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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The Money Master, by Gilbert Parker, V4
+#105 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+Title: The Money Master, Volume 4.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6278]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on November 28, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MONEY MASTER, PARKER, V4***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MONEY MASTER
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+EPOCH THE FOURTH
+
+XVI.      MISFORTUNES COME NOT SINGLY
+XVII.     HIS GREATEST ASSET
+XVIII.    JEAN JACQUES HAS AN OFFER
+XIX.      SEBASTIAN DOLORES DOES NOT SLEEP
+XX.       "AU 'VOIR, M'SIEU' JEAN JACQUES"
+XXI.      IF SHE HAD KNOWN IN TIME
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+MISFORTUNES COME NOT SINGLY
+
+Judge Carcasson was right.  For a year after Zoe's flight Jean Jacques
+wrapped Sebastian Dolores round his neck like a collar, and it choked him
+like a boaconstrictor.  But not Sebastian Dolores alone did that.  When
+things begin to go wrong in the life of a man whose hands have held too
+many things, the disorder flutters through all the radii of his affairs,
+and presently they rattle away from the hub of his control.
+
+So it was with Jean Jacques.  To take his reprobate father-in-law to his
+lonely home would have brought him trouble in any case; but as things
+were, the Spaniard became only the last straw which broke his camel's
+back.  And what a burden his camel carried--flour-mill, saw-mill, ash-
+factory, farms, a general store, lime-kilns, agency for lightning-rods
+and insurance, cattle-dealing, the project for the new cheese-factory,
+and money-lending!
+
+Money-lending?  It seemed strange that Jean Jacques should be able to
+lend money, since he himself had to borrow, and mortgage also, from time
+to time.  When things began to go really wrong with him financially, he
+mortgaged his farms, his flour-mill, and saw-mill, and then lent money on
+other mortgages.  This he did because he had always lent money, and it
+was a habit so associated with his prestige, that he tied himself up in
+borrowing and lending and counter-mortgaging till, as the saying is, "a
+Philadelphia lawyer" could not have unravelled his affairs without having
+been born again in the law.  That he was able to manipulate his tangled
+affairs, while keeping the confidence of those from whom he borrowed, and
+the admiration of those to whom he lent, was evidence of his capacity.
+"Genius of a kind" was what his biggest creditor called it later.
+
+After a personal visit to St. Saviour's, this biggest creditor and
+financial potentate--M. Mornay--said that if Jean Jacques had been
+started right and trained right, he would have been a "general in the
+financial field, winning big battles."
+
+M. Mornay chanced to be a friend of Judge Carcasson, and when he visited
+Vilray he remembered that the Judge had spoken often of his humble but
+learned friend, the Clerk of the Court, and of his sister.  So M. Mornay
+made his way from the office of the firm of avocats whom he had
+instructed in his affairs with Jean Jacques, to that of M. Fille.  Here
+he was soon engaged in comment on the master-miller and philosopher.
+
+"He has had much trouble, and no doubt his affairs have suffered,"
+remarked M. Fille cautiously, when the ice had been broken and the Big
+Financier had referred casually to the difficulties among which Jean
+Jacques was trying to maintain equilibrium; "but he is a man who can do
+things too hard for other men."
+
+The Big Financier lighted another cigar and blew away several clouds of
+smoke before he said in reply, "Yes, I know he has had family trouble
+again, but that is a year ago, and he has had a chance to get another
+grip of things."
+
+"He did not sit down and mope," explained M. Fille.  "He was at work the
+next day after his daughter's flight just the same as before.  He is a
+man of great courage.  Misfortune does not paralyse him."
+
+M. Mornay's speech was of a kind which came in spurts, with pauses of
+thought between, and the pause now was longer than usual.
+
+"Paralysis--certainly not," he said at last.  "Physical activity is one
+of the manifestations of mental, moral, and even physical shock and
+injury.  I've seen a man with a bullet in him run a half-mile--anywhere;
+I've seen a man ripped up by a crosscut-saw hold himself together, and
+walk--anywhere--till he dropped.  Physical and nervous activity is one of
+the forms which shattered force takes.  I expect that your 'M'sieu' Jean
+Jacques' has been busier this last year than ever before in his life.
+He'd have to be; for a man who has as many irons in the fire as he has,
+must keep running from bellows to bellows when misfortune starts to damp
+him down."
+
+The Clerk of the Court sighed.  He realized the significance of what his
+visitor was saying.  Ever Since Zoe had gone, Jean Jacques had been for
+ever on the move, for ever making hay on which the sun did not shine.
+Jean Jacques' face these days was lined and changeful.  It looked
+unstable and tired--as though disturbing forces were working up to the
+surface out of control.  The brown eyes, too, were far more restless than
+they had ever been since the Antoine was wrecked, and their owner
+returned with Carmen to the Manor Cartier.  But the new restlessness of
+the eyes was different from the old.  That was a mobility impelled by an
+active, inquisitive soul, trying to observe what was going on in the
+world, and to make sure that its possessor was being seen by the world.
+This activity was that of a mind essentially concerned to find how many
+ways it could see for escape from a maze of things; while his vanity was
+taking new forms.  It was always anxious to discover if the world was
+trying to know how he was taking the blows of fate and fortune.  He had
+been determined that, whatever came, it should not see him paralysed or
+broken.
+
+As M. Fille only nodded his head in sorrowful assent, the Big Financier
+became more explicit.  He was determined to lose nothing by Jean Jacques,
+and he was prepared to take instant action when it was required; but he
+was also interested in the man who might have done really powerful things
+in the world, had he gone about them in the right way.
+
+"M. Barbille has had some lawsuits this year, is it not so?" he asked.
+
+"Two of importance, monsieur, and one is not yet decided," answered M.
+Fille.
+
+"He lost those suits of importance?"
+
+"That is so, monsieur."
+
+"And they cost him six thousand dollars--and over?"  The Big Financier
+seemed to be pressing towards a point.
+
+"Something over that amount, monsieur."
+
+"And he may lose the suit now before the Courts?"
+
+"Who can tell, monsieur!" vaguely commented the little learned official.
+
+M. Mornay was not to be evaded.  "Yes, yes, but the case as it stands--
+to you who are wise in experience of legal affairs, does it seem at all
+a sure thing for him?"
+
+"I wish I could say it was, monsieur," sadly answered the other.
+
+The Big Financier nodded vigorously.  "Exactly.  Nothing is so
+unproductive as the law.  It is expensive whether you win or lose, and it
+is murderously expensive when you do lose.  You will observe, I know,
+that your Jean Jacques is a man who can only be killed once--eh?"
+
+"Monsieur?"  M. Fille really did not grasp this remark.
+
+M. Mornay's voice became precise.  "I will explain.  He has never
+created; he has only developed what has been created.  He inherited much
+of what he has or has had.  His designs were always affected by the fact
+that he had never built from the very bottom.  When he goes to pieces--"
+
+"Monsieur--to pieces!" exclaimed the Clerk of the Court painfully.
+
+"Well, put it another way.  If he is broken financially, he will never
+come up again.  Not because of his age--I lost a second fortune at fifty,
+and have a third ready to lose at sixty--but because the primary
+initiative won't be in him.  He'll say he has lost, and that there's
+an end to it all.  His philosophy will come into play--just at the last.
+It will help him in one way and harm him in another."
+
+"Ah, then you know about his philosophy, monsieur?" queried M. Fille.
+Was Jean Jacques' philosophy, after all, to be a real concrete asset of
+his life sooner or later?
+
+The Big Financier smiled, and turned some coins over in his pocket rather
+loudly.  Presently he said: "The first time I ever saw him he treated me
+to a page of Descartes.  It cost him one per cent.  I always charge a man
+for talking sentiment to me in business hours.  I had to listen to him,
+and he had to pay me for listening.  I've no doubt his general yearly
+expenditure has been increased for the same reason--eh, Maitre Fille?  He
+has done it with others--yes?"  M. Fille waved a hand in deprecation, and
+his voice had a little acidity as he replied: "Ah, monsieur, what can we
+poor provincials do--any of us--in dealing with men like you, philosophy
+or no philosophy?  You get us between the upper and the nether mill
+stones.  You are cosmopolitan; M. Jean Jacques Barbille is a provincial;
+and you, because he has soul enough to forget business for a moment and
+to speak of things that matter more than money and business, you grind
+him into powder."
+
+M. Mornay shook his head and lighted his cigar again.  "There you are
+wrong, Maitre Fille.  It is bad policy to grind to powder, or grind at
+all, men out of whom you are making money.  It is better to keep them
+from between the upper and nether mill-stones.
+
+"I have done so with your Barbille.  I could give him such trouble as
+would bring things crashing down upon him at once, if I wanted to be
+merely vicious in getting my own; but that would make it impossible for
+me to meet at dinner my friend Judge Carcasson.  So, as long as I can,
+I will not press him.  But I tell you that the margin of safety on which
+he is moving now is too narrow--scarce a foot-hold.  He has too much
+under construction in the business of his life, and if one stone slips
+out, down may come the whole pile.  He has stopped building the cheese-
+factory--that represents sheer loss.  The ash-factory is to close next
+week, the saw-mill is only paying its way, and the flour-mill and the
+farms, which have to sustain the call of his many interests, can't stand
+the drain.  Also, he has several people heavily indebted to him, and if
+they go down--well, it depends on the soundness of the security he holds.
+If they listened to him talk philosophy, encouraged him to do it, and
+told him they liked it, when the bargain was being made, the chances are
+the security is inadequate."
+
+The Clerk of the Court bridled up.  "Monsieur, you are very hard on a man
+who for twenty-five years has been a figure and a power in this part of
+the province.  You sneer at one who has been a benefactor to the place
+where he lives; who has given with the right hand and the left; whose
+enterprise has been a source of profit to many; and who has got a savage
+reward for the acts of a blameless and generous life.  You know his
+troubles, monsieur, and we who have seen him bear them with fortitude and
+Christian philosophy, we resent--"
+
+"You need resent nothing, Maitre Fille," interrupted the Big Financier,
+not unkindly.  "What I have said has been said to his friend and the
+friend of my own great friend, Judge Carcasson; and I am only anxious
+that he should be warned by someone whose opinions count with him; whom
+he can trust--"
+
+"But, monsieur, alas!" broke in the Clerk of the Court, "that is the
+trouble; he does not select those he can trust.  He is too confiding.
+He believes those who flatter him, who impose on his good heart.
+It has always been so."
+
+"I judge it is so still in the case of Monsieur Dolores, his daughter's
+grandfather?" the Big Financier asked quizzically.
+
+"It is so, monsieur," replied M. Fille.  "The loss of his daughter shook
+him even more than the flight of his wife; and it is as though he could
+not live without that scoundrel near him--a vicious man, who makes
+trouble wherever he goes.  He was a cause of loss to M. Barbille years
+ago when he managed the ash-factory; he is very dangerous to women--even
+now he is a danger to the future of a young widow" (he meant the widow of
+Palass Poucette); "and he has caused a scandal by perjury as a witness,
+and by the consequences--but I need not speak of that here.  He will do
+Jean Jacques great harm in the end, of that I am sure.  The very day
+Mademoiselle Zoe left the Manor Cartier to marry the English actor, Jean
+Jacques took that Spanish bad-lot to his home; and there he stays, and
+the old friends go--the old friends go; and he does not seem to miss
+them."
+
+There was something like a sob in M. Fille's voice.  He had loved Zoe
+in a way that in a mother would have meant martyrdom, if necessary,
+and in a father would have meant sacrifice when needed; and indeed he
+had sacrificed both time and money to find Zoe.  He had even gone as far
+as Winnipeg on the chance of finding her, making that first big journey
+in the world, which was as much to him in all ways as a journey to Bagdad
+would mean to most people of M. Mornay's world.  Also he had spent money
+since in corresponding with lawyers in the West whom he engaged to search
+for her; but Zoe had never been found.  She had never written but one
+letter to Jean Jacques since her flight.  This letter said, in effect,
+that she would come back when her husband was no longer "a beggar" as her
+father had called him, and not till then.  It was written en route to
+Winnipeg, at the dictation of Gerard Fynes, who had a romantic view of
+life and a mistaken pride, but some courage too--the courage of love.
+
+"He thinks his daughter will come back--yes?" asked M. Mornay.  "Once he
+said to me that he was sorry there was no lady to welcome me at the Manor
+Cartier, but that he hoped his daughter would yet have the honour.  His
+talk is quite spacious and lofty at times, as you know."
+
+"So--that is so, monsieur .  .  .  Mademoiselle Zoe's room is always
+ready for her.  At time of Noel he sent cards to all the families of the
+parish who had been his friends, as from his daughter and himself; and
+when people came to visit at the Manor on New Year's Day, he said to each
+and all that his daughter regretted she could not arrive in time from the
+West to receive them; but that next year she would certainly have the
+pleasure."
+
+"Like the light in the window for the unreturning sailor," somewhat
+cynically remarked the Big Financier.  "Did many come to the Manor on
+that New Year's Day?"
+
+"But yes, many, monsieur.  Some came from kindness, and some because they
+were curious--"
+
+"And Monsieur Dolores?"
+
+The lips of the Clerk of the Court curled, "He went about with a manner
+as soft as that of a young cure.  Butter would not melt in his mouth.
+Some of the women were sorry for him, until they knew he had given one
+of Jean Jacques' best bear-skin rugs to Madame Palass Poucette for a New
+Year's gift."
+
+The Big Financier laughed cheerfully.  "It's an old way to popularity--
+being generous with other people's money.  That is why I am here.  The
+people that spend your Jean Jacques' money will be spending mine too, if
+I don't take care."
+
+M. Fille noted the hard look which now settled in M. Mornay's face, and
+it disturbed him.  He rose and leaned over the table towards his visitor
+anxiously.
+
+"Tell me, if you please, monsieur, is there any real and immediate danger
+of the financial collapse of Jean Jacques?"
+
+The other regarded M. Fille with a look of consideration.  He liked this
+Clerk of the Court, but he liked Jean Jacques for the matter of that,
+and away now from the big financial arena where he usually worked, his
+natural instincts had play.  He had come to St. Saviour's with a bigger
+thing in his mind than Jean Jacques and his affairs; he had come on the
+matter of a railway, and had taken Jean Jacques on the way, as it were.
+The scheme for the railway looked very promising to him, and he was in
+good humour; so that all he said about Jean Jacques was free from that
+general irritation of spirit which has sacrificed many a small man on a
+big man's altar.  He saw the agitation he had caused, and he almost
+repented of what he had already said; yet he had acted with a view to
+getting M. Fille to warn Jean Jacques.
+
+"I repeat what I said," he now replied.  "Monsieur Jean Jacques' affairs
+are too nicely balanced.  A little shove one way or another and over goes
+the whole caboose.  If anyone here has influence over him, it would be a
+kindness to use it.  That case before the Court of Appeal, for instance;
+he'd be better advised to settle it, if there is still time.  One or two
+of the mortgages he holds ought to be foreclosed, so that he may get out
+of them all the law will let him.  He ought to pouch the money that's
+owing him; he ought to shave away his insurance, his lightning-rod, and
+his horsedealing business; and he ought to sell his farms and his store,
+and concentrate on the flour-mill and the saw-mill.  He has had his
+warnings generally from my lawyers, but what he wants most is the gentle
+hand to lead him; and I should think that yours, M. Fille, is the hand
+the Almighty would choose if He was concerned with what happens at St.
