This eBook was produced by David Widger





THE MONEY MASTER

By Gilbert Parker




CONTENTS

EPOCH THE FIRST
I.        THE GRAND TOUR OF JEAN JACQUES BARBILLE
II.       THE REST OF THE STORY "TO-MORROW"
III.      "TO-MORROW"

EPOCH THE SECOND
IV.       THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER AND THE CLERK OF THE COURT TELLS A STORY
V.        THE CLERK OF THE COURT ENDS HIS STORY
VI.       JEAN JACQUES HAD HAD A GREAT DAY
VII.      JEAN JACQUES AWAKES FROM SLEEP
VIII.     THE GATE IN THE WALL
IX.       "MOI-JE SUIS PHILOSOPHE"
X.        "QUIEN SABE"--WHO KNOWS!
XI.       THE CLERK OF THE COURT KEEPS A PROMISE
XII.      THE MASTER-CARPENTER HAS A PROBLEM

EPOCH THE THIRD
XIII.     THE MAN FROM OUTSIDE
XIV.      "I DO NOT WANT TO GO"
XV.       BON MARCHE

EPOCH THE FOURTH
XVI.      MISFORTUNES COME NOT SINGLY
XVII.     HIS GREATEST ASSET
XVIII.    JEAN JACQUES HAS AN OFFER
XIX.      SEBASTIAN DOLORES DOES NOT SLEEP
XX.       "AU 'VOIR, M'SIEU' JEAN JACQUES"
XXI.      IF SHE HAD KNOWN IN TIME

EPOCH THE FIFTH
XXII.     BELLS OF MEMORY
XXIII.    JEAN JACQUES HAS WORK TO DO
XXIV.     JEAN JACQUES ENCAMPED.
XXV.      WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE

EPILOGUE




INTRODUCTION

This book is in a place by itself among the novels I have written.  Many
critics said that it was a welcome return to Canada, where I had made my
first success in the field of fiction.  This statement was only meagrely
accurate, because since 'The Right of Way' was published in 1901 I had
written, and given to the public, 'Northern Lights', a book of short
stories, 'You Never Know Your Luck', a short novel, and 'The World for
Sale', though all of these dealt with life in Western Canada, and not
with the life of the French Canadians, in which field I had made my first
firm impression upon the public.  In any case, The Money Master was
favourably received by the press and public both in England and America,
and my friends were justified in thinking, and in saying, that I was at
home in French Canada and gave the impression of mastery of my material.
If mastery of material means a knowledge of the life, and a sympathy with
it, then my friends are justified; for I have always had an intense
sympathy with, and admiration for, French Canadian life.  I think the
French Canadian one of the most individual, original, and distinctive
beings of the modern world.  He has kept his place, with his own customs,
his own Gallic views of life, and his religious habits, with an assiduity
and firmness none too common.  He is essentially a man of the home, of
the soil, and of the stream; he has by nature instinctive philosophy and
temperamental logic.  As a lover of the soil of Canada he is not
surpassed by any of the other citizens of the country, English or
otherwise.

It would almost seem as though the pageantry of past French Canadian
history, and the beauty and vigour of the topographical surroundings of
French Canadian life, had produced an hereditary pride and exaltation--
perhaps an excessive pride and a strenuous exaltation, but, in any case,
there it was, and is.  The French Canadian lives a more secluded life on
the whole than any other citizen of Canada, though the native,
adventurous spirit has sent him to the Eastern States of the American
Union for work in the mills and factories, or up to the farthest reaches
of the St. Lawrence, Ottawa, and their tributaries in the wood and timber
trade.

Domestically he is perhaps the most productive son of the North American
continent.  Families of twenty, or even twenty-five, are not unknown,
and, when a man has had more than one wife, it has even exceeded that.
Life itself is full of camaraderie and good spirit, marked by religious
traits and sacerdotal influence.

The French Canadian is on the whole sober and industrious; but when he
breaks away from sobriety and industry he becomes a vicious element in
the general organism.  Yet his vices are of the surface, and do not
destroy the foundations of his social and domestic scheme.  A French
Canadian pony used to be considered the most virile and lasting stock on
the continent, and it is fair to say that the French Canadians themselves
are genuinely hardy, long-lived, virile, and enduring.

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; he is a child in the intrigues and inventions of
life; but he has imagination, he has a heart, he has a love of tradition,
and is the slave of legend.  To him domestic life is the summum bonum of
being.  His four walls are the best thing which the world has to offer,
except the cheerful and sacred communion of the Mass, and his dismissal
from life itself under the blessing of his priest and with the promise of
a good immortality.

Jean Jacques Barbille had the French Canadian life of pageant, pomp, and
place extraordinarily developed.  His love of history and tradition was
abnormal.  A genius, he was, within an inch, a tragedy to the last
button.  Probably the adventurous spirit of his forefathers played a
greater part in his development and in the story of his days than
anything else.  He was wide-eyed, and he had a big soul.  He trained
himself to believe in himself and to follow his own judgment; therefore,
he invited loss upon loss, he made mistake upon mistake, he heaped
financial adventure upon financial adventure, he ran great risks; and it
is possible that his vast belief in himself kept him going when other men
would have dropped by the wayside.  He loved his wife and daughter, and
he lost them both.  He loved his farms, his mills and his manor, and they
disappeared from his control.

It must be remembered that the story of The Money Master really runs for
a generation, and it says something for Jean Jacques Barbille that he
could travel through scenes, many of them depressing, for long years, and
still, in the end, provoke no disparagement, by marrying the woman who
had once out of the goodness of her heart offered him everything--
herself, her home, her honour; and it was to Jean Jacques's credit
that he took neither until the death of his wife made him free; but the
tremendous gift offered him produced a powerful impression upon his mind
and heart.

One of the most distinguished men of the world to-day wrote me in praise
and protest concerning The Money Master.  He declared that the first half
of the book was as good as anything that had been done by anybody, and
then he bemoaned the fact, which he believed, that the author had
sacrificed his two heroines without real cause and because he was tired
of them.  There he was wrong.  In the author's mind the story was planned
exactly as it worked out.  He was never tired; he was resolute.  He was
intent to produce, if possible, a figure which would breed and develop
its own disasters, which would suffer profoundly for its own mistakes;
but which, in the end, would triumph over the disasters of life and time.
It was all deliberate in the main intention and plan.  Any failures that
exist in the book are due to the faults of the author, and to nothing
else.

