Gilbert Parker

“ 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:
“Granada, Granada, thy gardens are gay, And bright are thy stars, the high stars above; But as flowers that fade and are gray, But as dusk at the end of the day, Are ye to the light in the eyes of my love In the eyes, in the soul, of my love. ”

“ You lose your wife for ever. You need not do so. She would have gone with me, not because of me, but because I was a man who she thought would treat her like a friend, like a comrade; who would love her—sacre, what husband could help make love to such a woman, unless he was in love with himself instead of her!”
Jean Jacques rocked to and fro over the lever in his agitation, yet he made no motion to move it. He was under a spell.
Straight home drove the master-carpenter’s reasoning now. “Kill me, and you lose her for ever. Kill me, and she will hate you. You think she will not find out? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Carmen and Zoe were more a part of himself now than they had ever been.
They were gone, the living spirits of his home. Anything that reminded him of them, despite the pain of the reminder, was dear to him. Love was greater than the vengeful desire of injured human nature. His eyes wandered over the people, over the market. At last he saw what he was looking for. He called. A man turned. Jean Jacques beckoned to him. He came eagerly, he hurried to the red wagon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was a thing so exquisite that a man of sentiment like Jean Jacques in his younger days would have wept to see. And the feeling was as palpable as the seeing; as in the early spring the new life which is being born in the year, produces a febrile kind of sorrow in the mind. But the glow of Indian summer, that compromise, that after-thought of real summer, which brings her back for another good-bye ere she vanishes for ever—its sadness is of a different kind. Its longing has a sharper edge; there stir in it the pangs of discontent; and the mind and body yearn for solace. ”

“ It was among such people that the hero of The Money Master, Jean Jacques Barbille, lived. He was the symbol or pattern of their virtues and of their weaknesses. By nature a poet, a philosopher, a farmer and an adventurer, his life was a sacrifice to prepossession and race instinct; to temperament more powerful than logic or common sense, though he was almost professionally the exponent of both.
There is no man so simply sincere, or so extraordinarily prejudiced as the French Canadian. He is at once modest and vain; he is even lyrical in his enthusiasms ”

“ If all goes well, you will see prudence and wisdom; but if it does not, you will see—ah, but just Zoe!”
The now alert Jean Jacques had seen the whispering of the two, though he did not know what had been said. It was, however, something secret, and if it was secret, then it was—yes, it was love; and love between his daughter and that waif of the world—the world of the stage—in which men and women were only grown-up children, and bad grown-up children at that—it was not to be endured. One thing was sure, the man should come to the Manor Cartier no more. He would see to that to-morrow. ”

“ No, bien sur! Did you take her where she could see the world? No. Did you bring her presents? No. Did you say, ‘Come along, we will make a little journey to see the world?’ No. Do you think that a woman can sit and darn your socks, and tidy your room, and bake you pancakes in the morning while you roast your toes, and be satisfied with just that, and not long for something outside?”
Jean Jacques was silent. He did not move. He was being hypnotized by a mind of subtle strength, by the logic of which he was so great a lover.
The master-carpenter pressed his logic home. ”

“ I say the Man of Calvary, He is before all, the sun; but I say Socrates, Plato, Jean Jacques—that is my name, and it is not for nothing, that—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Descartes, Locke, they are stars that go round the sun. It is the same light, but not the same sound. I reconcile. In me all comes together like the spokes to the hub of a wheel. Me—I am a Christian, I am philosophe, also. In St. Saviour’s, my home in Quebec, if the crops are good, what do men say? ‘C’est le bon Dieu—it is the good God,’ that is what they say. If the crops are bad, what do they say? ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ She had determined to go away with the master-carpenter, and though he might feel the same hesitation as that which Jean Jacques had shown—she had read her Norman aright aboard the Antoine—yet, still, George Masson should take her away. A catastrophe had thrown Jean Jacques into her arms; it would not be a catastrophe which would throw the master-carpenter into her arms. It would be that they wanted each other.
The mirror gave her a look of dominance—was it her regular features and her classic head? Does beauty in itself express authority, just because it has the transcendent thing in it? ”

“ Life had been so meagre and so dull, and the man who had worshipped her on the Antoine now worshipped himself only, and also Zoe, the child, maybe; or so she thought; while the man who had once possessed her whole mind and whole heart, and never her body, back there in Spain, he, Carvillho Gonzales, would have loved her to the end, in scenes where life had colour and passion and danger and delightful movement. ”