The Money Master, Complete - Gilbert Parker
"As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, m'sieu'," returned Masson.
"I must beg that you will make your farewells of a minute and no more,"
replied the Clerk of the Court firmly. He took out his watch. "It is six
o'clock. I will come again at three minutes past six. That is long enough
for any farewell--even on the gallows."
Not daring to look at the face of the woman, he softly disappeared into
the other room, and shut the door without a sound.
"Too good for this world," remarked the master-carpenter when the door
closed tight. He said it after the disappearing figure and not to Carmen.
"I don't suppose he ever kissed a real grown-up woman in his life. It
would have shattered his frail little carcass if, if"--he turned to his
companion--"if you had kissed him, Carmen. He's made of
tissue-paper,--not tissue--and apple-jelly. Yes, but a stiff little
backbone, too, or he'd not have faced me down."
Masson talked as though he were trying to gain time. "He said three
minutes," she returned with a look of death in her face. As George Masson
had talked with the Clerk of the Court, she had come to see, in so far as
agitation would permit, that he was not the same as when he left her by
the river the evening before.
"There's no time to waste," she continued. "You spoke of farewells--twice
you spoke, and three times he spoke of farewells between us.
Farewells--farewells--George--!"
With sudden emotion she held out her arms, and her face flushed with
passion and longing.
The tempest which shook her shook him also, and he swayed from side to
side like an animal uncertain if the moment had come to try its strength
with its foe; and in truth the man was fighting with himself. His moments
with Jean Jacques at the flume had expanded him in a curious kind of way.
His own arguments while he was fighting for his life had, in a way,
convinced himself. She was a rare creature, and she was alluring--more
alluring than she had ever been; for a tragic sense had made her thinner,
had refined the boldness of her beauty, had given a wonderful lustre to
her eyes; and suffering has its own attraction to the degenerate. But he,
George Masson, had had a great shock, and he had come out of the jaws of
death by the skin of his teeth. It had been the nearest thing he had ever
known; for though once he had had a pistol pointed at him, there was the
chance that it might miss at half-a-dozen yards, while there was no
chance of the lever of the flume going wrong; and water and a mill-wheel
were as absolute as the rope of the gallows.
In a sense he had saved himself by his cleverness, but if Jean Jacques
had not been just the man he was, he could not have saved himself. It did
not occur to him that Jean Jacques had acted weakly. He would not have
done what Jean Jacques had done, had Jean Jacques spoiled his home. He
would have sprung the lever; but he was not so mean as to despise Jean
Jacques because he had foregone his revenge. This master-carpenter had
certain gifts, or he could not have caused so much trouble in the world.
There is a kind of subtlety necessary to allure or delude even the
humblest of women, if she is not naturally bad; and Masson had had
experiences with the humblest, and also with those a little higher up.
This much had to be said for him, that he did not think Jean Jacques
contemptible because he had been merciful, or degraded because he had
chosen to forgive his wife.
The sight of the woman, as she stood with arms outstretched, had made his
pulses pound in his veins, but the heat was suddenly chilled by the wave
of tragedy which had passed over him. When he had climbed out of the
flume, and opened the lever for the river to rush through, he had felt as
though ice--cold liquid flowed in his veins, not blood; and all day he
had been like that. He had moved much as one in a dream, and he had felt
for the first time in his life that he was not ready to bluff creation.
He had always faced things down, as long as it could be done; and when it
could not, he had retreated, with the comment that no man was wise who
took gruel when he needn't. He was now face to face with his greatest
problem. One thing was clear--they must either part for ever, or go
together, and part no more. There could be no half measures. She was a
remarkable woman in her way, with a will of her own, and a kind of
madness in her; and there could be no backing and filling. They only had
three minutes to talk together alone, and two of them were up.
Her arms were held out to him, but he stood still, and before the fire of
her eyes his own eyes dropped. "No, not yet!" he exclaimed. "It's been a
day--heaven and hell, what a day it's been! He had me like that!" He
opened and shut his hand with fierce, spasmodic strength. "And he let me
go--oh, let me go like a fox out of a trap! I've had enough for one
day--blood of St. Peter, enough, enough!"
The flame of desire in her eyes suddenly turned to fury. "It is farewell,
then, that you wish," she said hoarsely. "It is no more and farewell
then? You said it to him"--she pointed to the other room--"you said it to
Jean Jacques, and you say it to me--to me that's given you all I have.