Some critics have been good enough to call 'The Money Master' a beautiful
book, and there are many who said that it was real, true, and faithful.
Personally I think it is real and true, and as time goes on, and we get
older, that is what seems to matter to those who love life and wish to
see it well harvested.

I do not know what the future of the book may be; what the future of any
work of mine will be; but I can say this, that no one has had the
pleasure in reading my books which I have had in making them.  They have
been ground out of the raw material of the soul.  I have a hope that they
will outlast my brief day, but, in any case, it will not matter.  They
have given me a chance of showing to the world life as I have seen it,
and indirectly, and perhaps indistinctly, my own ideas of that life.
'The Money Master' is a vivid and somewhat emotional part of it.




EPOCH THE FIRST

CHAPTER I

THE GRAND TOUR OF JEAN JACQUES BARBILLE

"Peace and plenty, peace and plenty"--that was the phrase M. Jean Jacques
Barbille, miller and moneymaster, applied to his home-scene, when he was
at the height of his career.  Both winter and summer the place had a look
of content and comfort, even a kind of opulence.  There is nothing like a
grove of pines to give a sense of warmth in winter and an air of coolness
in summer, so does the slightest breeze make the pine-needles swish like
the freshening sea.  But to this scene, where pines made a friendly
background, there were added oak, ash, and hickory trees, though in less
quantity on the side of the river where were Jean Jacques Barbille's
house and mills.  They flourished chiefly on the opposite side of the
Beau Cheval, whose waters flowed so waywardly--now with a rush, now
silently away through long reaches of country.  Here the land was rugged
and bold, while farther on it became gentle and spacious, and was flecked
or striped with farms on which low, white houses with dormer-windows and
big stoops flashed to the passer-by the message of the pioneer, "It is
mine.  I triumph."

At the Manor Cartier, not far from the town of Vilray, where Jean Jacques
was master, and above it and below it, there had been battles and the
ravages of war.  At the time of the Conquest the stubborn habitants,
refusing to accept the yielding of Quebec as the end of French power
in their proud province, had remained in arms and active, and had only
yielded when the musket and the torch had done their work, and smoking
ruins marked the places where homes had been.  They took their fortune
with something of the heroic calm of men to whom an idea was more than
aught else.  Jean Jacques' father, grandfather, and great-great-
grandfather had lived here, no one of them rising far, but none worthless
or unnoticeable.  They all had had "a way of their own," as their
neighbours said, and had been provident on the whole.  Thus it was that
when Jean Jacques' father died, and he came into his own, he found
himself at thirty a man of substance, unmarried, who "could have had the
pick of the province."  This was what the Old Cure said in despair, when
Jean Jacques did the incomprehensible thing, and married l'Espagnole, or
"the Spanische," as the lady was always called in the English of the
habitant.

When she came it was spring-time, and all the world was budding, exuding
joy and hope, with the sun dancing over all.  It was the time between
the sowing and the hay-time, and there was a feeling of alertness in
everything that had life, while even the rocks and solid earth seemed to
stir.  The air was filled with the long happy drone of the mill-stones as
they ground the grain; and from farther away came the soft, stinging cry
of a saw-mill.  Its keen buzzing complaint was harmonious with the
grumble of the mill-stones, as though a supreme maker of music had tuned
it.  So said a master-musician and his friend, a philosopher from Nantes,
who came to St. Saviour's in the summer just before the marriage, and
lodged with Jean Jacques.  Jean Jacques, having spent a year at Laval
University at Quebec, had almost a gift of thought, or thinking; and he
never ceased to ply the visiting philosopher and musician with questions
which he proceeded to answer himself before they could do so; his quaint,
sentimental, meretricious observations on life saddening while they
amused his guests.  They saddened the musician more than the other
because he knew life, while the philosopher only thought it and saw it.

But even the musician would probably have smiled in hope that day when
the young "Spanische" came driving up the river-road from the steamboat-
landing miles away.  She arrived just when the clock struck noon in the
big living-room of the Manor.  As she reached the open doorway and the
wide windows of the house which gaped with shady coolness, she heard the
bell summoning the workers in the mills and on the farm--yes, M. Barbille
was a farmer, too--for the welcome home to "M'sieu' Jean Jacques," as he
was called by everyone.

That the wedding had taken place far down in Gaspe and not in St.
Saviour's was a reproach and almost a scandal; and certainly it was
unpatriotic.  It was bad enough to marry the Spanische, but to marry
outside one's own parish, and so deprive that parish and its young people
of the week's gaiety, which a wedding and the consequent procession and
tour through the parish brings, was little less than treason.  But there
it was; and Jean Jacques was a man who had power to hurt, to hinder, or
to help; for the miller and the baker are nearer to the hearthstone of
every man than any other, and credit is a good thing when the oven is
empty and hard times are abroad.  The wedding in Gaspe had not been
attended by the usual functions, for it had all been hurriedly arranged,
as the romantic circumstances of the wooing required.  Romance indeed it
was; so remarkable that the master-musician might easily have found a
theme for a comedy--or tragedy--and the philosopher would have shaken his
head at the defiance it offered to the logic of things.

Now this is the true narrative, though in the parish of St. Saviour's it
is more highly decorated and has many legends hanging to it like tassels
to a curtain.  Even the Cure of to-day, who ought to know all the truth,
finds it hard to present it in its bare elements; for the history of Jean
Jacques Barbille affected the history of many a man in St. Saviour's; and
all that befel him, whether of good or evil, ran through the parish in a
thousand invisible threads.

                    .......................

What had happened was this.  After the visit of the musician and the
philosopher, Jean Jacques, to sustain his reputation and to increase it,
had decided to visit that Normandy from which his people had come at the
time of Frontenac.  He set forth with much 'eclat' and a little innocent
posturing and ritual, in which a cornet and a violin figured, together
with a farewell oration by the Cure.

In Paris Jean Jacques had found himself bewildered and engulfed.  He had
no idea that life could be so overbearing, and he was inclined to resent
his own insignificance.  However, in Normandy, when he read the names on
the tombstones and saw the records in the baptismal register of other
Jean Jacques Barbilles, who had come and gone generations before, his
self-respect was somewhat restored.  This pleasure was dashed, however,
by the quizzical attitude of the natives of his ancestral parish, who
walked round about inspecting him as though he were a zoological
specimen, and who criticized his accent--he who had been at Laval for one
whole term; who had had special instruction before that time from the Old
Cure and a Jesuit brother; and who had been the friend of musicians and
philosophers!

