Carnac's Folly: Chapter 18

Chapter 18

A GREAT DECISION

Months went by. In them Destiny made new drawings. With his mother,
Carnac went to paint at a place called Charlemont. Tarboe pursued his
work at the mills successfully; Junia saw nothing of Carnac, but she had
a letter from him, and it might have been written by a man to his friend,
yet with an undercurrent of sadness that troubled her.

She might, perhaps, have yielded to the attentions of Tarboe, had not an
appealing message come from her aunt, and at an hour's notice went West
again on her mission of sick-service.

Politically the Province of Quebec was in turmoil. The time was drawing
near when the Dominion Government must go to the polls, and in the most
secluded cottage on the St. Lawrence, the virtues and defects of the
administration were vital questions. Voters knew as much of technical
law-making as the average voter everywhere, but no more, and sometimes
less. Yet there was in the mind of the French-Canadian an intuition,
which was as valuable as the deeper knowledge of a trained politician.
The two great parties in the Province were led by Frenchmen. The English
people, however, were chiefly identified with the party opposed to Barode
Barouche, the Secretary of State.

As the agitation began in the late spring, Carnac became suddenly
interested in everything political.

He realized what John Grier had said concerning politics--that, given
other characteristics, the making of laws meant success or failure for
every profession or trade, for every interest in the country. He had
known a few politicians; though he had never yet met the most dominant
figure in the Province--Barode Barouche, who had a singular fascination
for him. He seemed a man dominant and plausible, with a right-minded
impulsiveness. Things John Grier had said about Barouche rang in his
ears.

As the autumn drew near excitement increased. Political meetings were
being held everywhere. There was one feature more common in Canada than
in any other country; opposing candidates met on the same platform and
fought their fight out in the hearing of those whom they were wooing. One
day Carnac read in a newspaper that Barode Barouche was to speak at St.
Annabel. As that was not far from Charlemont he determined to hear
Barouche for the first time. He had for him a sympathy which, to himself,
seemed a matter of temperament.

"Mother," he said, "wouldn't you like to go and hear Barode Barouche at
St. Annabel? You know him--I mean personally?"

"Yes, I knew him long ago," was the scarcely vocal reply.

"He's a great, fine man, isn't he? Wrong-headed, wrong-purposed, but a
big fine fellow."

"If a man is wrong-headed and wrong-purposed, it isn't easy for him to be
fine, is it?"

"That depends. A man might want to save his country by making some good
law, and be mistaken both as to the result of that law and the right
methods in making it. I'd like you to be with me when I hear him for the
first time. I've got a feeling he's one of the biggest men of our day. Of
course he isn't perfect. A man might want to save another's life, but he
might choose the wrong way to do it, and that's wrongheaded; and perhaps
he oughtn't to save the man's life, and that's wrong-purposed. There's no
crime in either. Let's go and hear Monsieur Barouche."

He did not see the flush which suddenly filled her face; and, if he had,
he would not have understood. For her a long twenty-seven years rolled
back to the day when she was a young neglected wife, full of life's
vitalities, out on a junction of the river and the wild woods, with
Barode Barouche's fishing-camp near by. She shivered now as she thought
of it. It was all so strange, and heart-breaking. For long years she had
paid the price of her mistake. She knew how eloquent Barode Barouche
could be; she knew how his voice had all the ravishment of silver bells
to the unsuspecting. How well she knew him; how deeply she realized the
darkness of his nature! Once she had said to him:

"Sometimes I think that for duty's sake you would cling like a leech."

It was true. For thirty long years he had been in one sense homeless, his
wife having lost her reason three years after they were married. In that
time he had faithfully visited the place of her confinement every month
of his life, sobered, chastened, at first hopeful, defiant. At the bottom
of his heart Barode Barouche did not want marital freedom. He had loved
the mad woman. He remembered her in the glory of her youth, in the
splendour of her beauty. The insane asylum did not destroy his memory.