Ah, what a beast you are, George Masson!"
"No, Carmen, you have not given me all. If you had, there would be no
farewell. I would stand by you to the end of life, if I had taken all."
He lied, but that does not matter here.
"All--all!" she cried. "What is all? Is it but the one thing that the
world says must part husband and wife? Caramba! Is that all? I have given
everything--I have had your arms around me--"
"Yes, the Clerk of the Court saw that," he interrupted. "He saw from the
hill behind the Manor on Tuesday last."
There was a tap at the door of the other room; it slowly opened, and the
figure of the Clerk appeared. "Two minutes--just two minutes more, old
trump!" said the master-carpenter, stretching out a hand. "One minute
will be enough," said Carmen, who was suffering the greatest humiliation
which can come to a woman.
The Clerk looked at them both, and he was content. He saw that one minute
would certainly be enough. "Very well, monsieur and madame," he said, and
closed the door again.
Carmen turned fiercely on the man. "M. Fille saw, did he, from Mont
Violet? Well, when I came here I did not care who saw. I only thought of
you--that you wanted me, and that I wanted you. What the world thought
was nothing, if you were as when we parted last night. . . . I could not
face Jean Jacques' forgiveness. To stay there, feeling that I must be
always grateful, that I must be humble, that I must pretend, that I must
kiss Jean Jacques, and lie in his arms, and go to mass and to confession,
and--"
"There is the child, there is Zoe--"
"Oh, it is you that preaches now--you that tempted me, that said I was
wasted at the Manor; that the parish did not understand me; that Jean
Jacques did not know a jewel of price when he saw it--little did you
think of Zoe then!"
He made a protesting gesture. "Maybe so, Carmen, but I think now before
it is too late."
"The child loves her father as she never loved me," she declared. "She is
twelve years old. She will soon be old enough to keep house for him, and
then to marry--ah, before there is time to think she will marry!"
"It would be better then for you to wait till she marries
before--before--"
"Before I go away with you!" She gave a shrill, agonized laugh. "So that
is the end of it all! What did you think of my child when you forced your
way into my life, when you made me think of you--ah, quel bete--what a
coward and beast you are!"
"No, I am not all coward, though I may be a beast," he answered. "I
didn't think of your child when I began to talk to you as I did. I was
out for all I could get. I was the hunter. And you were the finest woman
that I'd ever met and talked with; you--"
"Oh, stop lying!" she cried with a face suddenly grown white and cold.
"It isn't lying. You're the sort of woman to drive men mad. I went mad,
and I didn't think of your child. But this morning in the flume I saved
my life by thinking of her, and I saved your life, too, maybe, by
thinking of her; and I owe her something. I'm going to try to pay back by
letting her keep her mother. I never felt towards a woman as I've felt
towards you; and that's why I want to make things not so bad for you as
they might be."
In her bitter eagerness she took a step nearer to him. "As things might
be, if you were the man you were yesterday, willing to throw up
everything for me?"
"Like that--if you put it so," he answered.
She walked slowly up to him, looking as though she would plunge a knife
into his heart. "I wish Jean Jacques had opened the gates," she said. "It
would have saved the hangman trouble."
Then suddenly, and with a cry, she raised her hand and struck him full in
the face with her fist. At that instant came a tap at the door of the
other room, and the Clerk of the Court appeared. He saw the blow, and
drew back with an exclamation.
Carmen turned to him. "Farewell has been said, M'sieu' Fille," she
remarked in a voice sombre with rage and despair, and she went to the
door leading to the street.
Masson had winced at the blow, but he remained silent. He knew not what
to say or do.
M. Fille hastily followed Carmen to the door. "You are going home, dear
madame? Permit me to accompany you," he said gently. "I have to do
business with Jean Jacques."
A hand upon his chest, she pushed him back. "Where I go I'm going alone,"
she said. Opening the door she went out, but turning back again she gave
George Masson a look that he never forgot. Then the door closed.
"Grace of God, she is not going home!" brokenly murmured the Clerk of the
Court.
