The Money Master, Complete

“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.

CHAPTER XXII. BELLS OF MEMORY

However far Jean Jacques went, however long the day since leaving the Manor Cartier, he could not escape the signals from his past. He heard more than once the bells of memory ringing at the touch of the invisible hand of Destiny which accepts no philosophy save its own. At Montreal, for one hallowed instant, he had regained his lost Carmen, but he had turned from her grave—the only mourners being himself, Mme. Glozel and Mme. Popincourt, together with a barber who had coiffed her wonderful hair once a week—with a strange burning at his heart. That iceberg which most mourners carry in their breasts was not his, as he walked down the mountainside from Carmen’s grave. Behind him trotted Mme. Glozel and Mme. Popincourt, like little magpies, attendants on this eagle of sorrow whose life-love had been laid to rest, her heart-troubles over. Passion or ennui would no more vex her.

She had had a soul, had Carmen Dolores, though she had never known it till her days closed in on her, and from the dusk she looked out of the casements of life to such a glowing as Jean Jacques had seen when his burning mill beatified the evening sky. She had known passion and vivid life in the days when she went hand-in-hand with Carvillho Gonzales through the gardens of Granada; she had known the smothering home-sickness which does not alone mean being sick for a distant home, but a sickness of the home that is; and she had known what George Masson gave her for one thrilling hour, and then—then the man who left her in her death-year, taking not only the last thread of hope which held her to life. This vulture had taken also little things dear to her daily life, such as the ring Carvillho Gonzales had given her long ago in Cadiz, also another ring, a gift of Jean Jacques, and things less valuable to her, such as money, for which she knew surely she would have no long use.

As she lay waiting for the day when she must go from the garish scene, she unconsciously took stock of life in her own way. There intruded on her sight the stages of the theatres where she had played and danced, and she heard again the music of the paloma and those other Spanish airs which had made the world dance under her girl’s feet long ago. At first she kept seeing the faces of thousands looking up at her from the stalls, down at her from the gallery, over at her from the boxes; and the hot breath of that excitement smote her face with a drunken odour that sent her mad. Then, alas! somehow, as disease took hold of her, there were the colder lights, the colder breath from the few who applauded so little. And always the man who had left her in her day of direst need; who had had the last warm fires of her life, the last brief outrush of her soul, eager as it was for a joy which would prove she had not lost all when she fled from the Manor Cartier—a joy which would make her forget!

What she really did feel in this last adventure of passion only made her remember the more when she was alone now, her life at the Manor Cartier. She was wont to wake up suddenly in the morning—the very early morning—with the imagined sound of the gold Cock of Beaugard crowing in her ears. Memory, memory, memory—yet never a word, and never a hearsay of what had happened at the Manor Cartier since she had left it! Then there came a time when she longed intensely to see Jean Jacques before she died, though she could not bring herself to send word to him. She dreaded what the answer might be—not Jean Jacques’ answer, but the answer of Life. Jean Jacques and her child, her Zoe—more his than hers in years gone by—one or both might be dead! She dared not write, but she cherished a desire long denied. Then one day she saw everything in her life more clearly than she had ever done. She found an old book of French verse, once belonging to Mme. Popincourt’s husband, who had been a professor. Some lines therein opened up a chamber of her being never before unlocked. At first only the feeling of the thing came, then slowly the spiritual meaning possessed her. She learnt it by heart and let it sing to her as she lay half-sleeping and half-waking, half-living and half-dying:

At last the inner thought of it got into her heart, and then it was in reply to Mme. Glozel, who asked her where her home was, she said: “In Heaven, but I did not know it!” And thus it was, too, that at the very last, when Jean Jacques followed the singing bird into her death-chamber, she cried out, “Ah, my beautiful Jean Jacques!”

