‘Mr. Arbuthnot,’ cried Pouchée, warming on the instant, ‘is the most noble-hearted man living. Yes, and I have travelled! I have had my experiences widened. I know my world. That he should work hard at the hospital or over his books, I comprehend. A high degree is at stake. Men have their ambition. Mr. Arbuthnot goes into courts and alleys, vile places, left alone by the police, and where priests or parsons might get their throats cut. He searches out the worst outcasts in Barnwell and Chesterton, only to serve them.’
‘Now—at this present time?’ stammered Marjorie, conscience-stricken.
‘Now, while you and I, mon enfant, have been sight-seeing. His last protégé,’ went on Pouchée, ‘is a miserable bargeman, one of the worst characters on the river. This man was struck over the head by some falling timber two or three weeks ago. He was too nearly gone, so his mates thought, to be carried to hospital, and our gentleman just saved his life. He has nursed him day and night since, as one of your great London doctors would nurse a Prince of the Blood. If Mr. Arbuthnot were of our religion I could understand it. I visit in Barnwell myself a very little.’
This was Pouchée’s account of her own charities. She visited in Barnwell a great deal. Beside fever-stricken, dying pallets, her acquaintance with Geoffrey Arbuthnot had first begun.
‘But we, Catholics, see in the poor our own sick soul. We hope, in saving them, to save ourselves.’
‘And Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’
‘He serves them, gives them his time, his money—what do I know! his heart—simply because they are castaway men and women. “Sisters and brothers in a queer disguise.” You should hear him say that, with his grave smile! It was to talk over some of the sisters and brothers, Marjorie, that I went to our gentleman’s rooms last night.’
‘Our gentleman ought to be a happy man,’ said Marjorie, with a sigh.
The Frenchwoman’s shoulders were sceptically expressive.
‘A hair-shirt is never worn for pleasure, child. It is not in nature that a man of six-and-twenty should care for other people’s lives more than for his own. Geoffrey Arbuthnot might have made a good servant of the Church,—an Ignatius Loyola, a Francis Xavier. But if one speaks about happiness—allez!’