With a groan the master-carpenter started forward towards the door, but
M. Fille stepped between, laid a hand on his arm, and stopped him.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Confidence in a weak world gets unearned profit often
Enjoy his own generosity
Had the slight flavour of the superior and the paternal
He had only made of his wife an incident in his life
He was in fact not a philosopher, but a sentimentalist
He was not always sorry when his teasing hurt
Lacks a balance-wheel. He has brains, but not enough
Man who tells the story in a new way, that is genius
Missed being a genius by an inch
Not content to do even the smallest thing ill
You went north towards heaven and south towards hell
THE MONEY MASTER
By Gilbert Parker
EPOCH THE THIRD
XIII. THE MAN FROM OUTSIDE
XIV. "I DO NOT WANT TO GO"
XV. BON MARCHE
CHAPTER XIII
THE MAN FROM OUTSIDE
"Oh, who will walk the wood with me,
I fear to walk alone;
So young am I, as you may see;
No dangers have I known.
So young, so small--ah, yes, m'sieu',
I'll walk the wood with you!"
In the last note of the song applause came instantaneously, almost
impatiently, as it might seem. With cries of "Encore! Encore!" it lasted
some time, while the happy singer looked around with frank pleasure on
the little group encircling her in the Manor Cartier.
"Did you like it so much?" she asked in a general way, and not looking at
any particular person. A particular person, however, replied, and she had
addressed the question to him, although not looking at him. He was the
Man from Outside, and he sat near the bright wood-fire; for though it was
almost June the night was cool and he was delicate.
"Ah, but splendid, but splendid--it got into every corner of every one of
us," the Man from Outside responded, speaking his fluent French with a
slight English accent, which had a pleasant piquancy--at least to the
ears of the pretty singer, Mdlle. Zoe Barbille. He was a man of about
thirty-three, clean-shaven, dark-haired, with an expression of
cleverness; yet with an irresponsible something about him which M. Fille
had reflected upon with concern. For this slim, eager, talkative,
half-invalid visitor to St. Saviour's had of late shown a marked liking
for the presence and person of Zoe Barbille; and Zoe was as dear to M.
Fille as though she were his own daughter. He it was who, in sarcasm, had
spoken of this young stranger as "The Man from Outside."
Ever since Zoe's mother had vanished--alone--seven years before from the
Manor Cartier, or rather from his office at Vilray, M. Fille had been as
much like a maiden aunt or a very elder brother to the Spanische's
daughter as a man could be. Of M. Fille's influence over his daughter and
her love of his companionship, Jean Jacques had no jealousy whatever.
Very often indeed, when he felt incompetent to do for his child all that
he wished--philosophers are often stupid in human affairs--he thought it
was a blessing Zoe had a friend like M. Fille. Since the terrible day
when he found that his wife had gone from him--not with the
master-carpenter who only made his exit from Laplatte some years
afterwards--he had had no desire to have a woman at the Manor to fill her
place, even as housekeeper. He had never swerved from that. He had had a
hard row to hoe, but he had hoed it with a will not affected by domestic
accidents or inconveniences. The one woman from outside whom he permitted
to go and come at will--and she did not come often, because she and M.
Fille agreed it would be best not to do so--was the sister of the Cure.
To be sure there was Seraphe Corniche, the old cook, but she was buried
in her kitchen, and Jean Jacques treated her like a man.
When Zoe was confirmed, and had come back from Montreal, having spent two
years in a convent there--the only time she had been away from her father
in seven years--having had her education chiefly from a Catholic
"brother," the situation developed in a new way. Zoe at once became as
conspicuous in the country-side as her father had been over so many
years. She was fresh, volatile, without affectation or pride, and had a
temperament responsive to every phase of life's simple interests. She
took the attention of the young men a little bit as her due, but yet
without conceit. The gallants had come about her like bees, for there was
Jean Jacques' many businesses and his reputation for wealth; and there
was her own charm, concerning which there could be far less doubt than
about Jean Jacques' magnificent solvency.
Zoe had gone heart-whole and with no especial preference for any young
man, until the particular person came, the Man from Outside.
His name was Gerard Fynes, and his business was mumming. He was a young
lawyer turned actor, and he had lived in Montreal before he went on the
stage. He was English--that was a misfortune; he was an actor--that was a
greater misfortune, for it suggested vagabondage of morals as well as of
profession; and he was a Protestant, which was the greatest misfortune of
all. But he was only at St. Saviour's for his convalescence after a
so-called attack of congestion of the lungs; and as he still had a slight
cough and looked none too robust, and as, more than all, he was simple in
his ways, enjoying the life of the parish with greater zest than the
residents, he found popularity. Undoubtedly he had a taking way with him.
