Produced by David Widger
THE MONEY MASTER, Complete
By Gilbert Parker
CONTENTS
EPOCH THE FIRST
I. THE GRAND TOUR OF JEAN JACQUES BARBILLE
II. THE REST OF THE STORY “TO-MORROW”
III. “TO-MORROW”
EPOCH THE SECOND
IV. THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER AND THE CLERK OF THE COURT TELLS A STORY
V. THE CLERK OF THE COURT ENDS HIS STORY
VI. JEAN JACQUES HAD HAD A GREAT DAY
VII. JEAN JACQUES AWAKES FROM SLEEP
VIII. THE GATE IN THE WALL
IX. “MOI-JE SUIS PHILOSOPHE”
X. “QUIEN SABE”--WHO KNOWS!
XI. THE CLERK OF THE COURT KEEPS A PROMISE
XII. THE MASTER-CARPENTER HAS A PROBLEM
EPOCH THE THIRD
XIII. THE MAN FROM OUTSIDE
XIV. “I DO NOT WANT TO GO”
XV. BON MARCHE
EPOCH THE FOURTH
XVI. MISFORTUNES COME NOT SINGLY
XVII. HIS GREATEST ASSET
XVIII. JEAN JACQUES HAS AN OFFER
XIX. SEBASTIAN DOLORES DOES NOT SLEEP
XX. “AU ‘VOIR, M’SIEU’ JEAN JACQUES”
XXI. IF SHE HAD KNOWN IN TIME
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
INTRODUCTION
This book is in a place by itself among the novels I have written. Many
critics said that it was a welcome return to Canada, where I had made my
first success in the field of fiction. This statement was only meagrely
accurate, because since ‘The Right of Way’ was published in 1901 I had
written, and given to the public, ‘Northern Lights’, a book of short
stories, ‘You Never Know Your Luck’, a short novel, and ‘The World for
Sale’, though all of these dealt with life in Western Canada, and not
with the life of the French Canadians, in which field I had made my
first firm impression upon the public. In any case, The Money Master was
favourably received by the press and public both in England and America,
and my friends were justified in thinking, and in saying, that I was at
home in French Canada and gave the impression of mastery of my material.
If mastery of material means a knowledge of the life, and a sympathy
with it, then my friends are justified; for I have always had an intense
sympathy with, and admiration for, French Canadian life. I think the
French Canadian one of the most individual, original, and distinctive
beings of the modern world. He has kept his place, with his own
customs, his own Gallic views of life, and his religious habits, with an
assiduity and firmness none too common. He is essentially a man of
the home, of the soil, and of the stream; he has by nature instinctive
philosophy and temperamental logic. As a lover of the soil of Canada he
is not surpassed by any of the other citizens of the country, English or
otherwise.
It would almost seem as though the pageantry of past French Canadian
history, and the beauty and vigour of the topographical surroundings
of French Canadian life, had produced an hereditary pride and
exaltation--perhaps an excessive pride and a strenuous exaltation, but,
in any case, there it was, and is. The French Canadian lives a more
secluded life on the whole than any other citizen of Canada, though the
native, adventurous spirit has sent him to the Eastern States of
the American Union for work in the mills and factories, or up to the
farthest reaches of the St. Lawrence, Ottawa, and their tributaries in
the wood and timber trade.
Domestically he is perhaps the most productive son of the North American
continent. Families of twenty, or even twenty-five, are not unknown,
and, when a man has had more than one wife, it has even exceeded that.
Life itself is full of camaraderie and good spirit, marked by religious
traits and sacerdotal influence.
The French Canadian is on the whole sober and industrious; but when he
breaks away from sobriety and industry he becomes a vicious element
in the general organism. Yet his vices are of the surface, and do not
destroy the foundations of his social and domestic scheme. A French
Canadian pony used to be considered the most virile and lasting stock
on the continent, and it is fair to say that the French Canadians
themselves are genuinely hardy, long-lived, virile, and enduring.
