‘But whom, when he was at his worst, Mademoiselle Pouchée tended like a sister.’
‘I sat up one or two nights. I helped—because the good-for-nothing is of my religion. Our priest advised an act of contrition. I had my motives.’
‘As I had mine,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Never condescend, Mademoiselle, to become a motive-monger. Do you think no experimental zeal mingles with a medical student’s attention to his pauper fellows?’
‘O’Halloran rewards you, I trust, with gratitude. That, at least,’ observed Pouchée, with a touch of cynicism, ‘would be a new experience among ces messieurs of the gutters!’
‘O’Halloran rewards me with gratitude. The bandages were off him this afternoon for the first time, as you know. Well, he was sitting, propped up in bed, looking at my face with such poor remnant of sight as remains to him, when suddenly—“Doctor! I’m darned,” he cried in his hollow voice, “if it be’ant my Varsity man, after all!”’
‘Modestly spoken! His Varsity man, indeed!’
‘I should have thought the fever had come back,’ said Geff, ‘if I had not had my finger on his pulse two minutes before. “Your Varsity man, Mike—what are you talking about?” I asked him. “What have you to do with the University or its men?” “I had to do,” he said, “with a Varsity man one accursed November night that you must remember, doctor. There was a lot of chaps together, rough river chaps—you know the sort, sir—and three or four of the Varsity gentlemen came across ’em, down Petty Cury. The gentlemen wasn’t of the fighting kind, so far as I can recollect, but anyways they got into a Town and Gown row—a bad one.... Doctor, I say”—the poor fellow put out his big weak hand to me—“I was the leader of the roughs. I struck a foul coward’s blow when the gentlemen was fighting honourable and unarmed. It was me give you the devil’s mark you’ll take with you into the coffin.”’
‘Scélérat—misérable!’ put in Pouchée, between her closed teeth.
‘I tried to joke him out of his fancy,’ went on Geff Arbuthnot, ‘but in vain. Mike had seen my face, before he struck the blow—and afterwards. He had never forgotten me. The scar which you, Mademoiselle, have lamented over, as marring my beauty, put my identification beyond doubt. “My Varsity man—my Varsity man,” he moaned. “I’ve thought of him many a time in the black years since.... And now, at last, I’ve found him. Doctor, you’ve saved my life—you’ve looked after me when I should have died, else, like a dog on this miserable floor, here—there’s one favour more I durstn’t, no, I durstn’t ask of you.... Give me your hand in token of forgiveness.”’
‘And you gave it him,’ cried Pouchée, whose face had turned a queer shade of colour as she listened.