The Money Master, Complete. Gilbert Parker

      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”

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      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