And because Jean Jacques knew that, at the last, she had been his, soul and body, he went down from the mountain-side, the two black magpies fluttering mournfully and yet hopefully behind him, with more warmth at his heart than he had known for years. It never occurred to him that the two elderly magpies would jointly or severally have given the rest of their lives and their scant fortunes to have him with them either as husband, or as one who honourably hires a home at so much a day.

Though Jean Jacques did not know this last fact, when he fared forth again he left behind his canary with Mme. Glozel; also all Carmen’s clothes, except the dress she died in, he gave to Mme. Popincourt, on condition that she did not wear them till he had gone. The dress in which Carmen died he wrapped up carefully, with her few jewels and her wedding-ring, and gave the parcel to Mme. Glozel to care for till he should send for it or come again.

“The bird—take him on my birthday to sing at her grave,” he said to Mme. Glozel just before he went West. “It is in summer, my birthday, and you shall hear how he will sing there,” he added in a low voice at the very door. Then he took out a ten-dollar bill, and would have given it to her to do this thing for him; but she would have none of his money. She only wiped her eyes and deplored his going, and said that if ever he wanted a home, and she was alive, he would know where to find it. It sounded and looked sentimental, yet Jean Jacques was never less sentimental in a very sentimental life. This particular morning he was very quiet and grave, and not in the least agitated; he spoke like one from a friendly, sun-bright distance to Mme. Glozel, and also to Mme. Popincourt as he passed her at the door of her house.

Jean Jacques had no elation as he took the Western trail; there was not much hope in his voice; but there was purpose and there was a little stream of peace flowing through his being—and also, mark, a stream of anger tumbling over rough places. He had read two letters addressed to Carmen by the man—Hugo Stolphe—who had left her to her fate; and there was a grim devouring thing in him which would break loose, if ever the man crossed his path. He would not go hunting him, but if he passed him or met him on the way—! Still he would go hunting—to find his Carmencita, his little Carmen, his Zoe whom he had unwittingly, God knew! driven forth into the far world of the millions of acres—a wide, wide hunting-ground in good sooth.

So he left his beloved province where he no longer had a home, and though no letters came to him from St. Saviour’s, from Vilray or the Manor Cartier, yet he heard the bells of memory when the Hand Invisible arrested his footsteps. One day these bells rang so loud that he would have heard them were he sunk in the world’s deepest well of shame; but, as it was, he now marched on hills far higher than the passes through the mountains which his patchwork philosophy had ever provided.

It was in the town of Shilah on the Watloon River that the bells boomed out—not because he had encountered one he had ever known far down by the Beau Cheval, or in his glorious province, not because he had found his Zoe, but because a man, the man—not George Masson, but the other—met him in the way.

Shilah was a place to which, almost unconsciously, he had deviated his course, because once Virginie Poucette had read him a letter from there. That was in the office of the little Clerk of the Court at Vilray. The letter was from Virginie’s sister at Shilah, and told him that Zoe and her husband had gone away into farther fields of homelessness. Thus it was that Shilah ever seemed to him, as he worked West, a goal in his quest—not the last goal perhaps, but a goal.

He had been far past it by another route, up, up and out into the more scattered settlements, and now at last he had come to it again, having completed a kind of circle. As he entered it, the past crowded on to him with a hundred pictures. Shilah—it was where Virginie Poucette’s sister lived; and Virginie had been a part of the great revelation of his life at St. Saviour’s.

