CHAPTER XIV. “I DO NOT WANT TO GO”
It is a bad thing to call down a crisis in the night-time. A “scene” at midnight is a savage enemy of ultimate understanding, and that Devil, called Estrangement, laughs as he observes the objects of his attention in conflict when the midnight candle burns.
He should have been seized with a fit of remorse, however, at the sight he saw in the Manor Cartier at midnight of the day when Jean Jacques Barbille had reached his fiftieth year. There is nothing which, for pathos and for tragedy, can compare with a struggle between the young and the old.
The Devil of Estrangement when he sees it, may go away and indulge himself in sleep; for there will be no sleep for those who, one young and the other old, break their hearts on each other’s anvils, when the lights are low and it is long till morning.
When Jean Jacques had broken the forgotten guitar which his daughter had retrieved from her mother’s life at the Manor Cartier (all else he had had packed and stored away in the flour-mill out of sight) and thrown it in the fire, there had begun a revolt in the girl’s heart, founded on a sense of injustice, but which itself became injustice also; and that is a dark thing to come between those who love—even as parent and child.
After her first exclamation of dismay and pain, Zoe had regained her composure, and during the rest of the evening she was full of feverish gaiety. Indeed her spirits and playful hospitality made the evening a success in spite of the skeleton at the feast. Jean Jacques had also roused himself, and, when the dance began, he joined in with spirit, though his face was worn and haggard even when lighted by his smile. But though the evening came to the conventional height of hilarity, there was a note running through it which made even the youngest look at each other, as though to say, “Now, what’s going to happen next!”
Three people at any rate knew that something was going to happen. They were Zoe, the Man from Outside and M. Fille. Zoe had had more than one revelation that night, and she felt again as she did one day, seven years before, when, coming home from over the hills, she had stepped into a house where Horror brooded as palpably as though it sat beside the fire, or hung above the family table. She had felt something as soon as she had entered the door that far-off day, though the house seemed empty. It was an emptiness which was filled with a torturing presence or torturing presenes. It had stilled her young heart. What was it? She had learned the truth soon enough. Out of the sunset had come her father with a face twisted with misery, and as she ran to him, he had caught her by both shoulders, looked through her eyes to something far beyond, and hoarsely said: “She is gone—gone from us! She has run away from home! Curse her baptism—curse it, curse it!”
Zoe could never forget these last words she had ever heard her father speak of Carmen. They were words which would make any Catholic shudder to hear. It was a pity he had used them, for they made her think at last that her mother had been treated with injustice. This, in spite of the fact that in the days, now so far away, when her mother was with them she had ever been nearer to her father, and that, after first childhood, she and her mother were not so close as they had been, when she went to sleep to the humming of a chanson of Cadiz. Her own latent motherhood, however, kept stealing up out of the dim distances of childhood’s ignorance and, with modesty and allusiveness, whispering knowledge in her ear. So it was that now she looked back pensively to the years she had spent within sight and sound of her handsome mother, and out of the hunger of her own spirit she had come to idealize her memory. It was good to have a loving father; but he was a man, and he was so busy just when she wanted—when she wanted she knew not what, but at least to go and lay her head on a heart that would understand what was her sorrow, her joy, or her longing.
And now here at last was come Crisis, which showed its thunderous head in the gay dance, and shook his war-locks in the fire, where her mother’s guitar had shrieked in its last agony.
When all the guests had gone, when the bolts had been shot home, and old Seraphe Corniche had gone to bed, father and daughter came face to face.