+Saviour's and wanted an agent."
+
+The Clerk of the Court blushed greatly.  This was a very big man
+indeed in the great commercial world, and flattery from him had unusual
+significance; but he threw out his hands with a gesture of helplessness,
+and said: "Monsieur, if I could be of use I would; but he has ceased to
+listen to me; he--"
+
+He got no further, for there was a sharp knock at the street door of the
+outer office, and M. Fille hastened to the other room.  After a moment he
+came back, a familiar voice following him.
+
+"It is Monsieur Barbille, monsieur," M. Fille said quietly, but with
+apprehensive eyes.
+
+"Well--he wants to see me?" asked M. Mornay.  "No, no, monsieur.
+It would be better if he did not see you.  He is in some agitation."
+
+"Fille!  Maitre Fille--be quick now," called Jean Jacques' voice from the
+other room.
+
+"What did I say, monsieur?" asked the Big Financier.  "The mind that's
+received a blow must be moving--moving; the man with the many irons must
+be flying from bellows to bellows!"
+
+"Come, come, there's no time to lose," came Jean Jacques' voice again,
+and the handle of the door of their room turned.
+
+M. Fille's hand caught the handle.  "Excuse me, Monsieur Barbille,
+--a minute please," he persisted almost querulously.  "Be good enough to
+keep your manners .  .  .  monsieur!" he added to the Financier, "if you
+do not wish to speak with him, there is a door"--he pointed--"which will
+let you into the side-street."
+
+"What is his trouble?" asked M. Mornay.
+
+M. Fille hesitated, then said reflectively: "He has lost his case in the
+Appeal Court, monsieur; also, his cousin, Auguste Charron, who has been
+working the Latouche farm, has flitted, leaving--"
+
+"Leaving Jean Jacques to pay unexpected debts?"
+
+"So, monsieur."
+
+"Then I can be of no use, I fear," remarked M. Mornay dryly.
+
+"Fille!  Fille !" came the voice of Jean Jacques insistently from the
+room.
+
+"And so I will say au revoir, Monsieur Fille," continued the Big
+Financier.
+
+A moment later the great man was gone, and M. Fille was alone with the
+philosopher of the Manor Cartier.
+
+"Well, well, why do you keep me waiting!  Who was it in there--anyone
+that's concerned with my affairs?" asked Jean Jacques.
+
+In these days he was sensitive when there was no cause, and he was
+credulous where he ought to be suspicious.  The fact that the little man
+had held the door against him made him sure that M. Fille had not wished
+him to see the departed visitor.
+
+"Come, out with it--who was it making fresh trouble for me?" persisted
+Jean Jacques.
+
+"No one making trouble for you, my friend," answered the Clerk of the
+Court, "but someone who was trying to do you a good turn."
+
+"He must have been a stranger then," returned Jean Jacques bitterly.
+"Who was it?"
+
+M. Fille, after an instant's further hesitation, told him.
+
+"Oh, him--M. Momay !" exclaimed Jean Jacques, with a look of relief, his
+face lighting.  "That's a big man with a most capable and far-reaching
+mind.  He takes a thing in as the ocean mouths a river.  If I had had
+men like that to deal with all my life, what a different ledger I'd be
+balancing now!  Descartes, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel--he has
+an ear for them all.  That is the intellectual side of him; and in
+business"--he threw up a hand--"there he views the landscape from the
+mountain-top.  He has vision, strategy, executive.  He is Napoleon and
+Anacreon in one.  He is of the builders on the one hand, of the
+Illuminati and the Encyclopedistes on the other."
+
+Even the Clerk of the Court, with his circumscribed range of thought and
+experience, in that moment saw Jean Jacques as he really was.  Here was a
+man whose house of life was beginning to sway from an earthquake; who had
+been smitten in several deadly ways, and was about to receive buffetings
+beyond aught he had yet experienced, philosophizing on the tight-rope--
+Blondin and Plato in one.  Yet sardonically piteous as it was, the
+incident had shown Jean Jacques with the germ of something big in him.
+He had recognized in M. Mornay, who could level him to the dust tomorrow
+financially, a master of the world's affairs, a prospector of life's
+fields, who would march fearlessly beyond the farthest frontiers into the
+unknown.  Jean Jacques' admiration of the lion who could, and would, slay
+him was the best tribute to his own character.
+
+M. Fille's eyes moistened as he realized it; and he knew that nothing he
+could say or do would make this man accommodate his actions to the hard
+rules of the business of life; he must for ever be applying to them
+conceptions of a half-developed mind.
+
+"Quite so, quite so, Jean Jacques," M. Fille responded gently, "but"
+--here came a firmer note to his voice, for he had taken to heart the
+lesson M. Mornay had taught him, and he was determined to do his duty now
+when the opportunity was in his hand--"but you have got to deal with
+things as they are; not as they might have been.  If you cannot have the
+great men you have to deal with the little men like me.  You have to
+prove yourself bigger than the rest of us by doing things better.  A man
+doesn't fail only because of others, but also because of himself.  You
+were warned that the chances were all against you in the case that's just
+been decided, yet you would go on; you were warned that your cousin,
+Auguste Charron, was in debt, and that his wife was mad to get away from
+the farm and go West, yet you would take no notice.  Now he has gone, and
+you have to pay, and your case has gone against you in the Appellate
+Court besides.  .  .  .  I will tell you the truth, my friend, even if it
+cuts me to the heart.  You have not kept your judgment in hand; you have
+gone ahead like a bull at a gate; and you pay the price.  You listen to
+those who flatter, and on those who would go through fire and water for
+you, you turn your back--on those who would help you in your hour of
+trouble, in your dark day."
+
+Jean Jacques drew himself up with a gesture, impatient, masterful and
+forbidding.  "I have fought my fight alone in the dark day; I have not
+asked for any one's help," he answered.  "I have wept on no man's
+shoulder.  I have been mauled by the claws of injury and shame, and I
+have not flinched.  I have healed my own wounds, and I wear my scars
+without--"
+
+He stopped, for there came a sharp rat-tat-tat at the door which opened
+into the street.  Somehow the commonplace, trivial interruption produced
+on both a strange, even startling effect.  It suddenly produced in their
+minds a feeling of apprehension, as though there was whispered in their
+ears, "Something is going to happen--beware!"
+
+Rat-tat-tat!  The two men looked at each other.  The same thought was in
+the mind of both.  Jean Jacques clutched at his beard nervously, then
+with an effort he controlled himself.  He took off his hat as though he
+was about to greet some important person, or to receive sentence in a
+court.  Instinctively he felt the little book of philosophy which he
+always carried now in his breast-pocket, as a pietist would finger his
+beads in moments of fear or anxiety.  The Clerk of the Court passed his
+thin hand over his hair, as he was wont to do in court when the Judge
+began his charge to the Jury, and then with an action more impulsive than
+was usual with him, he held out his hand, and Jean Jacques grasped it.
+Something was bringing them together just when it seemed that, in the
+storm of Jean Jacques' indignation, they were about to fall apart.
+M. Fille's eyes said as plainly as words could do, "Courage, my friend!"
+
+Rat-tat-tat!  Rat-tat-tat!  The knocking was sharp and imperative now.
+The Clerk of the Court went quickly forward and threw open the door.
+
+There stepped inside the widow of Palass Poucette.  She had a letter in
+her hand.  "M'sieu', pardon, if I intrude," she said to M. Fille; "but I
+heard that M'sieu' Jean Jacques was here.  I have news for him."
+
+"News!" repeated Jean Jacques, and he looked like a man who was waiting
+for what he feared to hear.  "They told me at the post-office that you
+were here.  I got the letter only a quarter of an hour ago, and I thought
+I would go at once to the Manor Cartier and tell M'sieu' Jean Jacques
+what the letter says.  I wanted to go to the Manor Cartier for something
+else as well, but I will speak of that by and by.  It is the letter now."
+
+She pulled off first one glove and then the other, still holding the
+letter, as though she was about to perform some ceremony.  "It was a good
+thing I found out that M'sieu' Jean Jacques was here.  It saves a four-
+mile drive," she remarked.
+
+"The news--ah, nom de Dieu, the slowness of the woman--like a river going
+uphill!" exclaimed Jean Jacques, who was finding it hard to still the
+trembling of his limbs.
+
+The widow of Palass Poucette flushed, but she had some sense in her head,
+and she realized that Jean Jacques was a little unbalanced at the moment.
+Indeed, Jean Jacques was not so old that she would have found it
+difficult to take a well-defined and warm interest in him, were
+circumstances propitious.  She held out the letter to him at once.
+"It is from my sister in the West--at Shilah," she explained.  "There is
+nothing in it you can't read, and most of it concerns you."  Jean Jacques
+took the letter, but he could not bring himself to read it, for Virginie
+Poucette's manner was not suggestive of happy tidings.  After an
+instant's hesitation he handed the letter to M. Fille, who pressed
+his lips with an air of determination, and put on his glasses.
+
+Jean Jacques saw the face of the Clerk of the Court flush and then turn
+pale as he read the letter.  "There, be quick!" he said before M. Fille
+had turned the first page.
+
+Then the widow of Palass Poucette came to him and, in a simple harmless
+way she had, free from coquetry or guile, stood beside him, took his hand
+and held it.  He seemed almost unconscious of her act, but his fingers
+convulsively tightened on hers; while she reflected that here was one who
+needed help sorely; here was a good, warm-hearted man on whom a woman
+could empty out affection like rain and get a good harvest.  She really
+was as simple as a child, was Virginie Poucette, and even in her
+acquaintance with Sebastian Dolores, there had only been working in her
+the natural desire of a primitive woman to have a man saying that which
+would keep alive in her the things that make her sing as she toils; and
+certainly Virginie toiled late and early on her farm.  She really was
+concerned for Jean Jacques.  Both wife and daughter had taken flight, and
+he was alone and in trouble.  At this moment she felt she would like to
+be a sister to him--she was young enough to be his daughter almost.  Her
+heart was kind.
+
+"Now!" said Jean Jacques at last, as the Clerk of the Court's eyes
+reached the end of the last page.  "Now, speak!  It is--it is my Zoe?"
+
+"It is our Zoe," answered M. Fille.
+
+"Figure de Christ, what do you wait for--she is not dead?" exclaimed
+Jean Jacques with a courage which made him set his feet squarely.
+
+The Clerk of the Court shook his head and began.  "She is alive.
+Madame Poucette's sister saw her by chance.  Zoe was on her way up the
+Saskatchewan River to the Peace River country with her husband.  Her
+husband's health was bad.  He had to leave the stage in the United States
+where he had gone after Winnipeg.  The doctors said he must live the
+open-air life.  He and Zoe were going north, to take a farm somewhere."
+
+"Somewhere!  Somewhere!" murmured Jean Jacques.  The farther away from
+Jean Jacques the better--that is what she thinks."
+
+"No, you are wrong, my friend," rejoined M. Fille.  "She said to Madame
+Poucette's sister"--he held up the letter--"that when they had proved
+they could live without anybody's help they would come back to see you.
+Zoe thought that, having taken her life in her own hands, she ought to
+justify herself before she asked your forgiveness and a place at your
+table.  She felt that you could only love her and be glad of her, if her
+man was independent of you.  It is a proud and sensitive soul--but there
+it is!"
+
+"It is romance, it is quixotism--ah, heart of God, what quixotism!"
+exclaimed Jean Jacques.
+
+"She gets her romance and quixotism from Jean Jacques Barbille," retorted
+the Clerk of the Court.  "She does more feeling than thinking--like you."
+
+Jean Jacques' heart was bleeding, but he drew himself up proudly, and
+caught his hand away from the warm palm of Poucette's widow.  As his
+affairs crumbled his pride grew more insistent.  M. Fille had challenged
+his intellect--his intellect!
+
+"My life has been a procession of practical things," he declared
+oracularly.  "I have been a man of business who designs.  I am no
+dreamer.  I think.  I act.  I suffer.  I have been the victim of romance,
+not its interpreter.  Mercy of God, what has broken my life, what but
+romance--romance, first with one and then with another!  More feeling
+than thinking, Maitre Fille--you say that?  Why the Barbilles have ever
+in the past built up life on a basis of thought and action, and I have
+added philosophy--the science of thought and act.  Jean Jacques Barbille
+has been the man of design and the man of action also.  Don Quixote was a
+fool, a dreamer, but Jean Jacques is no Don Quixote.  He is a man who has
+done things, but also he is a man who has been broken on the wheel of
+life.  He is a man whose heart-strings have been torn--"
+
+He had worked himself up into a fit of eloquence and revolt.  He was
+touched by the rod of desperation, which makes the soul protest that it
+is right when it knows that it is wrong.
+
+Suddenly, breaking off his speech, he threw up his hands and made for the
+door.
+
+"I will fight it out alone!" he declared with rough emotion, and at the
+door he turned towards them again.  He looked at them both as though he
+would dare them to contradict him.  The restless fire of his eyes seemed
+to dart from one to the other.
+
+"That's the way it is," said the widow of Palass Poucette coming quickly
+forward to him.  "It's always the way.  We must fight our battles alone,
+but we don't have to bear the wounds alone.  In the battle you are alone,
+but the hand to heal the wounds may be another's.  You are a philosopher
+--well, what I speak is true, isn't it?"
+
+Virginie had said the one thing which could have stayed the tide of Jean
+Jacques' pessimism and broken his cloud of gloom.  She appealed to him in
+the tune of an old song.  The years and the curses of years had not
+dispelled the illusion that he was a philosopher.  He stopped with his
+hand on the door.
+
+"That's so, without doubt that's so," he said.  "You have stumbled on a
+truth of life, madame."
+
+Suddenly there came into his look something of the yearning and hunger
+which the lonely and forsaken feel when they are not on the full tide of
+doing.  It was as though he must have companionship, in spite of his
+brave announcement that he must fight his fight alone.  He had been
+wounded in the battle, and here was one who held out the hand of healing
+to him.  Never since his wife had left him the long lonely years ago had
+a woman meant anything to him except as one of a race; but in this moment
+here a woman had held his hand, and he could feel still the warm palm
+which had comforted his own agitated fingers.
+
+Virginie Poucette saw, and she understood what was passing in his mind.
+Yet she did not see and understand all by any means; and it is hard to
+tell what further show of fire there might have been, but that the Clerk
+of the Court was there, saying harshly under his breath, "The huzzy!
+The crafty huzzy!"
+
+The Clerk of the Court was wrong.  Virginie was merely sentimental, not
+intriguing or deceitful; for Jean Jacques was not a widower--and she was
+an honest woman and genuinely tender-hearted.
+
+"I'm coming to the Manor Cartier to-morrow," Virginie continued.  "I have
+a rug of yours.  By mistake it was left at my house by M'sieu' Dolores."
+
+"You needn't do that.  I will call at your place tomorrow for it,"
+replied Jean Jacques almost eagerly.  "I told M'sieu' Dolores to-day
+never to enter my house again.  I didn't know it was your rug.  It was
+giving away your property, not his own," she hurriedly explained, and her
+face flushed.
