The Money Master

Chapter 14

"I DO NOT WANT TO GO"

It is a bad thing to call down a crisis in the night-time. A "scene" at

midnight is a savage enemy of ultimate understanding, and that Devil,

called Estrangement, laughs as he observes the objects of his attention

in conflict when the midnight candle burns.

He should have been seized with a fit of remorse, however, at the sight

he saw in the Manor Cartier at midnight of the day when Jean Jacques

Barbille had reached his fiftieth year. There is nothing which, for

pathos and for tragedy, can compare with a struggle between the young and

the old.

The Devil of Estrangement when he sees it, may go away and indulge

himself in sleep; for there will be no sleep for those who, one young and

the other old, break their hearts on each other's anvils, when the lights

are low and it is long till morning.

When Jean Jacques had broken the forgotten guitar which his daughter had

retrieved from her mother's life at the Manor Cartier (all else he had

had packed and stored away in the flour-mill out of sight) and thrown it

in the fire, there had begun a revolt in the girl's heart, founded on a

sense of injustice, but which itself became injustice also; and that is a

dark thing to come between those who love--even as parent and child.

After her first exclamation of dismay and pain, Zoe had regained her

composure, and during the rest of the evening she was full of feverish

gaiety. Indeed her spirits and playful hospitality made the evening a

success in spite of the skeleton at the feast. Jean Jacques had also

roused himself, and, when the dance began, he joined in with spirit,

though his face was worn and haggard even when lighted by his smile. But

though the evening came to the conventional height of hilarity, there was

a note running through it which made even the youngest look at each

other, as though to say, "Now, what's going to happen next!"

Three people at any rate knew that something was going to happen. They

were Zoe, the Man from Outside and M. Fille. Zoe had had more than one

revelation that night, and she felt again as she did one day, seven years

before, when, coming home from over the hills, she had stepped into a

house where Horror brooded as palpably as though it sat beside the fire,

or hung above the family table. She had felt something as soon as she had

entered the door that far-off day, though the house seemed empty. It was

an emptiness which was filled with a torturing presence or torturing

presenes. It had stilled her young heart. What was it? She had learned

the truth soon enough. Out of the sunset had come her father with a face

twisted with misery, and as she ran to him, he had caught her by both

shoulders, looked through her eyes to something far beyond, and hoarsely

said: "She is gone--gone from us! She has run away from home! Curse her

baptism--curse it, curse it!"

Zoe could never forget these last words she had ever heard her father

speak of Carmen. They were words which would make any Catholic shudder to

hear. It was a pity he had used them, for they made her think at last

that her mother had been treated with injustice. This, in spite of the

fact that in the days, now so far away, when her mother was with them she

had ever been nearer to her father, and that, after first childhood, she

and her mother were not so close as they had been, when she went to sleep

to the humming of a chanson of Cadiz. Her own latent motherhood, however,

kept stealing up out of the dim distances of childhood's ignorance and,

with modesty and allusiveness, whispering knowledge in her ear. So it was

that now she looked back pensively to the years she had spent within

sight and sound of her handsome mother, and out of the hunger of her own

spirit she had come to idealize her memory. It was good to have a loving

father; but he was a man, and he was so busy just when she wanted--when

she wanted she knew not what, but at least to go and lay her head on a

heart that would understand what was her sorrow, her joy, or her longing.

And now here at last was come Crisis, which showed its thunderous head in

the gay dance, and shook his war-locks in the fire, where her mother's

guitar had shrieked in its last agony.

When all the guests had gone, when the bolts had been shot home, and old

Seraphe Corniche had gone to bed, father and daughter came face to face.

There was a moment's pause, as the two looked at each other, and then Zoe

came up to Jean Jacques to kiss him good-night. It was her way of facing

the issue. Instinctively she knew that he would draw back, and that the

struggle would begin. It might almost seem that she had invited it; for

she had let the Man from Outside hold her hand for far longer than

courtesy required, while her father looked on with fretful eyes--even

with a murmuring which was not a benediction. Indeed, he had evaded

shaking hands with his hated visitor by suddenly offering him a cigar,

and then in the doorway itself handing a lighted match.