It was among such people that the hero of The Money Master, Jean Jacques
Barbille, lived. He was the symbol or pattern of their virtues and
of their weaknesses. By nature a poet, a philosopher, a farmer and an
adventurer, his life was a sacrifice to prepossession and race instinct;
to temperament more powerful than logic or common sense, though he was
almost professionally the exponent of both.
There is no man so simply sincere, or so extraordinarily prejudiced as
the French Canadian. He is at once modest and vain; he is even lyrical
in his enthusiasms; he is a child in the intrigues and inventions
of life; but he has imagination, he has a heart, he has a love of
tradition, and is the slave of legend. To him domestic life is the
summum bonum of being. His four walls are the best thing which the world
has to offer, except the cheerful and sacred communion of the Mass, and
his dismissal from life itself under the blessing of his priest and with
the promise of a good immortality.
Jean Jacques Barbille had the French Canadian life of pageant, pomp, and
place extraordinarily developed. His love of history and tradition
was abnormal. A genius, he was, within an inch, a tragedy to the last
button. Probably the adventurous spirit of his forefathers played
a greater part in his development and in the story of his days than
anything else. He was wide-eyed, and he had a big soul. He trained
himself to believe in himself and to follow his own judgment; therefore,
he invited loss upon loss, he made mistake upon mistake, he heaped
financial adventure upon financial adventure, he ran great risks; and
it is possible that his vast belief in himself kept him going when other
men would have dropped by the wayside. He loved his wife and daughter,
and he lost them both. He loved his farms, his mills and his manor, and
they disappeared from his control.
It must be remembered that the story of The Money Master really runs for
a generation, and it says something for Jean Jacques Barbille that he
could travel through scenes, many of them depressing, for long years,
and still, in the end, provoke no disparagement, by marrying the
woman who had once out of the goodness of her heart offered him
everything--herself, her home, her honour; and it was to Jean Jacques’s
credit that he took neither until the death of his wife made him free;
but the tremendous gift offered him produced a powerful impression upon
his mind and heart.
One of the most distinguished men of the world to-day wrote me in praise
and protest concerning The Money Master. He declared that the first half
of the book was as good as anything that had been done by anybody,
and then he bemoaned the fact, which he believed, that the author had
sacrificed his two heroines without real cause and because he was tired
of them. There he was wrong. In the author’s mind the story was planned
exactly as it worked out. He was never tired; he was resolute. He was
intent to produce, if possible, a figure which would breed and develop
its own disasters, which would suffer profoundly for its own mistakes;
but which, in the end, would triumph over the disasters of life and
time. It was all deliberate in the main intention and plan. Any failures
that exist in the book are due to the faults of the author, and to
nothing else.
Some critics have been good enough to call ‘The Money Master’ a
beautiful book, and there are many who said that it was real, true, and
faithful. Personally I think it is real and true, and as time goes on,
and we get older, that is what seems to matter to those who love life
and wish to see it well harvested.
I do not know what the future of the book may be; what the future of
any work of mine will be; but I can say this, that no one has had the
pleasure in reading my books which I have had in making them. They have
been ground out of the raw material of the soul. I have a hope that they
will outlast my brief day, but, in any case, it will not matter. They
have given me a chance of showing to the world life as I have seen it,
and indirectly, and perhaps indistinctly, my own ideas of that life.
‘The Money Master’ is a vivid and somewhat emotional part of it.
EPOCH THE FIRST
CHAPTER I. THE GRAND TOUR OF JEAN JACQUES BARBILLE
“Peace and plenty, peace and plenty”--that was the phrase M. Jean
Jacques Barbille, miller and moneymaster, applied to his home-scene,
when he was at the height of his career. Both winter and summer the
place had a look of content and comfort, even a kind of opulence. There
is nothing like a grove of pines to give a sense of warmth in winter
and an air of coolness in summer, so does the slightest breeze make the
pine-needles swish like the freshening sea. But to this scene, where
pines made a friendly background, there were added oak, ash, and hickory
trees, though in less quantity on the side of the river where were
Jean Jacques Barbille’s house and mills. They flourished chiefly on the
opposite side of the Beau Cheval, whose waters flowed so waywardly--now
with a rush, now silently away through long reaches of country. Here
the land was rugged and bold, while farther on it became gentle and
spacious, and was flecked or striped with farms on which low, white
houses with dormer-windows and big stoops flashed to the passer-by the
message of the pioneer, “It is mine. I triumph.”
