It was this essentially spiritual side of Joyce that had interested him and appealed to him from the beginning.
One by one he gave up his hopes for her happiness. He saw that Jude was impossible long before Joyce did; then he put his faith in the little child—and now that had failed! Poor girl! he thought; and in the inner chamber of his shack with the doors and shutters barred, the pistol lying at hand upon his desk, he cursed himself for a fool who had tried to enrich his own wasted life with an interest in the lives of others that had brought about as bad a state of affairs as any meddler could well conceive.
Then he grew reckless. Things couldn't be much worse, anyway, and if he might brighten that dull life in the little house, he'd brighten it and Jude be—the laugh that Gaston laughed was perhaps better than the word he might have used had he finished his sentence.
There was the regular income from the outer world; as long as that was at Gaston's command he felt he could control Lauzoon, and who else mattered, except Filmer? Well, Filmer had sense to keep his opinions to himself—although the look in his eyes when he disapproved of anything, was unpleasant and—impertinent.
A clam like Filmer had no right to personal opinions of other folks' conduct. Unless he let light in upon his own excuse for being, he should withhold condemnation.
So Gaston spent his days' ends on Jude's little piazza, or in the bay window of the sitting room when the air was too cool for the baby snuggling against the young mother's breast.
Gaston brought his fiddle along, and those were wonderful tunes he drew from the strings. Sometimes he explained what they meant, his words running along in monotone that yet kept time to the alluring strains.
Joyce smiled, and her ready tears came, but the colour was coming back into her beautiful face; the brooding eyes once again had the glint of sweet mischief in them, and the lip curled away from the pretty teeth.
She had never been so beautiful before. Living in the ideal where her baby was concerned made it perilously easy for her to live ideally in all other ways.
Jude became a blurred reality. He was, when she thought of him at all, endowed with the graces and attractiveness of Gaston. Joyce did not consider Jude as he really existed. She smiled vaguely at him—his personality now, neither annoyed her nor appealed to her. While living with him outwardly, she was to all intents and purposes, spiritually living with Gaston. For she gave to Jude the attributes that made Gaston her hero, just as she gave to her poor, twisted baby the beautiful contours and heavenly beauty of the Madonna's exquisite Child.