The Money Master, Volume 2.

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THE MONEY MASTER

By Gilbert Parker

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

CHAPTER IV

THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER AND THE CLERK OF THE COURT TELLS A STORY

It was hard to say which was the more important person in the parish, the
New Cure or M'sieu' Jean Jacques Barbille. When the Old Cure was alive
Jean Jacques was a lesser light, and he accepted his degree of
illumination with content. But when Pere Langon was gathered to his
fathers, and thousands had turned away from the graveyard, where he who
had baptised them, confirmed them, blessed them, comforted them, and
firmly led them was laid to rest, they did not turn at once to his
successor with confidence and affection. The new cure, M. Savry, was
young; the Old Cure had lived to be eighty-five, bearing wherever he went
a lamp of wisdom at which the people lighted their small souls. The New
Cure could command their obedience, but he could not command their love
and confidence until he had earned them.

So it was that, for a time, Jean Jacques took the place of the Old Cure
in the human side of the life of the district, though in a vastly lesser
degree. Up to the death of M. Langon, Jean Jacques had done very well
in life, as things go in out-of-the-way places of the world. His mill,
which ground good flour, brought him increasing pence; his saw-mill more
than paid its way; his farms made a small profit, in spite of a cousin
who worked one on halves, but who had a spendthrift wife; the ash-factory
which his own initiative had started made no money, but the loss was only
small; and he had even made profit out of his lime-kilns, although
Sebastian Dolores, Carmen's father, had at one time mismanaged them--but
of that anon. Jean Jacques himself managed the business of money-lending
and horse-dealing; and he also was agent for fire insurance and a dealer
in lightning rods.

In the thirteen years since he married he had been able to keep a good
many irons in the fire, and also keep them more or less hot. Many people
in his and neighbouring parishes were indebted to him, and it was worth
their while to stand well with him. If he insisted on debts being paid,
he was never exacting or cruel. If he lent money, he never demanded more
than eight per cent.; and he never pressed his debtors unduly. His
cheerfulness seldom deserted him, and he was notably kind to the poor.
Not seldom in the winter time a poor man, here and there in the parish,
would find dumped down outside his door in the early morning a half-cord
of wood or a bag of flour.

It could not be said that Jean Jacques did not enjoy his own generosity.
His vanity, however, did not come from an increasing admiration of his
own personal appearance, a weakness which often belongs to middle age;
but from the study of his so-called philosophy, which in time became an
obsession with him. In vain the occasional college professors, who spent
summer months at St. Saviour's, sought to interest him in science and
history, for his philosophy had large areas of boredom; but science
marched over too jagged a road for his tender intellectual feet; the
wild places where it led dismayed him. History also meant numberless
dates and facts. Perhaps he could have managed the dates, for he was
quick at figures, but the facts were like bees in their hive,--he could
scarcely tell one from another by looking at them.

So it was that Jean Jacques kept turning his eyes, as he thought, to the
everlasting meaning of things, to "the laws of Life and the decrees of
Destiny." He was one of those who had found, as he thought, what he
could do, and was sensible enough to do it. Let the poor fellows, who
gave themselves to science, trouble their twisted minds with trigonometry
and the formula of some grotesque chemical combination; let the dull
people rub their noses in the ink of Greek and Latin, which was no use
for everyday consumption; let the heads of historians ache with the
warring facts of the lives of nations; it all made for sleep. But
philosophy--ah, there was a field where a man could always use knowledge
got from books or sorted out of his own experiences!

It happened, therefore, that Jean Jacques, who not too vaguely realized
that there was reputation to be got from being thought a philosopher,
always carried about with him his little compendium from the quay at
Quebec, which he had brought ashore inside his redflannel shirt, with the
antique silver watch, when the Antoine went down.

Thus also it was that when a lawyer in court at Vilray, four miles from
St. Saviour's, asked him one day, when he stepped into the witness-box,
what he was, meaning what was his occupation, his reply was, "Moi-je suis
M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosophe--(Me--I am M'sieu' Jean Jacques,
philosopher)."

A little later outside the court-house, the Judge who had tried the case
--M. Carcasson--said to the Clerk of the Court:

"A curious, interesting little man, that Monsieur Jean Jacques. What's
his history?"

