The letter went on to say much more: how he had kissed her by mistake on that first day of their meeting; how she had grown to love him and fight against her passion for the sake of Marianne; and how, just for one kiss more, she had asked him to meet her in the name of Marianne, knowing that in the dark, in the moonlight, he would not know the difference between them; how he took advantage of the blindness of love to betray her—“as he would have betrayed you,” said the letter, which went on to say that all was over and that poor Cerise would be seen no more.
Next day people knew that Cerise Ribot had vanished; the shop was open again and Marianne behind her counter. She would say nothing but that her sister had gone out and had not come back. Search was made without result; bad characters were arrested and interrogated; the wind blew the palms and the foam dashed the coral; time passed, but poor Cerise never returned.
Of all the people in Noumea outside the Maison Ribot, Monsieur Roche alone knew the facts of the matter.
Mother Rimbaut had told him and Roche, though a true man of the world, an innkeeper and the son of a convict, was shocked at the tragedy and that Carstairs, a customer whom he had liked, should have been the villain of the piece. “Perhaps some day he will come back,” said Roche.
The Hawk on leaving New Caledonia called at Sydney, and before reaching Sydney and tying up at Circular Wharf Carstairs had almost forgotten the incident at Noumea. A storm they had encountered three days out had helped in the obliteration, and with the soil of New South Wales under his feet the affair would have seemed to him remote as a love affair in Jupiter.
From Sydney the ship went to San Francisco and from San Francisco to Honolulu, at least toward Honolulu, for she was wrecked on that voyage and of all her company only Carstairs and half a dozen others were saved and taken to Chile, where great luck waited for him. One of the saved passengers, a woman very wealthy and with vast interests in the Islands, fell in love with him and married him and died a month after the marriage, leaving him a rich man, but tied. Wealth is not all jam.
Poor and working his way through life, Carstairs had been a happy man; that is to say, a man with perfect health, no worries and without a conscience. Wealth had suddenly developed a host of worries for him.
If you wish for revenge on any man, don’t cut his throat, leave him a huge fortune and thus bar him, possibly from the kingdom of heaven, probably from the kingdom of rest. Carstairs on reviewing his possessions found all sorts of things that were wrong. Shares that had depreciated in value and were likely to depreciate more, a lawsuit in the egg over some lands in California, a suit to upset the will, which was frantically absurd, yet irritating; interests everywhere that had to be looked after and papers in legions that had to be signed, including American income-tax papers, the most appalling documents ever devised by the wit of man for man’s distraction.
Much will love more; at all events it is ever anxious to keep itself intact, and Carstairs, who had been indifferent to money when he had none, became fretful now over the loss of a few dollars and sleepless over some depreciation that would not have kept an ordinary business man awake. And yet he was free-handed in spending on his own pleasures, though the instinct to protect his fortune from the hands of others developed and forced itself and dominated him with whip and spur. He felt that every man was trying to rob him—as in fact was the case—and not trusting the agent of some property in Queensland he went there to look into things himself. New Caledonia lay on the road to Queensland and on the way back his ship, a schooner belonging to a trading company in which he had an interest, touched at Noumea—because he ordered her to do so. The sight of New Caledonia recalled again the most beautiful girl he had ever seen; recollection of that last evening added fuel to the desire to meet her once again; and there would be no trouble to worry about. Cerise had shown him enough of her real nature on that parting over two years and six months ago to tell him that.