In sudden agony Jean Jacques threw up his hands. “So young and so soon to be gone!” he exclaimed. “But a child she was and had scarce tasted the world. The mercy of God—what is it!”
“You can’t take time as the measure of life,” rejoined the Young Doctor with a compassionate gesture. “Perhaps she had her share of happiness—as much as most of us get, maybe, in a longer course.”
“Share! She was worth a hundred years of happiness!” bitterly retorted Jean Jacques.
“Perhaps she knew her child would have it?” gently remarked the Young Doctor.
“Ah, that—that!... Do you think that possible, m’sieu’? Tell me, do you think that was in her mind—to have loved, and been a mother, and given her life for the child, and then the bosom of God. Answer that to me, m’sieu’?”
There was intense, poignant inquiry in Jean Jacques’ face, and a light seemed to play over it. The Young Doctor heeded the look and all that was in the face. It was his mission to heal, and he knew that to heal the mind was often more necessary than to heal the body. Here he would try to heal the mind, if only in a little.
“That might well have been in her thought,” he answered. “I saw her face. It had a wonderful look of peace, and a smile that would reconcile anyone she loved to her going. I thought of that when I looked at her. I recall it now. It was the smile of understanding.”
He had said the only thing which could have comforted Jean Jacques at that moment. Perhaps it was meant to be that Zoe’s child should represent to him all that he had lost—home, fortune, place, Carmen and Zoe. Perhaps she would be home again for him and all that home should mean—be the promise of a day when home would again include that fled from Carmen, and himself, and Carmen’s child. Maybe it was sentiment in him, maybe it was sentimentality—and maybe it was not.
“Come, m’sieu’,” Jean Jacques said impatiently: “let us go to the house of that M’sieu’ Doyle. But first, mark this: I have in the West here some land—three hundred and twenty acres. It may yet be to me a home, where I shall begin once more with my Zoe’s child—with my Zoe of Zoe—the home-life I lost down by the Beau Cheval.... Let us go at once.”
“Yes, at once,” answered the Young Doctor. Yet his feet were laggard, for he was not so sure that there would be another home for Jean Jacques with his grandchild as its star. He was thinking of Norah, to whom a waif of the prairie had made home what home should be for herself and Nolan Doyle.