His cheerful, kindly self-assurance stood the test with difficulty, but
it became a kind of ceremonial with him, whenever he was discomfited, to
read some pages of a little dun-coloured book of philosophy, picked up on
the quay at Quebec just before he sailed, and called, "Meditations in
Philosophy."  He had been warned by the bookseller that the Church had no
love for philosophy; but while at Laval he had met the independent minds
that, at eighteen to twenty-two, frequent academic groves; and he was not
to be put off by the pious bookseller--had he not also had a philosopher
in his house the year before, and was he not going to Nantes to see this
same savant before returning to his beloved St. Saviour's parish.

But Paris and Nantes and Rouen and Havre abashed and discomfited him,
played havoc with his self-esteem, confused his brain, and vexed him by
formality, and, more than all, by their indifference to himself.  He
admired, yet he wished to be admired; he was humble, but he wished all
people and things to be humble with him.  When he halted he wanted the
world to halt; when he entered a cathedral--Notre Dame or any other; or a
great building--the Law Courts at Rouen or any other; he simply wanted
people to say, wanted the cathedral, or at least the cloister, to whisper
to itself, "Here comes Jean Jacques Barbille."

That was all he wanted, and that would have sufficed.  He would not have
had them whisper about his philosophy and his intellect, or the mills and
the ash-factory which he meant to build, the lime-kilns he had started
even before he left, and the general store he intended to open when he
returned to St. Saviour's.  Not even his modesty was recognized; and, in
his grand tour, no one was impressed by all that he was, except once.  An
ancestor, a grandmother of his, had come from the Basque country; and so
down to St. Jean Pied de Port he went; for he came of a race who set
great store by mothers and grandmothers.  At St. Jean Pied de Port he was
more at home.  He was, in a sense, a foreigner among foreigners there,
and the people were not quizzical, since he was an outsider in any case
and not a native returned, as he had been in Normandy.  He learned to
play pelota, the Basque game taken from the Spaniards, and he even
allowed himself a little of that oratory which, as they say, has its
habitat chiefly in Gascony.  And because he had found an audience at
last, he became a liberal host, and spent freely of his dollars, as he
had never done either in Normandy, Paris, or elsewhere.  So freely did he
spend, that when he again embarked at Bordeaux for Quebec, he had only
enough cash left to see him through the remainder of his journey in the
great world.  Yet he left France with his self-respect restored, and he
even waved her a fond adieu, as the creaking Antoine broke heavily into
the waters of the Bay of Biscay, while he cried:

                         "My little ship,
                         It bears me far
                         From lights of home
                         To alien star.
                         O vierge Marie,
                         Pour moi priez Dieu!
                         Adieu, dear land,
                         Provence, adieu."

Then a further wave of sentiment swept over him, and he was vaguely
conscious of a desire to share the pains of parting which he saw in
labour around him--children from parents, lovers from loved.  He could
not imagine the parting from a parent, for both of his were in the bosom
of heaven, having followed his five brothers, all of whom had died in
infancy, to his good fortune, for otherwise his estate would now be only
one-sixth of what it was.  But he could imagine a parting with some sweet
daughter of France, and he added another verse to the thrilling of the
heart of Casimir Delavigne:

                         "Beloved Isaure,
                         Her hand makes sign--
                         No more, no more,
                         To rest in mine.
                         O vierge Marie,
                         Pour moi priez Dieu!
                         Adieu, dear land,
                         Isaure, adieu!"

As he murmured with limpid eye the last words, he saw in the forecastle
not far from him a girl looking at him.  There was unmistakable sadness
in her glance of interest.  In truth she was thinking of just such a man
as Jean Jacques, whom she could never see any more, for he had paid with
his life the penalty of the conspiracy in which her father, standing now
behind her on the leaky Antoine, had been a tool, and an evil tool.  Here
in Jean Jacques was the same ruddy brown face, black restless eye, and
young, silken, brown beard.  Also there was an air of certainty and
universal comprehension, and though assertion and vanity were apparent,
there was no self-consciousness.  The girl's dead and gone conspirator
had not the same honesty of face, the same curve of the ideal in the
broad forehead, the same poetry of rich wavy brown hair, the same
goodness of mind and body so characteristic of Jean Jacques--he was but
Jean Jacques gone wrong at the start; but the girl was of a nature that
could see little difference between things which were alike
superficially, and in the young provincial she only saw one who looked
like the man she had loved.  True, his moustaches did not curl upwards at
the ends as did those of Carvillho Gonzales, and he did not look out of
the corner of his eyes and smoke black cigarettes; but there he was, her
Carvillho with a difference--only such a difference that made him to her
Carvillho II., and not the ghost of Carvillho I.

She was a maiden who might have been as good as need be for all life,
so far as appearances went.  She had a wonderful skin, a smooth, velvety
cheek, where faint red roses came and went, as it might seem at will;
with a deep brown eye; and eh, but she was grandly tall--so Jean Jacques
thought, while he drew himself up to his full five feet, six and a half
with a determined air.  Even at his best, however, Jean Jacques could not
reach within three inches of her height.

Yet he did not regard her as at all overdone because of that.  He thought
her hair very fine, as it waved away from her low forehead in a grace
which reminded him of the pictures of the Empress Eugenie, and of the
sister of that monsieur le duc who had come fishing to St. Saviour's a
few years before.  He thought that if her hair was let down it would
probably reach to her waist, and maybe to her ankles.  She had none of
the plump, mellow softness of the beauties he had seen in the Basque
country.  She was a slim and long limbed Diana, with fine lines and a
bosom of extreme youth, though she must have been twenty-one her last
birthday.  The gown she wore was a dark green well-worn velvet, which
seemed of too good a make and quality for her class; and there was no
decoration about her anywhere, save at the ears, where two drops of gold
hung on little links an inch and a half long.

Jean Jacques Barbille's eyes took it all in with that observation of
which he was so proud and confident, and rested finally on the drops of
gold at her ears.  Instinctively he fingered the heavy gold watch-chain
he had bought in Paris to replace the silver chain with a little crucifix
dangling, which his father and even his great-grandfather had worn before
him.  He had kept the watch, however--the great fat-bellied thing which
had never run down in a hundred years.  It was his mascot.  To lose that
watch would be like losing his share in the promises of the Church.  So
his fingers ran along the new gold-fourteen-carat-chain, to the watch at
the end of it; and he took it out a little ostentatiously, since he saw
that the eyes of the girl were on him.  Involuntarily he wished to
impress her.