+
+"That is the Spanish of it," said Jean Jacques bitterly.  His eyes were
+being opened in many directions to-day.
+
+M. Fille was in distress.  Jean Jacques had had a warning about Sebastian
+Dolores, but here was another pit into which he might fall, the pit
+digged by a widow, who, no doubt, would not hesitate to marry a divorced
+Catholic philosopher, if he could get a divorce by hook or by crook.
+Jean Jacques had said that he was going to Virginie Poucette's place
+the next day.  That was as bad as it could be; yet there was this to the
+good, that it was to-morrow and not to-day; and who could tell what might
+happen between to-day and to-morrow!
+
+A moment later the three were standing outside the office in the street.
+As Jean Jacques climbed into his red wagon, Virginie Poucette's eyes were
+attracted to the northern sky where a reddish glow appeared, and she gave
+an exclamation of surprise.
+
+"That must be a fire," she said, pointing.
+
+"A bit of pine-land probably," said M. Fille--with anxiety, however, for
+the red glow lay in the direction of St. Saviour's where were the Manor
+Cartier and Jean Jacques' mills.  Maitre Fille was possessed of a
+superstition that all the things which threaten a man's life to wreck it,
+operate awhile in their many fields before they converge like an army in
+one field to deliver the last attack on their victim.  It would not have
+seemed strange to him, if out of the night a voice of the unseen had said
+that the glow in the sky came from the Manor Cartier.  This very day
+three things had smitten Jean Jacques, and, if three, why not four or
+five, or fifty!
+
+With a strange fascination Jean Jacques' eyes were fastened on the glow.
+He clucked to his horses, and they started jerkily away.  M. Fille and
+the widow Poucette said good-bye to him, but he did not hear, or if he
+heard, he did not heed.  His look was set upon the red reflection which
+widened in the sky and seemed to grow nearer and nearer.  The horses
+quickened their pace.  He touched them with the whip, and they went
+faster.  The glow increased as he left Vilray behind.  He gave the horses
+the whip again sharply, and they broke into a gallop.  Yet his eyes
+scarcely left the sky.  The crimson glow drew him, held him, till his
+brain was afire also.  Jean Jacques had a premonition and a conviction
+which was even deeper than the imagination of M. Fille.
+
+In Vilray, behind him, the telegraph clerk was in the street shouting to
+someone to summon the local fire-brigade to go to St. Saviour's.
+
+"What is it--what is it?" asked M. Fille of the telegraph clerk in
+marked agitation.
+
+"It's M'sieu' Jean Jacques' flour-mill," was the reply.
+
+Wagons and buggies and carts began to take the road to the Manor Cartier;
+and Maitre Fille went also with the widow of Palass Poucette.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+HIS GREATEST ASSET
+
+Jean Jacques did not go to the house of the widow of Palass Poucette
+"next day" as he had proposed: and she did not expect him.  She had seen
+his flour-mill burned to the ground on the-evening when they met in the
+office of the Clerk of the evening Court, when Jean Jacques had learned
+that his Zoe had gone into farther and farther places away from him.
+Perhaps Virginie Poucette never had shed as many tears in any whole year
+of her life as she did that night, not excepting the year Palass Poucette
+died, and left her his farm and seven horses, more or less sound, and a
+threshing-machine in good condition.  The woman had a rare heart and
+there was that about Jean Jacques which made her want to help him.  She
+had no clear idea as to how that could be done, but she had held his hand
+at any rate, and he had seemed the better for it.  Virginie had only an
+objective view of things; and if she was not material, still she could
+best express herself through the medium of the senses.
+
+There were others besides her who shed tears also--those who saw Jean
+Jacques' chief asset suddenly disappear in flame and smoke and all his
+other assets become thereby liabilities of a kind; and there were many
+who would be the poorer in the end because of it.  If Jean Jacques went
+down, he probably would not go alone.  Jean Jacques had done a good fire-
+insurance business over a course of years, but somehow he had not insured
+himself as heavily as he ought to have done; and in any case the fire-
+policy for the mill was not in his own hands.  It was in the safe-keeping
+of M. Mornay at Montreal, who had warned M. Fille of the crisis in the
+money-master's affairs on the very day that the crisis came.
+
+No one ever knew how it was that the mill took fire, but there was one
+man who had more than a shrewd suspicion, though there was no occasion
+for mentioning it.  This was Sebastian Dolores.  He had not set the mill
+afire.  That would have been profitable from no standpoint, and he had no
+grudge against Jean Jacques.  Why should he have a grudge?  Jean Jacques'
+good fortune, as things were, made his own good fortune; for he ate and
+drank and slept and was clothed at his son-in-law's expense.  But he
+guessed accurately who had set the mill on fire, and that it was done
+accidentally.  He remembered that a man who smoked bad tobacco which had
+to be lighted over and over again, threw a burning match down after
+applying it to his pipe.  He remembered that there was a heap of flour-
+bags near where the man stood when the match was thrown down; and that
+some loose strings for tying were also in a pile beside the bags.  So it
+was easy for the thing to have happened if the man did not turn round
+after he threw the match down, but went swaying on out of the mill, and
+over to the Manor Cartier, and up staggering to bed; for he had been
+drinking potato-brandy, and he had been brought up on the mild wines of
+Spain!  In other words, the man who threw down the lighted match which
+did the mischief was Sebastian Dolores himself.
+
+He regretted it quite as much as he had ever regretted anything; and on
+the night of the fire there were tears in his large brown eyes which
+deceived the New Cure and others; though they did not deceive the widow
+of Palass Poucette, who had found him out, and who now had no pleasure at
+all in his aged gallantries.  But the regret Dolores experienced would
+not prevent him from doing Jean Jacques still greater injury if, and
+when, the chance occurred, should it be to his own advantage.
+
+Jean Jacques shed no tears on the night that his beloved flour-mill
+became a blackened ruin, and his saw-mill had a narrow escape.  He was
+like one in a dream, scarcely realizing that men were saying kind things
+to him; that the New Cure held his hand and spoke to him more like a
+brother than one whose profession it was to be good to those who
+suffered.  In his eyes was the same half-rapt, intense, distant look
+which came into them when, at Vilray, he saw that red reflection in the
+sky over against St. Saviour's, and urged his horses onward.
+
+The world knew that the burning of the mill was a blow to Jean Jacques,
+but it did not know how great and heavy the blow was.  First one and then
+another of his friends said he was insured, and that in another six
+months the mill-wheel would be turning again.  They said so to Jean
+Jacques when he stood with his eyes fixed on the burning fabric, which
+nothing could save; but he showed no desire to speak.  He only nodded and
+kept on staring at the fire with that curious underglow in his eyes.
+Some chemistry of the soul had taken place in him in the hour when he
+drove to the Manor Cartier from Vilray, and it produced a strange fire,
+which merged into the reflection of the sky above the burning mill.
+Later, came things which were strange and eventful in his life, but that
+under-glow was for ever afterwards in his eyes.  It was in singular
+contrast to the snapping fire which had been theirs all the days of his
+life till now--the snapping fire of action, will and design.  It still
+was there when they said to him suddenly that the wind had changed, and
+that the flame and sparks were now blowing toward the saw-mill.  Even
+when he gave orders, and set to work to defend the saw-mill, arranging a
+line of men with buckets on its roof, and so saving it, this look
+remained.  It was something spiritual and unmaterial, something, maybe,
+which had to do with the philosophy he had preached, thought and
+practised over long years.  It did not disappear when at last, after
+midnight, everyone had gone, and the smouldering ruins of his greatest
+asset lay mournful in the wan light of the moon.
+
+Kind and good friends like the Clerk of the Court and the New Cure had
+seen him to his bedroom at midnight, leaving him there with a promise
+that they would come on the morrow; and he had said goodnight evenly, and
+had shut the door upon them with a sort of smile.  But long after they
+had gone, when Sebastian Dolores and Seraphe Corniche were asleep, he had
+got up again and left the house, to gaze at the spot where the big white
+mill with the red roof had been-the mill which had been there in the days
+of the Baron of Beaugard, and to which time had only added size and
+adornment.  The gold-cock weathervane of the mill, so long the admiration
+of people living and dead, and indeed the symbol of himself, as he had
+been told, being so full of life and pride, courage and vigour-it lay
+among the ruins, a blackened relic of the Barbilles.
+
+He had said in M. Fille's office not many hours before, "I will fight it
+all out alone," and here in the tragic quiet of the night he made his
+resolve a reality.  In appearance he was not now like the "Seigneur" who
+sang to the sailors on the Antoine when she was fighting for the shore of
+Gaspe; nevertheless there was that in him which would keep him much the
+same man to the end.
+
+Indeed, as he got into bed that fateful night he said aloud: "They shall
+see that I am not beaten.  If they give me time up there in Montreal I'll
+keep the place till Zoe comes back--till Zoe comes home."
+
+As he lay and tried to sleep, he kept saying over to himself, "Till Zoe
+comes home."
+
+He thought that if he could but have Zoe back, it all would not matter so
+much.  She would keep looking at him and saying, "There's the man that
+never flinched when things went wrong; there's the man that was a friend
+to everyone."
+
+At last a thought came to him--the key to the situation as it seemed, the
+one thing necessary to meet the financial situation.  He would sell the
+biggest farm he owned, which had been to him in its importance like the
+flour-mill itself.  He had had an offer for it that very day, and a
+bigger offer still a week before.  It was mortgaged to within eight
+thousand dollars of what it could be sold for but, if he could gain time,
+that eight thousand dollars would build the mill again.  M. Mornay, the
+Big Financier, would certainly see that this was his due--to get his
+chance to pull things straight.  Yes, he would certainly sell the
+Barbille farm to-morrow.  With this thought in his mind he went to sleep
+at last, and he did not wake till the sun was high.
+
+It was a sun of the most wonderful brightness and warmth.  Yesterday it
+would have made the Manor Cartier and all around it look like Arcady.
+But as it shone upon the ruins of the mill, when Jean Jacques went out
+into the working world again, it made so gaunt and hideous a picture
+that, in spite of himself, a cry of misery came from his lips.
+
+Through all the misfortunes which had come to him the outward semblance
+of things had remained, and when he went in and out of the plantation of
+the Manor Cartier, there was no physical change in the surroundings,
+which betrayed the troubles and disasters fallen upon its overlord.
+There it all was just as it had ever been, and seeming to deny that
+anything had changed in the lives of those who made the place other than
+a dead or deserted world.  When Carmen went, when Zoe fled, when his
+cousin Auguste Charron took his flight, when defeats at law abashed him,
+the house and mills, and stores and offices, and goodly trees, and well-
+kept yards and barns and cattle-sheds all looked the same.  Thus it was
+that he had been fortified.  In one sense his miseries had seemed unreal,
+because all was the same in the outward scene.  It was as though it all
+said to him: "It is a dream that those you love have vanished, that ill-
+fortune sits by your fireside.  One night you will go to bed thinking
+that wife and child have gone, that your treasury is nearly empty; and in
+the morning you will wake up and find your loved ones sitting in their
+accustomed places, and your treasury will be full to overflowing as of
+old."
+
+So it was while the picture of his home scene remained unbroken and
+serene; but the hideous mass of last night's holocaust was now before his
+eyes, with little streams of smoke rising from the cindered pile, and
+a hundred things with which his eyes had been familiar lay distorted,
+excoriated and useless.  He realized with sudden completeness that a
+terrible change bad come in his life, that a cyclone had ruined the face
+of his created world.
+
+This picture did more to open up Jean Jacques' eyes to his real position
+in life than anything he had experienced, than any sorrow he had
+suffered.  He had been in torment in the past, but he had refused to see
+that he was in Hades.  Now it was as though he had been led through the
+streets of Hell by some dark spirit, while in vain he looked round for
+his old friends Kant and Hegel, Voltaire and Rousseau and Rochefoucauld,
+Plato and Aristotle.
+
+While gazing at the dismal scene, however, and unheeding the idlers who
+poked about among the ruins, and watched him as one who was the centre of
+a drama, he suddenly caught sight of the gold Cock of Beaugard, which had
+stood on the top of the mill, in the very centre of the ruins.
+
+Yes, there it was, the crested golden cock which had typified his own
+life, as he went head high, body erect, spurs giving warning, and a
+clarion in his throat ready to blare forth at any moment.  There was the
+golden Cock of Beaugard in the cinders, the ashes and the dust.  His chin
+dropped on his breast, and a cloud like a fog on the coast of Gaspe
+settled round him.  Yet even as his head drooped, something else
+happened--one of those trivial things which yet may be the pivot of great
+things.  A cock crowed--almost in his very ear, it seemed.  He lifted his
+head quickly, and a superstitious look flashed into his face.  His eyes
+fastened on the burnished head of the Cock among the ruins.  To his
+excited imagination it was as though the ancient symbol of the Barbilles
+had spoken to him in its own language of good cheer and defiance.  Yes,
+there it was, half covered by the ruins, but its head was erect in the
+midst of fire and disaster.  Brought low, it was still alert above the
+wreckage.  The child, the dreamer, the optimist, the egoist, and the man
+alive in Jean Jacques sprang into vigour again.  It was as though the
+Cock of Beaugard had really summoned him to action, and the crowing had
+not been that of a barnyard bantam not a hundred feet away from him.
+Jean Jacques' head went up too.
+
+"Me--I am what I always was, nothing can change me," he exclaimed
+defiantly.  "I will sell the Barbille farm and build the mill again."
+
+So it was that by hook or by crook, and because the Big Financier had
+more heart than he even acknowledged to his own wife, Jean Jacques did
+sell the Barbille farm, and got in cash--in good hard cash-eight thousand
+dollars after the mortgage was paid.  M. Mornay was even willing to take
+the inadequate indemnity of the insurance policy on the mill, and lose
+the rest, in order that Jean Jacques should have the eight thousand
+dollars to rebuild.  This he did because Jean Jacques showed such amazing
+courage after the burning of the mill, and spread himself out in a
+greater activity than his career had yet shown.  He shaved through this
+financial crisis, in spite of the blow he had received by the loss of his
+lawsuits, the flitting of his cousin, Auguste Charron, and the farm debts
+of this same cousin.  It all meant a series of manipulations made
+possible by the apparent confidence reposed in him by M. Mornay.
+
+On the day he sold his farm he was by no means out of danger of absolute
+insolvency--he was in fact ruined; but he was not yet the victim of those
+processes which would make him legally insolvent.  The vultures were
+hovering, but they had not yet swooped, and there was the Manor saw-mill
+going night and day; for by the strangest good luck Jean Jacques received
+an order for M. Mornay's new railway (Judge Carcasson was behind that)
+which would keep his saw-mill working twenty-four hours in the day for
+six months.
+
+"I like his pluck, but still, ten to one, he loses," remarked M. Mornay
+to Judge Carcasson.  "He is an unlucky man, and I agree with Napoleon
+that you oughtn't to be partner with an unlucky man."
+
+"Yet you have had to do with Monsieur Jean Jacques," responded the aged
+Judge.
+
+M. Mornay nodded indulgently.
+
+"Yes, without risk, up to the burning of the mill.  Now I take my
+chances, simply because I'm a fool too, in spite of all the wisdom I see
+in history and in life's experiences.  I ought to have closed him up, but
+I've let him go on, you see."
