“What do you propose to do for a living?”
“God knows,” said he. “I don’t. Anyhow, the squirrel has escaped from his cage, and he’s not going back to it.”
“What’s he going to do? Sit on a tree and eat nuts? Oh, my dear Martin!”
“There are worse fates,” he replied, answering her laughter with a smile. “At any rate, he has God’s free universe all around him.”
“That’s all very well; but analogies are futile. You aren’t a squirrel and you can’t live on acorns and east wind. You must live on bread and beef. How are you going to get them?”
“I’ll get them somehow,” said he. “I’m waiting for Fortinbras.”
To this determination had he come after three weeks residence in Brantôme. The poor-spirited drudge had drunk of the waters of life and was a drudge no more. He had passed into another world. Far remote, as down the clouded vista of long memory, he saw the bare, hopeless class room and the pale, pinched faces of the students. All that belonged to a vague past. It had no concern with the present or the future. How he had arrived at this state of being he could not tell. The change had been wrought little by little, day by day. The ten years of his servitude had been blocked out. He had the thrilling sense of starting life afresh at thirty, as he had started it, a boy of twenty. There was so much more in the open world than he had dreamed of. If the worst came to the worst he could go forth into it, knapsack on shoulders and seek his fortune; and every step he took would carry him further from Margett’s Universal College.
“When is that fraud of a marchand de bonheur coming?” Corinna cried impatiently.
She put the question to Bigourdin the next time she met him alone—which was after the meal, on the terrasse. He could not tell. Perhaps to-night, to-morrow, the week after next. Fortinbras came and went like the wind, without warning. Did Mademoiselle Corinne desire his arrival so much?
“I should like to see him here before I go.”