"You think Jean Jacques Barbille's word as good as his bond?" he continued. "So it is; but I'm going to pull this thing through alone. That's what I said to you and Maitre Fille at his office. I meant it too —help of God, it is the truth!"
He had forgotten that if M. Mornay had not made it easy for him, and had not refrained from insisting on his pound of flesh, he would now be insolvent and with no roof over him. Like many another man Jean Jacques was the occasional slave of formula, and also the victim of phases of his own temperament. In truth he had not realized how big a thing M. Mornay had done for him. He had accepted the chance given him as the tribute to his own courage and enterprise and integrity, and as though it was to the advantage of his greatest creditor to give him another start; though in reality it had made no difference to the Big Financier, who knew his man and, with wide-open eyes, did what he had done.
Virginie was not subtle. She did not understand, was never satisfied with allusions, and she had no gift for catching the drift of things. She could endure no peradventure in her conversation. She wanted plain speaking and to be literally sure.
"Are you going to take it?" she asked abruptly.
He could not bear to be checked in his course. He waved a hand and smiled at her. Then his eyes seemed to travel away into the distance, the look of the dreamer in them; but behind all was that strange, ruddy underglow of revelation which kept emerging from shadows, retreating and emerging, yet always there now, in much or in little, since the burning of the mill.
"I've lent a good deal of money without security in my time," he reflected, "but the only people who ever paid me back were a deaf and dumb man and a flyaway—a woman that was tired of selling herself, and started straight and right with the money I lent her. She had been the wife of a man who studied with me at Laval. She paid me back every penny, too, year by year for five years. The rest I lent money to never paid; but they paid, the dummy and the harlot that was, they paid! But they paid for the rest also! If I had refused these two because of the others, I'd not be fit to visit at Neighbourhood House where Virginie Poucette lives."
He looked closely at the order she had given him again, as though to let it sink in his mind and be registered for ever. "I'm going to do without any further use of your two thousand dollars," he continued cheer fully. "It has done its work. You've lent it to me, I've used it"—he put the hand holding it on his breast—"and I'm paying it back to you, but without interest." He gave the order to her.
"I don't see what you mean," she said helplessly, and she looked at the paper, as though it had undergone some change while it was in his hand.
"That you would lend it me is worth ten times two thousand to me, Virginie Poucette," he explained. "It gives me, not a kick from behind —I've not had much else lately—but it holds a light in front of me. It calls me. It says, 'March on, Jean Jacques—climb the mountain.' It summons me to dispose my forces for the campaign which will restore the Manor Cartier to what it has ever been since the days of the Baron of Beaugard. It quickens the blood at my heart. It restores—"
Virginie would not allow him to go on. "You won't let me help you? Suppose I do lose the money—I didn't earn it; it was earned by Palass Poucette, and he'd understand, if he knew. I can live without the money, if I have to, but you would pay it back, I know. You oughtn't to take any extra risks. If your daughter should come back and not find you here, if she returned to the Manor Cartier, and—"