“Let a man when he is dying tell all the truth, to ease his mind,” said the master-carpenter with a machiavellian pretence and cunning. “It was vanity, it was, as you say; it was the peacock in me made me be the friend of many women and not the husband of one. I came down here to Quebec from the Far West to get away from consequences. It was expensive. I had to sacrifice. Well, here I am in trouble again—my last trouble, and with the wife of a man that I respect and admire, not enough to keep my hands off his wife, but still that I admire. It is my weakness that I could not be, as a man, honourable to Jean Jacques Barbille. And so I pay the price; so I have to go without time to make my will. Bless heaven above, I have no wife—”
“If you had a wife you would not be dying now. You would not then meddle with the home of Jean Jacques Barbille,” sneered Jean Jacques. The note was savage yet.
“Ah, for sure, for sure! It is so. And if I lived I would marry at once.”
Desperate as his condition was, the master-carpenter could almost have laughed at the idea of marriage preventing him from following the bent of his nature. He was the born lover. If he had been as high as the Czar, or as low as the ditcher, he would have been the same; but it would be madness to admit that to Jean Jacques now.
“But, as you say, let me get on. My time has come—”
Jean Jacques jerked his head angrily. “Enough of this. You keep on saying ‘Wait a little,’ but your time has come. Now take it so, and don’t repeat.”
“A man must get used to the idea of dying, or he will die hard,” replied the master-carpenter, for he saw that Jean Jacques’ hands were not so tightly clenched on the lever now; and time was everything. He had already been near five minutes, and every minute was a step to a chance of escape—somehow.
“I said you were to blame,” he continued. “Listen, Jean Jacques Barbille. You, a man of mind, married a girl who cared more for a touch of your hand than a bucketful of your knowledge, which every man in the province knows is great. At first you were almost always thinking of her and what a fine woman she was, and because everyone admired her, you played the peacock, too. I am not the only peacock. You are a good man—no one ever said anything against your character. But always, always, you think most of yourself. It is everywhere you go as if you say, ‘Look out. I am coming. I am Jean Jacques Barbille.
“‘Make way for Jean Jacques. I am from the Manor Cartier. You have heard of me.’... That is the way you say things in your mind. But all the time the people say, ‘That is Jean Jacques Barbille, but you should see his wife. She is a wonder. She is at home at the Manor with the cows and the geese. Jean Jacques travels alone through the parish to Quebec, to Three Rivers, to Tadousac, to the great exhibition at Montreal, but madame, she stays at home. M’sieu’ Jean Jacques is nothing beside her’—that is what the people say. They admire you for your brains, but they would have fallen down before your wife, if you had given her half a chance.”
“Ah, that’s bosh—what do you know!” exclaimed Jean Jacques fiercely, but he was fascinated too by the argument of the man whose life he was going to take.