When, in a week's time, some persons came to him to seek to buy the island, he was certain that they came from his late visitor, although they came only in the name and by the commission of a well-known lawyer of Aix.
He was himself dazzled by the great sums they were willing to propose, was half-disposed to treat with them; but his bride was shrewder, or thought herself so, than he.
'Would you barter your coming child's property?' she hissed in his ear. 'If rich men seek after the place, be sure it is because it has some value we are not aware of; it has some buried treasure that they know of, or some silver in the rocks, or some other ore or another. If you sell it you will never forgive yourself. Keep it, and send them about their business, and begin to bore in the ground and see what you can find.'
The suggestion heated the fancy and the cupidity of her husband. Of course, he reflected, no one offered three or four times the apparent value of a place unless they knew that it would become worth what they were anxious to pay for it; and he sternly refused to hearken to any terms of sale for the rock of Bonaventure.
'What is mine is mine, and all the kings of the earth cannot buy it of me,' he said, with a petty mind's delight in power and in the occasion of baffling and thwarting his superiors.
'I believe he is in love with the girl,' he added to his wife, 'and wants to get the island for her. We might make a rare bargain if it were so; but those men of Aix are too cautious to let out who is behind them.'
'Roze,' the wife said, 'you are a simpleton. There is no love in the business. They know of some value in the island that we do not; that is why they want to buy. Because you are for ever hankering yourself after that great-eyed, long-limbed child, you think every other man is just a fool the same.'
And Louis Roze, whose temper was cowed by the fiercer sharper temper of his bride, gave in to her argument, and remained so stubborn that the agents from Aix could come to no terms with him.
Inspired by the idea of buried treasures or possible ore in the rocks, he began to neglect his own affairs at St. Tropez and elsewhere, and dig and delve himself in the soil, and hack at the stone face of the cliffs with a pickaxe. The chimera of a fantastic hope entered into him and gave him no peace; he was ready to ruin all the fair fruits of the surface, and all the artificial soil brought there at such labour in the previous century, for the sake of this imaginary wealth, hidden in the bowels of the isle.
Meantime the men of Aix informed Othmar that it was not possible to induce the proprietor to part with Bonaventure, and ventured to hint that the property was not worth one-half or one-quarter of what he had been willing to spend on its purchase.