He was lodging with Louis Charron, a small farmer and kinsman of Jean
Jacques, who sold whisky--"white whisky"--without a license. It was a
Charron family habit to sell liquor illegally, and Louis pursued the
career with all an amateur's enthusiasm. He had a sovereign balm for
"colds," composed of camomile flowers, boneset, liquorice, pennyroyal and
gentian root, which he sold to all comers; and it was not unnatural that
a visitor with weak lungs should lodge with him.
Louis and his wife had only good things to say about Gerard Fynes; for
the young man lived their life as though he was born to it. He ate the
slap-jacks, the buttermilk-pop, the pork and beans, the Indian corn on
the cob, the pea-soup, and the bread baked in the roadside oven, with a
relish which was not all pretence; for indeed he was as primitive as he
was subtle. He himself could not have told how much of him was true and
how much was make-believe. But he was certainly lovable, and he was not
bad by nature. Since coming to St. Saviour's he had been constant to one
attraction, and he had not risked his chances with Zoe by response to the
shy invitations of dark eyes, young and not so young, which met his own
here and there in the parish.
Only M. Fille and Jean Jacques himself had feelings of real antagonism to
him. Jean Jacques, though not naturally suspicious, had, however, seen an
understanding look pass between his Zoe and this stranger--this
Protestant English stranger from the outer world, to which Jean Jacques
went less frequently since his fruitless search for his vanished Carmen.
The Clerk of the Court saw that Jean Jacques had observed the intimate
glances of the two young people, and their eyes met in understanding. It
was just before Zoe had sung so charmingly, 'Oh, Who Will Walk the Wood
With Me'.
At first after Carmen's going Jean Jacques had found it hard to endure
singing in his house. Zoe's trilling was torture to him, though he had
never forbidden her to sing, and she had sung on to her heart's content.
By a subtle instinct, however, and because of the unspoken sorrow in her
own heart, she never sang the songs like 'La Manola'. Never after the day
Carmen went did Zoe speak of her mother to anyone at all. It was worse
than death; it was annihilation, so far as speech was concerned. The
world at large only knew that Carmen Barbille had run away, and that even
Sebastian Dolores her father did not know where she was. The old man had
not heard from her, and he seldom visited at the Manor Cartier or saw his
grand-daughter. His own career of late years had been marked by long
sojourns in Quebec, Montreal and even New York; yet he always came back
to St. Saviour's when he was penniless, and was there started afresh by
Jean Jacques. Some said that Carmen had gone back to Spain, but others
discredited that, for, if she had done so, certainly old Sebastian
Dolores would have gone also. Others continued to insist that she had
gone off with a man; but there was George Masson at Laplatte living
alone, and never going twenty miles away from home, and he was the only
person under suspicion. Others again averred that since her flight Carmen
had become a loose woman in Montreal; but the New Cure came down on that
with a blow which no one was tempted to invite again.
M. Savry's method of punishing was of a kind to make men shrink. If
Carmen Barbille had become a loose woman in Montreal, how did any member
of his flock know that it was the case? What company had he kept in
Montreal that he could say that? Did he see the woman--or did he hear
about her? And if he heard, what sort of company was he keeping when he
went to Montreal without his wife to hear such things? That was final,
and the slanderer was under a cloud for a time, by reason of the anger of
his own wife. It was about this time that the good priest preached from
the text, "Judge not that ye be not judged," and said that there were
only ten commandments on the tables of stone; but that the ten included
all the commandments which the Church made for every man, and which every
man, knowing his own weakness, must also make for himself.
His flock understood, though they did refrain, every one, from looking
towards the place where Jean Jacques sat with Ma'm'selle--she was always
called that, as though she was a great lady; or else she was called "the
little Ma'm'selle Zoe," even when she had grown almost as tall as her
mother had been.
