OWN there in the Taumotus the sun is not to be trifled with. It pours out of the sky like molten brass, and where it falls unchecked sears the earth as with living flame. Not a blade of grass is to be seen in these atolls, and even the coral of which they are formed is bleached to a deathly pallor.
Yet here Monsieur Rénaud lived and throve, for the lagoons of the Taumotus are natural storehouses of treasure unequalled in the world, and he had forced their locks.
Each morning, as the inevitable sun climbed from the sea, a black serpent put out from shore, leaving an ugly scar on the fair face of the lagoon. Presently it would break into a score of fragments, each resolving itself into a pearling canoe complete with naked diver and mate. And somewhere amongst them would be Monsieur Rénaud, hunched over the gunwale of his dugout, scouring the sea-floor through a water-glass. Never were eyes quicker than his to catch a glimpse of shell. That was why he made a point of directing his own fleet, and that also accounted for his wealth. For those were the halcyon days of unrestricted diving, before a pettifogging Government stepped in to ordain that pearls should be the property of the diver—the property, if you please, of some brainless bronze giant who knew no more than to sell them to the highest bidder and drink himself to death on the proceeds. You should have heard Monsieur Rénaud on the subject!
But by the time the measure came into force he was beyond being affected by it. Apart from the substantial fortune he had derived from shell, and deposited in a Tahiti bank, there were his pearls. Each was perfect. It would not have been kept otherwise, and Monsieur Rénaud's chief amusement of an evening was to open the door of the safe where they lay in a bed of cotton-wool, and fondle them in much the same way that he fondled his adoring Parisian wife and little daughter Jeanne.
"So," he exclaimed one evening, while engaged in this pleasurable pastime, "so they would give you to the savage. They would indeed cast pearls before swine. Sacrilege!" He swung-to the door of the safe with a clang that caused Jeanne to come running to his knee, and Madame to look up from her needlework in alarm.
"It is nothing," he answered her anxious look. "Only that we shall shortly go to live in Paris." He explained the edict that had gone forth. "So, you see, there is nothing to keep us here longer."
Madame Rénaud regarded her husband with incredulous brown eyes. She had often heard him talk in this strain, but never with such tones of finality. Was it possible that he now meant what he had said so airily in the past, never dreaming of the torture he was inflicting—that Paris would be theirs in the near future, a small hótel in the Rue Voulois, close to the shops and the Opera?
A flush came to Madame Rénaud's cheeks, and her hands trembled over her work as she listened to what her husband was telling Jeanne.
"But yes, little one, there are other places in the world than the Taumotus; others even than Papeete, where you may remember making yourself ill with ice-cream. Where we are going there are shops filled with wonders, and at night lit up like fairyland. And it is cool there, even cold sometimes, so that you must wear little furs, and bowl a hoop through the gardens to keep warm. A hoop? Ah, you will soon learn all about hoops."
"May bébe come, too?" inquired Jeanne. She was a serious child for her years, and already concerned over the possible fate of a pet turtle that lived in a neighbouring rock-pool.
"How could we leave bébe?" laughed Monsieur Rénaud non-committally, and, setting the child down, turned to his wife.
"And what has maman to say?" he suggested, rubbing his strong hands together in anticipation of her pleasure.
Madame Rénaud looked up, and smiled as she knew he would have her smile.
"You will miss many things," she ventured.
"So that is all?" Monsieur Rénaud relapsed with the air of a disappointed schoolboy, then leant forward so that his starched drills crackled under the strain. "I shall miss many things," he mocked. "The everlasting heat and glare, perhaps, or a strip of coral and a few tattered pandanus palms. Or, again, it my be the embarrassing variety of our fare—the grated cocoanut, the eternal fish!" His face took on a look of tragedy that caused Madame Rénaud to laugh in spite of herself, and her husband to continue, elated at his success: "No, no, ma chérie, it is other things that I shall miss, and good riddance to them—the pallor of your cheek, the weariness in your eyes. We have enough. We will proceed to live."