"A character, a character, monsieur le juge," was the reply of M. Amand
Fille. "His family has been here since Frontenac's time. He is a figure
in the district, with a hand in everything. He does enough foolish
things to ruin any man, yet swims along--swims along. He has many kinds
of business--mills, stores, farms, lime-kilns, and all that, and keeps
them all going; and as if he hadn't enough to do, and wasn't risking
enough, he's now organizing a cheese-factory on the co-operative
principle, as in Upper Canada among the English."

"He has a touch of originality, that's sure," was the reply of the Judge.

The Clerk of the Court nodded and sighed. "Monseigneur Giron of Laval,
the greatest scholar in Quebec, he said to me once that M'sieu' Jean
Jacques missed being a genius by an inch. But, monsieur le juge, not to
have that inch is worse than to be an ignoramus."

Judge Carcasson nodded. "Ah, surely! Your Jean Jacques lacks a balance-
wheel. He has brains, but not enough. He has vision, but it is not
steady; he has argument, but it breaks down just where it should be most
cohesive. He interested me. I took note of every turn of his mind as he
gave evidence. He will go on for a time, pulling his strings, doing this
and doing that, and then, all at once, when he has got a train of
complications, his brain will not be big enough to see the way out. Tell
me, has he a balance-wheel in his home--a sensible wife, perhaps?"

The Clerk of the Court shook his head mournfully and seemed to hesitate.
Then he said, "Comme ci, comme ca--but no, I will speak the truth about
it. She is a Spaniard--the Spanische she is called by the neighbours.
I will tell you all about that, and you will wonder that he has carried
on as well as he has, with his vanity and his philosophy."

"He'll have need of his philosophy before he's done, or I don't know
human nature; he'll get a bad fall one of these days," responded the
Judge. "'Moi-je suis M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosophe'--that is what he
said. Bumptious little man, and yet--and yet there's something in him.
There's a sense of things which everyone doesn't have--a glimmer of life
beyond his own orbit, a catching at the biggest elements of being,
a hovering on the confines of deep understanding, as it were. Somehow
I feel almost sorry for him, though he annoyed me while he was in the
witness-box, in spite of myself. He was as the English say, so 'damn
sure.'"

"So damn sure always," agreed the Clerk of the Court, with a sense of
pleasure that his great man, this wonderful aged little judge, should
have shown himself so human as to use such a phrase.

"But, no doubt, the sureness has been a good servant in his business,"
returned the Judge. "Confidence in a weak world gets unearned profit
often. But tell me about his wife--the Spanische. Tell me the how and
why, and everything. I'd like to trace our little money-man wise to his
source."

Again M. Fille was sensibly agitated. "She is handsome, and she has
great, good gifts when she likes to use them," he answered. "She can do
as much in an hour as most women can do in two; but then she will not
keep at it. Her life is but fits and starts. Yet she has a good head
for business, yes, very good. She can see through things. Still, there
it is--she will not hold fast from day to day."

"Yes, yes, but where did she come from? What was the field where she
grew?"

"To be sure, monsieur. It was like this," responded the other.

Thereupon M. Fille proceeded to tell the history, musical with legend,
of Jean Jacques' Grand Tour, of the wreck of the Antoine, of the marriage
of the "seigneur," the home-coming, and the life that followed, so far as
rumour, observation, and a mind with a gift for narrative, which was not
to be incomplete for lack of imagination, could make it. It was only
when he offered his own reflections on Carmen Dolores, now Carmen
Barbille, and on women generally, that Judge Carcasson pulled him up.

"So, so, I see. She has temperament and so on, but she's unsteady,
and regarded by her neighbours not quite as one that belongs. Bah,
the conceit of every race! They are all the same. The English are the
worst--as though the good God was English. But the child--so beautiful,
you say, and yet more like the father than the mother. He is not
handsome, that Jean Jacques, but I can understand that the little one
should be like him and yet beautiful too. I should like to see the
child."

