The Money Master Part 25

The lawyer was prepared. M. Mornay had foreseen the timidity and sensitiveness of Jean Jacques, had antic.i.p.ated his mistaken chivalry--for how could a man decline to take advantage of the Bankruptcy Court unless he was another Don Quixote! He had therefore arranged with all the creditors for them to take responsibility with 'himself, though he provided the cash which manipulated this settlement.

"No, M'sieu' Jean Jacques," the lawyer replied, "this comes from all the creditors, as the sum due to you from all the transactions, so far as can be seen as yet. Further adjustment may be necessary, but this is the interim settlement."

Jean Jacques was far from being ignorant of business, but so bemused was his judgment and his intelligence now, that he did not see there was no balance which could possibly be his, since his liabilities vastly exceeded his a.s.sets. Yet with a wave of the hand he accepted the roll of bills, and signed the receipt with an air which said, "These forms must be observed, I suppose."

What he would have done if the three hundred and fifty dollars had not been given him, it would be hard to say, for with gentle asperity he had declined a loan from his friend M. Fille, and he had but one silver dollar in his pocket, or in the world. Indeed, Jean Jacques was living in a dream in these dark days--a dream of renunciation and sacrifice, and in the spirit of one who gives up all to some great cause. He was not yet even face to face with the fulness of his disaster. Only at moments had the real significance of it all come to him, and then he had shivered as before some terror menacing his path. Also, as M. Mornay had said, his philosophy was now in his bones and marrow rather than in his words. It had, after all, tinctured his blood and impregnated his mind.

He had babbled and been the egotist, and played c.o.c.k o' the walk; and now at last his philosophy was giving some foundation for his feet.

Yet at this auction-sale he looked a distracted, if smiling, whimsical, rather bustling figure of misfortune, with a tragic air of exile, of isolation from all by which he was surrounded. A profound and wayworn loneliness showed in his figure, in his face, in his eyes.

The crowd thinned in time, and yet very many lingered to see the last of this drama of lost fortunes. A few of the riff-raff, who invariably attend these public scenes, were now rather the worse for drink, from the indifferent liquor provided by the auctioneer, and they were inclined to horseplay and coa.r.s.e chaff. More than one ribald reference to Jean Jacques had been checked by his chivalrous fellow-citizens; indeed, M. Fille had almost laid himself open to a charge of a.s.sault in his own court by raising his stick at a loafer, who made insulting references to Jean Jacques. But as the sale drew to a close, an air of rollicking humour among the younger men would not be suppressed, and it looked as though Jean Jacques' exit would be attended by the elements of farce and satire.

In this world, however, things do not happen logically, and Jean Jacques made his exit in a wholly unexpected manner. He was going away by the train which left a new railway junction a few miles off, having gently yet firmly declined M. Fille's invitation, and also the invitations of others--including the Cure and Mere Langlois--to spend the night with them and start off the next day. He elected to go on to Montreal that very night, and before the sale was quite finished he prepared to start.

His carpet-bag containing a few clothes and necessaries had been sent on to the junction, and he meant to walk to the station in the cool of the evening.

M. Manotel, the auctioneer, hoa.r.s.e with his heavy day's work, was announcing that there were only a few more things to sell, and no doubt they could be had at a bargain, when Jean Jacques began a tour of the Manor. There was something inexpressibly mournful in this lonely pilgrimage of the dismantled mansion. Yet there was no show of cheap emotion by Jean Jacques; and a wave of the hand prevented any one from following him in his dry-eyed progress to say farewell to these haunts of childhood, manhood, family, and home. There was a strange numbness in his mind and body, and he had a feeling that he moved immense and reflective among material things. Only tragedy can produce that feeling.

Happiness makes the universe infinite and stupendous, despair makes it small and even trivial.

It was when he had reached the little office where he had done the business of his life--a kind of neutral place where he had ever isolated himself from the domestic scene--that the final sensation, save one, of his existence at the Manor came to him. Virginie Poucette had divined his purpose when he began the tour of the house, and going by a roundabout way, she had placed herself where she could speak with him alone before he left the place for ever--if that was to be. She was not sure that his exit was really inevitable--not yet.

When Jean Jacques saw Virginie standing beside the table in his office where he lead worked over so many years, now marked Sold, and waiting to be taken away by its new owner, he started and drew back, but she held out her hand and said:

"But one word, M'sieu' Jean Jacques; only one word from a friend--indeed a friend."

"A friend of friends," he answered, still in abstraction, his eyes having that burnished light which belonged to the night of the fire; but yet realizing that she was a sympathetic soul who had offered to lend him money without security.

"Oh, indeed yes, as good a friend as you can ever have!" she added.

Something had waked the bigger part of her, which had never been awake in the days of Pala.s.s Poucette. Jean Jacques was much older than she, but what she felt had nothing to do with age, or place or station. It had only to do with understanding, with the call of nature and of a motherhood crying for expression. Her heart ached for him.