He might have saved himself the trouble.  She was impressed.  It was
quite another matter however, whether he would have been pleased to know
that the impression was due to his resemblance to a Spanish conspirator,
whose object was to destroy the Monarchy and the Church, as had been the
object of the middle-aged conspirator--the girl's father--who had the
good fortune to escape from justice.  It is probable that if Jean Jacques
had known these facts, his story would never have been written, and he
would have died in course of time with twenty children and a seat in the
legislature; for, in spite of his ardent devotion to philosophy and its
accompanying rationalism, he was a devout monarchist and a child of the
Church.

Sad enough it was that, as he shifted his glance from the watch, which
ticked loud enough to wake a farmhand in the middle of the day, he found
those Spanish eyes which had been so lost in studying him.  In the glow
and glisten of the evening sun setting on the shores of Bordeaux, and
flashing reflected golden light to the girl's face, he saw that they were
shining with tears, and though looking at him, appeared not to see him.
In that moment the scrutiny of the little man's mind was volatilized, and
the Spanische, as she was ultimately called, began her career in the life
of the money-master of St. Saviour's.

It began by his immediately resenting the fact that she should be
travelling in the forecastle.  His mind imagined misfortune and a lost
home through political troubles, for he quickly came to know that the
girl and her father were Spanish; and to him, Spain was a place of
martyrs and criminals.  Criminals these could not be--one had but to
look at the girl's face; while the face of her worthless father might
have been that of a friend of Philip IV. in the Escorial, so quiet and
oppressed it seemed.  Nobility was written on the placid, apathetic
countenance, except when it was not under observation, and then the look
of Cain took its place.  Jean Jacques, however, was not likely to see
that look; since Sebastian Dolores--that was his name--had observed from
the first how the master-miller was impressed by his daughter, and he was
set to turn it to account.

Not that the father entered into an understanding with the girl.  He knew
her too well for that.  He had a wholesome respect, not to say fear, of
her; for when all else had failed, it was she who had arranged his escape
from Spain, and who almost saved Carvillho Gonzales from being shot.  She
could have saved Gonzales, might have saved him, would have saved him,
had she not been obliged to save her father.  In the circumstances she
could not save both.

Before the week was out Jean Jacques was possessed of as fine a tale of
political persecution as mind could conceive, and, told as it was by
Sebastian Dolores, his daughter did not seek to alter it, for she had
her own purposes, and they were mixed.  These refugees needed a friend,
for they would land in Canada with only a few dollars, and Carmen Dolores
loved her father well enough not to wish to see him again in such
distress as he had endured in Cadiz.  Also, Jean Jacques, the young,
verdant, impressionable French Catholic, was like her Carvillho Gonzales,
and she had loved her Carvillho in her own way very passionately, and--
this much to her credit--quite chastely.  So that she had no compunction
in drawing the young money-master to her side, and keeping him there by
such arts as such a woman possesses.  These are remarkable after their
kind.  They are combined of a frankness as to the emotions, and such
outer concessions to physical sensations, as make a painful combination
against a mere man's caution; even when that caution has a Norman origin.

More than once Jean Jacques was moved to tears, as the Ananias of Cadiz
told his stories of persecution.

So that one day, in sudden generosity, he paid the captain the necessary
sum to transfer the refugees from the forecastle to his own select
portion of the steamer, where he was so conspicuous a figure among a
handful of lower-level merchant folk and others of little mark who were
going to Quebec.  To these latter Jean Jacques was a gift of heaven, for
he knew so much, and seemed to know so much more, and could give them the
information they desired.  His importance lured him to pose as a
seigneur, though he had no claim to the title.  He did not call himself
Seigneur in so many words, but when others referred to him as the
Seigneur, and it came to his ears, he did not correct it; and when he was
addressed as such he did not reprove.

Thus, when he brought the two refugees from the forecastle and assured
his fellow-passengers that they were Spanish folk of good family exiled
by persecution, his generosity was acclaimed, even while all saw he was
enamoured of Carmen.  Once among the first-class passengers, father and
daughter maintained reserve, and though there were a few who saw that
they were not very far removed above peasants, still the dress of the
girl, which was good--she had been a maid in a great nobleman's family
--was evidence in favour of the father's story.  Sebastian Dolores
explained his own workman's dress as having been necessary for his
escape.

Only one person gave Jean Jacques any warning.  This was the captain
of the Antoine.  He was a Basque, he knew the Spanish people well--the
types, the character, the idiosyncrasies; and he was sure that Sebastian
Dolores and his daughter belonged to the lower clerical or higher working
class, and he greatly inclined towards the former.  In that he was right,
because Dolores, and his father before him, had been employed in the
office of a great commercial firm in Cadiz, and had repaid much
consideration by stirring up strife and disloyalty in the establishment.
But before the anarchist subtracted himself from his occupation, he had
appropriated certain sums of money, and these had helped to carry him on,
when he attached himself to the revolutionaries.  It was on his
daughter's savings that he was now travelling, with the only thing he
had saved from the downfall, which was his head.  It was of sufficient
personal value to make him quite cheerful as the Antoine plunged and
shivered on her way to the country where he could have no steady work
as a revolutionist.

With reserve and caution the Basque captain felt it his duty to tell Jean
Jacques of his suspicions, warning him that the Spaniards were the
choicest liars in the world, and were not ashamed of it; but had the same
pride in it as had their greatest rivals, the Arabs and the Egyptians.

His discreet confidences, however, were of no avail; he was not discreet
enough.  If he had challenged the bona fides of Sebastian Dolores only,
he might have been convincing, but he used the word "they" constantly,
and that roused the chivalry of Jean Jacques.  That the comely, careful
Carmen should be party to an imposture was intolerable.  Everything about
her gave it the lie.  Her body was so perfect and complete, so finely
contrived and balanced, so cunningly curved with every line filled in;
her eye was so full of lustre and half-melancholy too; her voice had such
a melodious monotone; her mouth was so ripe and yet so distant in its
luxury, that imposture was out of the question.

