said Jean Jacques, motioning to two
chairs by a table at the side of the room. This table was in the middle
of the room when the man under the lamp-Hugo Stolphe was his name--had
left it last. Why had the table been moved?
"Why should I sit down, and what are you doing here?--I want to know
that," Stolphe demanded. Jean Jacques' hands were opening and shutting.
"Because I want to talk to you. If you don't sit down, I'll give you no
chance at all. . . . Sit down!" Jean Jacques was smaller than Stolphe,
but he was all whipcord and leather; the other was sleek and soft, but
powerful too; and he had one of those savage natures which go blind with
hatred, and which fight like beasts. He glanced swiftly round the room.
"There is no weapon here," said Jean Jacques, nodding. "I have put
everything away--so you could not hurt me if you wanted. . . . Sit down!"
To gain time Stolphe sat down, for he had a fear that Jean Jacques was
armed, and might be a madman armed--there were his feet bare on the brown
painted boards. They looked so strange, so uncanny. He surely must be a
madman if he wanted to do harm to Hugo Stolphe; for Hugo Stolphe had only
"kept" the woman who had left her husband, not because of himself, but
because of another man altogether--one George Masson. Had not Carmen
herself told him that before she and he lived together? What grudge could
Carmen's husband have against Hugo Stolphe?
Jean Jacques sat down also, and, leaning on the table said: "Once I was a
fool and let the other man escape-George Masson it was. Because of what
he did, my wife left me."
His voice became husky, but he shook his throat, as it were, cleared it,
and went on. "I won't let you go. I was going to kill George Masson--I
had him like that!" He opened and shut his hand with a gesture of fierce
possession. "But I did not kill him. I let him go. He was so
clever--cleverer than you will know how to be. She said to me--my wife
said to me, when she thought I had killed him, 'Why did you not fight
him? Any man would have fought him.' That was her view. She was
right--not to kill without fighting. That is why I did not kill you at
once when I knew."
"When you knew what?" Stolphe was staring at the madman.
"When I knew you were you. First I saw that ring--that ring on your hand.
It was my wife's. I gave it to her the first New Year after we married. I
saw it on your hand when you were drinking at the bar next door. Then I
asked them your name. I knew it. I had read your letters to my wife--"
"Your wife once on a time!"
Jean Jacques' eyes swam red. "My wife always and always--and at the last
there in my arms." Stolphe temporized. "I never knew you. She did not
leave you because of me. She came to me because--because I was there for
her to come to, and you weren't there. Why do you want to do me any
harm?" He still must be careful, for undoubtedly the man was mad--his
eyes were too bright.
"You were the death of her," answered Jean Jacques, leaning forward. "She
was most ill-ah, who would not have been sorry for her! She was poor. She
had been to you--but to live with a woman day by day, but to be by her
side when the days are done, and then one morning to say, 'Au revoir till
supper' and then go and never come back, and to take money and rings that
belonged to her! . . . That was her death--that was the end of Carmen
Barbille; and it was your fault."
"You would do me harm and not hurt her! Look how she treated you--and
others."
Jean Jacques half rose from his seat in sudden rage, but he restrained
himself, and sat down again. "She had one husband--only one. It was Jean
Jacques Barbille. She could only treat one as she treated me--me, her
husband. But you, what had you to do with that! You used her--so!" He
made a motion as though to stamp out an insect with his foot. "Beautiful,
a genius, sick and alone--no husband, no child, and you used her so! That
is why I shall kill you to-night. We will fight for it."
Yes, but surely the man was mad, and the thing to do was to humour him,
to gain time. To humour a madman--that is what one always advised,
therefore Stolphe would make the pourparler, as the French say.
"Well, that's all right," he rejoined, "but how is it going to be done?
Have you got a pistol?" He thought he was very clever, and that he would
now see whether Jean Jacques Barbille was armed. If he was not armed,
well, then, there would be the chances in his favour; it wasn't easy to
kill with hands alone.
