“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:
“Tut, tut,” he had exclaimed, “an actor--an actor once a lawyer! That’s
serious. She’s at an age--and with a temperament like hers she’ll
believe anything, if once her affections are roused. She has a flair for
the romantic, for the thing that’s out of reach--the bird on the highest
branch, the bird in the sky beyond ours, the song that was lost before
time was, the light that never was on sea or land. Why, damn it, damn it
all, my Solon, here’s the beginning of a case in Court unless we can lay
the fellow by the heels! How long is he here for?”
When M. Fille had told him that he would stay for another month for
certain, and no doubt much longer, if there seemed a prospect of winning
the heiress of the Manor Cartier, the Judge gave a groan.
“We must get him away, somehow,” he said. “Where does he stay?”
“At the house of Louis Charron,” was the reply. “Louis Charron--isn’t he
the fellow that sells whisky without a license?”
“It is so, monsieur.”
The Judge moved his head from side to side like a bear in a cage. “It
is that, is it, my Fille? By the thumb of the devil, isn’t it time then
that Louis Charron was arrested for breaking the law? Also how do we
know but that the interloping fellow Fynes is an agent for a whisky firm
perhaps? Couldn’t he, then, on suspicion, be arrested with--”
The Clerk of the Court shook his head mournfully. His Judge was surely
becoming childish in his old age. He looked again closely at the great
man, and saw a glimmer of moisture in the grey eyes. It was clear that
Judge Carcasson felt deeply the dangers of the crisis, and that the
futile outburst had merely been the agitated protest of the helpless.
“The man is what he says he is--an actor; and it would be folly to
arrest him. If our Zoe is really fond of him, it would only make a
martyr of him.”
As he made this reply M. Fille looked furtively at the other--out of
the corner of his eye, as it were. The reply of the Judge was
impatient, almost peevish and rough. “Did you think I was in earnest,
my punchinello? Surely I don’t look so young as all that. I am over
sixty-five, and am therefore mentally developed!”
M. Fille was exactly sixty-five years of age, and the blow was a shrewd
one. He drew himself up with rigid dignity.
“You must feel sorry sometimes for those who suffered when your mind was
undeveloped, monsieur,” he answered. “You were a judge at forty-nine,
and you defended poor prisoners for twenty years before that.”
The Judge was conquered, and he was never the man to pretend he was not
beaten when he was. He admired skill too much for that. He squeezed M.
Fille’s arm and said:
“I’ve been quick with my tongue myself, but I feel sure now, that it’s
through long and close association with my Clerk of the Court.”
“Ah, monsieur, you are so difficult to understand!” was the reply. “I
have known you all these years, and yet--”
“And yet you did not know how much of the woman there was in me!...
But yes, it is that. It is that which I fear with our Zoe. Women break
out--they break out, and then there is the devil to pay. Look at her
mother. She broke out. It was not inevitable. It was the curse of
opportunity, the wrong thing popping up to drive her mad at the wrong
moment. Had the wrong thing come at the right time for her, when she was
quite sane, she would be yonder now with our philosopher. Perhaps she
would not be contented if she were there, but she would be there; and
as time goes on, to be where we were in all things which concern the
affections, that is the great matter.”
“Ah, yes, ah, yes,” was the bright-eyed reply of that Clerk, “there is
no doubt of that! My sister and I there, we are fifty years together,
never with the wrong thing at the wrong time, always the thing as it
was, always to be where we were.”
The Judge shook his head. “There is an eternity of difference, Fille,
between the sister and brother and the husband and wife. The sacredness
of isolation is the thing which holds the brother and sister together.
The familiarity of--but never mind what it is that so often forces
husband and wife apart. It is there, and it breaks out in rebellion as
it did with the wife of Jean Jacques Barbille. As she was a strong woman
in her way, it spoiled her life, and his too when it broke out.”