Ah, but Jean Jacques was a champion worth while!  He did nothing by
halves.  He was of the breed of men who grow more intense, more
convinced, more thorough, as they talk.  One adjective begets another,
one warm allusion gives birth to a warmer, one flashing impulse evokes a
brighter confidence, till the atmosphere is flaming with conviction.  If
Jean Jacques started with faint doubt regarding anything, and allowed
himself betimes the flush of a declaration of belief, there could be but
one end.  He gathered fire as he moved, impulse expanded into momentum,
and momentum became an Ariel fleeing before the dark.  He would start by
offering a finger to be pricked, and would end by presenting his own head
on a charger.  He was of those who hypnotize themselves, who glow with
self-creation, who flower and bloom without pollen.

His rejection of the captain's confidence even had a dignity.  He took
out his watch which represented so many laborious hours of other
Barbilles, and with a decision in which the strong pulse of chivalry was
beating hard, he said:

"I can never speak well till I have ate.  That is my hobby.  Well, so it
is.  And I like good company.  So that is why I sit beside Senor and
Senorita Dolores at table--the one on the right, the other on the left,
myself between, like this, like that.  It is dinner-time now here, and
my friends--my dear friends of Cadiz--they wait me.  Have you heard the
Senorita sing the song of Spain, m'sieu'?  What it must be with the
guitar, I know not; but with voice alone it is ravishing.  I have learned
it also.  The Senorita has taught me.  It is a song of Aragon.  It is
sung in high places.  It belongs to the nobility.  Ah, then, you have not
heard it--but it is not too late!  The Senorita, the unhappy ma'm'selle,
driven from her ancestral home by persecution, she will sing it to you as
she has sung it to me.  It is your due.  You are the master of the ship.
But, yes, she shall of her kindness and of her grace sing it to you.  You
do not know how it runs?  Well, it is like this--listen and tell me if it
does not speak of things that belong to the old regime, the ancient
noblesse--listen, m'sieu' le captaanne, how it runs:

              "Have you not heard of mad Murcie?
               Granada gay and And'lousie?
               There's where you'll see the joyous rout,
               When patios pour their beauties out;
               Come, children, come, the night gains fast,
               And Time's a jade too fair to last.
               My flower of Spain, my Juanetta,
               Away, away to gay Jota!
               Come forth, my sweet, away, my queen,
               Though daybreak scorns, the night's between.
               The Fete's afoot--ah!  ah!  ah!  ah!
               De la Jota Ar'gonesa.
               Ah!   ah!  ah!  ah!  ah!  ah!  ah! ah!
               De la Jota Ar'gonesa."

Before he had finished, the captain was more than ready to go, for he had
no patience with such credulity, simplicity and sentimentalism.  He was
Basque, and to be Basque is to lack sentiment and feel none, to play ever
for the safe thing, to get without giving, and to mind your own business.
It had only been an excessive sense of duty which had made the captain
move in this, for he liked Jean Jacques as everyone aboard his Antoine
did; and he was convinced that the Spaniards would play the "Seigneur" to
the brink of disaster at least, though it would have been hard to detect
any element of intrigue or coquetry in Carmen Dolores.

That was due partly to the fact that she was still in grief for her
Gonzales, whose heart had been perforated by almost as many bullets as
the arrows of Cupid had perforated it in his short, gay life of adventure
and anarchy; also partly because there was no coquetry needed to interest
Jean Jacques.  If he was interested it was not necessary to interest
anyone else, nor was it expedient to do so, for the biggest fish in the
net on the Antoine was the money-master of St. Saviour's.

Carmen had made up her mind from the first to marry Jean Jacques, and she
deported herself accordingly--with modesty, circumspection and skill.  It
would be the easiest way out of all their difficulties.  Since her heart,
such as it was, fluttered, a mournful ghost, over the Place d'Armes,
where her Gonzales was shot, it might better go to Jean Jacques than
anyone else; for he was a man of parts, of money, and of looks, and she
loved these all; and to her credit she loved his looks better than all
the rest.  She had no real cupidity, and she was not greatly enamoured of
brains.  She had some real philosophy of life learned in a hard school;
and it was infinitely better founded than the smattering of conventional
philosophy got by Jean Jacques from his compendium picked up on the quay
at Quebec.

Yet Jean Jacques' cruiser of life was not wholly unarmed.  From his
Norman forebears he had, beneath all, a shrewdness and an elementary
alertness not submerged by his vain, kind nature.  He was quite a good
business man, and had proved himself so before his father died--very
quick to see a chance, and even quicker to see where the distant,
sharp corners in the road were; though not so quick to see the pitfalls,
for his head was ever in the air.  And here on the Antoine, there crossed
his mind often the vision of Carmen Dolores and himself in the parish of
St. Saviour's, with the daily life of the Beau Cheval revolving about
him.  Flashes of danger warned him now and then, just at the beginning of
the journey, as it were; just before he had found it necessary to become
her champion against the captain and his calumnies; but they were of the
instant only.  But champion as he became, and worshipping as his manner
seemed, it all might easily have been put down to a warm, chivalrous, and
spontaneous nature, which had not been bitted or bridled, and he might
have landed at Quebec without committing himself, were it not for the
fact that he was not to land at Quebec.

That was the fact which controlled his destiny.  He had spent many, many
hours with the Dona Dolores, talking, talking, as he loved to talk, and
only saving himself from the betise of boring her by the fact that his
enthusiasm had in it so fresh a quality, and because he was so like
her Gonzales that she could always endure him.  Besides, quick of
intelligence as she was, she was by nature more material than she looked,
and there was certainly something physically attractive in him--some
curious magnetism.  She had a well of sensuousness which might one day
become sensuality; she had a richness of feeling and a contour in harmony
with it, which might expand into voluptuousness, if given too much sun,
or if untamed by the normal restraints of a happy married life.  There
was an earthquake zone in her being which might shake down the whole
structure of her existence.  She was unsafe, not because she was
deceiving Jean Jacques now as to her origin and as to her feelings for
him; she was unsafe because of the natural strain of the light of love
in her, joined to a passion for comfort and warmth and to a natural self-
indulgence.  She was determined to make Jean Jacques offer himself before
they landed at Quebec.

But they did not land at Quebec.




CHAPTER II

"THE REST OF THE STORY TO-MORROW"

The journey wore on to the coast of Canada.  Gaspe was not far off when,
still held back by the constitutional tendency of the Norman not to close
a bargain till compelled to do so, Jean Jacques sat with Carmen far
forward on the deck, where the groaning Antoine broke the waters into
sullen foam.  There they silently watched the sunset, golden, purple and
splendid--and ominous, as the captain knew.

"Look, the end of life--like that!" said Jean Jacques oratorically with
a wave of the hand towards the prismatic radiance.