Suddenly the Clerk of the Court stopped and touched the arm of his
distinguished friend and patron. "That is very easy, monsieur,"
he said eagerly, "for there she is in the red wagon yonder, waiting for
her father. She adores him, and that makes trouble sometimes. Then the
mother gets fits, and makes things hard at the Manor Cartier. It is not
all a bed of roses for our Jean Jacques. But there it is. He is very
busy all the time. Something doing always, never still, except when you
will find him by the road-side, or in a tavern with all the people round
him, talking, jesting, and he himself going into a trance with his book
of philosophy. It is very strange that everlasting going, going, going,
and yet that love of his book. I sometimes think it is all pretence, and
that he is all vanity--or almost so. Heaven forgive me for my want of
charity!"

The little round judge cocked his head astutely. "But you say he is kind
to the poor, that he does not treat men hardly who are in debt to him,
and that he will take his coat off his back to give to a tramp--is it
so?"

"As so, as so, monsieur."

"Then he is not all vanity, and because of that he will feel the blow
when it comes--alas, so much he will feel it!"

"What blow, monsieur le juge?--but ah, look, monsieur!" He pointed
eagerly. "There she is, going to the red wagon--Madame Jean Jacques.
Is she not a figure of a woman? See the walk of her--is it not
distinguished? She is half a hand-breadth taller than Jean Jacques. And
her face, most sure it is a face to see. If Jean Jacques was not so busy
with his farms and his mills and his kilns and his usury, he would see
what a woman he has got. It is his good fortune that she has such sense
in business. When Jean Jacques listens to her, he goes right. She
herself did not want her father to manage the lime-kilns--the old
Sebastian Dolores. She was for him staying at Mirimachi, where he kept
the books of the lumber firm. But no, Jean Jacques said that he could
make her happy by having her father near her, and he would not believe
she meant what she said. He does not understand her; that is the
trouble. He knows as much of women or men as I know of--"

"Of the law--hein?" laughed the great man.

"Monsieur--ah, that is your little joke! I laugh, yes, but I laugh,"
responded the Clerk of the Court a little uncertainly. "Now once when
she told him that the lime-kilns--"

The Judge, who had retraced his steps down the street of the town--it was
little more than a large village, but because it had a court-house and a
marketplace it was called a town--that he might have a good look at
Madame Jean Jacques and her child before he passed them, suddenly said:

"How is it you know so much about it all, Maitre Fille--as to what she
says and of the inner secrets of the household? Ah, ha, my little
Lothario, I have caught you--a bachelor too, with time on his hands,
and the right side of seventy as well! The evidence you have given of a
close knowledge of the household of our Jean Jacques does not have its
basis in hearsay, but in acute personal observation. Tut-tut! Fie-fie!
my little gay Clerk of the Court. Fie! Fie!"

M. Fille was greatly disconcerted. He had never been a Lothario.
In forty years he had never had an episode with one of "the other sex,"
but it was not because he was impervious to the softer emotions. An
intolerable shyness had ever possessed him when in the presence of women,
and even small girl children had frightened him, till he had made friends
with little Zoe Barbille, the daughter of Jean Jacques. Yet even with
Zoe, who was so simple and companionable and the very soul of childish
confidence, he used to blush and falter till she made him talk. Then he
became composed, and his tongue was like a running stream, and on that
stream any craft could sail. On it he became at ease with madame the
Spanische, and he even went so far as to look her full in the eyes on
more than one occasion.

"Answer me--ah, you cannot answer!" teasingly added the Judge, who loved
his Clerk of the Court, and had great amusement out of his discomfiture.
"You are convicted. At an age when a man should be settling down, you
are gallivanting with the wife of a philosopher."

"Monsieur--monsieur le juge!" protested M. Fille with slowly heightening
colour. "I am innocent, yes, altogether. There is nothing, believe me.
It is the child, the little Zoe--but a maid of charm and kindness. She
brings me cakes and the toffy made by her own hands; and if I go to the
Manor Cartier, as I often do, it is to be polite and neighbourly. If
Madame says things to me, and if I see what I see, and hear what I hear,
it is no crime; it is no misdemeanour; it is within the law--the perfect
law."

Suddenly the Judge linked his arm within that of the other, for he also
was little, and he was fat and round and ruddy, and even smaller than M.
Fille, who was thin, angular and pale.

