Carnac's Folly, Complete

by Gilbert Parker

At first he was almost appalled, for never since life began had his personality been so displayed. It seemed absurd that before he had struck a blow he should be advertised like a general in the field. Yet common sense told him that in standing against Barouche, he became important in the eyes of those affected by Barouche’s policy. He had had luck, and it was for him to justify that luck. Could he do it? His first thought, however, as his eyes fell on the headlines—he flushed with elation so that he scarcely saw—was for the thing itself. Before him there flashed a face, however, which at once sobered his exaltation. It was the face of Junia.

“I wonder what she will think,” he said to himself, with a little perplexity.

He knew in his heart of hearts she would not think it incongruous that he, an artist, should become a politician. Good laws served to make life beautiful, good pictures ministered to beauty; good laws helped to tell the story of human development; good sculpture strengthened the soul; good laws made life’s conveniences greater, enlarged activity, lessened the friction of things not yet adjusted; good laws taught their framers how to balance things, how to make new principles apply without disturbing old rights; good pictures increased the well-balanced harmony of the mind of the people. Junia would understand these things. As he sat at his breakfast, with the newspaper spread against the teapot and the milk-pitcher, he felt satisfied he had done the bold and right, if incomprehensible, thing.

But in another hotel, at another breakfast, another man read of Carnac’s candidature with sickening surprise. It was Barode Barouche.

So, after twenty-seven long years, this was to be the issue! His own son, whom he had never known, was to fight him at the polls! Somehow, the day when he had seen Carnac and his mother at the political meeting had given him new emotions. His wife, to whom he had been so faithful in one sense since she had passed into the asylum, had died, and with her going, a new field of life seemed to open up to him. She had died almost on the same day as John Grier. She had been buried secludedly, piteously, and he had gone back to his office with the thought that life had become a preposterous freedom.

So it was that, on the day when he spoke at the political meeting, his life’s tragedy became a hammer beating every nerve into emotion. He was like one shipwrecked who strikes out with a swimmer’s will to reach his goal. All at once, on the platform, as he spoke, when his eyes saw the faces of Carnac and his mother the catastrophe stunned him like a huge engine of war. There had come to him at last a sense of duty where Alma Grier was concerned. She was nearly fifty years of age, and he was fifty-nine; she was a widow with this world’s goods; she had been to him how near and dear! for a brief hour, and then—no more. He knew the boy was his son, because he saw his own face, as it had been in his youth, though his mother’s look was also there-transforming, illumining.

He had a pang as he saw the two at the close of his meeting filtering out into the great retort of the world. Then it was that he had the impulse to go to the woman’s home, express his sorrow, and in some small sense wipe out his wrong by offering her marriage. He had not gone.

He knew of Carnac’s success in the world of Art; and how he had alienated his reputed father by an independence revolting to a slave of convention. He had even bought, not from Carnac, but from a dealer, two of Carnac’s pictures and a statue of a riverman. Somehow the years had had their way with him. He had at long last realized that material things were not the great things of life, and that imagination, however productive, should be guided by uprightness of soul.

One thing was sure, the boy had never been told who his father was. That Barouche knew. He had the useful gift of reading the minds of people in their faces. From Carnac’s face, from Carnac’s mother’s face, had come to him the real story. He knew that Alma Grier had sinned only once and with him. In the first days after that ill-starred month, he had gone to her, only to be repelled as a woman can repel whose soul has been shocked, whose self-respect has been shamed.

It had been as though she thrust out arms of infinite length to push him away, such had been the storm of her remorse, such the revulsion against herself and him. So they had fallen apart, and he had seen his boy grow up independent, original, wilful, capable—a genius. He read the newspaper reports of what had happened the day before with senses greatly alive.