The journey wore on to the coast of Canada. Gaspe was not far off when,
still held back by the constitutional tendency of the Norman not to
close a bargain till compelled to do so, Jean Jacques sat with Carmen
far forward on the deck, where the groaning Antoine broke the waters
into sullen foam. There they silently watched the sunset, golden, purple
and splendid--and ominous, as the captain knew.
“Look, the end of life--like that!” said Jean Jacques oratorically with
a wave of the hand towards the prismatic radiance.
“All the way round, the whole circle--no, it would be too much,” Carmen
replied sadly. “Better to go at noon--or soon after. Then the only
memory of life would be of the gallop. No crawling into the night for
me, if I can help it. Mother of Heaven, no! Let me go at the top of the
flight.”
“It is all the same to me,” responded Jean Jacques, “I want to know it
all--to gallop, to trot, to walk, to crawl. Me, I’m a philosopher. I
wait.”
“But I thought you were a Catholic,” she replied, with a kindly, lurking
smile, which might easily have hardened into scoffing.
“First and last,” he answered firmly.
“A Catholic and a philosopher--together in one?” She shrugged a shoulder
to incite him to argument, for he was interesting when excited;
when spurting out little geysers of other people’s cheap wisdom and
philosophy, poured through the kind distortion of his own intelligence.
He gave a toss of his head. “Ah, that is my hobby--I reconcile, I unite,
I adapt! It is all the nature of the mind, the far-look, the all-round
sight of the man. I have it all. I see.”
He gazed eloquently into the sunset, he swept the horizon with his hand.
“I have the all-round look. I say the Man of Calvary, He is before all,
the sun; but I say Socrates, Plato, Jean Jacques--that is my name, and
it is not for nothing, that--Jean Jacques Rousseau, Descartes, Locke,
they are stars that go round the sun. It is the same light, but not the
same sound. I reconcile. In me all comes together like the spokes to
the hub of a wheel. Me--I am a Christian, I am philosophe, also. In St.
Saviour’s, my home in Quebec, if the crops are good, what do men say?
‘C’est le bon Dieu--it is the good God,’ that is what they say. If the
crops are bad, what do they say? ‘It is the good God’--that is what they
say. It is the good God that makes crops good or bad, and it is the
good God that makes men say, ‘C’est le bon Dieu.’ The good God makes the
philosophy. It is all one.”
She appeared to grow agitated, and her voice shook as she spoke. “Tsh,
it is only a fool that says the good God does it, when the thing that is
done breaks you or that which you love all to pieces. No, no, no, it is
not religion, it is not philosophy that makes one raise the head when
the heart is bowed down, when everything is snatched away that was all
in all. That the good God does it is a lie. Santa Maria, what a lie!”
“Why ‘Santa Maria,’ then, if it is a lie?” he asked triumphantly. He did
not observe how her breast was heaving, how her hands were clenched; for
she was really busy with thoughts of her dead Carvillho Gonzales; but
for the moment he could only see the point of an argument.
She made a gesture of despair. “So--that’s it. Habit in us is so strong.
It comes through the veins of our mothers to us. We say that God is
a lie one minute, and then the next minute we say, ‘God guard you!’
Always--always calling to something, for something outside ourselves.
That is why I said Santa Maria, why I ask her to pray for the soul of
my friend, to pray to the God that breaks me and mine, and sends us over
the seas, beggars without a home.”
Now she had him back out of the vanities of his philosophy. He was up,
inflamed, looking at her with an excitement on which she depended for
her future. She knew the caution of his nature, she realized how he
would take one step forward and another step back, and maybe get nowhere
in the end, and she wanted him--for a home, for her father’s sake, for
what he could do for them both. She had no compunctions. She thought
herself too good for him, in a way, for in her day men of place and mark
had taken notice of her; and if it had not been for her Gonzales she
would no doubt have listened to one of them sometime or another. She
knew she had ability, even though she was indolent, and she thought she
could do as much for him as any other girl. If she gave him a handsome
wife and handsome children, and made men envious of him, and filled him
with good things, for she could cook more than tortillas-she felt he
would have no right to complain. She meant him to marry her--and Quebec
was very near!
“A beggar in a strange land, without a home, without a friend--oh, my
broken life!” she whispered wistfully to the sunset.