"Ah, my little Confucius," he said gently, "have you seen and heard me so
seldom that you do not know me yet, or what I really think? Of course it
is within the law--the perfect law--to visit at m'sieu' the philosopher's
house and talk at length also to m'sieu' the philosopher's wife; while to
make the position regular by friendship with the philosopher's child is a
wisdom which I can only ascribe to"--his voice was charged with humour
and malicious badinage "to an extended acquaintance with the devices of
human nature, as seen in those episodes of the courts with which you have
been long familiar."

"Oh, monsieur, dear monsieur!" protested the Clerk of the Court, "you
always make me your butt."

"My friend," said the Judge, squeezing his arm, "if I could have you no
other way, I would make you my butler!"

Then they both laughed at the inexpensive joke, and the Clerk of the
Court was in high spirits, for on either side of the street were people
with whom he lived every day, and they could see the doyen of the Bench,
the great Judge Carcasson, who had refused to be knighted, arm in arm
with him. Aye, and better than all, and more than all, here was Zoe
Barbille drawing her mother's attention to him almost in the embrace of
the magnificent jurist.

The Judge, with his small, round, quizzical eyes which missed nothing,
saw too; and his attention was strangely arrested by the faces of both
the mother and the child. His first glance at the woman's face made him
flash an inward light on the memory of Jean Jacques' face in the witness-
box, and a look of reflective irony came into his own. The face of
Carmen Dolores, wife of the philosophic miller and money-master, did not
belong to the world where she was placed--not because she was so unlike
the habitant women, or even the wives of the big farmers, or the sister
of the Cure, or the ladies of the military and commercial exiles who
lived in that portion of the province; but because of an alien something
in her look--a lonely, distant sense of isolation, a something which
might hide a companionship and sympathy of a rare kind, or might be but
the mask of a furtive, soulless nature. In the child's face was nothing
of this. It was open as the day, bright with the cheerfulness of her
father's countenance, alive with a humour which that countenance did not
possess. The contour was like that of Jean Jacques, but with a fineness
and delicacy to its fulness absent from his own; and her eyes were a deep
and lustrous brown, under a forehead which had a boldness of gentle
dignity possessed by neither father nor mother. Her hair was thick,
brown and very full, like that of her father, and in all respects, save
one, she had an advantage over both her parents. Her mouth had a
sweetness which might not unfairly be called weakness, though that was
balanced by a chin of commendable strength.

But the Judge's eyes found at once this vulnerable point in her character
as he had found that of her mother. Delightful the child was, and alert
and companionable, with no remarkable gifts, but with a rare charm and
sympathy. Her face was the mirror of her mind, and it had no ulterior
thought. Her mother's face, the Judge had noted, was the foreground of a
landscape which had lonely shadows. It was a face of some distinction
and suited to surroundings more notable, though the rural life Carmen had
led since the Antoine went down and her fortunes came up, had coarsened
her beauty a very little.

"There's something stirring in the coverts," said the Judge to himself as
he was introduced to the mother and child. By a hasty gesture Zoe gave a
command to M. Fille to help her down. With a hand on his shoulder she
dropped to the ground. Her object was at once apparent. She made a
pretty old-fashioned curtsey to the Judge, then held out her hand, as
though to reassert her democratic equality.

As the Judge looked at Madame Barbille, he was involuntarily, but none
the less industriously, noting her characteristics; and the sum of his
reflections, after a few moments' talk, was that dangers he had seen
ahead of Jean Jacques, would not be averted by his wife, indeed might
easily have their origin in her.

"I wonder it has gone on as long as it has," he said to himself; though
it seemed unreasonable that his few moments with her, and the story told
him by the Clerk of the Court, should enable him to come to any definite
conclusion. But at eighty-odd Judge Carcasson was a Solon and a Solomon
in one. He had seen life from all angles, and he was not prepared to
give any virtue or the possession of any virtue too much rope; while
nothing in life surprised him.

"How would you like to be a judge?" he asked of Zoe, suddenly taking her
hand in his. A kinship had been at once established between them, so
little has age, position, and intellect to do with the natural
gravitations of human nature.

She did not answer direct, and that pleased him. "If I were a judge I
should have no jails," she said. "What would you do with the bad
people?" he asked.

"I would put them alone on a desert island, or out at sea in a little
boat, or out on the prairies without a horse, so that they'd have to work
for their lives."

