“Well, well, why do you keep me waiting! Who was it in there—anyone that’s concerned with my affairs?” asked Jean Jacques.
In these days he was sensitive when there was no cause, and he was credulous where he ought to be suspicious. The fact that the little man had held the door against him made him sure that M. Fille had not wished him to see the departed visitor.
“Come, out with it—who was it making fresh trouble for me?” persisted Jean Jacques.
“No one making trouble for you, my friend,” answered the Clerk of the Court, “but someone who was trying to do you a good turn.”
“He must have been a stranger then,” returned Jean Jacques bitterly. “Who was it?”
M. Fille, after an instant’s further hesitation, told him.
“Oh, him—M. Momay!” exclaimed Jean Jacques, with a look of relief, his face lighting. “That’s a big man with a most capable and far-reaching mind. He takes a thing in as the ocean mouths a river. If I had had men like that to deal with all my life, what a different ledger I’d be balancing now! Descartes, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel—he has an ear for them all. That is the intellectual side of him; and in business”—he threw up a hand—“there he views the landscape from the mountain-top. He has vision, strategy, executive. He is Napoleon and Anacreon in one. He is of the builders on the one hand, of the Illuminati and the Encyclopedistes on the other.”
Even the Clerk of the Court, with his circumscribed range of thought and experience, in that moment saw Jean Jacques as he really was. Here was a man whose house of life was beginning to sway from an earthquake; who had been smitten in several deadly ways, and was about to receive buffetings beyond aught he had yet experienced, philosophizing on the tight-rope—Blondin and Plato in one. Yet sardonically piteous as it was, the incident had shown Jean Jacques with the germ of something big in him. He had recognized in M. Mornay, who could level him to the dust tomorrow financially, a master of the world’s affairs, a prospector of life’s fields, who would march fearlessly beyond the farthest frontiers into the unknown. Jean Jacques’ admiration of the lion who could, and would, slay him was the best tribute to his own character.
M. Fille’s eyes moistened as he realized it; and he knew that nothing he could say or do would make this man accommodate his actions to the hard rules of the business of life; he must for ever be applying to them conceptions of a half-developed mind.
“Quite so, quite so, Jean Jacques,” M. Fille responded gently, “but”—here came a firmer note to his voice, for he had taken to heart the lesson M. Mornay had taught him, and he was determined to do his duty now when the opportunity was in his hand—“but you have got to deal with things as they are; not as they might have been. If you cannot have the great men you have to deal with the little men like me. You have to prove yourself bigger than the rest of us by doing things better. A man doesn’t fail only because of others, but also because of himself. You were warned that the chances were all against you in the case that’s just been decided, yet you would go on; you were warned that your cousin, Auguste Charron, was in debt, and that his wife was mad to get away from the farm and go West, yet you would take no notice. Now he has gone, and you have to pay, and your case has gone against you in the Appellate Court besides.... I will tell you the truth, my friend, even if it cuts me to the heart. You have not kept your judgment in hand; you have gone ahead like a bull at a gate; and you pay the price. You listen to those who flatter, and on those who would go through fire and water for you, you turn your back—on those who would help you in your hour of trouble, in your dark day.”