The Money Master, Volume 3.

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THE MONEY MASTER

By Gilbert Parker

EPOCH THE THIRD

XIII. THE MAN FROM OUTSIDE
XIV. "I DO NOT WANT TO GO"
XV. BON MARCHE

CHAPTER XIII

THE MAN FROM OUTSIDE

"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!"

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