“Oh, monsieur, dear monsieur!” protested the Clerk of the Court, “you always make me your butt.”
“My friend,” said the Judge, squeezing his arm, “if I could have you no other way, I would make you my butler!”
Then they both laughed at the inexpensive joke, and the Clerk of the Court was in high spirits, for on either side of the street were people with whom he lived every day, and they could see the doyen of the Bench, the great Judge Carcasson, who had refused to be knighted, arm in arm with him. Aye, and better than all, and more than all, here was Zoe Barbille drawing her mother’s attention to him almost in the embrace of the magnificent jurist.
The Judge, with his small, round, quizzical eyes which missed nothing, saw too; and his attention was strangely arrested by the faces of both the mother and the child. His first glance at the woman’s face made him flash an inward light on the memory of Jean Jacques’ face in the witness-box, and a look of reflective irony came into his own. The face of Carmen Dolores, wife of the philosophic miller and money-master, did not belong to the world where she was placed—not because she was so unlike the habitant women, or even the wives of the big farmers, or the sister of the Cure, or the ladies of the military and commercial exiles who lived in that portion of the province; but because of an alien something in her look—a lonely, distant sense of isolation, a something which might hide a companionship and sympathy of a rare kind, or might be but the mask of a furtive, soulless nature. In the child’s face was nothing of this. It was open as the day, bright with the cheerfulness of her father’s countenance, alive with a humour which that countenance did not possess. The contour was like that of Jean Jacques, but with a fineness and delicacy to its fulness absent from his own; and her eyes were a deep and lustrous brown, under a forehead which had a boldness of gentle dignity possessed by neither father nor mother. Her hair was thick, brown and very full, like that of her father, and in all respects, save one, she had an advantage over both her parents. Her mouth had a sweetness which might not unfairly be called weakness, though that was balanced by a chin of commendable strength.
But the Judge’s eyes found at once this vulnerable point in her character as he had found that of her mother. Delightful the child was, and alert and companionable, with no remarkable gifts, but with a rare charm and sympathy. Her face was the mirror of her mind, and it had no ulterior thought. Her mother’s face, the Judge had noted, was the foreground of a landscape which had lonely shadows. It was a face of some distinction and suited to surroundings more notable, though the rural life Carmen had led since the Antoine went down and her fortunes came up, had coarsened her beauty a very little.
“There’s something stirring in the coverts,” said the Judge to himself as he was introduced to the mother and child. By a hasty gesture Zoe gave a command to M. Fille to help her down. With a hand on his shoulder she dropped to the ground. Her object was at once apparent. She made a pretty old-fashioned curtsey to the Judge, then held out her hand, as though to reassert her democratic equality.
As the Judge looked at Madame Barbille, he was involuntarily, but none the less industriously, noting her characteristics; and the sum of his reflections, after a few moments’ talk, was that dangers he had seen ahead of Jean Jacques, would not be averted by his wife, indeed might easily have their origin in her.
“I wonder it has gone on as long as it has,” he said to himself; though it seemed unreasonable that his few moments with her, and the story told him by the Clerk of the Court, should enable him to come to any definite conclusion. But at eighty-odd Judge Carcasson was a Solon and a Solomon in one. He had seen life from all angles, and he was not prepared to give any virtue or the possession of any virtue too much rope; while nothing in life surprised him.
“How would you like to be a judge?” he asked of Zoe, suddenly taking her hand in his. A kinship had been at once established between them, so little has age, position, and intellect to do with the natural gravitations of human nature.
She did not answer direct, and that pleased him. “If I were a judge I should have no jails,” she said. “What would you do with the bad people?” he asked.
“I would put them alone on a desert island, or out at sea in a little boat, or out on the prairies without a horse, so that they’d have to work for their lives.”
“Oh, I see! If M. Fille here set fire to a house, you would drop him on the prairie far away from everything and everybody and let him ‘root hog or die’?”
“Don’t you think it would kill him or cure him?” she asked whimsically.
The Judge laughed, his eyes twinkling. “That’s what they did when the world was young, dear ma’m’selle. There was no time to build jails. Alone on the prairie—a separate prairie for every criminal—that would take a lot of space; but the idea is all right. It mightn’t provide the proper degree of punishment, however. But that is being too particular. Alone on the prairie for punishment—well, I should like to see it tried.”
He remembered that saying of his long after, while yet he was alive, and a tale came to him from the prairies which made his eyes turn more intently towards a land that is far off, where the miserable miscalculations and mistakes of this world are readjusted. Now he was only conscious of a primitive imagination looking out of a young girl’s face, and making a bridge between her understanding and his own.
“What else would you do if you were a judge?” he asked presently.
“I would make my father be a miller,” she replied. “But he is a miller, I hear.”
“But he is so many other things—so many. If he was only a miller we should have more of him. He is at home only a little. If I get up early enough in the morning, or if I am let stay up at night late enough, I see him; but that is not enough—is it, mother?” she added with a sudden sense that she had gone too far, that she ought not to say this perhaps.
The woman’s face had darkened for an instant, and irritation showed in her eyes, but by an effort of the will she controlled herself.
“Your father knows best what he can do and can’t do,” she said evenly.
“But you would not let a man judge for himself, would you, ma’m’selle?” asked the old inquisitor. “You would judge for the man what was best for him to do?”
“I would judge for my father,” she replied. “He is too good a man to judge for himself.”
“Well, there’s a lot of sense in that, ma’m’selle philosophe,” answered Judge Carcasson. “You would make the good idle, and make the bad work. The good you would put in a mill to watch the stones grind, and the bad you would put on a prairie alone to make the grist for the grinding. Ma’m’selle, we must be friends—is it not so?”
“Haven’t we always been friends?” the young girl asked with the look of a visionary suddenly springing up in her eyes.
Here was temperament indeed. She pleased Judge Carcasson greatly. “But yes, always, and always, and always,” he replied. Inwardly he said to himself, “I did not see that at first. It is her father in her.
“Zoe!” said her mother reprovingly.
CHAPTER V. THE CLERK OF THE COURT ENDS HIS STORY
A moment afterwards the Judge, as he walked down the street still arm in arm with the Clerk of the Court, said: “That child must have good luck, or she will not have her share of happiness. She has depths that are not deep enough.” Presently he added, “Tell me, my Clerk, the man—Jean Jacques—he is so much away—has there never been any talk about—about.”
“About—monsieur le juge?” asked M. Fille rather stiffly. “For instance—about what?”
“For instance, about a man—not