"All the way round, the whole circle--no, it would be too much," Carmen
replied sadly.  "Better to go at noon--or soon after.  Then the only
memory of life would be of the gallop.  No crawling into the night for
me, if I can help it.  Mother of Heaven, no!  Let me go at the top of the
flight."

"It is all the same to me," responded Jean Jacques, "I want to know it
all--to gallop, to trot, to walk, to crawl.  Me, I'm a philosopher.  I
wait."

"But I thought you were a Catholic," she replied, with a kindly, lurking
smile, which might easily have hardened into scoffing.

"First and last," he answered firmly.

"A Catholic and a philosopher--together in one?"  She shrugged a shoulder
to incite him to argument, for he was interesting when excited; when
spurting out little geysers of other people's cheap wisdom and
philosophy, poured through the kind distortion of his own intelligence.

He gave a toss of his head.  "Ah, that is my hobby--I reconcile, I unite,
I adapt!  It is all the nature of the mind, the far-look, the all-round
sight of the man.  I have it all.  I see."

He gazed eloquently into the sunset, he swept the horizon with his hand.
"I have the all-round look.  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?  'It is the good God'--that is what they
say.  It is the good God that makes crops good or bad, and it is the good
God that makes men say, 'C'est le bon Dieu.' The good God makes the
philosophy.  It is all one."

She appeared to grow agitated, and her voice shook as she spoke.  "Tsh,
it is only a fool that says the good God does it, when the thing that is
done breaks you or that which you love all to pieces.  No, no, no, it is
not religion, it is not philosophy that makes one raise the head when the
heart is bowed down, when everything is snatched away that was all in
all.  That the good God does it is a lie.  Santa Maria, what a lie!"

"Why 'Santa Maria,' then, if it is a lie?" he asked triumphantly.  He
did not observe how her breast was heaving, how her hands were clenched;
for she was really busy with thoughts of her dead Carvillho Gonzales; but
for the moment he could only see the point of an argument.

She made a gesture of despair.  "So--that's it.  Habit in us is so
strong.  It comes through the veins of our mothers to us.  We say that
God is a lie one minute, and then the next minute we say, 'God guard
you!'  Always--always calling to something, for something outside
ourselves.  That is why I said Santa Maria, why I ask her to pray for the
soul of my friend, to pray to the God that breaks me and mine, and sends
us over the seas, beggars without a home."

Now she had him back out of the vanities of his philosophy.  He was up,
inflamed, looking at her with an excitement on which she depended for her
future.  She knew the caution of his nature, she realized how he would
take one step forward and another step back, and maybe get nowhere in the
end, and she wanted him--for a home, for her father's sake, for what he
could do for them both.  She had no compunctions.  She thought herself
too good for him, in a way, for in her day men of place and mark had
taken notice of her; and if it had not been for her Gonzales she would no
doubt have listened to one of them sometime or another.  She knew she had
ability, even though she was indolent, and she thought she could do as
much for him as any other girl.  If she gave him a handsome wife and
handsome children, and made men envious of him, and filled him with good
things, for she could cook more than tortillas-she felt he would have no
right to complain.  She meant him to marry her--and Quebec was very near!

"A beggar in a strange land, without a home, without a friend--oh, my
broken life!" she whispered wistfully to the sunset.

It was not all acting, for the past reached out and swept over her,
throwing waves of its troubles upon the future.  She was that saddest
of human beings, a victim of dual forces which so fought for mastery with
each other that, while the struggle went on, the soul had no firm
foothold anywhere.  That, indeed, was why her Carvillho Gonzales, who
also had been dual in nature, said to himself so often, "I am a devil,"
and nearly as often, "I have the heart of an angel."

"Tell me all about your life, my friend," Jean Jacques said eagerly.  Now
his eyes no longer hurried here and there, but fastened on hers and
stayed thereabouts--ah, her face surely was like pictures he had seen in
the Louvre that day when he had ambled through the aisles of great men's
glories with the feeling that he could not see too much for nothing in an
hour.

"My life?  Ah, m'sieu', has not my father told you of it?" she asked.

He waved a hand in explanation, he cocked his head quizzically.  "Scraps
--like the buttons on a coat here and there--that's all," he answered.
"Born in Andalusia, lived in Cadiz, plenty of money, a beautiful home,"
--Carmen's eyes drooped, and her face flushed slightly--"no brothers or
sisters--visits to Madrid on political business--you at school--then the
going of your mother, and you at home at the head of the house.  So much
on the young shoulders, the kitchen, the parlour, the market, the shop,
society--and so on.  That is the way it was, so he said, except in the
last sad times, when your father, for the sake of Don Carlos and his
rights, near lost his life--ah, I can understand that: to stand by the
thing you have sworn to!  France is a republic, but I would give my life
to put a Napoleon or a Bourbon on the throne.  It is my hobby to stand by
the old ship, not sign on to a new captain every port."

She raised her head and looked at him calmly now.  The flush had gone
from her face, and a light of determination was in her eyes.  To that was
added suddenly a certain tinge of recklessness and abandon in carriage
and manner, as one flings the body loose from the restraints of clothes,
and it expands in a free, careless, defiant joy.

Jean Jacques' recital of her father's tale had confused her for a moment,
it was so true yet so untrue, so full of lies and yet so solid in fact.
"The head of the house--visits to Madrid on political business--the
parlour, the market, society--all that!"  It suggested the picture of the
life of a child of a great house; it made her a lady, and not a superior
servant as she had been; it adorned her with a credit which was not hers;
and for a moment she was ashamed.  Yet from the first she had lent
herself to the general imposture that they had fled from Spain for
political reasons, having lost all and suffered greatly; and it was true
while yet it was a lie.  She had suffered, both her father and herself
had suffered; she had been in danger, in agony, in sorrow, in despair--
it was only untrue that they were of good birth and blood, and had had
position and comfort and much money.  Well, what harm did that do
anybody?  What harm did it do this little brown seigneur from Quebec?
Perhaps he too had made himself out to be more than he was.  Perhaps he
was no seigneur at all, she thought.  When one is in distant seas and in
danger of his life, one will hoist any flag, sail to any port, pay homage
to any king.  So would she.  Anyhow, she was as good as this provincial,
with his ancient silver watch, his plump little hands, and his book of
philosophy.