"Oh, I see! If M. Fille here set fire to a house, you would drop him on
the prairie far away from everything and everybody and let him 'root hog
or die'?"

"Don't you think it would kill him or cure him?" she asked whimsically.

The Judge laughed, his eyes twinkling. "That's what they did when the
world was young, dear ma'm'selle. There was no time to build jails.
Alone on the prairie--a separate prairie for every criminal--that would
take a lot of space; but the idea is all right. It mightn't provide the
proper degree of punishment, however. But that is being too particular.
Alone on the prairie for punishment--well, I should like to see it
tried."

He remembered that saying of his long after, while yet he was alive,
and a tale came to him from the prairies which made his eyes turn
more intently towards a land that is far off, where the miserable
miscalculations and mistakes of this world are readjusted. Now he was
only conscious of a primitive imagination looking out of a young girl's
face, and making a bridge between her understanding and his own.

"What else would you do if you were a judge?" he asked presently.

"I would make my father be a miller," she replied. "But he is a miller,
I hear."

"But he is so many other things--so many. If he was only a miller we
should have more of him. He is at home only a little. If I get up early
enough in the morning, or if I am let stay up at night late enough, I see
him; but that is not enough--is it, mother?" she added with a sudden
sense that she had gone too far, that she ought not to say this perhaps.

The woman's face had darkened for an instant, and irritation showed in
her eyes, but by an effort of the will she controlled herself.

"Your father knows best what he can do and can't do," she said evenly.

"But you would not let a man judge for himself, would you, ma'm'selle?"
asked the old inquisitor. "You would judge for the man what was best for
him to do?"

"I would judge for my father," she replied. "He is too good a man to
judge for himself."

"Well, there's a lot of sense in that, ma'm'selle philosophe," answered
Judge Carcasson. "You would make the good idle, and make the bad work.
The good you would put in a mill to watch the stones grind, and the bad
you would put on a prairie alone to make the grist for the grinding.
Ma'm'selle, we must be friends--is it not so?"

"Haven't we always been friends?" the young girl asked with the look of
a visionary suddenly springing up in her eyes.

Here was temperament indeed. She pleased Judge Carcasson greatly. "But
yes, always, and always, and always," he replied. Inwardly he said to
himself, "I did not see that at first. It is her father in her.

"Zoe!" said her mother reprovingly.

CHAPTER V

THE CLERK OF THE COURT ENDS HIS STORY

A moment afterwards the Judge, as he walked down the street still arm in
arm with the Clerk of the Court, said: "That child must have good luck,
or she will not have her share of happiness. She has depths that are not
deep enough." Presently he added, "Tell me, my Clerk, the man--Jean
Jacques--he is so much away--has there never been any talk about--about."

"About--monsieur le juge?" asked M. Fille rather stiffly. "For instance
--about what?"

"For instance, about a man--not Jean Jacques."

The lips of the Clerk of the Court tightened. "Never at any time--till
now, monsieur le juge."

"Ah--till now!"

The Clerk of the Court blushed. What he was about to say was difficult,
but he alone of all the world guessed at the tragedy which was hovering
over Jean Jacques' home. By chance he had seen something on an afternoon
of three days before, and he had fled from it as a child would fly from a
demon. He was a purist at law, but he was a purist in life also, and not
because the flush of youth had gone and his feet were on the path which
leads into the autumn of a man's days. The thing he had seen had been
terribly on his mind, and he had felt that his own judgment was not
sufficient for the situation, that he ought to tell someone.

The Cure was the only person who had come to his mind when he became
troubled to the point of actual mental agony. But the new curb,
M. Savry, was not like the Old Cure, and, besides, was it not stepping
between the woman and her confessional? Yet he felt that something ought
to be done. It never occurred to him to speak to Jean Jacques. That
would have seemed so brutal to the woman. It came to him to speak to
Carmen, but he knew that he dared not do so. He could not say to a
woman that which must shame her before him, she who had kept her head
so arrogantly high--not so much to him, however, as to the rest of the
world. He had not the courage; and yet he had fear lest some awful thing
would at any moment now befall the Manor Cartier. If it did, he would
feel himself to blame had he done nothing to stay the peril. So far he
was the only person who could do so, for he was the only person who knew!

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