As he was walking by the riverside at Shilah, a woman spoke to him, touching his arm as she did so. He was in a deep dream as she spoke, but there certainly was a look in her face that reminded him of someone belonging to the old life. For an instant he could not remember. For a moment he did not even realize that he was at Shilah. His meditation had almost been a trance, and it took him time to adjust himself to the knowledge of the conscious mind. His subconsciousness was very powerfully alive in these days. There was not the same ceaselessly active eye, nor the vibration of the impatient body which belonged to the money-master and miller of the Manor Cartier. Yet the eye had more depth and force, and the body was more powerful and vigorous than it had ever been. The long tramping, the everlasting trail on false scents, the mental battling with troubles past and present, had given a fortitude and vigour to the body beyond what it had ever known. In spite of his homelessness and pilgrim equipment he looked as though he had a home—far off. The eyes did not smile; but the lips showed the goodness of his heart—and its hardness too. Hardness had never been there in the old days. It was, however, the hardness of resentment, and not of cruelty. It was not his wife’s or his daughter’s flight that he resented, nor yet the loss of all he had, nor the injury done him by Sebastian Dolores. No, his resentment was against one he had never seen, but was now soon to see. As his mind came back from the far places where it had been, and his eyes returned to the concrete world, he saw what the woman recalled to him. It was—yes, it was Virginie Poucette—the kind and beautiful Virginie—for her goodness had made him remember her as beautiful, though indeed she was but comely, like this woman who stayed him as he walked by the river.

“You are M’sieu’ Jean Jacques Barbille?” she said questioningly.

“How did you know?” he asked.... “Is Virginie Poucette here?”

“Ah, you knew me from her?” she asked.

“There was something about her—and you have it also—and the look in the eyes, and then the lips!” he replied.

Certainly they were quite wonderful, luxurious lips, and so shapely too—like those of Virginie.

“But how did you know I was Jean Jacques Barbille?” he repeated.

“Well, then it is quite easy,” she replied with a laugh almost like a giggle, for she was quite as simple and primitive as her sister. “There is a photographer at Vilray, and Virginie got one of your pictures there, and sent, it to me. ‘He may come your way,’ said Virginie to me, ‘and if he does, do not forget that he is my friend.’”

“That she is my friend,” corrected Jean Jacques. “And what a friend—merci, what a friend!” Suddenly he caught the woman’s arm. “You once wrote to your sister about my Zoe, my daughter, that married and ran away—”

“That ran away and got married,” she interrupted.

“Is there any more news—tell me, do you know-?”

But Virginie’s sister shook her head. “Only once since I wrote Virginie have I heard, and then the two poor children—but how helpless they were, clinging to each other so! Well, then, once I heard from Faragay, but that was much more than a year ago. Nothing since, and they were going on—on to Fort Providence to spend the winter—for his health—his lungs.”

“What to do—on what to live?” moaned Jean Jacques.

“His grandmother sent him a thousand dollars, so your Madame Zoe wrote me.”

Jean Jacques raised a hand with a gesture of emotion. “Ah, the blessed woman! May there be no purgatory for her, but Heaven at once and always!”

“Come home with me—where are your things?” she asked.

“I have only a knapsack,” he replied. “It is not far from here. But I cannot stay with you. I have no claim. No, I will not, for—”

“As to that, we keep a tavern,” she returned. “You can come the same as the rest of the world. The company is mixed, but there it is. You needn’t eat off the same plate, as they say in Quebec.”

Quebec! He looked at her with the face of one who saw a vision. How like Virginie Poucette—the brave, generous Virginie—how like she was!

In silence now he went with her, and seeing his mood she did not talk to him. People stared as they walked along, for his dress was curious and his head was bare, and his hair like the coat of a young lion. Besides, this woman was, in her way, as brave and as generous as Virginie Poucette. In the very doorway of the tavern by the river a man jostled them. He did not apologize. He only leered. It made his foreign-looking, coarsely handsome face detestable.

“Pig!” exclaimed Virginie Poucette’s sister. “That’s a man—well, look out! There’s trouble brewing for him. If he only knew! If suspicion comes out right and it’s proved—well, there, he’ll jostle the door-jamb of a jail.”

Jean Jacques stared after the man, and somehow every nerve in his body became angry. He had all at once a sense of hatred. He shook the shoulder against which the man had collided. He remembered the leer on the insolent, handsome face.

“I’d like to see him thrown into the river,” said Virginie Poucette’s sister. “We have a nice girl here—come from Ireland—as good as can be. Well, last night—but there, she oughtn’t to have let him speak to her. ‘A kiss is nothing,’ he said. Well, if he kissed me I would kill him—if I didn’t vomit myself to death first. He’s a mongrel—a South American mongrel with nigger blood.”

