It is a bad thing to call down a crisis in the night-time. A “scene” at
midnight is a savage enemy of ultimate understanding, and that Devil,
called Estrangement, laughs as he observes the objects of his attention
in conflict when the midnight candle burns.
He should have been seized with a fit of remorse, however, at the sight
he saw in the Manor Cartier at midnight of the day when Jean Jacques
Barbille had reached his fiftieth year. There is nothing which, for
pathos and for tragedy, can compare with a struggle between the young
and the old.
The Devil of Estrangement when he sees it, may go away and indulge
himself in sleep; for there will be no sleep for those who, one young
and the other old, break their hearts on each other’s anvils, when the
lights are low and it is long till morning.
When Jean Jacques had broken the forgotten guitar which his daughter had
retrieved from her mother’s life at the Manor Cartier (all else he had
had packed and stored away in the flour-mill out of sight) and thrown it
in the fire, there had begun a revolt in the girl’s heart, founded on a
sense of injustice, but which itself became injustice also; and that is
a dark thing to come between those who love--even as parent and child.
After her first exclamation of dismay and pain, Zoe had regained her
composure, and during the rest of the evening she was full of feverish
gaiety. Indeed her spirits and playful hospitality made the evening a
success in spite of the skeleton at the feast. Jean Jacques had also
roused himself, and, when the dance began, he joined in with spirit,
though his face was worn and haggard even when lighted by his smile. But
though the evening came to the conventional height of hilarity, there
was a note running through it which made even the youngest look at each
other, as though to say, “Now, what’s going to happen next!”
Three people at any rate knew that something was going to happen. They
were Zoe, the Man from Outside and M. Fille. Zoe had had more than one
revelation that night, and she felt again as she did one day, seven
years before, when, coming home from over the hills, she had stepped
into a house where Horror brooded as palpably as though it sat beside
the fire, or hung above the family table. She had felt something as soon
as she had entered the door that far-off day, though the house seemed
empty. It was an emptiness which was filled with a torturing presence or
torturing presenes. It had stilled her young heart. What was it? She
had learned the truth soon enough. Out of the sunset had come her father
with a face twisted with misery, and as she ran to him, he had caught
her by both shoulders, looked through her eyes to something far beyond,
and hoarsely said: “She is gone--gone from us! She has run away from
home! Curse her baptism--curse it, curse it!”
Zoe could never forget these last words she had ever heard her father
speak of Carmen. They were words which would make any Catholic shudder
to hear. It was a pity he had used them, for they made her think at last
that her mother had been treated with injustice. This, in spite of the
fact that in the days, now so far away, when her mother was with them
she had ever been nearer to her father, and that, after first childhood,
she and her mother were not so close as they had been, when she went to
sleep to the humming of a chanson of Cadiz. Her own latent motherhood,
however, kept stealing up out of the dim distances of childhood’s
ignorance and, with modesty and allusiveness, whispering knowledge in
her ear. So it was that now she looked back pensively to the years she
had spent within sight and sound of her handsome mother, and out of the
hunger of her own spirit she had come to idealize her memory. It was
good to have a loving father; but he was a man, and he was so busy just
when she wanted--when she wanted she knew not what, but at least to go
and lay her head on a heart that would understand what was her sorrow,
her joy, or her longing.
And now here at last was come Crisis, which showed its thunderous
head in the gay dance, and shook his war-locks in the fire, where her
mother’s guitar had shrieked in its last agony.
When all the guests had gone, when the bolts had been shot home, and old
Seraphe Corniche had gone to bed, father and daughter came face to face.
There was a moment’s pause, as the two looked at each other, and then
Zoe came up to Jean Jacques to kiss him good-night. It was her way of
facing the issue. Instinctively she knew that he would draw back, and
that the struggle would begin. It might almost seem that she had invited
it; for she had let the Man from Outside hold her hand for far longer
than courtesy required, while her father looked on with fretful
eyes--even with a murmuring which was not a benediction. Indeed, he had
evaded shaking hands with his hated visitor by suddenly offering him a
cigar, and then in the doorway itself handing a lighted match.