"Well, good-bye, my friend," he said, and held out his hand. "I must be going now."

"Wait," she said, and there was something insistent and yet pleading in her voice. "I've got something to say. You must hear it.... Why should you go? There is my farm--it needs to be worked right. It has got good chances. It has water-power and wood and the best flax in the province--they want to start a flax-mill on it--I've had letters from big men in Montreal. Well, why shouldn't you do it instead? There it is, the farm, and there am I a woman alone. I need help. I've got no head.

I have to work at a sum of figures all night to get it straight.... Ah, m'sieu', it is a need both sides! You want someone to look after you; you want a chance again to do things; but you want someone to look after you, and it is all waiting there on the farm. Pala.s.s Poucette left behind him seven sound horses, and cows and sheep, and a threshing-machine and a fanning-mill, and no debts, and two thousand dollars in the bank. You will never do anything away from here. You must stay here, where--where I can look after you, Jean Jacques."

The light in his eyes flamed up, died down, flamed up again, and presently it covered all his face, as he grasped what she meant.

"Wonder of G.o.d, do you forget?" he asked. "I am married--married still, Virginie Poucette. There is no divorce in the Catholic Church--no, none at all. It is for ever and ever."

"I said nothing about marriage," she said bravely, though her face suffused.

"Hand of Heaven, what do you mean? You mean to say you would do that for me in spite of the Cure and--and everybody and everything?"

"You ought to be taken care of," she protested. "You ought to have your chance again. No one here is free to do it all but me. You are alone.

Your wife that was--maybe she is dead. I am alone, and I'm not afraid of what the good G.o.d will say. I will settle with Him myself. Well, then, do you think I'd care what--what Mere Langlois or the rest of the world would say?... I can't bear to think of you going away with nothing, with n.o.body, when here is something and somebody--somebody who would be good to you. Everybody knows that you've been badly used--everybody. I'm young enough to make things bright and warm in your life, and the place is big enough for two, even if it isn't the Manor Cartier."

"Figure de Christ, do you think I'd let you do it--me?" declared Jean Jacques, with lips trembling now and his shoulders heaving. Misfortune and pain and penalty he could stand, but sacrifice like this and--and whatever else it was, were too much for him. They brought him back to the dusty road and everyday life again; they subtracted him from his big dream, in which he had been detached from the details of his catastrophe.

"No, no, no," he added. "You go look another way, Virginie. Turn your face to the young spring, not to the dead winter. To-morrow I'll be gone to find what I've got to find. I've finished here, but there's many a good man waiting for you--men who'll bring you something worth while besides themselves. Make no mistake, I've finished. I've done my term of life. I'm only out on ticket-of-leave now--but there, enough, I shall always want to think of you. I wish I had something to give you--but yes, here is something." He drew from his pocket a silver napkin-ring.

"I've had that since I was five years old. My uncle Stefan gave it to me. I've always used it. I don't know why I put it in my pocket this morning, but I did. Take it. It's more than money. It's got something of Jean Jacques about it. You've got the Barbille fruit-dish-that is a thing I'll remember. I'm glad you've got it, and--"

"I meant we should both eat from it," she said helplessly.

"It would cost too much to eat from it with you, Virginie--"

He stopped short, choked, then his face cleared, and his eyes became steady.

"Well then, good-bye, Virginie," he said, holding out his hand.

"You don't think I'd say to any other living man what I've said to you?"

she asked.

He nodded understandingly. "That's the best part of it. It was for me of all the world," he answered. "When I look back, I'll see the light in your window--the light you lit for the lost one--for Jean Jacques Barbille."

Suddenly, with eyes that did not see and hands held out before him, he turned, felt for the door and left the room.

She leaned helplessly against the table. "The poor Jean Jacques--the poor Jean Jacques!" she murmured. "Cure or no Cure, I'd have done it,"

she declared, with a ring to her voice. "Ah, but Jean Jacques, come with me!" she added with a hungry and compa.s.sionate gesture, speaking into s.p.a.ce. "I could make life worth while for us both."

A moment later Virginie was outside, watching the last act in the career of Jean Jacques in the parish of St. Saviour's.

This was what she saw.

The auctioneer was holding up a bird-cage containing a canary-Carmen's bird-cage, and Zoe's canary which had remained to be a vocal memory of her in her old home.

"Here," said the rhetorical, inflammable auctioneer, "here is the choicest lot left to the last. I put it away in the bakery, meaning to sell it at noon, when everybody was eating-food for the soul and food for the body. I forgot it. But here it is, worth anything you like to anybody that loves the beautiful, the good, and the harmonious. What do I hear for this lovely saffron singer from the Elysian fields? What did the immortal poet of France say of the bird in his garret, in 'L'Oiseau de Mon Crenier'? What did he say:

'Sing me a song of the bygone hour, A song of the stream and the sun; Sing of my love in her bosky bower, When my heart it was twenty-one.'

"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 G.o.d," 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."