Jean Jacques ignored the question, however. He waved a hand impatiently,
as though to dismiss it. "She was beautiful and splendid; she had been a
queen down there in Quebec. You lied to her, and she was blind at
first--I can see it all. She believed so easily--but yes, always! There
she was what she was, and you were what you are, not a Frenchman, not
Catholic, and an American--no, not an American--a South American. But no,
not quite a South American, for there was the Portuguese nigger in
you--Sit down!"
Jean Jacques was on his feet bending over the enraged mongrel. He had
spoken the truth, and Carmen's last lover had been stung as though a
serpent's tooth was in his flesh. Of all things that could be said about
him, that which Jean Jacques said was the worst--that he was not all
white, that he had nigger blood! Yet it was true; and he realized that
Jean Jacques must have got his information in Shilah itself where he had
been charged with it. Yet, raging as he was, and ready to take the Johnny
Crapaud--that is the name by which he had always called Carmen's
husband--by the throat, he was not yet sure that Jean Jacques was
unarmed. He sat still under an anger greater than his own, for there was
in it that fanaticism which only the love or hate of a woman could breed
in a man's mind.
Suddenly Stolphe laughed outright, a crackling, mirthless, ironical
laugh; for it really was absurdity made sublime that this man, who had
been abandoned by his wife, should now want to kill one who had abandoned
her! This outdid Don Quixote over and over.
"Well, what do you want?" he asked.
"I want you to fight," said Jean Jacques. "That is the way. That was
Carmen's view. You shall have your chance to live, but I shall throw you
in the river, and you can then fight the river. The current is swift, the
banks are steep and high as a house down below there. Now, I am
ready . . . !"
He had need to be, for Stolphe was quick, kicking the chair from beneath
him, and throwing himself heavily on Jean Jacques. He had had his day at
that in South America, and as Jean Jacques Barbille had said, the water
was swift and deep, and the banks of the Watloon high and steep!
But Jean Jacques was unconscious of everything save a debt to be
collected for a woman he had loved, a compensation which must be taken in
flesh and blood. Perhaps at the moment, as Stolphe had said to himself,
he was a little mad, for all his past, all his plundered, squandered,
spoiled life was crying out at him like a hundred ghosts, and he was
fighting with beasts at Ephesus. An exaltation possessed him. Not since
the day when his hand was on the lever of the flume with George Masson
below; not since the day he had turned his back for ever on the Manor
Cartier had he been so young and so much his old self-an egotist, with
all the blind confidence of his kind; a dreamer inflamed into action with
all a mad dreamer's wild power. He was not fifty-two years of age, but
thirty-two at this moment, and all the knowledge got of the wrestling
river-drivers of his boyhood, when he had spent hours by the river
struggling with river-champions, came back to him. It was a relief to his
sick soul to wrench and strain, and propel and twist and force onward,
step by step, to the door opening on the river, this creature who had
left his Carmen to die alone.
"No, you don't--not yet. The jail before the river!" called a cool,
sharp, sour voice; and on the edge of the trembling platform overhanging
the river, Hugo Stolphe was dragged back from the plunge downward he was
about to take, with Jean Jacques' hand at his throat.
Stolphe had heard the door of the bedroom forced, but Jean Jacques had
not heard it; he was only conscious of hands dragging him back just at
the moment of Stolphe's deadly peril.
"What is it?" asked Jean Jacques, seeing Stolphe in the hands of two men,
and hearing the snap of steel. "Wanted for firing a house for
insurance--wanted for falsifying the accounts of a Land Company--wanted
for his own good, Mr. Hugo Stolphe, C.O.D.--collect on delivery!" said
the officer of the law. "And collected just in time!"
"We didn't mean to take him till to-morrow," the officer added, "but out
on the river one of us saw this gladiator business here in the red-light
zone, and there wasn't any time to lose. . . . I don't know what your
business with him was," the long-moustached detective said to Jean
Jacques, "but whatever the grudge is, if you don't want to appear in
court in the morning, the walking's good out of town night or day--so
long!"