+
+"You will not regret it," remarked the Judge.  "He really is worth it."
+
+"But I think I will regret it financially.  I think that this is the last
+flare of the ambition and energy of your Jean Jacques.  That often
+happens--a man summons up all his reserves for one last effort.  It's
+partly pride, partly the undefeated thing in him, partly the gambling
+spirit which seizes men when nothing is left but one great spectacular
+success or else be blotted out.  That's the case with your philosopher;
+and I'm not sure that I won't lose twenty thousand dollars by him yet."
+
+"You've lost more with less justification," retorted the Judge, who, in
+his ninetieth year, was still as alive as his friend at sixty.
+
+M. Mornay waved a hand in acknowledgment, and rolled his cigar from
+corner to corner of his mouth.  "Oh, I've lost a lot more in my time,
+Judge, but with a squint in my eye!  But I'm doing this with no
+astigmatism.  I've got the focus."
+
+The aged Judge gave a conciliatory murmur-he had a fine persuasive voice.
+"You would never be sorry for what you have done if you had known his
+daughter--his Zoe.  It's the thought of her that keeps him going.  He
+wants the place to be just as she left it when she comes back."
+
+"Well, well, let's hope it will.  I'm giving him a chance," replied M.
+Mornay with his wineglass raised.  "He's got eight thousand dollars in
+cash to build his mill again; and I hope he'll keep a tight hand on it
+till the mill is up."
+
+Keep a tight hand on it?
+
+That is what Jean Jacques meant to do; but if a man wants to keep a tight
+hand on money he should not carry it about in his pocket in cold, hard
+cash.  It was a foolish whim of Jean Jacques that he must have the eight
+thousand dollars in cash--in hundred-dollar bills--and not in the form of
+a cheque; but there was something childlike in him.  When, as he thought,
+he had saved himself from complete ruin, he wanted to keep and gloat over
+the trophy of victory, and his trophy was the eight thousand dollars got
+from the Barbille farm.  He would have to pay out two thousand dollars in
+cash to the contractors for the rebuilding of the mill at once,--they
+were more than usually cautious--but he would have six thousand left,
+which he would put in the bank after he had let people see that he was
+well fortified with cash.
+
+The child in him liked the idea of pulling out of his pocket a few
+thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.  He had always carried a good
+deal of money loose in his pocket, and now that his resources were so
+limited he would still make a gallant show.  After a week or two he would
+deposit six thousand dollars in the bank; but he was so eager to begin
+building the mill, that he paid over the stipulated two thousand dollars
+to the contractors on the very day he received the eight thousand.  A few
+days later the remaining six thousand were housed in a cupboard with an
+iron door in the wall of his office at the Manor Cartier.
+
+"There, that will keep me in heart and promise," said Jean Jacques as he
+turned the key in the lock.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+JEAN JACQUES HAS AN OFFER
+
+The day after Jean Jacques had got a new lease of life and become his own
+banker, he treated himself to one of those interludes of pleasure from
+which he had emerged in the past like a hermit from his cave.  He sat on
+the hill above his lime-kilns, reading the little hand-book of philosophy
+which had played so big a part in his life.  Whatever else had disturbed
+his mind and diverted him from his course, nothing had weaned him from
+this obsession.  He still interlarded all his conversation with
+quotations from brilliant poseurs like Chateaubriand and Rochefoucauld,
+and from missionaries of thought like Hume and Hegel.
+
+His real joy, however, was in withdrawing for what might be called a
+seance of meditation from the world's business.  Some men make
+celebration in wine, sport and adventure; but Jean Jacques made it in
+flooding his mind with streams of human thought which often tried to run
+uphill, which were frequently choked with weeds, but still were like the
+pool of Siloam to his vain mind.  They bathed that vain mind in the
+illusion that it could see into the secret springs of experience.
+
+So, on as bright a day as ever the New World offered, Jean Jacques sat
+reciting to himself a spectacular bit of logic from one of his idols,
+wedged between a piece of Aristotle quartz and Plato marble.  The sound
+of it was good in his ears.  He mouthed it as greedily and happily as
+though he was not sitting on the edge of a volcano instead of the moss-
+grown limestone on a hill above his own manor.
+
+"The course of events in the life of a man, whatever their gravity or
+levity, are only to be valued and measured by the value and measure of
+his own soul.  Thus, what in its own intrinsic origin and material should
+in all outer reason be a tragedy, does not of itself shake the
+foundations or make a fissure in the superstructure.  Again--"
+
+Thus his oracle, but Jean Jacques' voice suddenly died down, for, as he
+sat there, the face of a woman made a vivid call of recognition.  He
+slowly awakened from his self-hypnotism, to hear a woman speaking to him;
+to see two dark eyes looking at him from under heavy black brows with
+bright, intent friendliness.
+
+"They said at the Manor you had come this way, so I thought I'd not have
+my drive for nothing, and here I am.  I wanted to say something to you,
+M'sieu' Jean Jacques."
+
+It was the widow of Palass Poucette.  She looked very fresh and friendly
+indeed, and she was the very acme of neatness.  If she was not handsome,
+she certainly had a true and sweet comeliness of her own, due to the deep
+rose-colour of her cheeks, the ivory whiteness round the lustrous brown
+eyes, the regular shining teeth which showed so much when she smiled, and
+the look half laughing, half sentimental which dominated all.
+
+Before she had finished speaking Jean Jacques was on his feet with his
+hat off.  Somehow she seemed to be a part of that abstraction, that
+intoxication, in which he had just been drowning his accumulated
+anxieties.  Not that Virginie Poucette was logical or philosophical, or
+a child of thought, for she was wholly the opposite-practical, sensuous,
+emotional, a child of nature and of Eve.  But neither was Jean Jacques a
+real child of thought, though he made unconscious pretence of it.  He
+also was a child of nature--and Adam.  He thought he had the courage of
+his convictions, but it was only the courage of his emotions.  His
+philosophy was but the bent or inclination of a mind with a capacity
+to feel things rather than to think them.  He had feeling, the first
+essential of the philosopher, but there he stayed, an undeveloped
+chrysalis.
+
+His look was abstracted still as he took the hand of the widow of Palass
+Poucette; but he spoke cheerfully.  "It is a pleasure, madame, to welcome
+you among my friends," he said.
+
+He made a little flourish with the book which had so long been his bosom
+friend, and added: "But I hope you are in no trouble that you come to me
+--so many come to me in their troubles," he continued with an air of
+satisfaction.
+
+"Come to you--why, you have enough troubles of your own!" she made
+answer.  "It's because you have your own troubles that I'm here."
+
+"Why you are here," he remarked vaguely.
+
+There was something very direct and childlike in Virginie Poucette.  She
+could not pretend; she wore her heart on her sleeve.  She travelled a
+long distance in a little while.
+
+"I've got no trouble myself," she responded.  "But, yes, I have," she
+added.  "I've got one trouble--it's yours.  It's that you've been having
+hard times--the flour-mill, your cousin Auguste Charron, the lawsuits,
+and all the rest.  They say at Vilray that you have all you can do to
+keep out of the Bankruptcy Court, and that--"
+
+Jean Jacques started, flushed, and seemed about to get angry; but she put
+things right at once.
+
+"People talk more than they know, but there's always some fire where
+there's smoke," she hastened to explain.  "Besides, your father-in-law
+babbles more than is good for him or for you.  I thought at first that
+M. Dolores was a first-class kind of man, that he had had hard times too,
+and I let him come and see me; but I found him out, and that was the end
+of it, you may be sure.  If you like him, I don't want to say anything
+more, but I'm sure that he's no real friend to you-or to anybody.  If
+that man went to confession--but there, that's not what I've come for.
+I've come to say to you that I never felt so sorry for anyone in my life
+as I do for you.  I cried all night after your beautiful mill was burned
+down.  You were coming to see me next day--you remember what you said in
+M. Fille's office--but of course you couldn't.  Of course, there was no
+reason why you should come to see me really--I've 'only got two hundred
+acres and the house.  It's a good house, though--Palass saw to that--and
+it's insured; but still I know you'd have come just the same if I'd had
+only two acres.  I know.  There's hosts of people you've been good to
+here, and they're sorry for you; and I'm sorrier than any, for I'm alone,
+and you're alone, too, except for the old Dolores, and he's no good to
+either of us--mark my words, no good to you!  I'm sorry for you, M'sieu'
+Jean Jacques, and I've come to say that I'm ready to lend you two
+thousand dollars, if that's any help.  I could make it more if I had
+time; but sometimes money on the spot is worth a lot more than what's
+just crawling to you--snailing along while you eat your heart out.  Two
+thousand dollars is two thousand dollars--I know what it's worth to me,
+though it mayn't be much to you; but I didn't earn it.  It belonged to
+a first-class man, and he worked for it, and he died and left it to me.
+It's not come easy, go easy with me.  I like to feel I've got two
+thousand cash without having to mortgage for it.  But it belonged to
+a number-one man, a man of brains--I've got no brains, only some sense
+--and I want another good man to use it and make the world easier for
+himself."
+
+It was a long speech, and she delivered it in little gasps of oratory
+which were brightened by her wonderfully kind smile and the heart--not to
+say sentiment--which showed in her face.  The sentiment, however, did not
+prejudice Jean Jacques against her, for he was a sentimentalist himself.
+His feelings were very quick, and before she had spoken fifty words the
+underglow of his eyes was flooded by something which might have been
+mistaken for tears.  It was, however, only the moisture of gratitude and
+the soul's good feeling.
+
+"Well there, well there," he said when she had finished, "I've never had
+anything like this in my life before.  It's the biggest thing in the art
+of being a neighbour I've ever seen.  You've only been in the parish
+three years, and yet you've shown me a confidence immense, inspiring!
+It is as the Greek philosopher said, 'To conceive the human mind aright
+is the greatest gift from the gods.'  And to you, who never read a line
+of philosophy, without doubt, you have done the thing that is greatest.
+It says, 'I teach neighbourliness and life's exchange.'  Madame, your
+house ought to be called Neighbourhood House.  It is the epitome of the
+spirit, it is the shrine of--"
+
+He was working himself up to a point where he could forget all the things
+that trouble humanity, in the inebriation of an idealistic soul which had
+a casing of passion, but the passion of the mind and not of the body; for
+Jean Jacques had not a sensual drift in his organism.  If there had been
+a sensual drift, probably Carmen would still have been the lady of his
+manor, and he would still have been a magnate and not a potential
+bankrupt; for in her way Carmen had been a kind of balance to his
+judgment in the business of life, in spite of her own material and
+(at the very last) sensual strain.  It was a godsend to Jean Jacques to
+have such an inspiration as Virginie Poucette had given him.  He could
+not in these days, somehow, get the fires of his soul lighted, as he was
+wont to do in the old times, and he loved talking--how he loved talking
+of great things!  He was really going hard, galloping strong, when
+Virginie interrupted him, first by an exclamation, then, as insistently
+he repeated the words, "It is the epitome of the spirit, the shrine of--"
+
+She put out a hand, interrupting him, and said: "Yes, yes, M'sieu'
+Jean Jacques, that's as good as Moliere, I s'pose, or the Archbishop at
+Quebec, but are you going to take it, the two thousand dollars?  I made a
+long speech, I know, but that was to tell you why I come with the money"
+--she drew out a pocketbook--"with the order on my lawyer to hand the
+cash over to you.  As a woman I had to explain to you, there being lots
+of ideas about what a woman should do and what she shouldn't do; but
+there's nothing at all for you to explain, and Mere Langlois and a lot of
+others would think I'm vain enough now without your compliments.  I'm a
+neighbour if you like, and I offer you a loan.  Will you take it--that's
+all?"
+
+He held out his hand in silence and took the paper from her.  Putting his
+head a little on one side, he read it.  At first he seemed hardly to get
+the formal language clear in his mind; however, or maybe his mind was
+still away in that abstraction into which he had whisked it when he began
+his reply to her fine offer; but he read it out aloud, first quickly,
+then very slowly, and he looked at the signature with a deeply meditative
+air.
+
+"Virginie Poucette--that's a good name," he remarked; "and also good for
+two thousand dollars!"  He paused to smile contentedly over his own joke.
+"And good for a great deal more than that too," he added with a nod.
+
+"Yes, ten times as much as that," she responded quickly, her eyes fixed
+on his face.  She scarcely knew herself what she was thinking when she
+said it; but most people who read this history will think she was hinting
+that her assets might be united with his, and so enable him to wipe out
+his liabilities and do a good deal more besides.  Yet, how could that be,
+since Carmen Dolores was still his wife if she was alive; and also they
+both were Catholics, and Catholics did not recognize divorce!
+
+Truth is, Virginie Poucette's mind did not define her feelings at all
+clearly, or express exactly what she wanted.  Her actions said one thing
+certainly; but if the question had been put to her, whether she was doing
+this thing because of a wish to take the place of Carmen Dolores in Jean
+Jacques' life she would have said no at once.  She had not come to that
+--yet.  She was simply moved by a sentiment of pity for Jean Jacques, and
+as she had no child, or husband, or sister, or brother, or father, or
+mother, but only relatives who tried to impose upon her, she needed an
+objective for the emotions of her nature, for the overflow of her unused
+affection and her unsatisfied maternal spirit.  Here, then, was the most
+obvious opportunity--a man in trouble who had not deserved the bitter bad
+luck which had come to him.  Even old Mere Langlois in the market-place
+at Vilray had admitted that, and had said the same later on in Virginie's
+home.
+
+For an instant Jean Jacques was fascinated by the sudden prospect which
+opened out before him.  If he asked her, this woman would probably loan
+him five thousand dollars--and she had mentioned nothing about security!
+
+"What security do you want?" he asked in a husky voice.
+
+"Security?  I don't understand about that," she replied.  "I'd not offer
+you the money if I didn't think you were an honest man, and an honest man
+would pay me back.  A dishonest man wouldn't pay me back, security or no
+security."
+
+"He'd have to pay you back if the security was right to start with," Jean
+Jacques insisted.  "But you don't want security, because you think I'm an
+honest man!  Well, for sure you're right.  I am honest.  I never took a
+cent that wasn't mine; but that's not everything.  If you lend you ought
+to have security.  I've lost a good deal from not having enough security
+at the start.  You are willing to lend me money without security--that's
+enough to make me feel thirty again, and I'm fifty--I'm fifty," he added,
+as though with an attempt to show her that she could not think of him in
+any emotional way; though the day when his flour-mill was burned he had
+felt the touch of her fingers comforting and thrilling.
+
+"You think Jean Jacques Barbille's word as good as his bond?" he
+continued.  "So it is; but I'm going to pull this thing through alone.
+That's what I said to you and Maitre Fille at his office.  I meant it too
+--help of God, it is the truth!"
+
+He had forgotten that if M. Mornay had not made it easy for him, and had
+not refrained from insisting on his pound of flesh, he would now be
+insolvent and with no roof over him.  Like many another man Jean Jacques
+was the occasional slave of formula, and also the victim of phases of his
+own temperament.  In truth he had not realized how big a thing M. Mornay
+had done for him.  He had accepted the chance given him as the tribute to
+his own courage and enterprise and integrity, and as though it was to the
+advantage of his greatest creditor to give him another start; though in
+reality it had made no difference to the Big Financier, who knew his man
+and, with wide-open eyes, did what he had done.