It was not all acting, for the past reached out and swept over her,
throwing waves of its troubles upon the future. She was that saddest of
human beings, a victim of dual forces which so fought for mastery
with each other that, while the struggle went on, the soul had no firm
foothold anywhere. That, indeed, was why her Carvillho Gonzales, who
also had been dual in nature, said to himself so often, “I am a devil,”
and nearly as often, “I have the heart of an angel.”
“Tell me all about your life, my friend,” Jean Jacques said eagerly.
Now his eyes no longer hurried here and there, but fastened on hers and
stayed thereabouts--ah, her face surely was like pictures he had seen in
the Louvre that day when he had ambled through the aisles of great men’s
glories with the feeling that he could not see too much for nothing in
an hour.
“My life? Ah, m’sieu’, has not my father told you of it?” she asked.
He waved a hand in explanation, he cocked his head quizzically.
“Scraps--like the buttons on a coat here and there--that’s all,”
he answered. “Born in Andalusia, lived in Cadiz, plenty of money,
a beautiful home,”--Carmen’s eyes drooped, and her face flushed
slightly--“no brothers or sisters--visits to Madrid on political
business--you at school--then the going of your mother, and you at home
at the head of the house. So much on the young shoulders, the kitchen,
the parlour, the market, the shop, society--and so on. That is the way
it was, so he said, except in the last sad times, when your father, for
the sake of Don Carlos and his rights, near lost his life--ah, I can
understand that: to stand by the thing you have sworn to! France is a
republic, but I would give my life to put a Napoleon or a Bourbon on the
throne. It is my hobby to stand by the old ship, not sign on to a new
captain every port.”
She raised her head and looked at him calmly now. The flush had gone
from her face, and a light of determination was in her eyes. To that was
added suddenly a certain tinge of recklessness and abandon in carriage
and manner, as one flings the body loose from the restraints of clothes,
and it expands in a free, careless, defiant joy.
Jean Jacques’ recital of her father’s tale had confused her for a
moment, it was so true yet so untrue, so full of lies and yet so
solid in fact. “The head of the house--visits to Madrid on political
business--the parlour, the market, society--all that!” It suggested the
picture of the life of a child of a great house; it made her a lady,
and not a superior servant as she had been; it adorned her with a credit
which was not hers; and for a moment she was ashamed. Yet from the first
she had lent herself to the general imposture that they had fled from
Spain for political reasons, having lost all and suffered greatly; and
it was true while yet it was a lie. She had suffered, both her father
and herself had suffered; she had been in danger, in agony, in sorrow,
in despair--it was only untrue that they were of good birth and blood,
and had had position and comfort and much money. Well, what harm did
that do anybody? What harm did it do this little brown seigneur from
Quebec? Perhaps he too had made himself out to be more than he was.
Perhaps he was no seigneur at all, she thought. When one is in distant
seas and in danger of his life, one will hoist any flag, sail to any
port, pay homage to any king. So would she. Anyhow, she was as good as
this provincial, with his ancient silver watch, his plump little hands,
and his book of philosophy.
What did it matter, so all came right in the end! She would justify
herself, if she had the chance. She was sick of conspiracy, and danger,
and chicanery--and blood. She wanted her chance. She had been badly
shaken in the last days in Spain, and she shrank from more worry and
misery. She wanted to have a home and not to wander. And here was a
chance--how good a chance she was not sure; but it was a chance. She
would not hesitate to make it hers. After all, self-preservation was the
thing which mattered. She wanted a bright fire, a good table, a horse,
a cow, and all such simple things. She wanted a roof over her and a warm
bed at night. She wanted a warm bed at night--but a warm bed at night
alone. It was the price she would have to pay for her imposture, that if
she had all these things, she could not be alone in the sleep-time. She
had not thought of this in the days when she looked forward to a home
with her Gonzales. To be near him was everything; but that was all
dead and done for; and now--it was at this point that, shrinking, she
suddenly threw off all restraining thoughts. With abandon of the
mind came a recklessness of body, which gave her, all at once, a
voluptuousness more in keeping with the typical maid of Andalusia. It
got into the eyes and senses of Jean Jacques, in a way which had nothing
to do with the philosophy of Descartes, or Kant, or Aristotle, or Hegel.