At the Manor Cartier, not far from the town of Vilray, where Jean
Jacques was master, and above it and below it, there had been battles
and the ravages of war. At the time of the Conquest the stubborn
habitants, refusing to accept the yielding of Quebec as the end of
French power in their proud province, had remained in arms and active,
and had only yielded when the musket and the torch had done their work,
and smoking ruins marked the places where homes had been. They took
their fortune with something of the heroic calm of men to whom an
idea was more than aught else. Jean Jacques’ father, grandfather, and
great-great-grandfather had lived here, no one of them rising far, but
none worthless or unnoticeable. They all had had “a way of their own,”
as their neighbours said, and had been provident on the whole. Thus it
was that when Jean Jacques’ father died, and he came into his own, he
found himself at thirty a man of substance, unmarried, who “could
have had the pick of the province.” This was what the Old Cure said in
despair, when Jean Jacques did the incomprehensible thing, and married
l’Espagnole, or “the Spanische,” as the lady was always called in the
English of the habitant.
When she came it was spring-time, and all the world was budding, exuding
joy and hope, with the sun dancing over all. It was the time between
the sowing and the hay-time, and there was a feeling of alertness in
everything that had life, while even the rocks and solid earth seemed to
stir. The air was filled with the long happy drone of the mill-stones as
they ground the grain; and from farther away came the soft, stinging
cry of a saw-mill. Its keen buzzing complaint was harmonious with the
grumble of the mill-stones, as though a supreme maker of music had tuned
it. So said a master-musician and his friend, a philosopher from Nantes,
who came to St. Saviour’s in the summer just before the marriage, and
lodged with Jean Jacques. Jean Jacques, having spent a year at Laval
University at Quebec, had almost a gift of thought, or thinking; and he
never ceased to ply the visiting philosopher and musician with questions
which he proceeded to answer himself before they could do so; his
quaint, sentimental, meretricious observations on life saddening while
they amused his guests. They saddened the musician more than the other
because he knew life, while the philosopher only thought it and saw it.
But even the musician would probably have smiled in hope that day
when the young “Spanische” came driving up the river-road from the
steamboat-landing miles away. She arrived just when the clock struck
noon in the big living-room of the Manor. As she reached the open
doorway and the wide windows of the house which gaped with shady
coolness, she heard the bell summoning the workers in the mills and on
the farm--yes, M. Barbille was a farmer, too--for the welcome home to
“M’sieu’ Jean Jacques,” as he was called by everyone.
That the wedding had taken place far down in Gaspe and not in St.
Saviour’s was a reproach and almost a scandal; and certainly it was
unpatriotic. It was bad enough to marry the Spanische, but to marry
outside one’s own parish, and so deprive that parish and its young
people of the week’s gaiety, which a wedding and the consequent
procession and tour through the parish brings, was little less than
treason. But there it was; and Jean Jacques was a man who had power to
hurt, to hinder, or to help; for the miller and the baker are nearer to
the hearthstone of every man than any other, and credit is a good thing
when the oven is empty and hard times are abroad. The wedding in Gaspe
had not been attended by the usual functions, for it had all been
hurriedly arranged, as the romantic circumstances of the wooing
required. Romance indeed it was; so remarkable that the master-musician
might easily have found a theme for a comedy--or tragedy--and the
philosopher would have shaken his head at the defiance it offered to the
logic of things.