+
+Virginie was not subtle.  She did not understand, was never satisfied
+with allusions, and she had no gift for catching the drift of things.
+She could endure no peradventure in her conversation.  She wanted plain
+speaking and to be literally sure.
+
+"Are you going to take it?" she asked abruptly.
+
+He could not bear to be checked in his course.  He waved a hand and
+smiled at her.  Then his eyes seemed to travel away into the distance,
+the look of the dreamer in them; but behind all was that strange, ruddy
+underglow of revelation which kept emerging from shadows, retreating and
+emerging, yet always there now, in much or in little, since the burning
+of the mill.
+
+"I've lent a good deal of money without security in my time," he
+reflected, "but the only people who ever paid me back were a deaf and
+dumb man and a flyaway--a woman that was tired of selling herself, and
+started straight and right with the money I lent her.  She had been the
+wife of a man who studied with me at Laval.  She paid me back every
+penny, too, year by year for five years.  The rest I lent money to never
+paid; but they paid, the dummy and the harlot that was, they paid!  But
+they paid for the rest also!  If I had refused these two because of the
+others, I'd not be fit to visit at Neighbourhood House where Virginie
+Poucette lives."
+
+He looked closely at the order she had given him again, as though to let
+it sink in his mind and be registered for ever.  "I'm going to do without
+any further use of your two thousand dollars," he continued cheer fully.
+"It has done its work.  You've lent it to me, I've used it"--he put the
+hand holding it on his breast--"and I'm paying it back to you, but
+without interest."  He gave the order to her.
+
+"I don't see what you mean," she said helplessly, and she looked at the
+paper, as though it had undergone some change while it was in his hand.
+
+"That you would lend it me is worth ten times two thousand to me,
+Virginie Poucette," he explained.  "It gives me, not a kick from behind
+--I've not had much else lately--but it holds a light in front of me.
+It calls me.  It says, 'March on, Jean Jacques--climb the mountain.'
+It summons me to dispose my forces for the campaign which will restore
+the Manor Cartier to what it has ever been since the days of the Baron
+of Beaugard.  It quickens the blood at my heart.  It restores--"
+
+Virginie would not allow him to go on.  "You won't let me help you?
+Suppose I do lose the money--I didn't earn it; it was earned by Palass
+Poucette, and he'd understand, if he knew.  I can live without the money,
+if I have to, but you would pay it back, I know.  You oughtn't to take
+any extra risks.  If your daughter should come back and not find you
+here, if she returned to the Manor Cartier, and--"
+
+He made an insistent gesture.  "Hush!  Be still, my friend--as good a
+friend as a man could have.  If my Zoe came back I'd like to feel--I'd
+like to feel that I had saved things alone; that no woman's money made
+me safe.  If Zoe or if--"
+
+He was going to say, "If Carmen came back," for his mind was moving in
+past scenes; but he stopped short and looked around helplessly.  Then
+presently, as though by an effort, he added with a bravura note in his
+voice:
+
+"The world has been full of trouble for a long time, but there have
+always been men to say to trouble, 'I am master, I have the mind to get
+above it all.'  Well, I am one of them."
+
+There was no note of vanity or bombast in his voice as he said this,
+and in his eyes that new underglow deepened and shone.  Perhaps in this
+instant he saw more of his future than he would speak of to anyone on
+earth.  Perhaps prevision was given him, and it was as the Big Financier
+had said to Maitre Fille, that his philosophy was now, at the last, to be
+of use to him.  When his wife had betrayed him, and his wife and child
+had left him, he had said, "Moi je suis philosophe!" but he was a man of
+wealth in those days, and money soothes hurts of that kind in rare
+degree.  Would he still say, whatever was yet to come, that he was a
+philosopher?
+
+"Well, I've done what I thought would help you, and I can't say more than
+that," Virginie remarked with a sigh, and there was despondency in her
+eyes.  Her face became flushed, her bosom showed agitation; she looked at
+him as she had done in Maitre Fille's office, and a wave of feeling
+passed over him now, as it did then, and he remembered, in response to
+her look, the thrill of his fingers in her palm.  His face now flushed
+also, and he had an impulse to ask her to sit down beside him.  He put it
+away from him, however, for the present, at any rate-who could tell what
+to-morrow might bring forth!--and then he held out his hand to her.  His
+voice shook a little when he spoke; but it cleared, and began to ring,
+before he had said a dozen words.
+
+"I'll never forget what you've said and done this morning, Virginie
+Poucette," he declared; "and if I break the back of the trouble that's in
+my way, and come out cock o' the walk again"--the gold Cock of Beaugard
+in the ruins near and the clarion of the bantam of his barnyard were in
+his mind and ears--"it'll be partly because of you.  I hug that thought
+to me."
+
+"I could do a good deal more than that," she ventured, with a tremulous
+voice, and then she took her warm hand from his nervous grasp, and turned
+sharply into the path which led back towards the Manor.  She did not turn
+around, and she walked quickly away.
+
+There was confusion in her eyes and in her mind.  It would take some time
+to make the confusion into order, and she was now hot, now cold, in all
+her frame, when at last she climbed into her wagon.
+
+This physical unrest imparted itself to all she did that day.  First her
+horses were driven almost at a gallop; then they were held down to a slow
+walk; then they were stopped altogether, and she sat in the shade of the
+trees on the road to her home, pondering--whispering to herself and
+pondering.
+
+As her horses were at a standstill she saw a wagon approaching.
+Instantly she touched her pair with the whip, and moved on.  Before the
+approaching wagon came alongside, she knew from the grey and the
+darkbrown horses who was driving them, and she made a strong effort for
+composure.  She succeeded indifferently, but her friend, Mere Langlois,
+did not notice this fact as her wagon drew near.  There was excitement in
+Mere Langlois' face.
+
+"There's been a shindy at the 'Red Eagle' tavern," she said.  "That
+father-in-law of M'sieu' Jean Jacques and Rocque Valescure, the landlord,
+they got at each other's throats.  Dolores hit Valescure on the head with
+a bottle."
+
+"He didn't kill Valescure, did he?"
+
+"Not that--no.  But Valescure is hurt bad--as bad.  It was six to one and
+half a dozen to the other--both no good at all.  But of course they'll
+arrest the old man--your great friend!  He'll not give you any more fur-
+robes, that's sure.  He got away from the tavern, though, and he's hiding
+somewhere.  M'sieu' Jean Jacques can't protect him now; he isn't what he
+once was in the parish.  He's done for, and old Dolores will have to go
+to trial.  They'll make it hot for him when they catch him.  No more fur-
+robes from your Spanish friend, Virginie !  You'll have to look somewhere
+else for your beaux, though to be sure there are enough that'd be glad to
+get you with that farm of yours, and your thrifty ways, if you keep your
+character."
+
+Virginie was quite quiet now.  The asperity and suggestiveness of the
+other's speech produced a cooling effect upon her.
+
+"Better hurry, Mere Langlois, or everybody won't hear your story before
+sundown.  If your throat gets tired, there's Brown's Bronchial Troches--"
+She pointed to an advertisement on the fence near by.  "M. Fille's cook
+says they cure a rasping throat."
+
+With that shot, Virginie Poucette whipped up her horses and drove on.
+She did not hear what Mere Langlois called after her, for Mere Langlois
+had been slow to recover from the unexpected violence dealt by one whom
+she had always bullied.
+
+"Poor Jean Jacques!" said Virginie Poucette to herself as her horses ate
+up the ground.  "That's another bit of bad luck.  He'll not sleep to-
+night.  Ah, the poor Jean Jacques--and all alone--not a hand to hold; no
+one to rumple that shaggy head of his or pat him on the back!  His wife
+and Ma'm'selle Zoe, they didn't know a good thing when they had it.  No,
+he'll not sleep to-night-ah, my dear Jean Jacques!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+SEBASTIAN DOLORES DOES NOT SLEEP
+
+But Jean Jacques did sleep well that night; though it would have been
+better for him if he had not done so.  The contractor's workmen had
+arrived in the early afternoon, he had seen the first ton of debris
+removed from the ruins of the historic mill, and it was crowned by the
+gold Cock of Beaugard, all grimy with the fire, but jaunty as of yore.
+The cheerfulness of the workmen, who sang gaily an old chanson of mill-
+life as they tugged at the timbers and stones, gave a fillip to the
+spirits of Jean Jacques, to whom had come a red-letter day.
+
+Like Mirza on the high hill of Bagdad he had had his philosophic
+meditations; his good talk with Virginie Poucette had followed; and the
+woman of her lingered in the feeling of his hand all day, as something
+kind and homelike and true.  Also in the evening had come M. Fille, who
+brought him a message from Judge Carcasson, that he must make the world
+sing for himself again.
+
+Contrary to what Mere Langlois had thought, he had not been perturbed by
+the parish noise about the savage incident at "The Red Eagle," and the
+desperate affair which would cause the arrest of his father-in-law.  He
+was at last well inclined to be rid of Sebastian Dolores, who had ceased
+to be a comfort to him, and who brought him hateful and not kindly
+memories of his lost women, and the happy hours of the past they
+represented.
+
+M. Fille had come to the Manor in much alarm, lest the news of the
+miserable episode at "The Red Eagle" should bring Jean Jacques down again
+to the depths.  He was infinitely relieved, however, to find that the
+lord of the Manor Cartier seemed only to be grateful that Sebastian
+Dolores did not return, and nodded emphatically when M. Fille remarked
+that perhaps it would be just as well if he never did return.
+
+As M. Fille sat with his host at the table in the sunset light, Jean
+Jacques seemed quieter and steadier of body and mind than he had been for
+a long, long time.  He even drank three glasses of the cordial which Mere
+Langlois had left for him, with the idea that it might comfort him when
+he got the bad news about Sebastian Dolores; and parting with M. Fille at
+the door, he waved a hand and said: "Well, good-night, master of the
+laws.  Safe journey!  I'm off to bed, and I'll sleep without rocking,
+that's very sure and sweet."
+
+He stood and waved his hand several times to M. Fille--till he was
+out of sight indeed; and the Clerk of the Court smiled to himself long
+afterwards, recalling Jean Jacques' cheerful face as he had seen it at
+their parting in the gathering dusk.  As for Jean Jacques, when he locked
+up the house at ten o'clock, with Dolores still absent, he had the air of
+a man from whose shoulders great weights had fallen.
+
+"Now I've shut the door on him, it'll stay shut," he said firmly.  "Let
+him go back to work.  He's no good here to me, to himself, or to anyone.
+And that business of the fur-robe and Virginie Poucette--ah, that!"
+
+He shook his head angrily, then seeing the bottle of cordial still
+uncorked on the sideboard, he poured some out and drank it very slowly,
+till his eyes were on the ceiling above him and every drop had gone home.
+Presently, with the bedroom lamp in his hand, he went upstairs, humming
+to himself the chanson the workmen had sung that afternoon as they raised
+again the walls of the mill:
+
+                   "Distaff of flax flowing behind her
+                    Margatton goes to the mill
+                    On the old grey ass she goes,
+                    The flour of love it will blind her
+                    Ah, the grist the devil will grind her,
+                    When Margatton goes to the mill!
+                    On the old grey ass she goes,
+                    And the old grey ass, he knows!"
+
+He liked the sound of his own voice this night of his Reconstruction
+Period--or such it seemed to him; and he thought that no one heard his
+singing save himself.  There, however, he was mistaken.  Someone was
+hidden in the house--in the big kitchen-bunk which served as a bed or a
+seat, as needed.  This someone had stolen in while Jean Jacques and M.
+Fille were at supper.  His name was Dolores, and he had a horse just over
+the hill near by, to serve him when his work was done, and he could get
+away.
+
+The constables of Vilray had twice visited the Manor to arrest him that
+day, but they had been led in another direction by a clue which he had
+provided; and afterwards in the dusk he had doubled back and hid himself
+under Jean Jacques' roof.  He had very important business at the Manor
+Cartier.
+
+Jean Jacques' voice ceased one song, and then, after a silence, it took
+up another, not so melodious.  Sebastian Dolores had impatiently waited
+for this later "musicale" to begin--he had heard it often before; and
+when it was at last a regular succession of nasal explosions, he crawled
+out and began to do the business which had brought him to the Manor
+Cartier.
+
+He did it all alone and with much skill; for when he was an anarchist in
+Spain, those long years ago, he had learned how to use tools with expert
+understanding.  Of late, Spain had been much in his mind.  He wanted to
+go back there.  Nostalgia had possessed him ever since he had come again
+to the Manor Cartier after Zoe had left.  He thought much of Spain, and
+but little of his daughter.  Memory of her was only poignant, in so far
+as it was associated with the days preceding the wreck of the Antoine.
+He had had far more than enough of the respectable working life of the
+New World; but there never was sufficient money to take him back to
+Europe, even were it safe to go.  Of late, however, he felt sure that he
+might venture, if he could only get cash for the journey.  He wanted to
+drift back to the idleness and adventure and the "easy money" of the old
+anarchist days in Cadiz and Madrid.  He was sick for the patio and the
+plaza, for the bull-fight, for the siesta in the sun, for the lazy
+glamour of the gardens and the red wine of Valladolid, for the redolent
+cigarette of the roadside tavern.  This cold iron land had spoiled him,
+and he would strive to get himself home again before it was too late.  In
+Spain there would always be some woman whom he could cajole; some comrade
+whom he could betray; some priest whom he could deceive, whose pocket he
+could empty by the recital of his troubles.  But if, peradventure, he
+returned to Spain with money to spare in his pocket, how easy indeed it
+would all be, and how happy he would find himself amid old surroundings
+and old friends!
+
+The way had suddenly opened up to him when Jean Jacques had brought
+home in hard cash, and had locked away in the iron-doored cupboard in
+the officewall, his last, his cherished, eight thousand dollars.  Six
+thousand of that eight were still left, and it was concern for this six
+thousand which had brought Dolores to the Manor this night when Jean
+Jacques snored so loudly.  The events of the day at "The Red Eagle" had
+brought things to a crisis in the affairs of Carmen's father.  It was a
+foolish business that at the tavern--so, at any rate, he thought, when
+it was all over, and he was awake to the fact that he must fly or go to
+jail.  From the time he had, with a bottle of gin, laid Valescure low,
+Spain was the word which went ringing through his head, and the way to
+Spain was by the Six Thousand Dollar Route, the New World terminal of
+which was the cupboard in the wall at the Manor Cartier.
+
+Little cared Sebastian Dolores that the theft of the money would mean
+the end of all things for Jean Jacques Barbille-for his own daughter's
+husband.  He was thinking of himself, as he had always done.
+
+He worked for two whole hours before he succeeded in quietly forcing open
+the iron door in the wall; but it was done at last.  Curiously enough,
+Jean Jacques' snoring stopped on the instant that Sebastian Dolores'
+fingers clutched the money; but it began cheerfully again when the door
+in the wall closed once more.
+
+Five minutes after Dolores had thrust the six thousand dollars into his
+pocket, his horse was galloping away over the hills towards the River St.
+Lawrence.  If he had luck, he would reach it by the morning.  As it
+happened, he had the luck.  Behind him, in the Manor Cartier, the man
+who had had no luck and much philosophy, snored on till morning in
+unconscious content.
