CHAPTER XIV
"I DO NOT WANT TO GO"
It is a bad thing to call down a crisis in the night-time. A "scene" at
midnight is a savage enemy of ultimate understanding, and that Devil,
called Estrangement, laughs as he observes the objects of his attention
in conflict when the midnight candle burns.
He should have been seized with a fit of remorse, however, at the sight
he saw in the Manor Cartier at midnight of the day when Jean Jacques
Barbille had reached his fiftieth year. There is nothing which, for
pathos and for tragedy, can compare with a struggle between the young and
the old.
The Devil of Estrangement when he sees it, may go away and indulge
himself in sleep; for there will be no sleep for those who, one young and
the other old, break their hearts on each other's anvils, when the lights
are low and it is long till morning.
When Jean Jacques had broken the forgotten guitar which his daughter had
retrieved from her mother's life at the Manor Cartier (all else he had
had packed and stored away in the flour-mill out of sight) and thrown it
in the fire, there had begun a revolt in the girl's heart, founded on a
sense of injustice, but which itself became injustice also; and that is a
dark thing to come between those who love--even as parent and child.
After her first exclamation of dismay and pain, Zoe had regained her
composure, and during the rest of the evening she was full of feverish
gaiety.
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