What did it matter, so all came right in the end!  She would justify
herself, if she had the chance.  She was sick of conspiracy, and danger,
and chicanery--and blood.  She wanted her chance.  She had been badly
shaken in the last days in Spain, and she shrank from more worry and
misery.  She wanted to have a home and not to wander.  And here was a
chance--how good a chance she was not sure; but it was a chance.  She
would not hesitate to make it hers.  After all, self-preservation was the
thing which mattered.  She wanted a bright fire, a good table, a horse,
a cow, and all such simple things.  She wanted a roof over her and a warm
bed at night.  She wanted a warm bed at night--but a warm bed at night
alone.  It was the price she would have to pay for her imposture, that if
she had all these things, she could not be alone in the sleep-time.  She
had not thought of this in the days when she looked forward to a home
with her Gonzales.  To be near him was everything; but that was all dead
and done for; and now--it was at this point that, shrinking, she suddenly
threw off all restraining thoughts.  With abandon of the mind came a
recklessness of body, which gave her, all at once, a voluptuousness more
in keeping with the typical maid of Andalusia.  It got into the eyes and
senses of Jean Jacques, in a way which had nothing to do with the
philosophy of Descartes, or Kant, or Aristotle, or Hegel.

"It was beautiful in much--my childhood," she said in a low voice,
dropping her eyes before his ardent gaze, "as my father said.  My mother
was lovely to see, but not bigger than I was at twelve--so petite, and
yet so perfect in form--like a lark or a canary.  Yes, and she could
sing--anything.  Not like me with a voice which has the note of a drum or
an organ--"

"Of a flute, bright Senorita," interposed Jean Jacques.

"But high, and with the trills in the skies, and all like a laugh with a
tear in it.  When she went to the river to wash--"

She was going to say "wash the clothes," but she stopped in time and said
instead, "wash her spaniel and her pony"--her face was flushed again with
shame, for to lie about one's mother is a sickening thing, and her mother
never had a spaniel or a pony--" the women on the shore wringing their
clothes, used to beg her to sing.  To the hum of the river she would make
the music which they loved--"

"La Manola and such?" interjected Jean Jacques eagerly.  "That's a fine
song as you sing it."

"Not La Manola, but others of a different sort--The Love of Isabella, The
Flight of Bobadil, Saragosse, My Little Banderillero, and so on, and all
so sweet that the women used to cry.  Always, always she was singing till
the time when my father became a rebel.  Then she used to cry too; and
she would sing no more; and when my father was put against a wall to be
shot, and fell in the dust when the rifles rang out, she came at the
moment, and seeing him lying there, she threw up her hands, and fell down
beside him dead--"

"The poor little senora, dead too--"

"Not dead too--that was the pity of it.  You see my father was not dead.
The officer"--she did not say sergeant--"who commanded the firing squad,
he was what is called a compadre of my father--"

"Yes, I understand--a made-brother, sealed with an oath, which binds
closer than a blood-brother.  It is that, is it not?"

"So--like that.  Well, the compadre had put blank cartridges in their
rifles, and my father pretended to fall dead; and the soldiers were
marched away; and my father, with my mother, was carried to his home,
still pretending to be dead.  It had been all arranged except the awful
thing, my mother's death.  Who could foresee that?  She ought to have
been told; but who could guess that she would hear of it all, and come
at the moment like that?  So, that was the way she went, and I was left
alone with my father."  She had told the truth in all, except in
conveying that her mother was not of the lower orders, and that she went
to the river to wash her spaniel and her pony instead of her clothes.

"Your father--did they not arrest him again?  Did they not know?"

She shrugged her shoulders.  That is not the way in Spain.  He was shot,
as the orders were, with his back to the wall by a squad of soldiers with
regulation bullets.  If he chose to come to life again, that was his own
affair.  The Government would take no notice of him after he was dead.
He could bury himself, or he could come alive--it was all the same to
them.  So he came alive again."

"That is a story which would make a man's name if he wrote it down,"
said Jean Jacques eloquently.  "And the poor little senora, but my heart
bleeds for her!  To go like that in such pain, and not to know--If she
had been my wife I think I would have gone after her to tell her it was
all right, and to be with her--"

He paused confused, for that seemed like a reflection on her father's
chivalry, and for a man who had risked his life for his banished king--
what would he have thought if he had been told that Sebastian Dolores was
an anarchist who loathed kings!--it was an insult to suggest that he did
not know the right thing to do, or, knowing, had not done it.

She saw the weakness of his case at once.  "There was his duty to the
living," she said indignantly.

"Ah, forgive me--what a fool I am!" Jean Jacques said repentantly at
once.  "There was his little girl, his beloved child, his Carmen Dolores,
so beautiful, with the voice like a flute, and--"

He drew nearer to her, his hand was outstretched to take hers; his eyes
were full of the passion of the moment; pity was drowning all caution,
all the Norman shrewdness in him, when the Antoine suddenly stopped
almost dead with a sudden jolt and shock, then plunged sideways, jerked,
and trembled.

"We've struck a sunk iceberg--the rest of the story to-morrow, Senorita,"
he cried, as they both sprang to their feet.

"The rest of the story to-morrow," she repeated, angry at the stroke of
fate which had so interrupted the course of her fortune.  She said it
with a voice also charged with fear; for she was by nature a landfarer,
not a sea-farer, though on the rivers of Spain she had lived almost as
much as on land, and she was a good swimmer.

"The rest to-morrow," she repeated, controlling herself.




CHAPTER III

"TO-MORROW"

The rest came to-morrow.  When the Antoine struck the sunken iceberg she
was not more than one hundred and twenty miles from the coast of Gaspe.
She had not struck it full on, or she would have crumpled up, but had
struck and glanced, mounting the berg, and sliding away with a small
gaping wound in her side, broken internally where she had been weakest.
Her condition was one of extreme danger, and the captain was by no means
sure that he could make the land.  If a storm or a heavy sea came on,
they were doomed.

As it was, with all hands at the pumps the water gained on her, and she
moaned and creaked and ached her way into the night with no surety that
she would show a funnel to the light of another day.  Passengers and crew
alike worked, and the few boats were got ready to lower away when the
worst should come to the worst.  Below, with the crew, the little
moneymaster of St. Saviour's worked with an energy which had behind it
some generations of hardy qualities; and all the time he refused to be
downcast.  There was something in his nature or in his philosophy after
all.  He had not much of a voice, but it was lusty and full of good
feeling; and when cursing began, when a sailor even dared to curse his
baptism--the crime of crimes to a Catholic mind--Jean Jacques began to
sing a cheery song with which the habitants make vocal their labours or
their playtimes:

                   "A Saint-Malo, beau port de mer,
                    Trois gros navir's sont arrives,
                    Trois gros navir's sont arrives
                    Charges d'avoin', charges de ble.
                    Charges d'avoin', charges de ble:
                    Trois dam's s'en vont les marchander."

