“Am I that sort, then?” answered Le Sage with a smile. “I am sorry I left so poor an impression.”
“Ah, but what an impression!” cried the other fervently. “An angel of goodness; a Samaritan; a comforter, and a healer in one!”
“Well, well, M. Ribault!” said the Baron. “You are still at the old toil, I observe?”
“Always at it, Monsieur; but in my plodding, uninspired way—not like my friend’s. Ah, he was a great artist was Jean.”
“Truly, he had a wonderful facility. Has he left you?”
“But for the grave, Monsieur. We had not otherwise been parted.”
Tears gathered in the poor creature’s eyes; he sighed, with a forlorn, resigned gesture. Hearing his words, a shadow crossed the visitor’s face. “That foreboding bell!” he muttered. He was genuinely concerned, and not for one only reason. “You will tell me all about it, perhaps, M. Ribault?” he said.
“He was never himself again after that accident,” answered the designer. “All your tenderness, your care, your disinterested help could do no more than earn for him a little respite from a sentence already pronounced. He was virtually a dying man when you last left him, Monsieur. The light of your healing presence withdrawn, the shadow came out and was visible to me. Ah, but he would talk of you often and often, and of how you had smoothed the bitter way for him. He confided in you much: he told you his little history?”
“Something of it, Ribault.”
“It was the history of a brave man, Monsieur: of patient merit eternally struggling against adversity; of conscious power having to submit itself to necessity. There was that in him could he but have indulged it—ah, if you had only seen!”