Now this is the true narrative, though in the parish of St. Saviour’s it
is more highly decorated and has many legends hanging to it like tassels
to a curtain. Even the Cure of to-day, who ought to know all the truth,
finds it hard to present it in its bare elements; for the history
of Jean Jacques Barbille affected the history of many a man in St.
Saviour’s; and all that befel him, whether of good or evil, ran through
the parish in a thousand invisible threads.
.......................
What had happened was this. After the visit of the musician and the
philosopher, Jean Jacques, to sustain his reputation and to increase it,
had decided to visit that Normandy from which his people had come at the
time of Frontenac. He set forth with much ‘eclat’ and a little innocent
posturing and ritual, in which a cornet and a violin figured, together
with a farewell oration by the Cure.
In Paris Jean Jacques had found himself bewildered and engulfed. He had
no idea that life could be so overbearing, and he was inclined to resent
his own insignificance. However, in Normandy, when he read the names on
the tombstones and saw the records in the baptismal register of other
Jean Jacques Barbilles, who had come and gone generations before, his
self-respect was somewhat restored. This pleasure was dashed, however,
by the quizzical attitude of the natives of his ancestral parish,
who walked round about inspecting him as though he were a zoological
specimen, and who criticized his accent--he who had been at Laval for
one whole term; who had had special instruction before that time from
the Old Cure and a Jesuit brother; and who had been the friend of
musicians and philosophers!
His cheerful, kindly self-assurance stood the test with difficulty, but
it became a kind of ceremonial with him, whenever he was discomfited, to
read some pages of a little dun-coloured book of philosophy, picked up
on the quay at Quebec just before he sailed, and called, “Meditations in
Philosophy.” He had been warned by the bookseller that the Church had no
love for philosophy; but while at Laval he had met the independent minds
that, at eighteen to twenty-two, frequent academic groves; and he
was not to be put off by the pious bookseller--had he not also had a
philosopher in his house the year before, and was he not going to Nantes
to see this same savant before returning to his beloved St. Saviour’s
parish.
But Paris and Nantes and Rouen and Havre abashed and discomfited him,
played havoc with his self-esteem, confused his brain, and vexed him
by formality, and, more than all, by their indifference to himself. He
admired, yet he wished to be admired; he was humble, but he wished all
people and things to be humble with him. When he halted he wanted the
world to halt; when he entered a cathedral--Notre Dame or any other; or
a great building--the Law Courts at Rouen or any other; he simply
wanted people to say, wanted the cathedral, or at least the cloister, to
whisper to itself, “Here comes Jean Jacques Barbille.”
That was all he wanted, and that would have sufficed. He would not have
had them whisper about his philosophy and his intellect, or the mills
and the ash-factory which he meant to build, the lime-kilns he had
started even before he left, and the general store he intended to open
when he returned to St. Saviour’s. Not even his modesty was recognized;
and, in his grand tour, no one was impressed by all that he was, except
once. An ancestor, a grandmother of his, had come from the Basque
country; and so down to St. Jean Pied de Port he went; for he came of a
race who set great store by mothers and grandmothers. At St. Jean Pied
de Port he was more at home. He was, in a sense, a foreigner among
foreigners there, and the people were not quizzical, since he was
an outsider in any case and not a native returned, as he had been in
Normandy. He learned to play pelota, the Basque game taken from the
Spaniards, and he even allowed himself a little of that oratory which,
as they say, has its habitat chiefly in Gascony. And because he had
found an audience at last, he became a liberal host, and spent freely
of his dollars, as he had never done either in Normandy, Paris, or
elsewhere. So freely did he spend, that when he again embarked at
Bordeaux for Quebec, he had only enough cash left to see him through the
remainder of his journey in the great world. Yet he left France with
his self-respect restored, and he even waved her a fond adieu, as the
creaking Antoine broke heavily into the waters of the Bay of Biscay,
while he cried:
“My little ship,
It bears me far
From lights of home
To alien star.
O vierge Marie,
Pour moi priez Dieu!
Adieu, dear land,
Provence, adieu.”