M. Fille’s face lighted with memory and feeling. “Ah, a woman of
powerful emotions, monsieur, that is so! I think I never told you, but
at the last, in my office, when she went, she struck George Masson in
the face. It was a blow that--but there it was; I have never liked to
think of it. When I do, I shudder. She was a woman who might have been
in other circumstances--but there!”
The Judge suddenly stopped in his walk and faced round on his friend.
“Did you ever know, my Solon,” he said, “that it was not Jean Jacques
who saved Carmen at the wreck of the Antoine, but it was she who saved
him; and yet she never breathed of it in all the years. One who was
saved from the Antoine told me of it. Jean Jacques was going down.
Carmen gave him her piece of wreckage to hang on to, and swam ashore
without help. He never gave her the credit. There was something big in
the woman, but it did not come out right.”
M. Fille threw up his hands. “Grace de Dieu, is it so that she saved
Jean Jacques? Then he would not be here if it had not been for her?”
“That is the obvious deduction, Maitre Fille,” replied the Judge.
The Clerk of the Court seemed moved. “He did not treat her ill. I
know that he would take her back to-morrow if he could. He has never
forgotten. I saw him weeping one day--it was where she used to sing to
the flax-beaters by the Beau Cheval. I put my hand on his shoulder, and
said, ‘I know, I comprehend; but be a philosopher, Jean Jacques.’”
“What did he say?” asked the Judge.
“He drew himself up. ‘In my mind, in my soul, I am philosopher always,’
he said, ‘but my eyes are the windows of my heart, m’sieu’. They look
out and see the sorrow of one I loved. It is for her sorrow that I weep,
not for my own. I have my child, I have money; the world says to me,
“How goes it, my friend?” I have a home--a home; but where is she, and
what does the world say to her?’”
The Judge shook his head sadly. “I used to think I knew life, but I come
to the belief in the end that I know nothing. Who could have guessed
that he would have spoken like that!”
“He forgave her, monsieur.”
The Judge nodded mournfully. “Yes, yes, but I used to think it is such
men who forgive one day and kill the next. You never can tell where they
will explode, philosophy or no philosophy.”
The Judge was right. After all the years that had passed since his wife
had left him, Jean Jacques did explode. It was the night of his birthday
party at which was present the Man from Outside. It was in the hour when
he first saw what the Clerk of the Court had seen some time before--the
understanding between Zoe and Gerard Fynes. It had never occurred to him
that there was any danger. Zoe had been so indifferent to the young men
of St. Saviour’s and beyond, had always been so much his friend and the
friend of those much older than himself, like Judge Carcasson and M.
Fille, that he had not yet thought of her electing to go and leave him
alone.
To leave him alone! To be left alone--it had never become a possibility
to his mind. It did not break upon him with its full force all at once.
He first got the glimmer of it, then the glimmer grew to a glow, and the
glow to a great red light, in which his brain became drunk, and all his
philosophy was burned up like wood-shavings in a fiery furnace.
“Did you like it so much?” Zoe had asked when her song was finished, and
the Man from Outside had replied, “Ah, but splendid, splendid! It got
into every corner of every one of us.”
“Into the senses--why not into the heart? Songs are meant for the
heart,” said Zoe.
“Yes, yes, certainly,” was the young man’s reply, “but it depends upon
the song whether it touches the heart more than the senses. Won’t you
sing that perfect thing, ‘La Claire Fontaine’?” he added, with eyes as
bright as passion and the hectic fires of his lung-trouble could make
them.
She nodded and was about to sing, for she loved the song, and it had
been ringing in her head all day; but at that point M. Fille rose, and
with his glass raised high--for at that moment Seraphe Corniche and
another carried round native wine and cider to the company--he said:
“To Monsieur Jean Jacques Barbille, and his fifty years, good
health--bonne sante! This is his birthday. To a hundred years for Jean
Jacques!”
Instantly everyone was up with glass raised, and Zoe ran and threw her
arms round her father’s neck. “Kiss me before you drink,” she said.