"His eminence, Cardinal Christophe, gave these cigars to me when he

passed through St. Saviour's five years ago," Jean Jacques had remarked

loftily, "and I always smoke one on my birthday. I am a good Catholic,

and his eminence rested here for a whole day."

He had had a grim pleasure in avoiding the handshake, and in having the

Protestant outsider smoke the Catholic cigar! In his anger it seemed to

him that he had done something worthy almost of the Vatican, indeed of

the great Cardinal Christophe himself. Even in his moments of crisis, in

his hours of real tragedy, in the times when he was shaken to the centre,

Jean Jacques fancied himself more than a little. It was as the

master-carpenter had remarked seven years before, he was always

involuntarily saying, "Here I come--look at me. I am Jean Jacques

Barbille!"

When Zoe reached out a hand to touch his arm, and raised her face as

though to kiss him good-night, Jean Jacques drew back.

"Not yet, Zoe," he said. "There are some things--What is all this between

you and that man? . . . I have seen. You must not forget who you are--the

daughter of Jean Jacques Barbille, of the Manor Cartier, whose name is

known in the whole province, who was asked to stand for the legislature.

You are Zoe Barbille--Mademoiselle Zoe Barbille. We do not put on airs.

We are kind to our neighbours, but I am descended from the Baron of

Beaugard. I have a place--yes, a place in society; and it is for you to

respect it. You comprehend?"

Zoe flushed, but there was no hesitation whatever in her reply. "I am

what I have always been, and it is not my fault that I am the daughter of

M. Jean Jacques Barbille! I have never done anything which was not good

enough for the Manor Cartier." She held her head firmly as she said it.

Now Jean Jacques flushed, and he did hesitate in his reply. He hated

irony in anyone else, though he loved it in himself, when heaven gave him

inspiration thereto. He was in a state of tension, and was ready to break

out, to be a force let loose--that is the way he would have expressed it;

and he was faced by a new spirit in his daughter which would surely

spring the mine, unless he secured peace by strategy. He had sense enough

to feel the danger.

He did not see, however, any course for diplomacy here, for she had given

him his cue in her last words. As a pure logician he was bound to take

it, though it might lead to drama of a kind painful to them both.

"It is not good enough for the Manor Cartier that you go falling in love

with a nobody from nowhere," he responded.

"I am not falling in love," she rejoined.

"What did you mean, then, by looking at him as you did; by whispering

together; by letting him hold your hand when he left, and him looking at

you as though he'd eat you up--without sugar!"

"I said I was not falling in love," she persisted, quietly, but with

characteristic boldness. "I am in love."

"You are in love with him--with that interloper! Heaven of heavens, do

you speak the truth? Answer me, Zoe Barbille."

She bridled. "Certainly I will answer. Did you think I would let a man

look at me as he did, that I would look at a man as I looked at him, that

I would let him hold my hand as I did, if I did not love him? Have you

ever seen me do it before?"

Her voice was even and quiet--as though she had made up her mind on a

course, and meant to carry it through to the end.

"No, I never saw you look at a man like that, and everything is as you

say, but--" his voice suddenly became uneven and higher--pitched and a

little hoarse, "but he is English, he is an actor--only that; and he is a

Protestant."

"Only that?" she asked, for the tone of his voice was such as one would

use in speaking of a toad or vermin, and she could not bear it. "Is it a

disgrace to be any one of those things?"

"The Barbilles have been here for two hundred years; they have been

French Catholics since the time of"--he was not quite sure--"since the

time of Louis XI.," he added at a venture, and then paused, overcome by

his own rashness.

"Yes, that is a long time," she said, "but what difference does it make?

We are just what we are now, and as if there never had been a Baron of

Beaugard. What is there against Gerard except that he is an actor, that

he is English, and that he is a Protestant? Is there anything?"

"Sacre, is it not enough? An actor, what is that--to pretend to be

someone else and not to be yourself!"

"It would be better for a great many people to be someone else rather

than themselves--for nothing; and he does it for money."

"For money! What money has he got? You don't know. None of us know.