Then a further wave of sentiment swept over him, and he was vaguely
conscious of a desire to share the pains of parting which he saw in
labour around him--children from parents, lovers from loved. He could
not imagine the parting from a parent, for both of his were in the bosom
of heaven, having followed his five brothers, all of whom had died in
infancy, to his good fortune, for otherwise his estate would now be only
one-sixth of what it was. But he could imagine a parting with some sweet
daughter of France, and he added another verse to the thrilling of the
heart of Casimir Delavigne:
“Beloved Isaure,
Her hand makes sign--
No more, no more,
To rest in mine.
O vierge Marie,
Pour moi priez Dieu!
Adieu, dear land,
Isaure, adieu!”
As he murmured with limpid eye the last words, he saw in the forecastle
not far from him a girl looking at him. There was unmistakable sadness
in her glance of interest. In truth she was thinking of just such a man
as Jean Jacques, whom she could never see any more, for he had paid with
his life the penalty of the conspiracy in which her father, standing now
behind her on the leaky Antoine, had been a tool, and an evil tool. Here
in Jean Jacques was the same ruddy brown face, black restless eye,
and young, silken, brown beard. Also there was an air of certainty and
universal comprehension, and though assertion and vanity were apparent,
there was no self-consciousness. The girl’s dead and gone conspirator
had not the same honesty of face, the same curve of the ideal in the
broad forehead, the same poetry of rich wavy brown hair, the same
goodness of mind and body so characteristic of Jean Jacques--he was but
Jean Jacques gone wrong at the start; but the girl was of a nature
that could see little difference between things which were alike
superficially, and in the young provincial she only saw one who looked
like the man she had loved. True, his moustaches did not curl upwards at
the ends as did those of Carvillho Gonzales, and he did not look out of
the corner of his eyes and smoke black cigarettes; but there he was, her
Carvillho with a difference--only such a difference that made him to her
Carvillho II., and not the ghost of Carvillho I.
She was a maiden who might have been as good as need be for all life,
so far as appearances went. She had a wonderful skin, a smooth, velvety
cheek, where faint red roses came and went, as it might seem at will;
with a deep brown eye; and eh, but she was grandly tall--so Jean Jacques
thought, while he drew himself up to his full five feet, six and a half
with a determined air. Even at his best, however, Jean Jacques could not
reach within three inches of her height.
Yet he did not regard her as at all overdone because of that. He thought
her hair very fine, as it waved away from her low forehead in a grace
which reminded him of the pictures of the Empress Eugenie, and of the
sister of that monsieur le duc who had come fishing to St. Saviour’s
a few years before. He thought that if her hair was let down it would
probably reach to her waist, and maybe to her ankles. She had none of
the plump, mellow softness of the beauties he had seen in the Basque
country. She was a slim and long limbed Diana, with fine lines and a
bosom of extreme youth, though she must have been twenty-one her last
birthday. The gown she wore was a dark green well-worn velvet, which
seemed of too good a make and quality for her class; and there was no
decoration about her anywhere, save at the ears, where two drops of gold
hung on little links an inch and a half long.
Jean Jacques Barbille’s eyes took it all in with that observation of
which he was so proud and confident, and rested finally on the drops of
gold at her ears. Instinctively he fingered the heavy gold watch-chain
he had bought in Paris to replace the silver chain with a little
crucifix dangling, which his father and even his great-grandfather had
worn before him. He had kept the watch, however--the great fat-bellied
thing which had never run down in a hundred years. It was his mascot.
To lose that watch would be like losing his share in the promises of the
Church. So his fingers ran along the new gold-fourteen-carat-chain, to
the watch at the end of it; and he took it out a little ostentatiously,
since he saw that the eyes of the girl were on him. Involuntarily he
wished to impress her.