“His eminence, Cardinal Christophe, gave these cigars to me when he
passed through St. Saviour’s five years ago,” Jean Jacques had remarked
loftily, “and I always smoke one on my birthday. I am a good Catholic,
and his eminence rested here for a whole day.”
He had had a grim pleasure in avoiding the handshake, and in having the
Protestant outsider smoke the Catholic cigar! In his anger it seemed to
him that he had done something worthy almost of the Vatican, indeed of
the great Cardinal Christophe himself. Even in his moments of crisis,
in his hours of real tragedy, in the times when he was shaken to the
centre, Jean Jacques fancied himself more than a little. It was as
the master-carpenter had remarked seven years before, he was always
involuntarily saying, “Here I come--look at me. I am Jean Jacques
Barbille!”
When Zoe reached out a hand to touch his arm, and raised her face as
though to kiss him good-night, Jean Jacques drew back.
“Not yet, Zoe,” he said. “There are some things--What is all this
between you and that man?... I have seen. You must not forget who you
are--the daughter of Jean Jacques Barbille, of the Manor Cartier, whose
name is known in the whole province, who was asked to stand for the
legislature. You are Zoe Barbille--Mademoiselle Zoe Barbille. We do not
put on airs. We are kind to our neighbours, but I am descended from the
Baron of Beaugard. I have a place--yes, a place in society; and it is
for you to respect it. You comprehend?”
Zoe flushed, but there was no hesitation whatever in her reply. “I am
what I have always been, and it is not my fault that I am the daughter
of M. Jean Jacques Barbille! I have never done anything which was not
good enough for the Manor Cartier.” She held her head firmly as she said
it.
Now Jean Jacques flushed, and he did hesitate in his reply. He hated
irony in anyone else, though he loved it in himself, when heaven gave
him inspiration thereto. He was in a state of tension, and was ready
to break out, to be a force let loose--that is the way he would have
expressed it; and he was faced by a new spirit in his daughter which
would surely spring the mine, unless he secured peace by strategy. He
had sense enough to feel the danger.
He did not see, however, any course for diplomacy here, for she had
given him his cue in her last words. As a pure logician he was bound to
take it, though it might lead to drama of a kind painful to them both.
“It is not good enough for the Manor Cartier that you go falling in love
with a nobody from nowhere,” he responded.
“I am not falling in love,” she rejoined.
“What did you mean, then, by looking at him as you did; by whispering
together; by letting him hold your hand when he left, and him looking at
you as though he’d eat you up--without sugar!”
“I said I was not falling in love,” she persisted, quietly, but with
characteristic boldness. “I am in love.”
“You are in love with him--with that interloper! Heaven of heavens, do
you speak the truth? Answer me, Zoe Barbille.”
She bridled. “Certainly I will answer. Did you think I would let a man
look at me as he did, that I would look at a man as I looked at him,
that I would let him hold my hand as I did, if I did not love him? Have
you ever seen me do it before?”
Her voice was even and quiet--as though she had made up her mind on a
course, and meant to carry it through to the end.
“No, I never saw you look at a man like that, and everything is as you
say, but--” his voice suddenly became uneven and higher--pitched and a
little hoarse, “but he is English, he is an actor--only that; and he is
a Protestant.”
“Only that?” she asked, for the tone of his voice was such as one would
use in speaking of a toad or vermin, and she could not bear it. “Is it a
disgrace to be any one of those things?”
“The Barbilles have been here for two hundred years; they have been
French Catholics since the time of”--he was not quite sure--“since the
time of Louis XI.,” he added at a venture, and then paused, overcome by
his own rashness.
“Yes, that is a long time,” she said, “but what difference does it make?
We are just what we are now, and as if there never had been a Baron of
Beaugard. What is there against Gerard except that he is an actor, that
he is English, and that he is a Protestant? Is there anything?”
“Sacre, is it not enough? An actor, what is that--to pretend to be
someone else and not to be yourself!”
“It would be better for a great many people to be someone else rather
than themselves--for nothing; and he does it for money.”
“For money! What money has he got? You don’t know. None of us know.
Besides, he’s a Protestant, and he’s English, and that ends it. There
never has been an Englishman or a Protestant in the Barbille family, and
it shan’t begin at the Manor Cartier.” Jean Jacques’ voice was rising in
proportion as he perceived her quiet determination. Here was something
of the woman who had left him seven years ago--left this comfortable
home of his to go to disgrace and exile, and God only knew what else!