He hustled his prisoner out.
Jean Jacques did not want to appear in court, and as the walking was
officially good at dawn, he said good-bye to Virginie Poucette's sister
through the crack of a door, and was gone before she could restrain him.
"Well, things happen that way," he said, as he turned back to look at
Shilah before it disappeared from view.
"Ah, the poor, handsome vaurien!" the woman at the tavern kept saying to
her husband all that day; and she could not rest till she had written to
Virginie how Jean Jacques came to Shilah in the evening, and went with
the dawn.
CHAPTER XXIV
JEAN JACQUES ENCAMPED
The Young Doctor of Askatoon had a good heart, and he was exercising it
honourably one winter's day near three years after Jean Jacques had left
St. Saviour's.
"There are many French Canadians working on the railway now, and a good
many habitant farmers live hereabouts, and they have plenty of
children--why not stay here and teach school? You are a Catholic, of
course, monsieur?"
This is what the Young Doctor said to one who had been under his anxious
care for a few, vivid days. The little brown-bearded man with the
grey-brown hair nodded in reply, but his gaze was on the billowing waste
of snow, which stretched as far as eye could see to the pine-hills in the
far distance. He nodded assent, but it was plain to be seen that the
Young Doctor's suggestion was not in tune with his thought. His nod only
acknowledged the reasonableness of the proposal. In his eyes, however,
was the wanderlust which had possessed him for three long years, in which
he had been searching for what to him was more than Eldorado, for it was
hope and home. Hope was all he had left of the assets which had made him
so great a figure--as he once thought--in his native parish of St.
Saviour's. It was his fixed idea--une idee fixe, as he himself said.
Lands, mills, manor, lime-kilns, factories, store, all were gone, and his
wife Carmen also was gone. He had buried her with simple magnificence in
Montreal--Mme. Glozel had said to her neighbours afterwards that the
funeral cost over seventy-five dollars--and had set up a stone to her
memory on which was carved, "Chez nous autrefois, et chez Dieu
maintenant"--which was to say, "Our home once, and God's Home now."
That done, with a sorrow which still had the peace of finality in his
mind, he had turned his face to the West. His long, long sojourning had
brought him to Shilah where a new chapter of his life was closed, and at
last to Askatoon, where another chapter still closed an epoch in his
life, and gave finality to all. There he had been taken down with
congestion of the lungs, and, fainting at the door of a drug-store, had
been taken possession of by the Young Doctor, who would not send him to
the hospital. He would not send him there because he found inside the
waistcoat of this cleanest tramp--if he was a tramp--that he had ever
seen, a book of philosophy, the daguerreotype photo of a beautiful
foreign-looking woman, and some verses in a child's handwriting. The book
of philosophy was underlined and interlined on every page, and every
margin had comment which showed a mind of the most singular simplicity,
searching wisdom, and hopeless confusion, all in one.
The Young Doctor was a man of decision, and he had whisked the little
brown-grey sufferer to his own home, and tended him there like a brother
till the danger disappeared; and behold he was rewarded for his humanity
by as quaint an experience as he had ever known. He had not
succeeded--though he tried hard--in getting at the history of his
patient's life; but he did succeed in reading the fascinating story of a
mind; for Jean Jacques, if not so voluble as of yore, had still moments
when he seemed to hypnotize himself, and his thoughts were alive in an
atmosphere of intellectual passion ill in accord with his condition.
Presently the little brown man withdrew his eyes from the window of the
Young Doctor's office and the snowy waste beyond. They had a curious red
underglow which had first come to them an evening long ago, when they
caught from the sky the reflection of a burning mill. There was distance
and the far thing in that underglow of his eyes. It had to do with the
horizon, not with the place where his feet were. It said, "Out there,
beyond, is what I go to seek, what I must find, what will be home to me."