“It was beautiful in much--my childhood,” she said in a low voice,
dropping her eyes before his ardent gaze, “as my father said. My mother
was lovely to see, but not bigger than I was at twelve--so petite, and
yet so perfect in form--like a lark or a canary. Yes, and she could
sing--anything. Not like me with a voice which has the note of a drum or
an organ--”
“Of a flute, bright Senorita,” interposed Jean Jacques.
“But high, and with the trills in the skies, and all like a laugh with a
tear in it. When she went to the river to wash--”
She was going to say “wash the clothes,” but she stopped in time and
said instead, “wash her spaniel and her pony”--her face was flushed
again with shame, for to lie about one’s mother is a sickening thing,
and her mother never had a spaniel or a pony--“the women on the shore
wringing their clothes, used to beg her to sing. To the hum of the river
she would make the music which they loved--”
“La Manola and such?” interjected Jean Jacques eagerly. “That’s a fine
song as you sing it.”
“Not La Manola, but others of a different sort--The Love of Isabella,
The Flight of Bobadil, Saragosse, My Little Banderillero, and so on, and
all so sweet that the women used to cry. Always, always she was singing
till the time when my father became a rebel. Then she used to cry too;
and she would sing no more; and when my father was put against a wall to
be shot, and fell in the dust when the rifles rang out, she came at the
moment, and seeing him lying there, she threw up her hands, and fell
down beside him dead--”
“The poor little senora, dead too--”
“Not dead too--that was the pity of it. You see my father was not dead.
The officer”--she did not say sergeant--“who commanded the firing squad,
he was what is called a compadre of my father--”
“Yes, I understand--a made-brother, sealed with an oath, which binds
closer than a blood-brother. It is that, is it not?”
“So--like that. Well, the compadre had put blank cartridges in their
rifles, and my father pretended to fall dead; and the soldiers were
marched away; and my father, with my mother, was carried to his home,
still pretending to be dead. It had been all arranged except the awful
thing, my mother’s death. Who could foresee that? She ought to have been
told; but who could guess that she would hear of it all, and come at the
moment like that? So, that was the way she went, and I was left alone
with my father.” She had told the truth in all, except in conveying that
her mother was not of the lower orders, and that she went to the river
to wash her spaniel and her pony instead of her clothes.
“Your father--did they not arrest him again? Did they not know?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “That is not the way in Spain. He was shot,
as the orders were, with his back to the wall by a squad of soldiers
with regulation bullets. If he chose to come to life again, that was
his own affair. The Government would take no notice of him after he was
dead. He could bury himself, or he could come alive--it was all the same
to them. So he came alive again.”
“That is a story which would make a man’s name if he wrote it down,”
said Jean Jacques eloquently. “And the poor little senora, but my heart
bleeds for her! To go like that in such pain, and not to know--If she
had been my wife I think I would have gone after her to tell her it was
all right, and to be with her--”
He paused confused, for that seemed like a reflection on her father’s
chivalry, and for a man who had risked his life for his banished
king--what would he have thought if he had been told that Sebastian
Dolores was an anarchist who loathed kings!--it was an insult to suggest
that he did not know the right thing to do, or, knowing, had not done
it.
She saw the weakness of his case at once. “There was his duty to the
living,” she said indignantly.
“Ah, forgive me--what a fool I am!” Jean Jacques said repentantly at
once. “There was his little girl, his beloved child, his Carmen Dolores,
so beautiful, with the voice like a flute, and--”
He drew nearer to her, his hand was outstretched to take hers; his eyes
were full of the passion of the moment; pity was drowning all caution,
all the Norman shrewdness in him, when the Antoine suddenly stopped
almost dead with a sudden jolt and shock, then plunged sideways, jerked,
and trembled.
“We’ve struck a sunk iceberg--the rest of the story to-morrow,
Senorita,” he cried, as they both sprang to their feet.
“The rest of the story to-morrow,” she repeated, angry at the stroke
of fate which had so interrupted the course of her fortune. She said it
with a voice also charged with fear; for she was by nature a landfarer,
not a sea-farer, though on the rivers of Spain she had lived almost as
much as on land, and she was a good swimmer.
“The rest to-morrow,” she repeated, controlling herself.