The Ruling Passion [9]
afternoon sun shone hot.
He took great pride in this effort of the builder's art. One day at
the beginning of May, when the house was nearly finished, he asked
old Moody and Serena to stop on their way home from the village and
see what he had done. He showed them the kitchen, and the living-
room, with the bed-room partitioned off from it, and sharing half of
its side window. Here was a place where a door could be cut at the
back, and a shed built for a summer kitchen--for the coolness, you
understand. And here were two stoves--one for the cooking, and the
other in the living-room for the warming, both of the newest.
"An' look dat roof. Dat's lak' we make dem in Canada. De rain ron
off easy, and de sun not shine too strong at de door. Ain't dat
nice? You lak' dat roof, Ma'amselle Serene, hein?"
Thus the imagination of Jacques unfolded itself, and his ambition
appeared to be making plans for its accomplishment. I do not want
any one to suppose that there was a crisis in his affair of the
heart. There was none. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether anybody
in the village, even Serena herself, ever dreamed that there was
such an affair. Up to the point when the house was finished and
furnished, it was to be a secret between Jacques and his violin; and
they found no difficulty in keeping it.
Bytown was a Yankee village. Jacques was, after all, nothing but a
Frenchman. The native tone of religion, what there was of it, was
strongly Methodist. Jacques never went to church, and if he was
anything, was probably a Roman Catholic. Serena was something of a
sentimentalist, and a great reader of novels; but the international
love-story had not yet been invented, and the idea of getting
married to a foreigner never entered her head. I do not say that
she suspected nothing in the wild flowers, and the Sunday evening
boat-rides, and the music. She was a woman. I have said already
that she liked Jacques very much, and his violin pleased her to the
heart. But the new building by the river? I am sure she never even
thought of it once, in the way that he did.
Well, in the end of June, just after the furniture had come for the
house with the curved roof, Serena was married to Hose Ransom. He
was a young widower without children, and altogether the best
fellow, as well as the most prosperous, in the settlement. His
house stood up on the hill, across the road from the lot which
Jacques had bought. It was painted white, and it had a narrow front
porch, with a scroll-saw fringe around the edge of it; and there was
a little garden fenced in with white palings, in which Sweet
Williams and pansies and blue lupines and pink bleeding-hearts were
planted.
The wedding was at the Sportsmen's Retreat, and Jacques was there,
of course. There was nothing of the disconsolate lover about him.
The noun he might have confessed to, in a confidential moment of
intercourse with his violin; but the adjective was not in his line.
The strongest impulse in his nature was to be a giver of
entertaininent, a source of joy in others, a recognized element of
delight in the little world where he moved. He had the artistic
temperament in its most primitive and naive form. Nothing pleased
him so much as the act of pleasing. Music was the means which
Nature had given him to fulfil this desire. He played, as you might
say, out of a certain kind of selfishness, because he enjoyed making
other people happy. He was selfish enough, in his way, to want the
pleasure of making everybody feel the same delight that he felt in
the clear tones, the merry cadences, the tender and caressing flow
of his violin. That was consolation. That was power. That was
success.
And especially was he selfish enough to want to feel his ability to
give Serena a pleasure at her wedding--a pleasure that nobody else