The Judge suddenly stopped in his walk and faced round on his friend. “Did you ever know, my Solon,” he said, “that it was not Jean Jacques who saved Carmen at the wreck of the Antoine, but it was she who saved him; and yet she never breathed of it in all the years. One who was saved from the Antoine told me of it. Jean Jacques was going down. Carmen gave him her piece of wreckage to hang on to, and swam ashore without help. He never gave her the credit. There was something big in the woman, but it did not come out right.”
M. Fille threw up his hands. “Grace de Dieu, is it so that she saved Jean Jacques? Then he would not be here if it had not been for her?”
“That is the obvious deduction, Maitre Fille,” replied the Judge.
The Clerk of the Court seemed moved. “He did not treat her ill. I know that he would take her back to-morrow if he could. He has never forgotten. I saw him weeping one day—it was where she used to sing to the flax-beaters by the Beau Cheval. I put my hand on his shoulder, and said, ‘I know, I comprehend; but be a philosopher, Jean Jacques.’”
“What did he say?” asked the Judge.
“He drew himself up. ‘In my mind, in my soul, I am philosopher always,’ he said, ‘but my eyes are the windows of my heart, m’sieu’. They look out and see the sorrow of one I loved. It is for her sorrow that I weep, not for my own. I have my child, I have money; the world says to me, “How goes it, my friend?” I have a home—a home; but where is she, and what does the world say to her?’”
The Judge shook his head sadly. “I used to think I knew life, but I come to the belief in the end that I know nothing. Who could have guessed that he would have spoken like that!”
“He forgave her, monsieur.”
The Judge nodded mournfully. “Yes, yes, but I used to think it is such men who forgive one day and kill the next. You never can tell where they will explode, philosophy or no philosophy.”
The Judge was right. After all the years that had passed since his wife had left him, Jean Jacques did explode. It was the night of his birthday party at which was present the Man from Outside. It was in the hour when he first saw what the Clerk of the Court had seen some time before—the understanding between Zoe and Gerard Fynes. It had never occurred to him that there was any danger. Zoe had been so indifferent to the young men of St. Saviour’s and beyond, had always been so much his friend and the friend of those much older than himself, like Judge Carcasson and M. Fille, that he had not yet thought of her electing to go and leave him alone.