Brent’s blue eyes gave a sudden, interested gleam. He foresaw the return of Manon Latour, and he wondered what she would think of this house of hers, what she would make of it.
Brent left his box, jumped down into the roadway, and began to examine the Café de la Victoire with an intelligently reconstructive eye. There was something of the Jude in Brent. Twelve years ago he had been a jobbing builder, carrying on an obscure little business in a west-country town, a man who had used the trowel and the plumb-line by day, and read Maeterlinck, or Green’s “History of the English People” or Montaigne’s Essays at night. Chance, rather than his own inclination, had pushed him into bigger things, and his marriage had discovered him seven years later as the practical partner in the exploitation of a suburban building scheme. He had been the owner of an ambitious wife, a car, and a very passable library, until other people’s speculative cynicisms had brought him down with a crash.
And now, he stood looking at this French café with the critical eyes of a man who once had worked with his hands.
“Yes—if I had the stuff!”
The thought fired an extraordinary series of explosions in Brent’s brain. He began to walk up and down with his hands in his pockets, an excited man who glanced from time to time at the old red-walled building, calculating, contriving. His pipe went out, but remained gripped between his teeth. Then he re-entered the house. He wanted to examine the inside of it, every corner of it, even the cellar. One of his candles gave him the necessary light, and in the cellar he made a discovery.
Some man in the near past had been fairly comfortable here. Brent’s candles showed him a wire bed in one corner, a rough table with some shelves made of ammunition boxes standing against the wall, and what was of still more luxurious significance—a rusty but sound Canadian stove with its flue pipe connected with the little grating that opened just above the paving of the path. The cellar was quite dry.
“Well I’m damned!” said Brent; “here’s my new billet.”
VII
Brent went upstairs again, and sat down like Crusoe to consider the situation.
A billet in Beaucourt postulated the quest of a number of elemental necessities. Brent tore the white wood lid off the box on which he was sitting, produced a pencil, and began the creation of an inventory much like an ancient scribe dabbing his cuneiform letters upon a tablet of clay.