With a touch almost solemn in its tenderness Jean Jacques drew her head
to his shoulder and kissed her hair, then her forehead. “My blessed
one--my angel,” he whispered; but there was a look in his eyes which
only M. Fille had seen there before. It was the look which had been in
his eyes at the flax-beaters’ place by the river.
“Sing--father, you must sing,” said Zoe, and motioned to the fiddler.
“Sing It’s Fifty Years,” she cried eagerly. They all repeated her
request, and he could but obey.
Jean Jacques’ voice was rather rough, but he had some fine resonant
notes in it, and presently, with eyes fastened on the distance, and
with free gesture and much expression, he sang the first verse of the
haunting ballad of the man who had reached his fifty years:
“Wherefore these flowers?
This fete for me?
Ah, no, it is not fifty years,
Since in my eyes the light you see
First shone upon life’s joys and tears!
How fast the heedless days have flown
Too late to wail the misspent hours,
To mourn the vanished friends I’ve known,
To kneel beside love’s ruined bowers.
Ah, have I then seen fifty years,
With all their joys and hopes and fears!”
Through all the verses he ranged, his voice improving with each phrase,
growing more resonant, till at last it rang out with a ragged richness
which went home to the hearts of all. He was possessed. All at once he
was conscious that the beginning of the end of things was come for
him; and that now, at fifty, in no sphere had he absolutely “arrived,”
neither in home nor fortune, nor--but yes, there was one sphere of
success; there was his fatherhood. There was his daughter, his wonderful
Zoe. He drew his eyes from the distance, and saw that her ardent look
was not towards him, but towards one whom she had known but a few weeks.
Suddenly he stopped in the middle of a verse, and broke forward with
his arms outstretched, laughing. He felt that he must laugh, or he would
cry; and that would be a humiliating thing to do.
“Come, come, my friends, my children, enough of that!” he cried. “We’ll
have no more maundering. Fifty years--what are fifty years! Think of
Methuselah! It’s summer in the world still, and it’s only spring at
St. Saviour’s. It’s the time of the first flowers. Let’s dance--no, no,
never mind the Cure to-night! He will not mind. I’ll settle it with him.
We’ll dance the gay quadrille.”
He caught the hands of the two youngest girls present, and nodded at the
fiddler, who at once began to tune his violin afresh. One of the joyous
young girls, however, began to plead with him.
“Ah, no, let us dance, but at the last--not yet, M’sieu’ Jean Jacques!
There is Zoe’s song, we must have that, and then we must have charades.
Here is M’sieu’ Fynes--he can make splendid charades for us. Then the
dance at the last--ah, yes, yes, M’sieu’ Jean Jacques! Let it be like
that. We all planned it, and though it is your birthday, it’s us are
making the fete.”
“As you will then, as you will, little ones,” Jean Jacques acquiesced
with a half-sigh; but he did not look at his daughter. Somehow,
suddenly, a strange constraint possessed him where Zoe was concerned.
“Then let us have Zoe’s song; let us have ‘La Claire Fontaine’,” cried
the black-eyed young madcap who held Jean Jacques’ arms.
But Zoe interrupted. “No, no,” she protested, “the singing spell is
broken. We will have the song after the charades--after the charades.”
“Good, good--after the charades!” they all cried, for there would be
charades like none which had ever been played before, with a real actor
to help them, to carry them through as they did on the stage. To them
the stage was compounded of mystery, gaiety and the forbidden.
So, for the next half-hour they were all at the disposal of the Man from
Outside, who worked as though it was a real stage, and they were real
players, and there were great audiences to see them. It was all quite
wonderful, and it involved certain posings, attitudes, mimicry and
pantomime, for they were really ingenious charades.
