His cheerfulness seldom deserted him, and he was notably kind to the poor. Not seldom in the winter time a poor man, here and there in the parish, would find dumped down outside his door in the early morning a half-cord of wood or a bag of flour.
It could not be said that Jean Jacques did not enjoy his own generosity. His vanity, however, did not come from an increasing admiration of his own personal appearance, a weakness which often belongs to middle age; but from the study of his so-called philosophy, which in time became an obsession with him. In vain the occasional college professors, who spent summer months at St. Saviour’s, sought to interest him in science and history, for his philosophy had large areas of boredom; but science marched over too jagged a road for his tender intellectual feet; the wild places where it led dismayed him. History also meant numberless dates and facts. Perhaps he could have managed the dates, for he was quick at figures, but the facts were like bees in their hive—he could scarcely tell one from another by looking at them.
So it was that Jean Jacques kept turning his eyes, as he thought, to the everlasting meaning of things, to “the laws of Life and the decrees of Destiny.” He was one of those who had found, as he thought, what he could do, and was sensible enough to do it. Let the poor fellows, who gave themselves to science, trouble their twisted minds with trigonometry and the formula of some grotesque chemical combination; let the dull people rub their noses in the ink of Greek and Latin, which was no use for everyday consumption; let the heads of historians ache with the warring facts of the lives of nations; it all made for sleep. But philosophy—ah, there was a field where a man could always use knowledge got from books or sorted out of his own experiences!
It happened, therefore, that Jean Jacques, who not too vaguely realized that there was reputation to be got from being thought a philosopher, always carried about with him his little compendium from the quay at Quebec, which he had brought ashore inside his redflannel shirt, with the antique silver watch, when the Antoine went down.
Thus also it was that when a lawyer in court at Vilray, four miles from St. Saviour’s, asked him one day, when he stepped into the witness-box, what he was, meaning what was his occupation, his reply was, “Moi-je suis M’sieu’ Jean Jacques, philosophe—(Me—I am M’sieu’ Jean Jacques, philosopher).”
A little later outside the court-house, the Judge who had tried the case—M. Carcasson—said to the Clerk of the Court:
“A curious, interesting little man, that Monsieur Jean Jacques. What’s his history?”
“A character, a character, monsieur le juge,” was the reply of M. Amand Fille. “His family has been here since Frontenac’s time. He is a figure in the district, with a hand in everything. He does enough foolish things to ruin any man, yet swims along—swims along. He has many kinds of business—mills, stores, farms, lime-kilns, and all that, and keeps them all going; and as if he hadn’t enough to do, and wasn’t risking enough, he’s now organizing a cheese-factory on the co-operative principle, as in Upper Canada among the English.”
“He has a touch of originality, that’s sure,” was the reply of the Judge.
The Clerk of the Court nodded and sighed. “Monseigneur Giron of Laval, the greatest scholar in Quebec, he said to me once that M’sieu’ Jean Jacques missed being a genius by an inch. But, monsieur le juge, not to have that inch is worse than to be an ignoramus.”
Judge Carcasson nodded. “Ah, surely! Your Jean Jacques lacks a balance-wheel. He has brains, but not enough. He has vision, but it is not steady; he has argument, but it breaks down just where it should be most cohesive. He interested me. I took note of every turn of his mind as he gave evidence. He will go on for a time, pulling his strings, doing this and doing that, and then, all at once, when he has got a train of complications, his brain will not be big enough to see the way out. Tell me, has he a balance-wheel in his home—a sensible wife, perhaps?”
The Clerk of the Court shook his head mournfully and seemed to hesitate. Then he said, “Comme ci, comme ca—but no, I will speak the truth about it. She is a Spaniard—the Spanische she is called by the neighbours. I will tell you all about that, and you will wonder that he has carried on as well as he has, with his vanity and his philosophy.”
“He’ll have need of his philosophy before he’s done, or I don’t know human nature; he’ll get a bad fall one of these days,” responded the Judge. “ ‘Moi-je suis M’sieu’ Jean Jacques, philosophe’—that is what he said. Bumptious little man, and yet—and yet there’s something in him. There’s a sense of things which everyone doesn’t have—a glimmer of life beyond his own orbit, a catching at the biggest elements of being, a hovering on the confines of deep understanding, as it were. Somehow I feel almost sorry for him, though he annoyed me while he was in the witness-box, in spite of myself. He was as the English say, so ‘damn sure.’ ”
“So damn sure always,” agreed the Clerk of the Court, with a sense of pleasure that his great man, this wonderful aged little judge, should have shown himself so human as to use such a phrase.
“But, no doubt, the sureness has been a good servant in his business,” returned the Judge. “Confidence in a weak world gets unearned profit often. But tell me about his wife—the Spanische. Tell me the how and why, and everything. I’d like to trace our little money-man wise to his source.”
Again M. Fille was sensibly agitated. “She is handsome, and she has great, good gifts when she likes to use them,” he answered. “She can do as much in an hour as most women can do in two; but then she will not keep at it. Her life is but fits and starts. Yet she has a good head for business, yes, very good. She can see through things. Still, there it is—she will not hold fast from day to day.”
“Yes, yes, but where did she come from? What was the field where she grew?”
“To be sure, monsieur. It was like this,” responded the other.
Thereupon M. Fille proceeded to tell the history, musical with legend, of Jean Jacques’ Grand Tour, of the wreck of the Antoine, of the marriage of the “seigneur,” the home-coming, and the life that followed, so far as rumour, observation, and a mind with a gift for narrative, which was not to be incomplete for lack of imagination, could make it. It was only when he offered his own reflections on Carmen Dolores, now Carmen Barbille, and on women generally, that Judge Carcasson pulled him up.
“So, so, I see. She has temperament and so on, but she’s unsteady, and regarded by her neighbours not quite as one that belongs. Bah, the conceit of every race! They are all the same. The English are the worst—as though the good God was English. But the child—so beautiful, you say, and yet more like the father than the mother. He is not handsome, that Jean Jacques, but I can understand that the little one should be like him and yet beautiful too. I should like to see the child.”
Suddenly the Clerk of the Court stopped and touched the arm of his distinguished friend and patron. “That is very easy, monsieur,” he said eagerly, “for there she is in the red wagon yonder, waiting for her father. She adores him, and that makes trouble sometimes. Then the mother gets fits, and makes things hard at the Manor Cartier. It is not all a bed of roses for our Jean Jacques. But there it is. He is very busy all the time. Something doing always, never still, except when you will find him by the road-side, or in a tavern with all the people round him, talking, jesting, and he himself going into a trance with his book of philosophy. It is very strange that everlasting going, going, going, and yet that love of his book. I sometimes think it is all pretence, and that he is all vanity—or almost so. Heaven forgive me for my want of charity!”
The little round judge cocked his head astutely. “But you say he is kind to the poor, that he does not treat men hardly who are in debt to him, and that he
