He had had his day at
that in South America, and as Jean Jacques Barbille had said, the water
was swift and deep, and the banks of the Watloon high and steep!
But Jean Jacques was unconscious of everything save a debt to be
collected for a woman he had loved, a compensation which must be taken in
flesh and blood. Perhaps at the moment, as Stolphe had said to himself,
he was a little mad, for all his past, all his plundered, squandered,
spoiled life was crying out at him like a hundred ghosts, and he was
fighting with beasts at Ephesus. An exaltation possessed him. Not since
the day when his hand was on the lever of the flume with George Masson
below; not since the day he had turned his back for ever on the Manor
Cartier had he been so young and so much his old self-an egotist, with
all the blind confidence of his kind; a dreamer inflamed into action with
all a mad dreamer's wild power. He was not fifty-two years of age, but
thirty-two at this moment, and all the knowledge got of the wrestling
river-drivers of his boyhood, when he had spent hours by the river
struggling with river-champions, came back to him. It was a relief to his
sick soul to wrench and strain, and propel and twist and force onward,
step by step, to the door opening on the river, this creature who had
left his Carmen to die alone.
"No, you don't--not yet.
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