The Money Master

Chapter 7

JEAN JACQUES AWAKES FROM SLEEP

The pensiveness of a summer evening on the Beau Cheval was like a veil

hung over all the world. While yet the sun was shining, there was the

tremor of life in the sadness; but when the last glint of amethyst and

gold died away behind Mont Violet, and the melancholy swish of the river

against the osiered banks rose out of the windless dusk, all the region

around Manor Cartier, with its cypresses, its firs, its beeches, and its

elms, became gently triste. Even the weather-vane on the Manor--the gold

Cock of Beaugard, as it was called--did not move; and the stamping of a

horse in the stable was like the thunderous knock of a traveller from

Beyond. The white mill and the grey manor stood out with ghostly

vividness in the light of the rising moon. Yet there were times

innumerable when they looked like cool retreats for those who wanted

rest; when, in the summer solstice, they offered the pleasant peace of

the happy fireside. How often had Jean Jacques stood off from it all of a

summer night and said to himself: "Look at that, my Jean Jacques. It is

all yours, Manor and mills and farms and factory--all."

"Growing, growing, fattening, while I drone in my feather bed," he had as

often said, with the delighted observation of the philosopher. "And me

but a young man yet--but a mere boy," he would add. "I have piled it

up--I have piled it up, and it keeps on growing, first one thing and then

another."

Could such a man be unhappy? Finding within himself his satisfaction, his

fountain of appeasement, why should not his days be days of pleasantness

and peace? So it appeared to him during that summer, just passed, when he

had surveyed the World and his world within the World, and it seemed to

his innocent mind that he himself had made it all. There he was, not far

beyond forty, and eligible to become a member of Parliament, or even a

count of the Holy Roman Empire! He had thought of both these honours, but

there was so much to occupy him--he never had a moment to himself, except

at night; and then there was planning and accounting to do, his foremen

to see, or some knotty thing to disentangle. But when the big clock in

the Manor struck ten, and he took out his great antique silver watch, to

see if the two marched to the second, he would go to the door, look out

into the night, say, "All's well, thank the good God," and would go to

bed, very often forgetting to kiss Carmen, and even forgetting his

darling little Zoe.

After all, a mind has to be very big and to have very many tentacles to

hold so many things all at once, and also to remember to do the right

thing at the right moment every time. He would even forget to ask Carmen

to play on the guitar, which in the first days of their married life was

the recreation of every evening. Seldom with the later years had he asked

her to sing, because he was so busy; and somehow his ear had not that

keenness of sound once belonging to it. There was a time when he himself

was wont to sing, when he taught his little Zoe the tunes of the Chansons

Canadiennes; but even that had dropped away, except at rare intervals,

when he would sing Le Petit Roger Bontemps, with Petite Fleur de Bois,

and a dozen others; but most he would sing--indeed there was never a

sing-song in the Manor Cartier but he would burst forth with A la Claire

Fontaine and its haunting refrain:

M. Fille had wondered much that night of June at the listless manner and

listless playing of Carmen Barbille. For a woman of such spirit and fire

it would seem as though she must be in ill-health to play like that. Yet

when he looked at her he saw only the comeliness of a woman whom the life

of the haut habitant had not destroyed or, indeed, dimmed. Her skin was

smooth, she had no wrinkles, and her neck was a pillar of softly moulded

white flesh, around which a man might well string unset jewels, if he had

them; for the tint and purity of her skin would be a better setting than

platinum or fine gold. But the Clerk of the Court was really

unsophisticated, or he would have seen that Carmen played the guitar

badly because she was not interested in Jean Jacques' singing. He would

have known that she had come to that stage in her married life when the

tenure is pitifully insecure. He would have seen that the crisis was

near. If he had had any real observation he would have noticed that

Carmen's eyes at once kindled, and that the guitar became a different

thing, when M. Colombin, the young schoolmaster, one of the guests,

caught up the refrain of A la Claire Fontaine, and in a soft tenor voice

sang it with Jean Jacques to the end, and then sang it again with Zoe.

Then Carmen's dark eyes deepened with the gathering light in them, her

body seemed to vibrate and thrill with emotion; and when M. Colombin and

Zoe ceased, with her eyes fixed on the distance, and as though

unconscious of them all, she began to sing a song of Cadiz which she had

not sung since boarding the Antoine at Bordeaux. Her mind had, suddenly

flown back out of her dark discontent to the days when all life was

before her, and, with her Gonzales, she had moved in an atmosphere of

romance, adventure and passion.

In a second she was transformed from the wife of the brown money-master

to the girl she was when she came to St. Saviour's from the plaza, where

her Carvillho Gonzales was shot, with love behind her and memory blazoned

in the red of martyrdom. She sang now as she had not sung for some years.

Her guitar seemed to leap into life, her face shone with the hot passion

of memory, her voice rang with the pain of a disappointed life:

How had she gone through it all so long, she asked herself? The presence

of Jean Jacques had become almost unbearable when, the day done, he

retired to the feather bed which she loathed, though he would have looked

upon discarding it like the abdication of his social position. A feather

bed was a sign of social position; it was as much the dais to his honour

as is the woolsack to the Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords.

She was waiting for something. There was a restless, vagrant spirit alive

in her now. She had been so long inactive, tied by the leg, with wings

clipped; now her mind roamed into pleasant places of the imagination

where life had freedom, where she could renew the impulses of youth. A

true philosopher-a man of the world-would have known for what she was

waiting with that vague, disordered expectancy and yearning; but there

was no man of the world to watch and guide her this fateful summer, when

things began to go irretrievably wrong.

Then George Masson came. He was a man of the world in his way; he saw and

knew better than the philosopher of the Manor Cartier. He grasped the

situation with the mind of an artist in his own sphere, and with the

knowledge got by experience. Thus there had been the thing which the

Clerk of the Court saw from Mont Violet behind the Manor; and so it was

that as Jean Jacques helped Carmen down from the red wagon on their

return from Vilray, she gave him a smile which was meant to deceive; for

though given to him it was really given to another man in her mind's eye.

At sunset she gave it again to George Masson on the river-bank, only

warmer and brighter still, with eyes that were burning, with hands that

trembled, and with an agitated bosom more delicately ample than it was on

the day the Antoine was wrecked.

Neither of these two adventurers into a wild world of feeling noticed

that a man was sitting on a little knoll under a tree, not far away from

their meeting-place, busy with pencil and paper.

It was Jean Jacques, who had also come to the river-bank to work out a

business problem which must be settled on the morrow. He had stolen out

immediately after supper from neighbours who wished to see him, and had

come here by a roundabout way, because he wished to be alone.

George Masson and Carmen were together for a few moments only, but Jean

Jacques heard his wife say, "Yes, to-morrow--for sure," and then he saw

her kiss the master-carpenter--kiss him twice, thrice. After which they

vanished, she in one direction, and the invader and marauder in another.

If either of these two had seen the face of the man with a pencil and

paper under the spreading beechtree, they would not have been so

impatient for tomorrow, and Carmen would not have said "for sure."

Jean Jacques was awake at last, man as well as philosopher.