Here in this very room--yes, here where they now were, father and
daughter, stood husband and wife that morning when he had his hand on
the lever prepared to destroy the man who had invaded his home; who had
cast a blight upon it, which remained after all the years; after he had
done all a man could do to keep the home and the woman too. The woman
had gone; the home remained with his daughter in it, and now again there
was a fight for home and the woman. Memory reproduced the picture of the
mother standing just where the daughter now stood, Carmen quiet and well
in hand, and himself all shaken with weakness, and with all power gone
out of him--even the power which rage and a murderous soul give.
But yet this was different. There was no such shame here as had fallen
on him seven years ago. But there was a shame after its kind; and if it
were not averted, there was the end of the home, of the prestige, the
pride and the hope of “M’sieu’ Jean Jacques, philosophe.”
“What shall not begin here at the Manor Cartier?” she asked with burning
cheek.
“The shame--it shall not begin here.”
“What shame, father?”
“Of marriage with a Protestant and an actor.”
“You will not let me marry him?” she persisted stubbornly.
Her words seemed to shake him all to pieces. It was as though he was
going through the older tragedy all over again. It had possessed him
ever since the sight of Carmen’s guitar had driven him mad three hours
ago. He swayed to and fro, even as he did when his hand left the lever
and he let the master-carpenter go free. It was indeed a philosopher
under torture, a spirit rocking on its anchor. Just now she had put into
words herself what, even in his fear, he had hoped had no place in her
mind--marriage with the man. He did not know this daughter of his very
well. There was that in her which was far beyond his ken. Thousands of
miles away in Spain it had origin, and the stream of tendency came down
through long generations, by courses unknown to him.
“Marry him--you want to marry him!” he gasped. “You, my Zoe, want to
marry that tramp of a Protestant!”
Her eyes blazed in anger. Tramp--the man with the air of a young
Alexander, with a voice like the low notes of the guitar thrown to the
flames! Tramp!
“If I love him I ought to marry him,” she answered with a kind of
calmness, however, though all her body was quivering. Suddenly she came
close to her father, a great sympathy welled up in her eyes, and her
voice shook.
“I do not want to leave you, father, and I never meant to do so. I never
thought of it as possible; but now it is different. I want to stay with
you; but I want to go with him too.”
Presently as she seemed to weaken before him, he hardened. “You can’t
have both,” he declared with as much sternness as was possible to him,
and with a Norman wilfulness which was not strength. “You shall
not marry an actor and a Protestant. You shall not marry a man like
that--never--never--never. If you do, you will never have a penny of
mine, and I will never--”
“Oh, hush--Mother of Heaven, hush!” she cried. “You shall not put a
curse on me too.”
“What curse?” he burst forth, passion shaking him. “You cursed my
mother’s baptism. It would be a curse to be told that you would see
me no more, that I should be no more part of this home. There has been
enough of that curse here.... Ah, why--why--” she added with a sudden
rush of indignation, “why did you destroy the only thing I had of hers?
It was all that was left--her guitar. I loved it so.”
All at once, with a cry of pain, she turned and ran to the
door--entering on the staircase which led to her room. In the doorway
she turned.
“I can’t help it. I can’t help it, father. I love him--but I love you
too,” she cried. “I don’t want to go--oh, I don’t want to go! Why do
you--?” her voice choked; she did not finish the sentence; or if she
did, he could not hear.
Then she opened the door wide, and disappeared into the darkness of
the unlighted stairway, murmuring, “Pity--have pity on me, holy Mother,
Vierge Marie!” Then the door closed behind her almost with a bang.
After a moment of stupefied inaction Jean Jacques hurried over and
threw open the door she had closed. “Zoe--little Zoe, come back and
say good-night,” he called. But she did not hear, for, with a burst of
crying, she had hurried into her own room and shut and locked the door.
It was a pity, a measureless pity, as Mary the Mother must have seen,
if she could see mortal life at all, that Zoe did not hear him. It might
have altered the future. As it was, the Devil of Estrangement might well
be content with his night’s work.