He might have saved himself the trouble. She was impressed. It was quite
another matter however, whether he would have been pleased to know that
the impression was due to his resemblance to a Spanish conspirator,
whose object was to destroy the Monarchy and the Church, as had been the
object of the middle-aged conspirator--the girl’s father--who had the
good fortune to escape from justice. It is probable that if Jean Jacques
had known these facts, his story would never have been written, and he
would have died in course of time with twenty children and a seat in the
legislature; for, in spite of his ardent devotion to philosophy and its
accompanying rationalism, he was a devout monarchist and a child of the
Church.
Sad enough it was that, as he shifted his glance from the watch, which
ticked loud enough to wake a farmhand in the middle of the day, he found
those Spanish eyes which had been so lost in studying him. In the glow
and glisten of the evening sun setting on the shores of Bordeaux, and
flashing reflected golden light to the girl’s face, he saw that they
were shining with tears, and though looking at him, appeared not to
see him. In that moment the scrutiny of the little man’s mind was
volatilized, and the Spanische, as she was ultimately called, began her
career in the life of the money-master of St. Saviour’s.
It began by his immediately resenting the fact that she should be
travelling in the forecastle. His mind imagined misfortune and a lost
home through political troubles, for he quickly came to know that the
girl and her father were Spanish; and to him, Spain was a place of
martyrs and criminals. Criminals these could not be--one had but to look
at the girl’s face; while the face of her worthless father might have
been that of a friend of Philip IV. in the Escorial, so quiet and
oppressed it seemed. Nobility was written on the placid, apathetic
countenance, except when it was not under observation, and then the look
of Cain took its place. Jean Jacques, however, was not likely to see
that look; since Sebastian Dolores--that was his name--had observed from
the first how the master-miller was impressed by his daughter, and he
was set to turn it to account.
Not that the father entered into an understanding with the girl. He knew
her too well for that. He had a wholesome respect, not to say fear,
of her; for when all else had failed, it was she who had arranged his
escape from Spain, and who almost saved Carvillho Gonzales from being
shot. She could have saved Gonzales, might have saved him, would
have saved him, had she not been obliged to save her father. In the
circumstances she could not save both.
Before the week was out Jean Jacques was possessed of as fine a tale
of political persecution as mind could conceive, and, told as it was by
Sebastian Dolores, his daughter did not seek to alter it, for she had
her own purposes, and they were mixed. These refugees needed a friend,
for they would land in Canada with only a few dollars, and Carmen
Dolores loved her father well enough not to wish to see him again in
such distress as he had endured in Cadiz. Also, Jean Jacques, the
young, verdant, impressionable French Catholic, was like her Carvillho
Gonzales, and she had loved her Carvillho in her own way very
passionately, and--this much to her credit--quite chastely. So that she
had no compunction in drawing the young money-master to her side, and
keeping him there by such arts as such a woman possesses. These are
remarkable after their kind. They are combined of a frankness as to the
emotions, and such outer concessions to physical sensations, as make a
painful combination against a mere man’s caution; even when that caution
has a Norman origin.
More than once Jean Jacques was moved to tears, as the Ananias of Cadiz
told his stories of persecution.
So that one day, in sudden generosity, he paid the captain the necessary
sum to transfer the refugees from the forecastle to his own select
portion of the steamer, where he was so conspicuous a figure among a
handful of lower-level merchant folk and others of little mark who were
going to Quebec. To these latter Jean Jacques was a gift of heaven, for
he knew so much, and seemed to know so much more, and could give them
the information they desired. His importance lured him to pose as a
seigneur, though he had no claim to the title. He did not call himself
Seigneur in so many words, but when others referred to him as the
Seigneur, and it came to his ears, he did not correct it; and when he
was addressed as such he did not reprove.
Thus, when he brought the two refugees from the forecastle and assured
his fellow-passengers that they were Spanish folk of good family exiled
by persecution, his generosity was acclaimed, even while all saw he was
enamoured of Carmen. Once among the first-class passengers, father and
daughter maintained reserve, and though there were a few who saw that
they were not very far removed above peasants, still the dress of
the girl, which was good--she had been a maid in a great nobleman’s
family--was evidence in favour of the father’s story. Sebastian Dolores
explained his own workman’s dress as having been necessary for his
escape.