And so on through many verses, with a heartiness that was a good antidote
to melancholy, even though it was no specific for a shipwreck.  It played
its part, however; and when Jean Jacques finished it, he plunged into
that other outburst of the habitant's gay spirits, 'Bal chez Boule':

              "Bal chez Boule, bal chez Boule,
               The vespers o'er, we'll away to that;
               With our hearts so light, and our feet so gay,
               We'll dance to the tune of 'The Cardinal's Hat'
               The better the deed, the better the day
               Bal chez Boule, bal chez Boule!"

And while Jean Jacques worked "like a little French pony," as they say in
Canada of every man with the courage to do hard things in him, he did not
stop to think that the scanty life-belts had all been taken, and that he
was a very poor swimmer indeed: for, as a child, he had been subject to
cramp, and so had made the Beau Cheval River less his friend than would
have been useful now.

He realized it, however, soon after daybreak, when, within a few hundred
yards of the shores of Gaspe, to which the good Basque captain had been
slowly driving the Antoine all night, there came the cry, "All
hands on deck!" and "Lower the boats!" for the Antoine's time had come,
and within a hand-reach of shore almost she found the end of her rickety
life.  Not more than three-fourths of the passengers and crew were got
into the boats.  Jean Jacques was not one of these; but he saw Carmen
Dolores and her father safely bestowed, though in different boats.  To
the girl's appeal to him to come he gave a nod of assent, and said he
would get in at the last moment; but this he did not do, pushing into the
boat instead a crying lad of fifteen, who said he was afraid to die.

So it was that Jean Jacques took to the water side by side with the
Basque captain, when the Antoine groaned and shook, and then grew still,
and presently, with some dignity, dipped her nose into the shallow sea
and went down.

"The rest of the story to-morrow," Jean Jacques had said when the vessel
struck the iceberg the night before; and so it was.

The boat in which Carmen had been placed was swamped not far from shore,
but she managed to lay hold of a piece of drifting wreckage, and began to
fight steadily and easily landward.  Presently she was aware, however, of
a man struggling hard some little distance away to the left of her, and
from the tousled hair shaking in the water she was sure that it was Jean
Jacques.

So it proved to be; and thus it was that, at his last gasp almost, when
he felt he could keep up no longer, the wooden seat to which Carmen clung
came to his hand, and a word of cheer from her drew his head up with what
was almost a laugh.

"To think of this!" he said presently when he was safe, with her
swimming beside him without support, for the wooden seat would not
sustain the weight of two.  "To think that it is you who saves me!" he
again declared eloquently, as they made the shore in comparative ease,
for she was a fine swimmer.

"It is the rest of the story," he said with great cheerfulness and aplomb
as they stood on the shore in the morning sun, shoeless, coatless, but
safe: and she understood.

There was nothing else for him to do.  The usual process of romance had
been reversed.  He had not saved her life, she had saved his.  The least
that he could do was to give her shelter at the Manor Cartier yonder at
St. Saviour's, her and, if need be, her father.  Human gratitude must
have play.  It was so strong in this case that it alone could have
overcome the Norman caution of Jean Jacques, and all his worldly wisdom
(so much in his own eyes).  Added thereto was the thing which had been
greatly stirred in him at the instant the Antoine struck; and now he kept
picturing Carmen in the big living-room and the big bedroom of the house
by the mill, where was the comfortable four-poster which had come from
the mansion of the last Baron of Beaugard down by St. Laurent.

Three days after the shipwreck of the Antoine, and as soon as sufficient
finery could be got in Quebec, it was accomplished, the fate of Jean
Jacques.  How proud he was to open his cheque-book before the young
Spanish maid, and write in cramped, characteristic hand a cheque for a
hundred dollars or so at a time!  A moiety of this money was given to
Sebastian Dolores, who could scarcely believe his good fortune.  A
situation was got for him by the help of a good abbe at Quebec, who was
touched by the tale of the wreck of the Antoine, and by the no less
wonderful tale of the refugees of Spain, who naturally belonged to the
true faith which "feared God and honoured the King."  Sebastian Dolores
was grateful for the post offered him, though he would rather have gone
to St. Saviour's with his daughter, for he had lost the gift of work, and
he desired peace after war.  In other words, he had that fatal trait of
those who strive to make the world better by talk and violence, the vice
of indolence.

But when Jean Jacques and his handsome bride started for St. Saviour's,
the new father-in-law did not despair of following soon.  He would
greatly have enjoyed the festivities which, after all, did follow the
home-coming of Jean Jacques Barbille and his Spanische; for while they
lacked enthusiasm because Carmen was a foreigner, the romance of the
story gave the whole proceedings a spirit and interest which spread into
adjoining parishes: so that people came to mass from forty miles away to
see the pair who had been saved from the sea.

And when the Quebec newspapers found their way into the parish, with a
thrilling account of the last hours of the Antoine; and of Jean Jacques'
chivalrous act in refusing to enter a boat to save himself, though he was
such a bad swimmer and was in danger of cramp; and how he sang Bal chez
Boule while the men worked at the pumps; they permitted the apres noces
of M'sieu' and Madame Jean Jacques Barbille to be as brilliant as could
be, with the help of lively improvisation.  Even speech-making occurred
again in an address of welcome some days later.  This was followed by a
feast of Spanish cakes and meats made by the hands of Carmen Dolores,
"the lady saved from the sea"--as they called her; not knowing that she
had saved herself, and saved Jean Jacques as well.  It was not quite to
Jean Jacques' credit that he did not set this error right, and tell the
world the whole exact truth.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Air of certainty and universal comprehension
Always calling to something, for something outside ourselves
Came of a race who set great store by mothers and grandmothers
Grove of pines to give a sense of warmth in winter
Grow more intense, more convinced, more thorough, as they talk
He admired, yet he wished to be admired
Inclined to resent his own insignificance
Lyrical in his enthusiasms
No man so simply sincere, or so extraordinarily prejudiced
Of those who hypnotize themselves, who glow with self-creation
Spurting out little geysers of other people's cheap wisdom
Untamed by the normal restraints of a happy married life