He had had an offer for it that very day, and a bigger
offer still a week before. It was mortgaged to within eight thousand
dollars of what it could be sold for but, if he could gain time, that
eight thousand dollars would build the mill again. M. Mornay, the Big
Financier, would certainly see that this was his due--to get his chance
to pull things straight. Yes, he would certainly sell the Barbille farm
to-morrow. With this thought in his mind he went to sleep at last, and he
did not wake till the sun was high.
It was a sun of the most wonderful brightness and warmth. Yesterday it
would have made the Manor Cartier and all around it look like Arcady. But
as it shone upon the ruins of the mill, when Jean Jacques went out into
the working world again, it made so gaunt and hideous a picture that, in
spite of himself, a cry of misery came from his lips.
Through all the misfortunes which had come to him the outward semblance
of things had remained, and when he went in and out of the plantation of
the Manor Cartier, there was no physical change in the surroundings,
which betrayed the troubles and disasters fallen upon its overlord. There
it all was just as it had ever been, and seeming to deny that anything
had changed in the lives of those who made the place other than a dead or
deserted world. When Carmen went, when Zoe fled, when his cousin Auguste
Charron took his flight, when defeats at law abashed him, the house and
mills, and stores and offices, and goodly trees, and well-kept yards and
barns and cattle-sheds all looked the same.
Pages:
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245