Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/113

 which, with its contents, she kept from a sense of piety, without suspecting that perhaps there were documents in i1t of importance from a financial point of view—was suddenly lost in the most unaccountable manner. Though in no way mercenary, he could not help forming, from this and many other circumstances, the opinion that behind it was concealed a roman intime, and one can scarcely blame him, with his expensive inclinations, for the fact that it would have given him great pleasure if that novel had ended happily. Now whatever may have been the truth about this novel, and whether or no there had been spoliation, there is no doubt that in Havelaar’s mind something had arisen that one might call a rêve aux millions.

But again it was characteristic that he, who would most accurately and keenly have traced and defended the rights of others, however deeply buried under dusty documents and cobwebs of intrigue, now, when his own interests were concerned, neglected in the most slovenly manner the moment when probably the matter might have been tackled with the best chance of success. He seemed to feel something like shame in a case where his own advantage was at stake, and I firmly believe that if “his Tine” had been married to someone else, someone who had appealed to him to lend a hand in breaking the thick cobwebs in which her ancestral fortune had remained stuck, he would have succeeded in restoring to “the interesting orphan” the fortune that belonged to her. But now this interesting orphan was wife,  fortune was, and he felt something commercial, something derogatory in asking in her name: “Do you not still owe me something?”

And yet he could not shake off this dream of millions, even though it were only as a handy excuse in answer to the oft-recurring self-reproach that he spent too much money.

Not until shortly before starting on the return journey to Java, when he had already suffered considerably from the pressure of money shortage, when he had had to bow his proud head under the furca caudina of many a creditor, had he succeeded in con-