But when Emanuel learned this, then he would be angry, and he would cover over no more money to that account at the bank. Eh bien! It couldn’t be helped. Christian recalled that he had still at that blessed bank more than sixty thousand francs!—truly a prodigious sum, when one thought of it soberly. The question whether this sum ought not to be given back to Emanuel, under certain circumstances, seemed to have settled itself. When it had first occurred to him that afternoon, it had suggested a good many moral difficulties. But it was really simplicity itself, as he considered it now. There were all those lean and poverty-stricken years of his youth and childhood to be remembered—and, stretching back beyond that, those other years of his father’s exile before he was born—nearly forty in all. The intelligent thing was to regard the three thousand pounds as a sort of restitution fund, to be spread out over the whole of that long period. Viewed in this light, the annual fraction of it was a paltry matter. Besides, Emanuel had expressly declared that no conditions whatever were attached to the money. Christian saw that he could make his mind quite easy on that score.
So then, there were sixty thousand francs! With that he might live admirably, even luxuriously, on the Continent, until his grandfather’s death. That event would of course alter everything. There would then come automatically to him—no matter where he was or what he did—a certain fixed income, which he understood to be probably over rather than under seventy-five thousand francs a year. This—still on the Continent—would be almost incredible wealth! There was really no limit to the soul-satisfying possibilities it opened before him. He would have a yacht on the Mediterranean; he would have a little chateau in the marvelous green depths of the Styrian Mountains—of which a boyhood friend had told him with such tender reverence of memory. He would see Innsbruck and Moscow, and, if he liked, even Samarkand and China. Why, he could go round the world in his yacht, if he chose—to remote spice islands and tropical seas! He could be a duke when, and as much, as it pleased him to be one. Instead of being the slave to his position and title, he would make them minister to him. He would do original things—realize his own inner fancies and predilections. If the whim seized him to climb Mount Ararat, or to cross the Sahara with a caravan of his own servants—that he would do. But above all things—now and henceforth forever, he would be a free man! He laughed grimly as he thought how slight was the actual difference between the life of pauper bondage he had led up to last October, and the existence which polite England and London had imposed upon him ever since. The second set of chains were of precious metal—that was all. Well, hereafter there would be no fetters of any description!
“I’m quite ready to go now, old man, if you are,” Dicky Westland said at some belated stage of this reverie. He had approached without being seen by his friend, and he had to pull at Christian’s sleeve to attract his attention. “I fancy you’ve been walking in your sleep,” he laughed, in comment upon this.
Christian shook himself, and, blinking at Dicky, protested that he had never been more wide awake in his life. “I go only if you’re entirely ready,” he said. “Don’t dream of leaving on my account I have been extremely interested, I assure you.”
“Every fellow has his own notions of enjoyment,” reflected Westland, with drowsy philosophy, as they went up the stairs toward the stage. “I tried to explain your point of view to some of the girls up here, but I’m not sure they quite grasped it. They were dying to have me bring you up and make you dance, you know. By George, I had a job to keep Dolly Montressor from coming down and fetching you, off her own bat.”
“How should they know or care about me?” asked Christian. “I didn’t expect to be pointed out.”
“My dear man,” retorted Dicky, sleepily, “no one pointed you out. They all know you by sight as well as they do George Edwards. It isn’t too late, still, you know—if you really would like to be introduced.”
Christian shook his head with resolution, as they halted at the wings. “Truly, no!” he repeated. “But I should like a glass of wine and a sandwich, if we can get past the stage. I’m not an atom sleepy, but I’m hungry and thirsty.”
On their way through a narrow, shadowed defile of huge canvas-stretched frames of deal, they passed two young men, one much taller than the other, who had their heads bent together in some low-voiced, private conversation. Christian glanced at them casually, and was struck with the notion that they observed him in turn, and exchanged comment upon his approach. He looked at them with a keener scrutiny as he went by—and it seemed to him that there was something familiar in the face of the larger man—who indeed looked away upon the instant their eyes met.
“Did you see those men?” he asked Westland, in an undertone, a moment later. “Do you know them?”