So it happened that Zoe’s fingers often came in touch with those of
the stage-manager, that his hands touched her shoulders, that his cheek
brushed against her dark hair once, and that she had sensations never
experienced before. Why was it that she thrilled when she came near to
him, that her whole body throbbed and her heart fluttered when their
shoulders or arms touched? Her childlike nature, with all its warmth and
vibration of life, had never till now felt the stir of sex in its vital
sense. All men had in one way been the same to her; but now she realized
that there was a world-wide difference between her Judge Carcasson, her
little Clerk of the Court, and this young man whose eyes drank hers. She
had often been excited, even wildly agitated, had been like a sprite let
loose in quiet ways; but that was mere spirit. Here was body and senses
too; here was her whole being alive to a music, which had an aching
sweetness and a harmony coaxing every sense into delight.
“To-morrow evening, by the flume, where the beechtrees are--come--at
six. I want to speak with you. Will you come?”
Thus whispered the maker of this music of the senses, who directed the
charades, but who was also directing the course of another life than his
own.
“Yes, if I can,” was Zoe’s whispered reply, and the words shook as she
said them; for she felt that their meeting in the beech-trees by the
flume would be of consequence beyond imagination.
Judge Carcasson had always said that Zoe had judgment beyond her years;
M. Fille had remarked often that she had both prudence and shrewdness as
well as a sympathetic spirit; but M. Fille’s little whispering sister,
who could never be tempted away from her home to any house, to whom the
market and the church were like pilgrimages to distant wilds, had said
to her brother:
“Wait, Armand--wait till Zoe is waked, and then prudence and wisdom will
be but accident. If all goes well, you will see prudence and wisdom; but
if it does not, you will see--ah, but just Zoe!”
The now alert Jean Jacques had seen the whispering of the two, though he
did not know what had been said. It was, however, something secret, and
if it was secret, then it was--yes, it was love; and love between his
daughter and that waif of the world--the world of the stage--in which
men and women were only grown-up children, and bad grown-up children at
that--it was not to be endured. One thing was sure, the man should come
to the Manor Cartier no more. He would see to that to-morrow. There
would be no faltering or paltering on his part. His home had been shaken
to its foundations once, and he was determined that it should not fall
about his ears a second time. An Englishman, an actor, a Protestant, and
a renegade lawyer! It was not to be endured.
The charade now being played was the best of the evening. One of the
madcap friends of Zoe was to be a singing-girl. She was supposed to
carry a tambourine. When her turn to enter came, with a look of mischief
and a gay dancing step, she ran into the room. In her hands was a
guitar, not a tambourine. When Zoe saw the guitar she gave a cry.
“Where did you get that?” she asked in a low, shocked, indignant voice.
“In your room--your bedroom,” was the half-frightened answer. “I saw it
on the dresser, and I took it.”
“Come, come, let’s get on with the charade,” urged the Man from Outside.
On the instant’s pause, in which Zoe looked at her lover almost
involuntarily, and without fully understanding what he said, someone
else started forward with a smothered exclamation--of anger, of horror,
of dismay. It was Jean Jacques. He was suddenly transformed.
His eyes were darkened by hideous memory, his face alight with passion.
He caught from the girl’s hands the guitar--Carmen’s forgotten guitar
which he had not seen for seven years--how well he knew it! With both
hands he broke it across his knee. The strings, as they snapped, gave
a shrill, wailing cry, like a voice stopped suddenly by death. Stepping
jerkily to the fireplace he thrust it into the flame.
“Ah, there!” he said savagely. “There--there!” When he turned round
slowly again, his face--which he had never sought to control before
he had his great Accident seven years ago--was under his command. A
strange, ironic-almost sardonic-smile was on his lips.
“It’s in the play,” he said.
“No, it’s not in the charade, Monsieur Barbille,” said the Man from
Outside fretfully.
“That is the way I read it, m’sieu’,” retorted Jean Jacques, and he made
a motion to the fiddler.
“The dance! The dance!” he exclaimed.
But yet he looked little like a man who wished to dance, save upon a
grave.