Why he waited in Montreal it would be hard to say, save that it was a kind of middle place between the old life and the new, and also because he must decide what was to be his plan of search. First the West—first Winnipeg, but where after that? He had at last secured information of where Zoe and Gerard Fynes had stayed while in Montreal; and now he followed clues which would bring him in touch with folk who knew them. He came to know one or two people who were with Zoe and Gerard in the last days they spent in the metropolis, and he turned over and over in his mind every word said about his girl, as a child turns a sweetmeat in its mouth. This made him eager to be off; but on the very day he decided to start at once for the West, something strange happened.
It was towards the late afternoon of a Saturday, when the streets were full of people going to and from the shops in a marketing quarter, that Madame Glozel came to him and said:
“M’sieu’, I have an idea, and you will not think it strange, for you have a kind heart. There is a woman—look you, it is a sad, sad story hers. She is ill and dying in a room a little way down the street. But yes, I am sure she is dying—of heart disease it is. She came here first when the illness took her, but she could not afford to stay. She went to those cheaper lodgings down the street. She used to be on the stage over in the States, and then she came back here, and there was a man—married to him or not I do not know, and I will not think. Well, the man—the brute—he left her when she got ill—but yes, forsook her absolutely! He was a land-agent or something like that, and all very fine to your face, to promise and to pretend—just make-believe. When her sickness got worse, off he went with ‘Au revoir, my dear—I will be back to supper.’ Supper! If she’d waited for her supper till he came back, she’d have waited as long as I’ve done for the fortune the gipsy promised me forty years ago. Away he went, the rogue, without a thought of her, and with another woman. That’s what hurt her most of all. Straight from her that could hardly drag herself about—ah, yes, and has been as handsome a woman as ever was!—straight from her he went to a slut. She was a slut, m’sieu’—did I not know her? Did Ma’m’selle Slut not wait at table in this house and lead the men a dance here night and day-day and night till I found it out! Well, off he went with the slut, and left the lady behind.... You men, you treat women so.”
Jean Jacques put out a hand as though to argue with her. “Sometimes it is the other way,” he retorted. “Most of us have seen it like that.”
“Well, for sure, you’re right enough there, m’sieu’,” was the response. “I’ve got nothing to say to that, except that it’s a man that runs away with a woman, or that gets her to leave her husband when she does go. There’s always a man that says, ‘Come along, I’m the better chap for you.’”
Jean Jacques wearily turned his head away towards the cage where his canary was beginning to pipe its evening lay.
“It all comes to the same thing in the end,” he said pensively; and then he who had been so quiet since he came to the little hotel—Glozel’s, it was called—began to move about the room excitedly, running his fingers through his still bushy hair, which, to his credit, was always as clean as could be, burnished and shiny even at his mid-century period. He began murmuring to himself, and a frown settled on his fore head. Mme. Glozel saw that she had perturbed him, and that no doubt she had roused some memories which made sombre the sunny little room where the canary sang; where, to ravish the eyes of the pessimist, was a picture of Louis XVI. going to heaven in the arms of St. Peter.
When started, however, the good woman could no more “slow down” than her French pony would stop when its head was turned homewards from market. So she kept on with the history of the woman down the street.
“Heart disease,” she said, nodding with assurance and finality; “and we know what that is—a start, a shock, a fall, a strain, and pht! off the poor thing goes. Yes, heart disease, and sometimes with such awful pain. But so; and yesterday she told me she had only a hundred dollars left. ‘Enough to last me through,’ she said to me. Poor thing, she lifted up her eyes with a way she has, as if looking for something she couldn’t find, and she says, as simple as though she was asking about the price of a bed-tick, ‘It won’t cost more than fifty dollars to bury me, I s’pose?’ Well, that made me squeamish, for the poor dear’s plight came home to me so clear, and she young enough yet to get plenty out of life, if she had the chance. So I asked her again about her people—whether I couldn’t send for someone belonging to her. ‘There’s none that belongs to me,’ she says, ‘and there’s no one I belong to.’
“I thought very likely she didn’t want to tell me about herself; perhaps because she had done wrong, and her family had not been good to her. Yet it was right I should try and get her folks to come, if she had any folks. So I said to her, ‘Where was your home?’ And now, what do you think she answered, m’sieu’?’ ‘Look there,’ she said to me, with her big eyes standing out of her head almost—for that’s what comes to her sometimes when she is in pain, and she looks more handsome then than at any other time—‘Look there,’ she said to me, ‘it was in heaven, that’s where—my home was; but I didn’t know it. I hadn’t been taught to know the place when I saw it.’