Gilbert Parker

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A man—he was me own brother and a millionaire if I do say it—he took her and married her; and then, too, Heaven's will sent this child's mother to her last end and the child itself to my Nolan's arms. To my husband's arms first it came, you understand; and he give the child to me, as it should be, and said he, 'We'll make believe it is our own.' But I said to him, 'There's no make-believe. 'Tis mine. 'Tis mine. It came to me out of the storm from the hand of God.' And so it was and is; and all's well here in the home, praise be to God. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Is it a home? What have you got to start a home with? Do you deny you are no better than a tramp? Have you got a hundred dollars in the world? Have you got a roof over your head? Have you got a trade? You'll take her where—to what? Even if you had a home, what then? You would have to get someone to look after her—some old crone, a wench maybe, who'd be as fit to bring up a child as I would be to—" she paused and looked round in helpless quest for a simile, when, in despair, she caught sight of Jean Jacques' watch-chain—"as I would be to make a watch !" ”

“ It was Nolan who found your daughter on the prairie—the driver dead, but she just alive when found. To give her ease of mind, Nolan said he would make the child his own. When he said that, she smiled and tried to speak, but it was too late, and she was gone."
In sudden agony Jean Jacques threw up his hands. "So young and so soon to be gone!" he exclaimed. "But a child she was and had scarce tasted the world. The mercy of God—what is it!"
"You can't take time as the measure of life," rejoined the Young Doctor with a compassionate gesture. ”

“ I will start from the time when I used to watch the gold Cock of Beaugard turning on the mill, when I sat in the doorway of the Manor Cartier in my pinafore. I don't know why I tell you, but maybe it was meant I should. I obey conviction. While you are able to keep logic and conviction hand in hand then everything is all right. I have found that out. Logic, philosophy are the props of life, but still you must obey the impulse of the soul—oh, absolutely! ”

“ Norah bitingly interjected, while her eyes flashed fire, and she rocked the cradle more swiftly than was good for the child's sleep.
Jean Jacques flared up. "There were sons and daughters of the family of Adam that had names, but there were plenty others you whistled to as you would to a four-footer, and they'd come. The Barbilles had names—always names of their own back to Adam. The child is a Barbille—Don't rock the cradle so fast," he suddenly added with an irritable gesture, breaking off from his argument. "Don't you know better than that when a child's asleep? ”

“ It gave him courage to make the fight for his own.
"The good God would see that—" he began.
"The good God doesn't interfere in bringing up babies," she retorted. "That's the work for the fathers and mothers, or godfathers and godmothers."
"You are neither," exclaimed Jean Jacques. "You have no rights at all."
"I have no rights—eh? I have no rights! Look at the child. Look at the way she's clothed. Look at the cradle in which it lies. It cost fifteen dollars; and the clothes—what they cost would keep a family half a year. ”

“ 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 ”

“ See the web that the weaver weaves!"
For quite two minutes Jean Jacques and Norah Doyle stooped over the cradle, looking at Zoe's rosy, healthy, pretty face, as though unconscious of each other, and only conscious of the child. When Jean Jacques had finished the long first verse of the chanson, and would have begun another, Norah made a protesting gesture.
"She's asleep, and there's no more need," she said. "Wasn't it a good lullaby, madame?" Jean Jacques asked. ”

“ There could be no mistake about it; here was the face of his lost Zoe, with something, too, of Carmen, and also the forehead of the Barbilles. As though the child knew, it opened its eyes wide-big, brown eyes like those of Carmen Dolores.
"Ah, the beautiful, beloved thing!" he exclaimed in a low-voice, ere Norah stepped between and almost pushed him back. An outstretched arm in front of her prevented him from stooping to kiss the child. "Stand back. The child must not be waked," she said. "It must sleep another hour. It has its milk at twelve o'clock. Stand aside. ”

“ The door opened quickly and shut again, and Jean Jacques was alone with the woman and the child. "What's best for the child!"
That was what the Young Doctor had said. Norah stopped rocking the cradle and stared at the closed door. What had this man before her, this tramp habitant of whom she had heard, of course, to do with little Zoe in the cradle—her little Zoe who had come just when she was most needed; who had brought her man and herself close together again after an estrangement which neither had seemed able to prevent.
"What's best for the child!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Also his look was incredulous when Jean Jacques protested that he had enough to pay the fee.
"When you searched me you forgot to look in the right place," continued Jean Jacques; and he drew from the lining of the hat he held in his hand a little bundle of ten-dollar bills. "Here—take your pay from them," he said, and held out the roll of bills. "I suppose it won't be more than four dollars a day; and there's enough, I think. I can't pay you for your kindness to me, and I don't want to. I'd like to owe you that; and it's a good thing for a man himself to be owed kindness. ”

“ 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 faces of dear children at the door.
"Land of the Greater Love—men call it this;
No light-o'-love sets here an ambuscade;
No tender torture of the secret kiss
Makes sick the spirit and the soul afraid. ”

“ During her passionate and defiant appeal Jean Jacques was restless with the old unrest of years ago, and his face twitched with emotion; but before she had finished he had himself in some sort of control.
"You—madame, you are only thinking of yourself in this. You are only thinking what you want, what you and your man need. But it's not to be looked at that way only, and—"
"Well, then it isn't to be looked at that way only," she interrupted.
"As you say, it isn't Nolan and me alone to be considered. There's—"
"There's me," he interrupted sharply. "The child is bone of my bone. ”

“ That's settled. There's manny an English and Irish lullaby that'll be sung to her hence and onward; and there's manny an English song she'll sing when she's got her voice, and is big enough. Well, I think she'll sing like a canary."
"Do the birds sing in English?" exclaimed Jean Jacques, with anger in his face now. Was there ever any vanity like the vanity of these people who had made the conquest of Quebec, when sixteen Barbilles lost their lives, one of them being aide-de-camp to M. Vaudreuil, the governor! ”

“ CHAPTER XXIV JEAN JACQUES ENCAMPED The Young Doctor of Askatoon had a good heart, and he was exercising it honourably one winter's day near three years after Jean Jacques had left St. Saviour's.
"There are many French Canadians working on the railway now, and a good many habitant farmers live hereabouts, and they have plenty of children —why not stay here and teach school? ”

“ Keeping books in shops and factories, collecting accounts for storekeepers, when they saw they could trust me, working at threshings and harvests, teaching school here and there. Once I made fifty dollars at a railway camp telling French Canadian tales and singing chansons Canadiennes. ”