“My son, smoking is a silly habit,” he said.
“I suppose you’re right,” I responded, taking my pipe from my lips.
He at once held my hand, saying: “Smoke on, I know of men who have done worse.”
By this alone one may gather that he was harmless enough and a truly religious man.
He often spoke to me of his boyhood as we sat beneath the orange grove by his little mission-room bungalow. I learnt then that his mother was Irish and his father French.
He lent me a little book on the philosophy of the senses and I discovered a beautiful lock of twisted hair in it. When I mentioned my discovery, the priest coloured slightly and seemed embarrassed. He had evidently forgotten it was in the book. When he was down with fever a few days after, I distinctly heard him mention a woman’s name in his delirium—a pretty French name—and from all that I heard his lips mutter, it was evident that somewhere back in the past the Father had had a love affair. As I lay on my trestle bed by his side, I wondered if that woman’s name had anything to do with his exile out there in the South Seas, and conjured up quite a host of romantic imaginings over the discovery of that lock of brown hair. Whose was it? What evil fate had intervened, that the only tokens of that romance should be the lock of hair and the feverish ravings on the lips of an old French missionary priest in the Marquesan cannibal isles? While the Father slept I gazed at him and thought what a handsome youth he must have been. Even in old age some aftermath of youth’s charm still lingered on his face. He had a fine brow and a kind mouth, so different to millions of mouths I’ve seen.
He was never so happy as when we sat out beneath the bread-fruits by moonlight and I played tender solos on the violin. Fired by the romance I had weaved around my discovery of that ringlet, I composed the following solo. It was a favourite of the priest’s; he asked me to play it over and over again. Nor did he dream why I had been inspired to compose that strain.
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