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.