“Dear, dear Fille!” She always called him that now, and not by his Christian name, as though he was a peer. She had done so ever since the Government had made him a magistrate, and Laval University had honoured him with the degree of doctor of laws.
She was leading him to the pony-carriage in which she had come to meet him, when he said:
“Do you think you could walk the distance, my dear?... It would be like old times,” he added gently.
“I could walk twice as far to-day,” she answered, and at once gave directions for the young coachman to put “His Honour’s” bag into the carriage. In spite of Fille’s reproofs she insisted in calling him that to the servants. They had two servants now, thanks to the legacy left them by the late Judge Carcasson. Presently M. Fille took her by the hand. “Before we start—one look yonder,” he murmured, pointing towards the mill which had once belonged to Jean Jacques, now rebuilt and looking almost as of old. “I promised Jean Jacques that I would come and salute it in his name, before I did aught else, and so now I do salute it.”
He waved a hand and made a bow to the gold Cock of Beaugard, the pride of all the vanished Barbilles. “Jean Jacques Barbille says that his head is up like yours, M. le Coq, and he wishes you many, many winds to come,” he recited quite seriously, and as though it was not out of tune with the modern world.
The gold Cock of Beaugard seemed to understand, for it swung to the left, and now a little to the right, and then stood still, as if looking at the little pair of exiles from an ancient world—of which the only vestiges remaining may be found in old Quebec.
This ceremony over, they walked towards Mont Violet, averting their heads as they passed the Manor Cartier, in a kind of tribute to its departed master—as a Stuart Legitimist might pass the big palace at the end of the Mall in London. In the wood-path, Fille took his sister’s hand.
“I will tell you what you are so trembling to hear,” he said. “There they are at peace, Jean Jacques and Virginie—that best of best women.”
“To think—married to Virginie Poucette—to think of that!” His sister’s voice fluttered as she spoke. “But entirely. There was nothing in the way—and she meant to have him, the dear soul! I do not blame her, for at bottom he is as good a man as lives. Our Judge called him ‘That dear fool, Jean Jacques, a man of men in his way, after all,’ and our Judge was always right—but yes, nearly always right.”
After a moment of contented meditation he resumed. “Well, when Virginie sold her place here and went to live with her sister out at Shilah in the West, she said, ‘If Jean Jacques is alive, he will be on the land which was Zoe’s, which he bought for her. If he is alive—then!’ So it was, and by one of the strange accidents which chance or women like Virginie, who have plenty of courage in their simpleness, arrange, they met on that three hundred and sixty acres. It was like the genius of Jean Jacques to have done that one right thing which would save him in the end—a thing which came out of his love for his child—the emotion of an hour. Indeed, that three hundred and sixty acres was his salvation after he learned of Zoe’s death, and the other little Zoe, his grandchild, was denied to him—to close his heart against what seemed that last hope, was it not courage? And so, and so he has the reward of his own soul—a home at last once more.”