Besides, he's a Protestant, and he's English, and that ends it. There

never has been an Englishman or a Protestant in the Barbille family, and

it shan't begin at the Manor Cartier." Jean Jacques' voice was rising in

proportion as he perceived her quiet determination. Here was something of

the woman who had left him seven years ago--left this comfortable home of

his to go to disgrace and exile, and God only knew what else! Here in

this very room--yes, here where they now were, father and daughter, stood

husband and wife that morning when he had his hand on the lever prepared

to destroy the man who had invaded his home; who had cast a blight upon

it, which remained after all the years; after he had done all a man could

do to keep the home and the woman too. The woman had gone; the home

remained with his daughter in it, and now again there was a fight for

home and the woman. Memory reproduced the picture of the mother standing

just where the daughter now stood, Carmen quiet and well in hand, and

himself all shaken with weakness, and with all power gone out of

him--even the power which rage and a murderous soul give.

But yet this was different. There was no such shame here as had fallen on

him seven years ago. But there was a shame after its kind; and if it were

not averted, there was the end of the home, of the prestige, the pride

and the hope of "M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosophe."

"What shall not begin here at the Manor Cartier?" she asked with burning

cheek.

"The shame--it shall not begin here."

"What shame, father?"

"Of marriage with a Protestant and an actor."

"You will not let me marry him?" she persisted stubbornly.

Her words seemed to shake him all to pieces. It was as though he was

going through the older tragedy all over again. It had possessed him ever

since the sight of Carmen's guitar had driven him mad three hours ago. He

swayed to and fro, even as he did when his hand left the lever and he let

the master-carpenter go free. It was indeed a philosopher under torture,

a spirit rocking on its anchor. Just now she had put into words herself

what, even in his fear, he had hoped had no place in her mind--marriage

with the man. He did not know this daughter of his very well. There was

that in her which was far beyond his ken. Thousands of miles away in

Spain it had origin, and the stream of tendency came down through long

generations, by courses unknown to him.

"Marry him--you want to marry him!" he gasped. "You, my Zoe, want to

marry that tramp of a Protestant!"

Her eyes blazed in anger. Tramp--the man with the air of a young

Alexander, with a voice like the low notes of the guitar thrown to the

flames! Tramp!

"If I love him I ought to marry him," she answered with a kind of

calmness, however, though all her body was quivering. Suddenly she came

close to her father, a great sympathy welled up in her eyes, and her

voice shook.

"I do not want to leave you, father, and I never meant to do so. I never

thought of it as possible; but now it is different. I want to stay with

you; but I want to go with him too."

Presently as she seemed to weaken before him, he hardened. "You can't

have both," he declared with as much sternness as was possible to him,

and with a Norman wilfulness which was not strength. "You shall not marry

an actor and a Protestant. You shall not marry a man like

that--never--never--never. If you do, you will never have a penny of

mine, and I will never--"

"Oh, hush--Mother of Heaven, hush!" she cried. "You shall not put a curse

on me too."

"What curse?" he burst forth, passion shaking him. "You cursed my

mother's baptism. It would be a curse to be told that you would see me no

more, that I should be no more part of this home. There has been enough

of that curse here. . . . Ah, why--why--" she added with a sudden rush of

indignation, "why did you destroy the only thing I had of hers? It was

all that was left--her guitar. I loved it so."

All at once, with a cry of pain, she turned and ran to the door--entering

on the staircase which led to her room. In the doorway she turned.

"I can't help it. I can't help it, father. I love him--but I love you

too," she cried. "I don't want to go--oh, I don't want to go! Why do

you--?" her voice choked; she did not finish the sentence; or if she did,

he could not hear.

Then she opened the door wide, and disappeared into the darkness of the

unlighted stairway, murmuring, "Pity--have pity on me, holy Mother,

Vierge Marie!" Then the door closed behind her almost with a bang.

After a moment of stupefied inaction Jean Jacques hurried over and threw

open the door she had closed. "Zoe--little Zoe, come back and say

good-night," he called. But she did not hear, for, with a burst of

crying, she had hurried into her own room and shut and locked the door.

It was a pity, a measureless pity, as Mary the Mother must have seen, if

she could see mortal life at all, that Zoe did not hear him. It might

have altered the future. As it was, the Devil of Estrangement might well

be content with his night's work.