The
poor toiler had brought back from New York, together with his cottons,
a pretty little wife, attracted it would seem by his French nature.
Miss Grummer was worth about four thousand dollars (twenty thousand
francs), which sum Dumay placed with his colonel, to whom he now
became an alter ego. In a short time he learned to keep his patron's
books, a science which, to use his own expression, pertains to the
sergeant-majors of commerce. The simple-hearted soldier, whom fortune
had forgotten for twenty years, thought himself the happiest man in
the world as the owner of the little house (which his master's
liberality had furnished), with twelve hundred francs a year from
money in the funds, and a salary of three thousand six hundred. Never
in his dreams had Lieutenant Dumay hoped for a situation so good as
this; but greater still was the satisfaction he derived from the
knowledge that his lucky enterprise had been the pivot of good fortune
to the richest commercial house in Havre.
Madame Dumay, a rather pretty little American, had the misfortune to
lose all her children at their birth; and her last confinement was so
disastrous as to deprive her of the hope of any other.
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