There was a moment’s pause, as the two looked at each other, and then Zoe came up to Jean Jacques to kiss him good-night. It was her way of facing the issue. Instinctively she knew that he would draw back, and that the struggle would begin. It might almost seem that she had invited it; for she had let the Man from Outside hold her hand for far longer than courtesy required, while her father looked on with fretful eyes—even with a murmuring which was not a benediction. Indeed, he had evaded shaking hands with his hated visitor by suddenly offering him a cigar, and then in the doorway itself handing a lighted match.
“His eminence, Cardinal Christophe, gave these cigars to me when he passed through St. Saviour’s five years ago,” Jean Jacques had remarked loftily, “and I always smoke one on my birthday. I am a good Catholic, and his eminence rested here for a whole day.”
He had had a grim pleasure in avoiding the handshake, and in having the Protestant outsider smoke the Catholic cigar! In his anger it seemed to him that he had done something worthy almost of the Vatican, indeed of the great Cardinal Christophe himself. Even in his moments of crisis, in his hours of real tragedy, in the times when he was shaken to the centre, Jean Jacques fancied himself more than a little. It was as the master-carpenter had remarked seven years before, he was always involuntarily saying, “Here I come—look at me. I am Jean Jacques Barbille!”
When Zoe reached out a hand to touch his arm, and raised her face as though to kiss him good-night, Jean Jacques drew back.
“Not yet, Zoe,” he said. “There are some things—What is all this between you and that man?... I have seen. You must not forget who you are—the daughter of Jean Jacques Barbille, of the Manor Cartier, whose name is known in the whole province, who was asked to stand for the legislature. You are Zoe Barbille—Mademoiselle Zoe Barbille. We do not put on airs. We are kind to our neighbours, but I am descended from the Baron of Beaugard. I have a place—yes, a place in society; and it is for you to respect it. You comprehend?”
Zoe flushed, but there was no hesitation whatever in her reply. “I am what I have always been, and it is not my fault that I am the daughter of M. Jean Jacques Barbille! I have never done anything which was not good enough for the Manor Cartier.” She held her head firmly as she said it.
Now Jean Jacques flushed, and he did hesitate in his reply. He hated irony in anyone else, though he loved it in himself, when heaven gave him inspiration thereto. He was in a state of tension, and was ready to break out, to be a force let loose—that is the way he would have expressed it; and he was faced by a new spirit in his daughter which would surely spring the mine, unless he secured peace by strategy. He had sense enough to feel the danger.
He did not see, however, any course for diplomacy here, for she had given him his cue in her last words. As a pure logician he was bound to take it, though it might lead to drama of a kind painful to them both.
“It is not good enough for the Manor Cartier that you go falling in love with a nobody from nowhere,” he responded.
“I am not falling in love,” she rejoined.