Only one person gave Jean Jacques any warning. This was the captain
of the Antoine. He was a Basque, he knew the Spanish people well--the
types, the character, the idiosyncrasies; and he was sure that Sebastian
Dolores and his daughter belonged to the lower clerical or higher
working class, and he greatly inclined towards the former. In that he
was right, because Dolores, and his father before him, had been employed
in the office of a great commercial firm in Cadiz, and had repaid much
consideration by stirring up strife and disloyalty in the establishment.
But before the anarchist subtracted himself from his occupation, he had
appropriated certain sums of money, and these had helped to carry him
on, when he attached himself to the revolutionaries. It was on his
daughter’s savings that he was now travelling, with the only thing he
had saved from the downfall, which was his head. It was of sufficient
personal value to make him quite cheerful as the Antoine plunged and
shivered on her way to the country where he could have no steady work as
a revolutionist.
With reserve and caution the Basque captain felt it his duty to tell
Jean Jacques of his suspicions, warning him that the Spaniards were the
choicest liars in the world, and were not ashamed of it; but had
the same pride in it as had their greatest rivals, the Arabs and the
Egyptians.
His discreet confidences, however, were of no avail; he was not discreet
enough. If he had challenged the bona fides of Sebastian Dolores only,
he might have been convincing, but he used the word “they” constantly,
and that roused the chivalry of Jean Jacques. That the comely, careful
Carmen should be party to an imposture was intolerable. Everything about
her gave it the lie. Her body was so perfect and complete, so finely
contrived and balanced, so cunningly curved with every line filled in;
her eye was so full of lustre and half-melancholy too; her voice had
such a melodious monotone; her mouth was so ripe and yet so distant in
its luxury, that imposture was out of the question.
Ah, but Jean Jacques was a champion worth while! He did nothing
by halves. He was of the breed of men who grow more intense, more
convinced, more thorough, as they talk. One adjective begets another,
one warm allusion gives birth to a warmer, one flashing impulse evokes a
brighter confidence, till the atmosphere is flaming with conviction. If
Jean Jacques started with faint doubt regarding anything, and allowed
himself betimes the flush of a declaration of belief, there could be but
one end. He gathered fire as he moved, impulse expanded into momentum,
and momentum became an Ariel fleeing before the dark. He would start
by offering a finger to be pricked, and would end by presenting his own
head on a charger. He was of those who hypnotize themselves, who glow
with self-creation, who flower and bloom without pollen.
His rejection of the captain’s confidence even had a dignity. He
took out his watch which represented so many laborious hours of other
Barbilles, and with a decision in which the strong pulse of chivalry was
beating hard, he said:
“I can never speak well till I have ate. That is my hobby. Well, so
it is. And I like good company. So that is why I sit beside Senor and
Senorita Dolores at table--the one on the right, the other on the left,
myself between, like this, like that. It is dinner-time now here, and
my friends--my dear friends of Cadiz--they wait me. Have you heard
the Senorita sing the song of Spain, m’sieu’? What it must be with the
guitar, I know not; but with voice alone it is ravishing. I have learned
it also. The Senorita has taught me. It is a song of Aragon. It is sung
in high places. It belongs to the nobility. Ah, then, you have not heard
it--but it is not too late! The Senorita, the unhappy ma’m’selle, driven
from her ancestral home by persecution, she will sing it to you as she
has sung it to me. It is your due. You are the master of the ship. But,
yes, she shall of her kindness and of her grace sing it to you. You do
not know how it runs? Well, it is like this--listen and tell me if it
does not speak of things that belong to the old regime, the ancient
noblesse--listen, m’sieu’ le captainne, how it runs:
“Have you not heard of mad Murcie?
Granada gay and And’lousie?
There’s where you’ll see the joyous rout,
When patios pour their beauties out;
Come, children, come, the night gains fast,
And Time’s a jade too fair to last.