+
+It was a whole day before Jean Jacques discovered his loss.  When he had
+finished his lonely supper the next evening, he went to the cupboard in
+his office to cheer himself with the sight of the six thousand dollars.
+He felt that he must revive his spirits.  They had been drooping all day,
+he knew not why.
+
+When he saw the empty pigeon-hole in the cupboard, his sight swam.  It
+was some time before it cleared, but, when it did, and he knew beyond
+peradventure the crushing, everlasting truth, not a sound escaped him.
+His heart stood still.  His face filled with a panic confusion.  He
+seemed like one bereft of understanding.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+"AU 'VOIR, M'SIEU' JEAN JACQUES"
+
+It is seldom that Justice travels as swiftly as Crime, and it is also
+seldom that the luck is more with the law than with the criminal.  It
+took the parish of St. Saviour's so long to make up its mind who stole
+Jean Jacques' six thousand dollars, that when the hounds got the scent at
+last the quarry had reached the water--in other words, Sebastian Dolores
+had achieved the St. Lawrence.  The criminal had had near a day's start
+before a telegram was sent to the police at Montreal, Quebec, and other
+places to look out for the picaroon who had left his mark on the parish
+of St. Saviour's.  The telegram would not even then have been sent had it
+not been for M. Fille, who, suspecting Sebastian Dolores, still refrained
+from instant action.  This he did because he thought Jean Jacques would
+not wish his beloved Zoe's grandfather sent to prison.  But when other
+people at last declared that it must have been Dolores, M. Fille insisted
+on telegrams being sent by the magistrate at Vilray without Jean Jacques'
+consent.  He had even urged the magistrate to "rush" the wire, because it
+came home to him with stunning force that, if the money was not
+recovered, Jean Jacques would be a beggar.  It was better to jail the
+father-in-law, than for the little money-master to take to the road a
+pauper, or stay on at St. Saviour's as an underling where he had been
+overlord.
+
+As for Jean Jacques, in his heart of hearts he knew who had robbed him.
+He realized that it was one of the radii of the comedy-tragedy which
+began on the Antoine, so many years before; and it had settled in his
+mind at last that Sebastian Dolores was but part of the dark machinery
+of fate, and that what was now had to be.
+
+For one whole day after the robbery he was like a man paralysed--
+dispossessed of active being; but when his creditors began to swarm, when
+M. Mornay sent his man of business down to foreclose his mortgages before
+others could take action, Jean Jacques waked from his apathy.  He began
+an imitation of his old restlessness, and made essay again to pull the
+strings of his affairs.  They were, however, so confused that a pull at
+one string tangled them all.
+
+When the constables and others came to him, and said that they were on
+the trail of the robber, and that the rogue would be caught, he nodded
+his head encouragingly; but he was sure in his own mind that the flight
+of Dolores would be as successful as that of Carmen and Zoe.
+
+This is the way he put it: "That man--we will just miss finding him,
+as I missed Zoe at the railroad junction when she went away, as I missed
+catching Carmen at St. Chrisanthine.  When you are at the shore, he will
+be on the river; when you are getting into the train, he will be getting
+out.  It is the custom of the family.  At Bordeaux, the Spanish
+detectives were on the shore gnashing their teeth, when he was a hundred
+yards away at sea on the Antoine.  They missed him like that; and we'll
+miss him too.  What is the good!  It was not his fault--that was the way
+of his bringing up beyond there at Cadiz, where they think more of a
+toreador than of John the Baptist.  It was my fault.  I ought to have
+banked the money.  I ought not to have kept it to look at like a gamin
+with his marbles.  There it was in the wall; and there was Dolores a long
+way from home and wanting to get back.  He found the way by a gift of the
+tools; and I wish I had the same gift now; for I've got no other gift
+that'll earn anything for me."
+
+These were the last dark or pessimistic words spoken at St. Saviour's by
+Jean Jacques; and they were said to the Clerk of the Court, who could not
+deny the truth of them; but he wrung the hand of Jean Jacques
+nevertheless, and would not leave him night or day.  M. Fille was like a
+little cruiser protecting a fort when gunboats swarm near, not daring to
+attack till their battleship heaves in sight.  The battleship was the
+Big Financier, who saw that a wreck was now inevitable, and was only
+concerned that there should be a fair distribution of the assets.  That
+meant, of course, that he should be served first, and then that those
+below the salt should get a share.
+
+Revelation after revelation had been Jean Jacques' lot of late years,
+but the final revelation of his own impotence was overwhelming.  When
+he began to stir about among his affairs, he was faced by the fact that
+the law stood in his way.  He realized with inward horror his shattered
+egotism and natural vanity; he saw that he might just as well be in jail;
+that he had no freedom; that he could do nothing at all in regard to
+anything he owned; that he was, in effect, a prisoner of war where
+he had been the general commanding an army.
+
+Yet the old pride intervened, and it was associated with some innate
+nobility; for from the hour in which it was known that Sebastian Dolores
+had escaped in a steamer bound for France, and could not be overhauled,
+and the chances were that he would never have to yield up the six
+thousand dollars, Jean Jacques bustled about cheerfully, and as though
+he had still great affairs of business to order and regulate.  It was a
+make-believe which few treated with scorn.  Even the workmen at the mill
+humoured him, as he came several times every day to inspect the work of
+rebuilding; and they took his orders, though they did not carry them out.
+No one really carried out any of his orders except Seraphe Corniche, who,
+weeping from morning till night, protested that there never was so good a
+man as M'sieu' Jean Jacques; and she cooked his favourite dishes, giving
+him no peace until he had eaten them.
+
+The days, the weeks went on, with Jean Jacques growing thinner and
+thinner, but going about with his head up like the gold Cock of Beaugard,
+and even crowing now and then, as he had done of yore.  He faced the
+inevitable with something of his old smiling volubility; treating nothing
+of his disaster as though it really existed; signing off this asset and
+that; disposing of this thing and that; stripping himself bare of all the
+properties on his life's stage, in such a manner as might have been his
+had he been receiving gifts and not yielding up all he owned.  He chatted
+as his belongings were, figuratively speaking, being carried away--as
+though they were mechanical, formal things to be done as he had done them
+every day of a fairly long life; as a clerk would check off the boxes or
+parcels carried past him by the porters.  M. Fille could hardly bear to
+see him in this mood, and the New Cure hovered round him with a mournful
+and harmlessly deceptive kindness.  But the end had to come, and
+practically all the parish was present when it came.  That was on the
+day when the contents of the Manor were sold at auction by order of the
+Court.  One thing Jean Jacques refused absolutely and irrevocably to do
+from the first--refused it at last in anger and even with an oath: he
+would not go through the Bankruptcy Court.  No persuasion had any effect.
+The very suggestion seemed to smirch his honour.  His lawyer pleaded with
+him, said he would be able to save something out of the wreck, and that
+his creditors would be willing that he should take advantage of the
+privileges of that court; but he only said in reply:
+
+"Thank you, thank you altogether, monsieur, but it is impossible--'non
+possumus, non possumus, my son,' as the Pope said to Bonaparte.  I owe
+and I will pay what I can; and what I can't pay now I will try to pay in
+the future, by the cent, by the dollar, till all is paid to the last
+copper.  It is the way with the Barbilles.  They have paid their way and
+their debts in honour, and it is in the bond with all the Barbilles of
+the past that I do as they do.  If I can't do it, then that I have tried
+to do it will be endorsed on the foot of the bill."
+
+No one could move him, not even Judge Carcasson, who from his armchair in
+Montreal wrote a feeble-handed letter begging him to believe that it was
+"well within his rights as a gentleman"--this he put in at the request of
+M. Mornay--to take advantage of the privileges of the Bankruptcy Court.
+Even then Jean Jacques had only a few moments' hesitation.  What the
+Judge said made a deep impression; but he had determined to drink the cup
+of his misfortune to the dregs.  He was set upon complete renunciation;
+on going forth like a pilgrim from the place of his troubles and sorrows,
+taking no gifts, no mercies save those which heaven accorded him.
+
+When the day of the auction came everything went.  Even his best suit
+of clothes was sold to a blacksmith, while his fur-coat was bought by a
+horse-doctor for fifteen dollars.  Things that had been part of his life
+for a generation found their way into hands where he would least have
+wished them to go--of those who had been envious of him, who had cheated
+or deceived him, of people with whom he had had nothing in common.  The
+red wagon and the pair of little longtailed stallions, which he had
+driven for six years, were bought by the owner of a rival flour-mill in
+the parish of Vilray; but his best sleigh, with its coon-skin robes, was
+bought by the widow of Palass Poucette, who bought also the famous
+bearskin which Dolores had given her at Jean Jacques' expense, and had
+been returned by her to its proper owner.  The silver fruitdish, once (it
+was said) the property of the Baron of Beaugard, which each generation of
+Barbilles had displayed with as much ceremony as though it was a chalice
+given by the Pope, went to Virginie Poucette.  Virginie also bought the
+furniture from Zoe's bedroom as it stood, together with the little
+upright piano on which she used to play.  The Cure bought Jean Jacques'
+writing-desk, and M. Fille purchased his armchair, in which had sat at
+least six Barbilles as owners of the Manor.  The beaver-hat which Jean
+Jacques wore on state occasions, as his grandfather had done, together
+with the bonnet rouge of the habitant, donned by him in his younger days
+--they fell to the nod of Mere Langlois, who declared that, as she was a
+cousin, she would keep the things in the family.  Mere Langlois would
+have bought the fruit-dish also if she could have afforded to bid against
+Virginie Poucette; but the latter would have had the dish if it had cost
+her two hundred dollars.  The only time she had broken bread in Jean
+Jacques' house, she had eaten cake from this fruit-dish; and to her,
+as to the parish generally, the dish so beautifully shaped, with its
+graceful depth and its fine-chased handles, was symbol of the social
+caste of the Barbilles, as the gold Cock of Beaugard was sign of their
+civic and commercial glory.
+
+Jean Jacques, who had moved about all day with an almost voluble
+affability, seeming not to realize the tragedy going on, or, if he
+realized it, rising superior to it, was noticed to stand still suddenly
+when the auctioneer put up the fruit-dish for sale.  Then the smile left
+his face, and the reddish glow in his eyes, which had been there since
+the burning of the mill, fled, and a touch of amazement and confusion
+took its place.  All in a moment he was like a fluttered dweller of the
+wilds to whom comes some tremor of danger.
+
+His mouth opened as though he would forbid the selling of the heirloom;
+but it closed again, because he knew he had no right to withhold it from
+the hammer; and he took on a look like that which comes to the eyes of a
+child when it faces humiliating denial.  Quickly as it came, however, it
+vanished, for he remembered that he could buy the dish himself.  He could
+buy it himself and keep it.  .  .  .  Yet what could he do with it?  Even
+so, he could keep it.  It could still be his till better days came.
+
+The auctioneer's voice told off the value of the fruitdish--"As an
+heirloom, as an antique; as a piece of workmanship impossible of
+duplication in these days of no handicraft; as good pure silver, bearing
+the head of Louis Quinze--beautiful, marvellous, historic, honourable,"
+and Jean Jacques made ready to bid.  Then he remembered he had no money--
+he who all his life had been able to take a roll of bills from his pocket
+as another man took a packet of letters.  His glance fell in shame, and
+the words died on his lips, even as M. Manotel, the auctioneer, was about
+to add another five-dollar bid to the price, which already was standing
+at forty dollars.
+
+It was at this moment Jean Jacques heard a woman's voice bidding, then
+two women's voices.  Looking up he saw that one of the women was Mere
+Langlois and the other was Virginie Poucette, who had made the first bid.
+For a moment they contended, and then Mere Langlois fell out of the
+contest, and Virginie continued it with an ambitious farmer from the next
+county, who was about to become a Member of Parliament.  Presently the
+owner of a river pleasure-steamer entered into the costly emulation also,
+but he soon fell away; and Virginie Poucette stubbornly raised the
+bidding by five dollars each time, till the silver symbol of the
+Barbilles' pride had reached one hundred dollars.  Then she raised the
+price by ten dollars, and her rival, seeing that he was face to face with
+a woman who would now bid till her last dollar was at stake, withdrew;
+and Virginie was left triumphant with the heirloom.
+
+At the moment when Virginie turned away with the handsome dish from M.
+Manotel, and the crowd cheered her gaily, she caught Jean-Jacques' eye,
+and she came straight towards him.  She wanted to give the dish to him
+then and there; but she knew that this would provide annoying gossip for
+many a day, and besides, she thought he would refuse.  More than
+that, she had in her mind another alternative which might in the end
+secure the heirloom to him, in spite of all.  As she passed him,
+she said:
+
+"At least we keep it in the parish.  If you don't have it, well, then..."
+
+She paused, for she did not quite know what to say unless she spoke what
+was really in her mind, and she dared not do that.
+
+"But you ought to have an heirloom," she added, leaving unsaid what was
+her real thought and hope.  With sudden inspiration, for he saw she was
+trying to make it easy for him, he drew the great silver-watch from his
+pocket, which the head of the Barbilles had worn for generations, and
+said:
+
+"I have the only heirloom I could carry about with me.  It will keep time
+for me as long as I'll last.  The Manor clock strikes the time for the
+world, and this watch is set by the Manor clock."
+
+"Well said--well and truly said, M'sieu' Jean Jacques," remarked the lean
+watchmaker and so-called jeweller of Vilray, who stood near.  "It is a
+watch which couldn't miss the stroke of Judgment Day."
+
+It was at that moment, in the sunset hour, when the sale had drawn to a
+close, and the people had begun to disperse, that the avocat of Vilray
+who represented the Big Financier came to Jean Jacques and said:
+
+"M'sieu', I have to say that there is due to you three hundred and fifty
+dollars from the settlement, excluding this sale, which will just do what
+was expected of it.  I am instructed to give it to you from the
+creditors.  Here it is."
+
+He took out a roll of bills and offered it to Jean Jacques.
+
+"What creditors?" asked Jean Jacques.
+
+"All the creditors," responded the other, and he produced a receipt for
+Jean Jacques to sign.  "A formal statement will be sent you, and if there
+is any more due to you, it will be added then.  But now--well, there it
+is, the creditors think there is no reason for you to wait."
+
+Jean Jacques did not yet take the roll of bills.  "They come from M.
+Mornay?" he asked with an air of resistance, for he did not wish to be
+under further obligations to the man who would lose most by him.
+
+The lawyer was prepared.  M. Mornay had foreseen the timidity and
+sensitiveness of Jean Jacques, had anticipated his mistaken chivalry--for
+how could a man decline to take advantage of the Bankruptcy Court unless
+he was another Don Quixote!  He had therefore arranged with all the
+creditors for them to take responsibility with 'himself, though he
+provided the cash which manipulated this settlement.
+
+"No, M'sieu' Jean Jacques," the lawyer replied, this comes from all the
+creditors, as the sum due to you from all the transactions, so far as can
+be seen as yet.  Further adjustment may be necessary, but this is the
+interim settlement."
+
+Jean Jacques was far from being ignorant of business, but so bemused was
+his judgment and his intelligence now, that he did not see there was no
+balance which could possibly be his, since his liabilities vastly
+exceeded his assets.  Yet with a wave of the hand he accepted the roll of
+bills, and signed the receipt with an air which said, "These forms must
+be observed, I suppose."