Jean Jacques kept looking after the man. “Why don’t you turn him out?” he asked sharply.

“He’s going away to-morrow anyhow,” she replied. “Besides, the girl, she’s so ashamed—and she doesn’t want anyone to know. ‘Who’d want to kiss me after him’ she said, and so he stays till to-morrow. He’s not in the tavern itself, but in the little annex next door-there, where he’s going now. He’s only had his meals here, though the annex belongs to us as well. He’s alone there on his dung-hill.”

She brought Jean Jacques into a room that overlooked the river—which, indeed, hung on its very brink. From the steps at its river-door, a little ferry-boat took people to the other side of the Watloon, and very near—just a few hand-breadths away—was the annex where was the man who had jostled Jean Jacques.

CHAPTER XXIII. JEAN JACQUES HAS WORK TO DO

A single lighted lamp, turned low, was suspended from the ceiling of the raftered room, and through the open doorway which gave on to a little wooden piazza with a slight railing and small, shaky gate came the swish of the Watloon River. No moon was visible, but the stars were radiant and alive—trembling with life. There was something soothing, something endlessly soothing in the sound of the river. It suggested the ceaseless movement of life to the final fulness thereof.

So still was the room that it might have seemed to be without life, were it not for a faint sound of breathing. The bed, however, was empty, and no chair was occupied; but on a settle in a corner beside an unused fireplace sat a man, now with hands clasped between his knees, again with arms folded across his breast; but with his head always in a listening attitude. The whole figure suggested suspense, vigilance and preparedness. The man had taken off his boots and stockings, and his bare feet seemed to grip the floor; also the sleeves of his jacket were rolled up a little. It was not a figure you would wish to see in your room at midnight unasked. Once or twice he sighed heavily, as he listened to the river slishing past and looked out to the sparkle of the skies. It was as though the infinite had drawn near to the man, or else that the man had drawn near to the infinite. Now and again he brought his fists down on his knees with a savage, though noiseless, force. The peace of the river and the night could not contend successfully against a dark spirit working in him. When, during his vigil, he shook his shaggy head and his lips opened on his set teeth, he seemed like one who would take toll at a gateway of forbidden things.

He started to his feet at last, hearing footsteps outside upon the stairs. Then he settled back again, drawing near to the chimney-wall, so that he should not be easily seen by anyone entering. Presently there was the click of a latch, then the door opened and shut, and cigar-smoke invaded the room. An instant later a hand went up to the suspended oil-lamp and twisted the wick into brighter flame. As it did so, there was a slight noise, then the click of a lock. Turning sharply, the man under the lamp saw at the door the man who had been sitting in the corner. The man had a key in his hand. Exit now could only be had through the door opening on to the river.

“Who are you? What the hell do you want here?” asked the fellow under the lamp, his swarthy face drawn with fear and yet frowning with anger.

“Me—I am Jean Jacques Barbille,” said the other in French, putting the key of the door in his pocket. The other replied in French, with a Spanish-English accent. “Barbille—Carmen’s husband! Well, who would have thought—!”

He ended with a laugh not pleasant to hear, for it was coarse with sardonic mirth; yet it had also an unreasonable apprehension; for why should he fear the husband of the woman who had done that husband such an injury!

“She treated you pretty bad, didn’t she—not much heart, had Carmen!” he added.

“Sit down. I want to talk to you,” said Jean Jacques, motioning to two chairs by a table at the side of the room. This table was in the middle of the room when the man under the lamp-Hugo Stolphe was his name—had left it last. Why had the table been moved?

“Why should I sit down, and what are you doing here?—I want to know that,” Stolphe demanded. Jean Jacques’ hands were opening and shutting. “Because I want to talk to you. If you don’t sit down, I’ll give you no chance at all.... Sit down!” Jean Jacques was smaller than Stolphe, but he was all whipcord and leather; the other was sleek and soft, but powerful too; and he had one of those savage natures which go blind with hatred, and which fight like beasts. He glanced swiftly round the room.

