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"I've been living here for years," said he. "When I saw you last in Frisco I
was about to take up a proposition inOregon . I didn't, owing to a telegram
going wrong. That little fact changed my whole life. I came to the islands
instead and started trading,then I came to live inNew Caledonia . I'm
married."
"Oh," I said, "is that so?"
Something in the tone of those two words "I'm married" struck me as strange.
We talked on indifferent subjects, and before we parted I promised to come
over and see him next day at his place a few miles from the town. I did and I
was astonished at what I saw.
New Caledonia, pleasant as the climate may be, is not the place one would
live in by choice. In those days, the convicts were still coming there
fromFrance . The gangs of prisoners shepherded by wardens armed to the teeth,
the great barges filled with prisoners that ply every evening when work is
over between the harbor quay and the Isle Nou, the military air of the place
and the fretting regulations, all these things and more robbed it of its
appeal as a residential neighborhood. Yet the Lewishons lived there and what
astonished me was the evidence of their wealth and the fact that they had no
apparent interests at all to bind them to the place.
Mrs. Lewishon was a woman of forty-five or so, yet her beauty had scarce
begun to fade. I was introduced to her by Lewishon on the broad veranda of
their house, which stood in the midst of gardens more wonderful than the
gardens of La Mortola.
A week or so later, after dining with me in the town he told me the story of
his marriage, one of the strangest stories I ever heard and this is it, just
as he told it.
"The Pacific is the finest place in the world to drop money in. You see it's
so big and full of holes that look like safe investments. I started, after I
parted with you, growing coconut trees in theFijis . It takes five years for a
coconut palm to grow, but when it's grown it will bring you in an income of
eighteen pence or so a year according as the copra prices range. I planted
forty thousand young trees and at the end of the fourth year a hurricane took
the lot. That's the Pacific. I was down and out, and then I struck luck.
That's the Pacific again. I got to be agent for a big English firm here
inNoumea and in a short time I was friends with everyone from Chardin, the
governor, right down.
"Chardin was a good sort but very severe. The former governor had been lax,
so the people said, letting rules fall into abeyance like the rule about
cropping the convicts' hair and beards to the same pattern. However that may
have been, Chardin had just come as governor and I had not been here more than
a few months when one day a big, white yacht fromFrance came and dropped
anchor in the harbor. A day or two after, a lady appeared at my office and
asked for an interview.
"She had heard of me through a friend, she said, and she sought my assistance
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in a most difficult matter. In plain English, she wanted me to help in the
escape of a convict.
"I was aghast. I was about to order her out of the office, when
something--something--something, I don't know what, held my tongue while, with
the cunning of a desperate woman in love, she managed to still my anger. 'I
understand,' she said, 'and I should have been surprised if you had taken the
matter calmly, but will you listen to me and when you have heard me out, tell
me if you would not have done what I have done today?'
"I could not stop her, and this is what she told me.
"Her name was Madame Armand Duplessis. Her maiden name had been Alexandre.
She was the only child of Alexandre the big sugar refiner, and at his death
she found herself a handsome young girl with a fortune of about twenty million
francs--and nothing between her and the rogues of the world but an old maiden
aunt given to piety and guileless as a rabbit. However, she managed to escape
the sharks and married an excellent man, a captain in the cavalry and attached
to St. Cyr. He died shortly after the marriage and the young widow, left
desolate and without a child to console her, took up living again with her
aunt, or rather the aunt came to live with her in the big house she occupied
on the Avenue de la Grande Armée.
"About six months after, she met Duplessis. I don't know how she met him, she
didn't say, but anyhow he wasn't quite in the same circle asherself . He was a
clerk in La Fontaine's Bank and only drawing a few thousand francs a year, but
he was handsome and attractive and young, and the upshot of it was they got
married.
"She did not know anything of his past history and he had no family in
evidence, nothing to stand on at all but his position at the bank, but she did
not mind--she was in love and she took him on trust and they got married. A
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