My flower of Spain, my Juanetta,
Away, away to gay Jota!
Come forth, my sweet, away, my queen,
Though daybreak scorns, the night’s between.
The Fete’s afoot--ah! ah! ah! ah!
De la Jota Ar’gonesa.
Ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah!
De la Jota Ar’gonesa.”
Before he had finished, the captain was more than ready to go, for he
had no patience with such credulity, simplicity and sentimentalism. He
was Basque, and to be Basque is to lack sentiment and feel none, to play
ever for the safe thing, to get without giving, and to mind your own
business. It had only been an excessive sense of duty which had made the
captain move in this, for he liked Jean Jacques as everyone aboard his
Antoine did; and he was convinced that the Spaniards would play the
“Seigneur” to the brink of disaster at least, though it would have been
hard to detect any element of intrigue or coquetry in Carmen Dolores.
That was due partly to the fact that she was still in grief for her
Gonzales, whose heart had been perforated by almost as many bullets
as the arrows of Cupid had perforated it in his short, gay life of
adventure and anarchy; also partly because there was no coquetry needed
to interest Jean Jacques. If he was interested it was not necessary to
interest anyone else, nor was it expedient to do so, for the biggest
fish in the net on the Antoine was the money-master of St. Saviour’s.
Carmen had made up her mind from the first to marry Jean Jacques, and
she deported herself accordingly--with modesty, circumspection and
skill. It would be the easiest way out of all their difficulties. Since
her heart, such as it was, fluttered, a mournful ghost, over the Place
d’Armes, where her Gonzales was shot, it might better go to Jean Jacques
than anyone else; for he was a man of parts, of money, and of looks, and
she loved these all; and to her credit she loved his looks better
than all the rest. She had no real cupidity, and she was not greatly
enamoured of brains. She had some real philosophy of life learned in a
hard school; and it was infinitely better founded than the smattering of
conventional philosophy got by Jean Jacques from his compendium picked
up on the quay at Quebec.
Yet Jean Jacques’ cruiser of life was not wholly unarmed. From his
Norman forebears he had, beneath all, a shrewdness and an elementary
alertness not submerged by his vain, kind nature. He was quite a good
business man, and had proved himself so before his father died--very
quick to see a chance, and even quicker to see where the distant, sharp
corners in the road were; though not so quick to see the pitfalls, for
his head was ever in the air. And here on the Antoine, there crossed his
mind often the vision of Carmen Dolores and himself in the parish of St.
Saviour’s, with the daily life of the Beau Cheval revolving about him.
Flashes of danger warned him now and then, just at the beginning of the
journey, as it were; just before he had found it necessary to become
her champion against the captain and his calumnies; but they were of the
instant only. But champion as he became, and worshipping as his manner
seemed, it all might easily have been put down to a warm, chivalrous,
and spontaneous nature, which had not been bitted or bridled, and he
might have landed at Quebec without committing himself, were it not for
the fact that he was not to land at Quebec.
That was the fact which controlled his destiny. He had spent many, many
hours with the Dona Dolores, talking, talking, as he loved to talk, and
only saving himself from the betise of boring her by the fact that his
enthusiasm had in it so fresh a quality, and because he was so like
her Gonzales that she could always endure him. Besides, quick of
intelligence as she was, she was by nature more material than she
looked, and there was certainly something physically attractive in
him--some curious magnetism. She had a well of sensuousness which might
one day become sensuality; she had a richness of feeling and a contour
in harmony with it, which might expand into voluptuousness, if given
too much sun, or if untamed by the normal restraints of a happy married
life. There was an earthquake zone in her being which might shake down
the whole structure of her existence. She was unsafe, not because she
was deceiving Jean Jacques now as to her origin and as to her feelings
for him; she was unsafe because of the natural strain of the light of
love in her, joined to a passion for comfort and warmth and to a natural
self-indulgence. She was determined to make Jean Jacques offer himself
before they landed at Quebec.
But they did not land at Quebec.