“There is no weapon here,” said Jean Jacques, nodding. “I have put everything away—so you could not hurt me if you wanted.... Sit down!”

To gain time Stolphe sat down, for he had a fear that Jean Jacques was armed, and might be a madman armed—there were his feet bare on the brown painted boards. They looked so strange, so uncanny. He surely must be a madman if he wanted to do harm to Hugo Stolphe; for Hugo Stolphe had only “kept” the woman who had left her husband, not because of himself, but because of another man altogether—one George Masson. Had not Carmen herself told him that before she and he lived together? What grudge could Carmen’s husband have against Hugo Stolphe?

Jean Jacques sat down also, and, leaning on the table said: “Once I was a fool and let the other man escape-George Masson it was. Because of what he did, my wife left me.”

His voice became husky, but he shook his throat, as it were, cleared it, and went on. “I won’t let you go. I was going to kill George Masson—I had him like that!” He opened and shut his hand with a gesture of fierce possession. “But I did not kill him. I let him go. He was so clever—cleverer than you will know how to be. She said to me—my wife said to me, when she thought I had killed him, ‘Why did you not fight him? Any man would have fought him.’ That was her view. She was right—not to kill without fighting. That is why I did not kill you at once when I knew.”

“When you knew what?” Stolphe was staring at the madman.

“When I knew you were you. First I saw that ring—that ring on your hand. It was my wife’s. I gave it to her the first New Year after we married. I saw it on your hand when you were drinking at the bar next door. Then I asked them your name. I knew it. I had read your letters to my wife—”

“Your wife once on a time!”

Jean Jacques’ eyes swam red. “My wife always and always—and at the last there in my arms.” Stolphe temporized. “I never knew you. She did not leave you because of me. She came to me because—because I was there for her to come to, and you weren’t there. Why do you want to do me any harm?” He still must be careful, for undoubtedly the man was mad—his eyes were too bright.

“You were the death of her,” answered Jean Jacques, leaning forward. “She was most ill-ah, who would not have been sorry for her! She was poor. She had been to you—but to live with a woman day by day, but to be by her side when the days are done, and then one morning to say, ‘Au revoir till supper’ and then go and never come back, and to take money and rings that belonged to her!... That was her death—that was the end of Carmen Barbille; and it was your fault.”

“You would do me harm and not hurt her! Look how she treated you—and others.”

Jean Jacques half rose from his seat in sudden rage, but he restrained himself, and sat down again. “She had one husband—only one. It was Jean Jacques Barbille. She could only treat one as she treated me—me, her husband. But you, what had you to do with that! You used her—so!” He made a motion as though to stamp out an insect with his foot. “Beautiful, a genius, sick and alone—no husband, no child, and you used her so! That is why I shall kill you to-night. We will fight for it.”

Yes, but surely the man was mad, and the thing to do was to humour him, to gain time. To humour a madman—that is what one always advised, therefore Stolphe would make the pourparler, as the French say.

“Well, that’s all right,” he rejoined, “but how is it going to be done? Have you got a pistol?” He thought he was very clever, and that he would now see whether Jean Jacques Barbille was armed. If he was not armed, well, then, there would be the chances in his favour; it wasn’t easy to kill with hands alone.

Jean Jacques ignored the question, however. He waved a hand impatiently, as though to dismiss it. “She was beautiful and splendid; she had been a queen down there in Quebec. You lied to her, and she was blind at first—I can see it all. She believed so easily—but yes, always! There she was what she was, and you were what you are, not a Frenchman, not Catholic, and an American—no, not an American—a South American. But no, not quite a South American, for there was the Portuguese nigger in you—Sit down!”

