“So, so, I see. She has temperament and so on, but she’s unsteady, and regarded by her neighbours not quite as one that belongs. Bah, the conceit of every race! They are all the same. The English are the worst—as though the good God was English. But the child—so beautiful, you say, and yet more like the father than the mother. He is not handsome, that Jean Jacques, but I can understand that the little one should be like him and yet beautiful too. I should like to see the child.”
Suddenly the Clerk of the Court stopped and touched the arm of his distinguished friend and patron. “That is very easy, monsieur,” he said eagerly, “for there she is in the red wagon yonder, waiting for her father. She adores him, and that makes trouble sometimes. Then the mother gets fits, and makes things hard at the Manor Cartier. It is not all a bed of roses for our Jean Jacques. But there it is. He is very busy all the time. Something doing always, never still, except when you will find him by the road-side, or in a tavern with all the people round him, talking, jesting, and he himself going into a trance with his book of philosophy. It is very strange that everlasting going, going, going, and yet that love of his book. I sometimes think it is all pretence, and that he is all vanity—or almost so. Heaven forgive me for my want of charity!”
The little round judge cocked his head astutely. “But you say he is kind to the poor, that he does not treat men hardly who are in debt to him, and that he will take his coat off his back to give to a tramp—is it so?”
“As so, as so, monsieur.”
“Then he is not all vanity, and because of that he will feel the blow when it comes—alas, so much he will feel it!”
“What blow, monsieur le juge?—but ah, look, monsieur!” He pointed eagerly. “There she is, going to the red wagon—Madame Jean Jacques. Is she not a figure of a woman? See the walk of her—is it not distinguished? She is half a hand-breadth taller than Jean Jacques. And her face, most sure it is a face to see. If Jean Jacques was not so busy with his farms and his mills and his kilns and his usury, he would see what a woman he has got. It is his good fortune that she has such sense in business. When Jean Jacques listens to her, he goes right. She herself did not want her father to manage the lime-kilns—the old Sebastian Dolores. She was for him staying at Mirimachi, where he kept the books of the lumber firm. But no, Jean Jacques said that he could make her happy by having her father near her, and he would not believe she meant what she said. He does not understand her; that is the trouble. He knows as much of women or men as I know of—”
“Of the law—hein?” laughed the great man.
“Monsieur—ah, that is your little joke! I laugh, yes, but I laugh,” responded the Clerk of the Court a little uncertainly. “Now once when she told him that the lime-kilns—”
The Judge, who had retraced his steps down the street of the town—it was little more than a large village, but because it had a court-house and a marketplace it was called a town—that he might have a good look at Madame Jean Jacques and her child before he passed them, suddenly said:
“How is it you know so much about it all, Maitre Fille—as to what she says and of the inner secrets of the household? Ah, ha, my little Lothario, I have caught you—a bachelor too, with time on his hands, and the right side of seventy as well! The evidence you have given of a close knowledge of the household of our Jean Jacques does not have its basis in hearsay, but in acute personal observation. Tut-tut! Fie-fie! my little gay Clerk of the Court. Fie! Fie!”