+
+What he would have done if the three hundred and fifty dollars had not
+been given him, it would be hard to say, for with gentle asperity he had
+declined a loan from his friend M. Fille, and he had but one silver
+dollar in his pocket, or in the world.  Indeed, Jean Jacques was living
+in a dream in these dark days--a dream of renunciation and sacrifice, and
+in the spirit of one who gives up all to some great cause.  He was not
+yet even face to face with the fulness of his disaster.  Only at moments
+had the real significance of it all come to him, and then he had shivered
+as before some terror menacing his path.  Also, as M. Mornay had said,
+his philosophy was now in his bones and marrow rather than in his words.
+It had, after all, tinctured his blood and impregnated his mind.  He had
+babbled and been the egotist, and played cock o' the walk; and now at
+last his philosophy was giving some foundation for his feet.  Yet at
+this auction-sale he looked a distracted, if smiling, whimsical, rather
+bustling figure of misfortune, with a tragic air of exile, of isolation
+from all by which he was surrounded.  A profound and wayworn loneliness
+showed in his figure, in his face, in his eyes.
+
+The crowd thinned in time, and yet very many lingered to see the last of
+this drama of lost fortunes.  A few of the riff-raff, who invariably
+attend these public scenes, were now rather the worse for drink, from the
+indifferent liquor provided by the auctioneer, and they were inclined to
+horseplay and coarse chaff.  More than one ribald reference to Jean
+Jacques had been checked by his chivalrous fellow-citizens; indeed, M.
+Fille had almost laid himself open to a charge of assault in his own
+court by raising his stick at a loafer, who made insulting references to
+Jean Jacques.  But as the sale drew to a close, an air of rollicking
+humour among the younger men would not be suppressed, and it looked as
+though Jean Jacques' exit would be attended by the elements of farce and
+satire.
+
+In this world, however, things do not happen logically, and Jean Jacques
+made his exit in a wholly unexpected manner.  He was going away by the
+train which left a new railway junction a few miles off, having gently
+yet firmly declined M. Fille's invitation, and also the invitations of
+others--including the Cure and Mere Langlois--to spend the night with
+them and start off the next day.  He elected to go on to Montreal that
+very night, and before the sale was quite finished he prepared to start.
+His carpet-bag containing a few clothes and necessaries had been sent on
+to the junction, and he meant to walk to the station in the cool of the
+evening.
+
+M. Manotel, the auctioneer, hoarse with his heavy day's work, was
+announcing that there were only a few more things to sell, and no doubt
+they could be had at a bargain, when Jean Jacques began a tour of the
+Manor.  There was something inexpressibly mournful in this lonely
+pilgrimage of the dismantled mansion.  Yet there was no show of cheap
+emotion by Jean Jacques; and a wave of the hand prevented any one from
+following him in his dry-eyed progress to say farewell to these haunts of
+childhood, manhood, family, and home.  There was a strange numbness in
+his mind and body, and he had a feeling that he moved immense and
+reflective among material things.  Only tragedy can produce that feeling.
+Happiness makes the universe infinite and stupendous, despair makes it
+small and even trivial.
+
+It was when he had reached the little office where he had done the
+business of his life--a kind of neutral place where he had ever isolated
+himself from the domestic scene--that the final sensation, save one, of
+his existence at the Manor came to him.  Virginie Poucette had divined
+his purpose when he began the tour of the house, and going by a
+roundabout way, she had placed herself where she could speak with him
+alone before he left the place for ever--if that was to be.  She was not
+sure that his exit was really inevitable--not yet.
+
+When Jean Jacques saw Virginie standing beside the table in his office
+where he lead worked over so many years, now marked Sold, and waiting to
+be taken away by its new owner, he started and drew back, but she held
+out her hand and said:
+
+"But one word, M'sieu' Jean Jacques; only one word from a friend--indeed
+a friend."
+
+"A friend of friends," he answered, still in abstraction, his eyes having
+that burnished light which belonged to the night of the fire; but yet
+realizing that she was a sympathetic soul who had offered to lend him
+money without security.
+
+"Oh, indeed yes, as good a friend as you can ever have!" she added.
+
+Something had waked the bigger part of her, which had never been awake in
+the days of Palass Poucette.  Jean Jacques was much older than she, but
+what she felt had nothing to do with age, or place or station.  It had
+only to do with understanding, with the call of nature and of a
+motherhood crying for expression.  Her heart ached for him.
+
+"Well, good-bye, my friend," he said, and held out his hand.  "I must be
+going now."
+
+"Wait," she said, and there was something insistent and yet pleading in
+her voice.  "I've got something to say.  You must hear it.  .  .  .  Why
+should you go?  There is my farm--it needs to be worked right.  It has
+got good chances.  It has water-power and wood and the best flax in the
+province--they want to start a flax-mill on it--I've had letters from big
+men in Montreal.  Well, why shouldn't you do it instead?  There it is,
+the farm, and there am I a woman alone.  I need help.  I've got no head.
+I have to work at a sum of figures all night to get it straight.  .  .  .
+Ah, m'sieu', it is a need both sides!  You want someone to look after
+you; you want a chance again to do things; but you want someone to look
+after you, and it is all waiting there on the farm.  Palass Poucette left
+behind him seven sound horses, and cows and sheep, and a threshing-
+machine and a fanning-mill, and no debts, and two thousand dollars in the
+bank.  You will never do anything away from here.  You must stay here,
+where--where I can look after you, Jean Jacques."
+
+The light in his eyes flamed up, died down, flamed up again, and
+presently it covered all his face, as he grasped what she meant.
+
+"Wonder of God, do you forget?" he asked.  "I am married--married still,
+Virginie Poucette.  There is no divorce in the Catholic Church--no, none
+at all.  It is for ever and ever."
+
+"I said nothing about marriage," she said bravely, though her face
+suffused.
+
+"Hand of Heaven, what do you mean?  You mean to say you would do that for
+me in spite of the Cure and--and everybody and everything?"
+
+"You ought to be taken care of," she protested.  "You ought to have your
+chance again.  No one here is free to do it all but me.  You are alone.
+Your wife that was--maybe she is dead.  I am alone, and I'm not afraid of
+what the good God will say.  I will settle with Him myself.  Well, then,
+do you think I'd care what--what Mere Langlois or the rest of the world
+would say?  .  .  .  I can't bear to think of you going away with
+nothing, with nobody, when here is something and somebody--somebody
+who would be good to you.  Everybody knows that you've been badly used--
+everybody.  I'm young enough to make things bright and warm in your life,
+and the place is big enough for two, even if it isn't the Manor Cartier."
+
+"Figure de Christ, do you think I'd let you do it--me?" declared Jean
+Jacques, with lips trembling now and his shoulders heaving.  Misfortune
+and pain and penalty he could stand, but sacrifice like this and--and
+whatever else it was, were too much for him.  They brought him back to
+the dusty road and everyday life again; they subtracted him from his big
+dream, in which he had been detached from the details of his catastrophe.
+
+"No, no, no," he added.  "You go look another way, Virginie.  Turn your
+face to the young spring, not to the dead winter.  To-morrow I'll be gone
+to find what I've got to find.  I've finished here, but there's many a
+good man waiting for you--men who'll bring you something worth while
+besides themselves.  Make no mistake, I've finished.  I've done my term
+of life.  I'm only out on ticket-of-leave now--but there, enough, I shall
+always want to think of you.  I wish I had something to give you--but
+yes, here is something."  He drew from his pocket a silver napkin-ring.
+"I've had that since I was five years old.  My uncle Stefan gave it to
+me.  I've always used it.  I don't know why I put it in my pocket this
+morning, but I did.  Take it.  It's more than money.  It's got something
+of Jean Jacques about it.  You've got the Barbille fruit-dish-that is a
+thing I'll remember.  I'm glad you've got it, and--"
+
+"I meant we should both eat from it," she said helplessly.
+
+"It would cost too much to eat from it with you, Virginie--"
+
+He stopped short, choked, then his face cleared, and his eyes became
+steady.
+
+"Well then, good-bye, Virginie," he said, holding out his hand.
+
+"You don't think I'd say to any other living man what I've said to you?"
+she asked.
+
+He nodded understandingly.  "That's the best part of it.  It was for me
+of all the world," he answered.  "When I look back, I'll see the light
+in your window--the light you lit for the lost one--for Jean Jacques
+Barbille."
+
+Suddenly, with eyes that did not see and hands held out before him, he
+turned, felt for the door and left the room.
+
+She leaned helplessly against the table.  "The poor Jean Jacques--the
+poor Jean Jacques!" she murmured.  "Cure or no Cure, I'd have done it,"
+she declared, with a ring to her voice.  "Ah, but Jean Jacques, come with
+me!" she added with a hungry and compassionate gesture, speaking into
+space.  "I could make life worth while for us both."
+
+A moment later Virginie was outside, watching the last act in the career
+of Jean Jacques in the parish of St. Saviour's.
+
+This was what she saw.
+
+The auctioneer was holding up a bird-cage containing a canary-Carmen's
+bird-cage, and Zoe's canary which had remained to be a vocal memory of
+her in her old home.
+
+"Here," said the rhetorical, inflammable auctioneer, "here is the
+choicest lot left to the last.  I put it away in the bakery, meaning to
+sell it at noon, when everybody was eating-food for the soul and food for
+the body.  I forgot it.  But here it is, worth anything you like to
+anybody that loves the beautiful, the good, and the harmonious.  What do
+I hear for this lovely saffron singer from the Elysian fields?  What did
+the immortal poet of France say of the bird in his garret, in 'L'Oiseau
+de Mon Crenier'?  What did he say:
+
+                   'Sing me a song of the bygone hour,
+                    A song of the stream and the sun;
+                    Sing of my love in her bosky bower,
+                    When my heart it was twenty-one.'
+
+"Come now, who will renew his age or regale her youth with the divine
+notes of nature's minstrel?  Who will make me an offer for this vestal
+virgin of song--the joy of the morning and the benediction of the
+evening?  What do I hear?  The best of the wine to the last of the feast!
+What do I hear?--five dollars--seven dollars--nine dollars--going at nine
+dollars--ten dollars--Well, ladies and gentlemen, the bird can sing--ah,
+voila !"
+
+He stopped short for a moment, for as the evening sun swept its veil of
+rainbow radiance over the scene, the bird began to sing.  Its little
+throat swelled, it chirruped, it trilled, it called, it soared, it lost
+itself in a flood of ecstasy.  In the applausive silence, the emotional
+recess of the sale, as it were, the man to whom the bird and the song
+meant most, pushed his way up to the stand where M. Manotel stood.  When
+the people saw who it was, they fell back, for there was that in his face
+which needed no interpretation.  It filled them with a kind of awe.
+
+He reached up a brown, eager, affectionate hand--it had always been that
+--fat and small, but rather fine and certainly emotional, though not
+material or sensual.
+
+"Go on with your bidding," he said.
+
+He was going to buy the thing which had belonged to his daughter, was
+beloved by her--the living oracle of the morning, the muezzin of his
+mosque of home.  It had been to the girl who had gone as another such a
+bird had been to the mother of the girl, the voice that sang, "Praise
+God," in the short summer of that bygone happiness of his.  Even this
+cage and its homebird were not his; they belonged to the creditors.
+
+"Go on.  I buy--I bid," Jean Jacques said in a voice that rang.  It had
+no blur of emotion.  It had resonance.  The hammer that struck the bell
+of his voice was the hammer of memory, and if it was plaintive it also
+was clear, and it was also vibrant with the silver of lost hopes.
+
+M. Manotel humoured him, while the bird still sang.  "Four dollars--five
+dollars: do I hear no more than five dollars?--going once, going twice,
+going three times--gone!" he cried, for no one had made a further bid;
+and indeed M. Manotel would not have heard another voice than Jean
+Jacques' if it had been as loud as the falls of the Saguenay.  He was a
+kind of poet in his way, was M. Manotel.  He had been married four times,
+and he would be married again if he had the chance; also he wrote verses
+for tombstones in the churchyard at St. Saviour's, and couplets for fetes
+and weddings.
+
+He handed the cage to Jean Jacques, who put it down on the ground at his
+feet, and in an instant had handed up five dollars for one of the idols
+of his own altar.  Anyone else than M. Manotel, or perhaps M. Fille or
+the New Cure, would have hesitated to take the five dollars, or, if they
+had done so, would have handed it back; but they had souls to understand
+this Jean Jacques, and they would not deny him his insistent
+independence.  And so, in a moment, he was making his way out of the
+crowd with the cage in his hand, the bird silent now.
+
+As he went, some one touched his arm and slipped a book into his hand.
+It was M. Fille, and the book was his little compendium of philosophy
+which his friend had retrieved from his bedroom in the early morning.
+
+"You weren't going to forget it, Jean Jacques?" M. Fille said
+reproachfully.  "It is an old friend.  It would not be happy with
+any one else."
+
+Jean Jacques looked M. Fille in the eyes.  "Moi--je suis philosophe," he
+said without any of the old insistence and pride and egotism, but as one
+would make an affirmation or repeat a creed.
+
+"Yes, yes, to be sure, always, as of old," answered M. Fille firmly;
+for, from that formula might come strength, when it was most needed,
+in a sense other and deeper far than it had been or was now.  "You will
+remember that you will always know where to find us--eh?" added the
+little Clerk of the Court.
+
+The going of Jean Jacques was inevitable; all persuasion had failed to
+induce him to stay--even that of Virginie; and M. Fille now treated it
+as though it was the beginning of a new career for Jean Jacques, whatever
+that career might be.  It might be he would come back some day, but not
+to things as they were, not ever again, nor as the same man.
+
+"You will move on with the world outside there," continued M. Fille,
+"but we shall be turning on the same swivel here always; and whenever you
+come--there, you understand.  With us it is semper fidelis, always the
+same."
+
+Jean Jacques looked at M. Fille again as though to ask him a question,
+but presently he shook his head in negation to his thought.
+
+"Well, good-bye," he said cheerfully--"A la bonne heure!"
+
+By that M. Fille knew that Jean Jacques did not wish for company as he
+went--not even the company of his old friend who had loved the bright
+whimsical emotional Zoe; who had hovered around his life like a
+protecting spirit.
+
+"A bi'tot," responded M. Fille, declining upon the homely patois.
+
+But as Jean Jacques walked away with his little book of philosophy in his
+pocket, and the bird-cage in his hand, someone sobbed.  M. Fille turned
+and saw.  It was Virginie Poucette.  Fortunately for Virginie other women
+did the same, not for the same reason, but out of a sympathy which was
+part of the scene.
+
+It had been the intention of some friends of Jean Jacques to give him
+a cheer when he left, and even his sullen local creditors, now that the
+worst had come, were disposed to give him a good send-off; but the
+incident of the canary in its cage gave a turn to the feeling of the
+crowd which could not be resisted.  They were not a people who could cut
+and dry their sentiments; they were all impulse and simplicity, with an
+obvious cocksure shrewdness too, like that of Jean Jacques--of the old
+Jean Jacques.  He had been the epitome of all their faults and all their
+virtues.
+
+No one cheered.  Only one person called, "Au 'voir, M'sieu' Jean
+Jacques!" and no one followed him--a curious, assertive, feebly-brisk,
+shock-headed figure in the brown velveteen jacket, which he had bought in
+Paris on his Grand Tour.