Jean Jacques was on his feet bending over the enraged mongrel. He had spoken the truth, and Carmen’s last lover had been stung as though a serpent’s tooth was in his flesh. Of all things that could be said about him, that which Jean Jacques said was the worst—that he was not all white, that he had nigger blood! Yet it was true; and he realized that Jean Jacques must have got his information in Shilah itself where he had been charged with it. Yet, raging as he was, and ready to take the Johnny Crapaud—that is the name by which he had always called Carmen’s husband—by the throat, he was not yet sure that Jean Jacques was unarmed. He sat still under an anger greater than his own, for there was in it that fanaticism which only the love or hate of a woman could breed in a man’s mind.

Suddenly Stolphe laughed outright, a crackling, mirthless, ironical laugh; for it really was absurdity made sublime that this man, who had been abandoned by his wife, should now want to kill one who had abandoned her! This outdid Don Quixote over and over.

“Well, what do you want?” he asked.

“I want you to fight,” said Jean Jacques. “That is the way. That was Carmen’s view. You shall have your chance to live, but I shall throw you in the river, and you can then fight the river. The current is swift, the banks are steep and high as a house down below there. Now, I am ready...!”

He had need to be, for Stolphe was quick, kicking the chair from beneath him, and throwing himself heavily on Jean Jacques. He had had his day at that in South America, and as Jean Jacques Barbille had said, the water was swift and deep, and the banks of the Watloon high and steep!

But Jean Jacques was unconscious of everything save a debt to be collected for a woman he had loved, a compensation which must be taken in flesh and blood. Perhaps at the moment, as Stolphe had said to himself, he was a little mad, for all his past, all his plundered, squandered, spoiled life was crying out at him like a hundred ghosts, and he was fighting with beasts at Ephesus. An exaltation possessed him. Not since the day when his hand was on the lever of the flume with George Masson below; not since the day he had turned his back for ever on the Manor Cartier had he been so young and so much his old self-an egotist, with all the blind confidence of his kind; a dreamer inflamed into action with all a mad dreamer’s wild power. He was not fifty-two years of age, but thirty-two at this moment, and all the knowledge got of the wrestling river-drivers of his boyhood, when he had spent hours by the river struggling with river-champions, came back to him. It was a relief to his sick soul to wrench and strain, and propel and twist and force onward, step by step, to the door opening on the river, this creature who had left his Carmen to die alone.

“No, you don’t—not yet. The jail before the river!” called a cool, sharp, sour voice; and on the edge of the trembling platform overhanging the river, Hugo Stolphe was dragged back from the plunge downward he was about to take, with Jean Jacques’ hand at his throat.

Stolphe had heard the door of the bedroom forced, but Jean Jacques had not heard it; he was only conscious of hands dragging him back just at the moment of Stolphe’s deadly peril.

“What is it?” asked Jean Jacques, seeing Stolphe in the hands of two men, and hearing the snap of steel. “Wanted for firing a house for insurance—wanted for falsifying the accounts of a Land Company—wanted for his own good, Mr. Hugo Stolphe, C.O.D.—collect on delivery!” said the officer of the law. “And collected just in time!”

“We didn’t mean to take him till to-morrow,” the officer added, “but out on the river one of us saw this gladiator business here in the red-light zone, and there wasn’t any time to lose.... I don’t know what your business with him was,” the long-moustached detective said to Jean Jacques, “but whatever the grudge is, if you don’t want to appear in court in the morning, the walking’s good out of town night or day—so long!”

He hustled his prisoner out.

Jean Jacques did not want to appear in court, and as the walking was officially good at dawn, he said good-bye to Virginie Poucette’s sister through the crack of a door, and was gone before she could restrain him.

“Well, things happen that way,” he said, as he turned back to look at Shilah before it disappeared from view.

“Ah, the poor, handsome vaurien!” the woman at the tavern kept saying to her husband all that day; and she could not rest till she had written to Virginie how Jean Jacques came to Shilah in the evening, and went with the dawn.