Mrs. Grier remembered too, but in a different way. Her relations with him
had been one swift, absorbing fever--a mad dream, a moment of rash
impulse, a yielding to the natural feeling which her own husband had
aroused: the husband who now neglected her while Barode Barouche treated
her so well, until a day when under his beguilement a stormy impulse
gave--Carnac. Then the end came, instant and final; she bolted, barred
and locked the door against Barode and he had made little effort to open
it. So they had parted, and had never clasped hands or kissed again. To
him she was a sin of which he never repented. He had watched the growth
and development of Carnac with a sharp sympathy. He was not a good man;
but in him were seeds of goodness. To her he was the lash searing her
flesh, day in day out, year in year out, which kept her sacred to her
home. For her children's sake she did not tell her husband, and she had
emptied out her heart over Carnac with overwhelming fondness.

"Yes, I'll go, Carnac," she said at last, for it seemed the easier way.
"I haven't been to a political meeting for many years."

"That's right. I like your being with me."

The meeting was held in what had been a skating-rink and drill-hall. On
the platform in the centre was the chairman, with Barode Barouche on his
right. There was some preliminary speech-making from the chairman. A
resolution was moved supporting Barouche, his party and policy, and there
were little explosions of merriment at strokes of unconscious humour made
by the speakers; and especially by one old farmer who made his jokes on
the spot, and who now tried to embalm Barouche with praise. He drew
attention to Barouche's leonine head and beard, to his alert eyes and
quizzical face, and said he was as strong in the field of legislation as
he was in body and mind. Carnac noticed that Barouche listened
good-naturedly, and now and then cocked his head and looked up at the
ceiling as though to find something there.

There was a curious familiarity in the action of the head which struck
Carnac. He and his mother were seated about five rows back from the front
row on the edge of the aisle. As the meeting progressed, Barouche's eyes
wandered slowly over the faces of his audience. Presently he saw Carnac
and his mother. Mrs. Grier was conscious of a shock upon the mind of
Barouche. She saw his eyes go misty with feeling. For him the world was
suddenly shut out, and he only saw the woods of a late summer's
afternoon, a lonely tent--and a woman. A flush crept up his face. Then he
made a spasmodic gesture of the hand, outward, which again Carnac
recognized as familiar. It was the kind of thing he did himself.

So absorbed was Barode Barouche that he only mechanically heard the
chairman announce himself, but when he got to his feet his full senses
came back. The sight of the woman to whom he had been so much, and who
had been so much to him for one short month, magnetized him; the face of
the boy, so like his own as he remembered it thirty years ago, stirred
his veins. There before him was his own one unacknowledged child--the
only child ever born to him. His heart throbbed. Then he began to speak.
Never in all his life had he spoken as he did this day. It was only a
rural audience; there was not much intelligence in it; but it had a
character all its own. It was alive to its own interests, chiefly of
agriculture and the river. It was composed of both parties, and he could
stimulate his own side, and, perhaps, win the other.

Thus it was that, with the blood pounding through his veins, the inspired
sensualist began his speech. It was his duty to map out a policy for the
future; to give the people an idea of what his party meant to do; to
guide, to inspire, to inflame.

As Carnac listened he kept framing the words not yet issued, but which
did issue from Barouche's mouth; his quick intelligence correctly
imagined the line Barouche would take; again and again Barouche made a
gesture, or tossed his head, or swung upon his feet to right and left in
harmony with Carnac's own mind. Carnac would say to himself: "Why, that's
what I'd have done--that's what I'd have said, if I had his policy." More
than once, in some inspired moment of the speech, he caught his mother's
hand, and he did not notice that her hand trembled.

But as for one of Barouche's chapter of policy Carnac almost sprang to
his feet in protest when Barouche declared it. To Carnac it seemed fatal
to French Canada, though it was expounded with a taking air; yet as he
himself had said it was "wrong-headed and wrong-purposed."

When the speech had finished to great cheering, Carnac suddenly turned to
his mother:

"He's on the wrong track. I know the policy to down his. He's got no
opponent. I'm going to stand against him at the polls."

She clutched his arm. "Carnac--Carnac! You don't know what you're doing."

"Well, I will pretty quick," he replied stoutly. "I'm out after him, if
they'll have me."

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