+
+"What a ridiculous little man!" said a woman from Chalfonte over the
+water, who had been buying freely all day for her new "Manor," her
+husband being a member of the provincial legislature.
+
+The words were no sooner out of her mouth than two women faced her
+threateningly.
+
+"For two pins I'd slap your face," said old Mere Langlois, her great
+breast heaving.  "Popinjay--you, that ought to be in a cage like his
+canary."
+
+But Virginie Poucette also was there in front of the offender, and she
+also had come from Chalfonte--was born in that parish; and she knew what
+she was facing.
+
+"Better carry a bird-cage and a book than carry swill to swine," she
+said; and madame from Chalfonte turned white, for it had been said that
+her father was once a swine-herd, and that she had tried her best to
+forget it when, with her coarse beauty, she married the well-to-do
+farmer who was now in the legislature.
+
+"Hold your tongues, all of you, and look at that," said M. Manotel, who
+had joined the agitated group.  He was pointing towards the departing
+Jean Jacques, who was now away upon his road.
+
+Jean Jacques had raised the cage on a level with his face, and was
+evidently speaking to the bird in the way birds love--that soft kissing
+sound to which they reply with song.
+
+Presently there came a chirp or two, and then the bird thrust up its
+head, and out came the full blessedness of its song, exultant, home-like,
+intimate.
+
+Jean Jacques walked on, the bird singing by his side; and he did not look
+back.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+IF SHE HAD KNOWN IN TIME
+
+Nothing stops when we stop for a time, or for all time, except ourselves.
+Everything else goes on--not in the same way; but it does go on.  Life
+did not stop at St. Saviour's after Jean Jacques made his exit.  Slowly
+the ruined mill rose up again, and very slowly indeed the widow of Palass
+Poucette recovered her spirits, though she remained a widow in spite of
+all appeals; but M. Fille and his sister never were the same after they
+lost their friend.  They had great comfort in the dog which Jean Jacques
+had given to them, and they roused themselves to a malicious pleasure
+when Bobon, as he had been called by Zoe, rushed out at the heels of an
+importunate local creditor who had greatly worried Jean Jacques at the
+last.  They waited in vain for a letter from Jean Jacques, but none came;
+nor did they hear anything from him, or of him, for a long, long time.
+
+Jean Jacques did not mean that they should.  When he went away with his
+book of philosophy and his canary he had but one thing in his mind, and
+that was to find Zoe and make her understand that he knew he had been in
+the wrong.  He had illusions about starting life again, in which he
+probably did not believe; but the make-believe was good for him.  Long
+before the crash came, in Zoe's name--not his own--he had bought from the
+Government three hundred and twenty acres of land out near the Rockies
+and had spent five hundred dollars in improvements on it.
+
+There it was in the West, one remaining asset still his own--or rather
+Zoe's--but worth little if he or she did not develop it.  As he left St.
+Saviour's, however, he kept fixing his mind on that "last domain," as he
+called it to himself.  If this was done intentionally, that he might be
+saved from distraction and despair, it was well done; if it was a real
+illusion--the old self-deception which had been his bane so often in the
+past--it still could only do him good at the present.  It prevented him
+from noticing the attention he attracted on the railway journey from St.
+Saviour's to Montreal, cherishing his canary and his book as he went.
+
+He was not so self-conscious now as in the days when he was surprised
+that Paris did not stop to say, "Bless us, here is that fine fellow, Jean
+Jacques Barbille of St. Saviour's!" He could concentrate himself more
+now on things that did not concern the impression he was making on the
+world.  At present he could only think of Zoe and of her future.
+
+When a patronizing and aggressive commercial traveller in the little
+hotel on a side-street where he had taken a room in Montreal said to him,
+"Bien, mon vieux" (which is to say, "Well, old cock"), "aren't you a long
+way from home?" something of a new dignity came into Jean Jacques'
+bearing, very different from the assurance of the old days, and in reply
+he said:
+
+"Not so far that I need be careless about my company."  This made the
+landlady of the little hotel laugh quite hard, for she did not like the
+braggart "drummer" who had treated her with great condescension for a
+number of years.  Also Madame Glozel liked Jean Jacques because of his
+canary.  She thought there must be some sentimental reason for a man of
+fifty or more carrying a bird about with him; and she did not rest until
+she had drawn from Jean Jacques that he was taking the bird to his
+daughter in the West.  There, however, madame was stayed in her search
+for information.  Jean Jacques closed up, and did but smile when she
+adroitly set traps for him, and at last asked him outright where his
+daughter was.
+
+Why he waited in Montreal it would be hard to say, save that it was a
+kind of middle place between the old life and the new, and also because
+he must decide what was to be his plan of search.  First the West--first
+Winnipeg, but where after that?  He had at last secured information of
+where Zoe and Gerard Fynes had stayed while in Montreal; and now he
+followed clues which would bring him in touch with folk who knew them.
+He came to know one or two people who were with Zoe and Gerard in the
+last days they spent in the metropolis, and he turned over and over in
+his mind every word said about his girl, as a child turns a sweetmeat in
+its mouth.  This made him eager to be off; but on the very day he decided
+to start at once for the West, something strange happened.
+
+It was towards the late afternoon of a Saturday, when the streets were
+full of people going to and from the shops in a marketing quarter, that
+Madame Glozel came to him and said:
+
+"M'sieu', I have an idea, and you will not think it strange, for you have
+a kind heart.  There is a woman--look you, it is a sad, sad story hers.
+She is ill and dying in a room a little way down the street.  But yes,
+I am sure she is dying--of heart disease it is.  She came here first when
+the illness took her, but she could not afford to stay.  She went to
+those cheaper lodgings down the street.  She used to be on the stage
+over in the States, and then she came back here, and there was a man--
+married to him or not I do not know, and I will not think.  Well, the
+man--the brute--he left her when she got ill--but yes, forsook her
+absolutely!  He was a land-agent or something like that, and all very
+fine to your face, to promise and to pretend--just make-believe.  When
+her sickness got worse, off he went with 'Au revoir, my dear--I will be
+back to supper.'  Supper!  If she'd waited for her supper till he came
+back, she'd have waited as long as I've done for the fortune the gipsy
+promised me forty years ago.  Away he went, the rogue, without a thought
+of her, and with another woman.  That's what hurt her most of all.
+Straight from her that could hardly drag herself about--ah, yes, and has
+been as handsome a woman as ever was!--straight from her he went to a
+slut.  She was a slut, m'sieu'--did I not know her?  Did Ma'm'selle Slut
+not wait at table in this house and lead the men a dance here night and
+day-day and night till I found it out!  Well, off he went with the slut,
+and left the lady behind.  .  .  .  You men, you treat women so."
+
+Jean Jacques put out a hand as though to argue with her.  "Sometimes it
+is the other way," he retorted.  "Most of us have seen it like that."
+
+"Well, for sure, you're right enough there, m'sieu'," was the response.
+"I've got nothing to say to that, except that it's a man that runs away
+with a woman, or that gets her to leave her husband when she does go.
+There's always a man that says, 'Come along, I'm the better chap for
+you.'"
+
+Jean Jacques wearily turned his head away towards the cage where his
+canary was beginning to pipe its evening lay.
+
+"It all comes to the same thing in the end," he said pensively; and then
+he who had been so quiet since he came to the little hotel--Glozel's,
+it was called--began to move about the room excitedly, running his
+fingers through his still bushy hair, which, to his credit, was always
+as clean as could be, burnished and shiny even at his mid-century period.
+He began murmuring to himself, and a frown settled on his fore head.
+Mme. Glozel saw that she had perturbed him, and that no doubt she had
+roused some memories which made sombre the sunny little room where the
+canary sang; where, to ravish the eyes of the pessimist, was a picture of
+Louis XVI.  going to heaven in the arms of St. Peter.
+
+When started, however, the good woman could no more "slow down" than her
+French pony would stop when its head was turned homewards from market.
+So she kept on with the history of the woman down the street.
+
+"Heart disease," she said, nodding with assurance and finality; "and we
+know what that is--a start, a shock, a fall, a strain, and pht! off the
+poor thing goes.  Yes, heart disease, and sometimes with such awful pain.
+But so; and yesterday she told me she had only a hundred dollars left.
+'Enough to last me through,' she said to me.  Poor thing, she lifted up
+her eyes with a way she has, as if looking for something she couldn't
+find, and she says, as simple as though she was asking about the price of
+a bed-tick, 'It won't cost more than fifty dollars to bury me, I s'pose?'
+Well, that made me squeamish, for the poor dear's plight came home to me
+so clear, and she young enough yet to get plenty out of life, if she had
+the chance.  So I asked her again about her people--whether I couldn't
+send for someone belonging to her.  'There's none that belongs to me,'
+she says, 'and there's no one I belong to.'
+
+"I thought very likely she didn't want to tell me about herself; perhaps
+because she had done wrong, and her family had not been good to her.  Yet
+it was right I should try and get her folks to come, if she had any
+folks.  So I said to her, 'Where was your home?'  And now, what do you
+think she answered, m'sieu'?'  'Look there,' she said to me, with her big
+eyes standing out of her head almost--for that's what comes to her
+sometimes when she is in pain, and she looks more handsome then than at
+any other time--'Look there,' she said to me, 'it was in heaven, that's
+where--my home was; but I didn't know it.  I hadn't been taught to know
+the place when I saw it.'
+
+"Well, I felt my skin go goosey, for I saw what was going on in her
+mind, and how she was remembering what had happened to her some time,
+somewhere; but there wasn't a tear in her eyes, and I never saw her cry-
+never once, m'sieu'--well, but as brave as brave.  Her eyes are always
+dry--burning.  They're like two furnaces scorching up her face.  So I
+never found out her history, and she won't have the priest.  I believe
+that's because she wants to die unknown, and doesn't want to confess.
+I never saw a woman I was sorrier for, though I think she wasn't married
+to the man that left her.  But whatever she was, there's good in her--I
+haven't known hundreds of women and had seven sisters for nothing.  Well,
+there she is--not a friend near her at the last; for it's coming soon,
+the end--no one to speak to her, except the woman she pays to come in and
+look after her and nurse her a bit.  Of course there's the landlady too,
+Madame Popincourt, a kind enough little cricket of a woman, but with no
+sense and no head for business.  And so the poor sick thing has not a
+single pleasure in the world.  She can't read, because it makes her head
+ache, she says; and she never writes to any one.  One day she tried to
+sing a little, but it seemed to hurt her, and she stopped before she had
+begun almost.  Yes, m'sieu', there she is without a single pleasure in
+the long hours when she doesn't sleep."
+
+"There's my canary--that would cheer her up," eagerly said Jean Jacques,
+who, as the story of the chirruping landlady continued, became master of
+his agitation, and listened as though to the tale of some life for which
+he had concern.  "Yes, take my canary to her, madame.  It picked me up
+when I was down.  It'll help her--such a bird it is!  It's the best
+singer in the world.  It's got in its throat the music of Malibran and
+Jenny Lind and Grisi, and all the stars in heaven that sang together.
+Also, to be sure, it doesn't charge anything, but just as long as there's
+daylight it sings and sings, as you know."
+
+"M'sieu'--oh, m'sieu', it was what I wanted to ask you, and I didn't
+dare!" gushingly declared madame.  "I never heard a bird sing like that
+--just as if it knew how much good it was doing, and with all the airs of
+a grand seigneur.  It's a prince of birds, that.  If you mean it,
+m'sieu', you'll do as good a thing as you have ever done."
+
+"It would have to be much better, or it wouldn't be any use," remarked
+Jean Jacques.
+
+The woman made a motion of friendliness with both hands.  "I don't
+believe that.  You may be queer, but you've got a kind eye.  It won't be
+for long she'll need the canary, and it will cheer her.  There certainly
+was never a bird so little tied to one note.  Now this note, now that,
+and so amusing.  At times it's as though he was laughing at you."
+
+"That's because, with me for his master, he has had good reason to
+laugh," remarked Jean Jacques, who had come at last to take a despondent
+view of himself.
+
+"That's bosh," rejoined Mme. Glozel; "I've seen several people odder than
+you."
+
+She went over to the cage eagerly, and was about to take it away.
+"Excuse me," interposed Jean Jacques, "I will carry the cage to the
+house.  Then you will go in with the bird, and I'll wait outside and see
+if the little rascal sings."
+
+"This minute?" asked madame.
+
+"For sure, this very minute.  Why should the poor lady wait?  It's a
+lonely time of day, this, the evening, when the long night's ahead."
+
+A moment later the two were walking along the street to the door of Mme.
+Popincourt's lodgings, and people turned to look at the pair, one
+carrying something covered with a white cloth, evidently a savoury dish
+of some kind--the other with a cage in which a handsome canary hopped
+about, well pleased with the world.
+
+At Mme.  Popincourt's door Mme.  Glozel took the cage and went upstairs.
+Jean Jacques, left behind, paced backwards and forwards in front of the
+house waiting and looking up, for Mme.  Glozel had said that behind the
+front window on the third floor was where the sick woman lived.  He had
+not long to wait.  The setting sun shining full on the window had roused
+the bird, and he began to pour out a flood of delicious melody which
+flowed on and on, causing the people in the street to stay their steps
+and look up.  Jean Jacques' face, as he listened, had something very like
+a smile.  There was that in the smile belonging to the old pride, which
+in days gone by had made him say when he looked at his domains at the
+Manor Cartier--his houses, his mills, his store, his buildings and his
+lands--"It is all mine.  It all belongs to Jean Jacques Barbille."
+
+Suddenly, however, there came a sharp pause in the singing, and after
+that a cry--a faint, startled cry.  Then Mme.  Glozel's head was thrust
+out of the window three floors up, and she called to Jean Jacques to come
+quickly.  As she bade him come, some strange premonition flashed to Jean
+Jacques, and with thumping heart he hastened up the staircase.  Outside a
+bedroom door, Mme.  Glozel met him.  She was so excited she could only
+whisper.
+
+"Be very quiet," she said.  "There is something strange.  When the bird
+sang as it did--you heard it--she sat like one in a trance.  Then her
+face took on a look glad and frightened too, and she stared hard at the
+cage.  'Bring that cage to me,' she said.  I brought it.  She looked
+sharp at it, then she gave a cry and fell back.  As I took the cage away
+I saw what she had been looking at--a writing at the bottom of the cage.
+It was the name Carmen."
+
+With a stifled cry Jean Jacques pushed her aside and entered the room.
+As he did so, the sick woman in the big armchair, so pale yet so splendid
+in her death-beauty, raised herself up.  With eyes that Francesca might
+have turned to the vision of her fate, she looked at the opening door, as
+though to learn if he who came was one she had wished to see through
+long, relentless days.
+
+"Jean Jacques--ah, my beautiful Jean Jacques!" she cried out presently in
+a voice like a wisp of sound, for she had little breath; and then with a
+smile she sank back, too late to hear, but not too late to know, what
+Jean Jacques said to her.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Being generous with other people's money
+I had to listen to him, and he had to pay me for listening
+Law.  It is expensive whether you win or lose
+Protest that it is right when it knows that it is wrong
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MONEY MASTER, PARKER, V4 ***
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