Part 35 (2/2)

A large fortune is like a delicate animal, always in need of nursing and attention, it is always changing colour in spots from rosy to dark, a depreciation in Peruvian bonds means that your capital has shrunk just there and the question comes will it go on shrinking; a big rise in P.L.M. shares suggests taking the profit and re-investing should they fall again.

Monsieur Bonvalot had problems of this sort to set before the girl--she swept them away. ”I have no time to attend to all that now,” said she, ”some other day will do. I want twenty thousand francs, have you got them?”

”Twenty thousand francs,” said Bonvalot. ”No, Mademoiselle. I brought five thousand francs in notes thinking you would want them for your expenses here, but you can write a cheque on the Credit Lyonnais and I will get it cashed for you at once.”

He produced from a wallet a bundle of pink and blue bank notes and counted out five thousand francs, then she wrote a cheque for fifteen thousand payable to him. He endorsed it, went off and returned in ten minutes with the money. She put the notes in a big envelope and the envelope in her pocket. That same pocket still contained the old tobacco box of Captain Sloc.u.m and the other odds and ends which she treasured more than gold.

”That will do for the present,” said she, ”to-morrow I will open an account at the Ma.r.s.eilles branch of the Credit Lyonnais, or rather you can do it for me to-day. Give them this specimen of my signature and they can telegraph to the Paris branch. I would like two hundred thousand francs put to my credit here.

”But are you not coming back to Paris?” asked Bonvalot.

”No, Monsieur Bonvalot, not at present!” He pulled his whiskers.

The idea had suddenly come to him, and come to him strongly, that she was about to do ”something foolish.”

He had seen women do very foolish things in the course of his business life and all that talk of hers at the luncheon table came back to him now.

He remembered the beautiful Mademoiselle de Lacy who had run off and married a groom; could it be possible that Cleo contemplated any such mad act with that terrific sailor man? The idea chilled his heart.

Equality and Fraternity were parts of his motto and he was an honest socialist; he believed honestly that all men were equals and that the waiters who served him at table were as good as himself, with a difference of course due to the accidents of life, but he believed, with Daudet, that there is no greater abyss than cla.s.s difference.

His theory was confounded by this practice. But he could say nothing, for the matter was too delicate to be touched upon.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

A NEW HOME

Raft was still in the room where she had left him. As they pa.s.sed through the hall where a number of people were seated about in basket chairs she felt every eye fixed upon her and her companion. Then out in the sunlit Cannabier Prolongue she drew a deep breath just as a person draws a deep breath after a dive.

She also felt free.

She had always been free in theory; possessed of her own money she could have done absolutely as she liked, in theory. In practice she had always been a slave. The slave of a thousand and one things and circ.u.mstances, things and circ.u.mstances many of them troublesome, many of them wearisome, all of them not to be denied.

”Mademoiselle, your bath is ready.”

”Mademoiselle, the first gong has sounded.”

”What dress will Mademoiselle wear this afternoon?”

Oh, the day, the day with its hundred phases and divisions, the dresses that went with each phase, the lukewarm emotions and interests and boredom and suppressed hatreds, this thing called the day, which she had first reviewed in the open boat after the wreck of the _Gaston de Paris_ terrified to find it torn from her--this thing had been returned to her that morning in all its futility. It seemed to her, as she cast it away, a horrible gaud, a thing made of tinsel, yet a thing that could destroy the soul and blind the eyes and numb the heart.

She had never been free, she had always been the veriest slave, the slave of things, of people, of convenances, and of circ.u.mstances.

Doctor Epinard had spoken something of the truth.

Man may not be an automaton worked by environment, all the same he is the slave of environment, and never such a slave as when his environment is that of high Civilisation.

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