Though no one looked towards the place where Jean Jacques and his
daughter sat when this sermon was preached, and although Zoe seemed not
to apprehend personal reference in the priest's words, when she reached
home, after talking to her father about casual things all the way, she
flew to her room, and, locking the door, flung herself on her bed and
cried till her body felt as though it had been beaten by rods. Then she
suddenly got up and, from a drawer, took out two things--an old
photograph of her mother at the time of her marriage, and Carmen's
guitar, which she had made her own on the day after the flight, and had
kept hidden ever since. She lay on the bed with her cheek pressed to the
guitar, and her eyes hungrily feeding on the face of a woman whose beauty
belonged to spheres other than where she had spent the thirteen years of
her married life.
Zoe had understood more even at the time of the crisis than they thought
she did, child though she was; and as the years had gone on she had
grasped the meaning of it all more clearly perhaps than anyone at all
except her adored friends Judge Carcasson, at whose home she had visited
in Montreal, and M. Fille.
The thing last rumoured about her mother in the parish was that she had
become an actress. To this Zoe made no protest in her mind. It was better
than many other possibilities, and she fixed her mind on it, so saving
herself from other agonizing speculations. In a fixed imagination lay
safety. In her soul she knew that, no matter what happened, her mother
would never return to the Manor Cartier.
The years had not deepened confidence between father and daughter. A
shadow hung between them. They laughed and talked together, were even
boisterous in their fun sometimes, and yet in the eyes of both was the
forbidden thing--the deserted city into which they could not enter. He
could not speak to the child of the shame of her mother; she could not
speak of that in him which had contributed to that mother's shame--the
neglect which existed to some degree in her own life with him. This was
chiefly so because his enterprises had grown to such a number and height,
that he seemed ever to be counting them, ever struggling to the height,
while none of his ventures ever reached that state of success when it
"ran itself", although as years passed men called him rich, and he spent
and loaned money so freely that they called him the Money Master, or the
Money Man Wise, in deference to his philosophy.
Zoe was not beautiful, but there was a wondrous charm in her deep brown
eyes and in the expression of her pretty, if irregular, features.
Sometimes her face seemed as small as that of a young child, and alive
with eerie fancies; and always behind her laughter was something which
got into her eyes, giving them a haunting melancholy. She had no signs of
hysteria, though now and then there came heart-breaking little outbursts
of emotion which had this proof that they were not hysteria--they were
never seen by others. They were sacred to her own solitude. While in
Montreal she had tasted for the first time the joys of the theatre, and
had then secretly read numbers of plays, which she bought from an old
bookseller, who was wise enough to choose them for her. She became
possessed of a love for the stage even before Gerard Fynes came upon the
scene. The beginning of it all was the rumour that her mother was now an
actress; yet the root-cause was far down in a temperament responsive to
all artistic things.
The coming of the Man from Outside acted on the confined elements of her
nature like the shutter of a camera. It let in a world of light upon
unexplored places, it set free elements of being which had not before
been active. She had been instantly drawn to Gerard Fynes. He had the
distance from her own life which provoked interest, and in that distance
was the mother whom perhaps it was her duty to forget, yet for whom she
had a longing which grew greater as the years went on.
Gerard Fynes could talk well, and his vivid pictures of his short
play-acting career absorbed her; and all the time she was vigilant for
some name, for the description of some actress which would seem to be a
clue to the lost spirit of her life. This clue never came, but before she
gave up hope of it, the man had got nearer to her than any man had ever
done.
After meeting him she awoke to the fact that there was a difference
between men, that it was not the same thing to be young as to be old;
that the reason why she could kiss the old Judge and the little Clerk of
the Court, and not kiss, say, the young manager of the great lumber firm
who came every year for a fortnight's fishing at St. Saviour's, was one
which had an understandable cause and was not a mere matter of individual
taste. She had been good friends with this young manager, who was only
thirty years of age, and was married, but when he had wanted to kiss her
on saying good-bye one recent summer, she had said, "Oh, no, oh, no, that
would spoil it all!" Yet when he had asked her why, and what she meant,
she could not tell him. She did not know; but by the end of the first
week after Gerard Fynes had been brought to the Manor Cartier by Louis
Charron, she knew.
She had then been suddenly awakened from mere girlhood. Judge Carcasson
saw the difference in her on a half-hour's visit as he passed westward,
and he had said to M. Fille, "Who is the man, my keeper of the treasure?"
The reply had been of such a sort that the Judge was startled: