CHAPTER VI
THE BEGINNING OF A NEW LIFE
On the morning of March 15th, Clifford Matheson lit a blazing fire in the laboratory of a tumbledown villa in Neuilly in order to destroy the clothes and other identity marks of the financier.
For some months past he had been leading a double life—as Clifford Matheson the financier, and as John Rivière the recluse scientist. He had chosen to take up the name of his dead half-brother because he had been taking up the latter's life-work.
The motives that had urged him to this strange double life were such as a Lars Larssen could scarcely comprehend. Every man has his mental as well as his physical limitations. The keenest brain, if trained on some specialized line, will fail to understand what to the dabbler in many lines seems perfectly natural and reasonable. Larssen, a master-mind, had his peculiar limitations as well as smaller men. His brain had been trained to see the world as an ant-heap into which some Power External had stamped an iron heel. The ants fought blindly with one another to reach the surface—to live. That was the law of life as he saw it—to fight one's way to the open.
The world he looked upon breathed in money through eager nostrils. Money was the oxygen of civilization. Without money a man slowly asphyxiated. It must be every man's ambition to own big money—to breathe it in himself with full-lunged, lustful, intoxicating gulps, and to dole it out as master to dependents pleading for their ration of life. That was the meaning of power: to give or withhold the essentials of life at one's pleasure.
Consequently he had failed to read the riddle of Matheson's motive at that crucial interview in the financier's office on the Rue Laffitte. He had failed to realize that a man might be as eager to give as to grasp. He had failed to reckon on altruism as a possible dominating factor in the decisions of a successful man of business.
Further than that, it lay entirely outside Lars Larssen's plane of thought that a man who had fought his way up to worldly success from a clerk's stool in a Montreal broker's office, who had made himself a power in the world of London and Paris finance, could voluntarily give up money and power and bury himself in obscurity.
Larssen judged that Matheson had been murdered and robbed by the apaches. It was possible, though extremely improbable, that he might have committed suicide. Which it was, mattered nothing to the shipowner. But he did not dream for one instant that Matheson might have thrown up place and power to disappear into voluntary exile.
Clifford Matheson had set himself from the age of eighteen to achieve a money success. At thirty-seven, he had achieved it. He had slashed out for himself a path to power in the financial world. He was rich enough to satisfy the desires of most men.