The Money Master

Chapter 17

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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-c**k 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."

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 h*******t 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 c**k 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 c**k 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 c**k 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 c**k 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 c**k 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."

"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."

"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."

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.

In the 1600s, Balthasar Gracian, a jesuit priest wrote 300 aphorisms on living life called "The Art of Worldly Wisdom." Join our newsletter below and read them all, one at a time.