“I am glad to see you well again, Monsieur,” he said, and his cool thin hand held Charley’s for a moment, as he looked him benignly in the eye.
With a kind of instinct as to the course he must henceforth pursue, Charley replied simply, dropping his eye-glass as he met that clear soluble look of the priest—such a well of simplicity he had never before seen. Only naked eye could meet that naked eye, imperfect though his own sight was.
“It is good of you to feel so, and to come and tell me so,” he answered quietly. “I have been a great trouble, I know.”
There was none of the old pose in his manner, none of the old cryptic quality in his words.
“We were anxious for your sake—and for the sake of your friends, Monsieur.”
Charley evaded the suggestion. “I cannot easily repay your kindness and that of Jo Portugais, my good friend here,” he rejoined.
“M’sieu’,” replied Jo, his face turned away, and his foot pushing a log on the fire, “you have repaid it.”
Charley shook his head. “I am in a conspiracy of kindness,” he said. “It is all a mystery to me. For why should one expect such treatment from strangers, when, besides all, one can never make any real return, not even to pay for board and lodging!”
“‘I was a stranger and ye took me in,”’ said the Cure, smiling by no means sentimentally. “So said the Friend of the World.”
Charley looked the Curb steadily in the eyes. He was thinking how simply this man had said these things; as if, indeed, they were part of his life; as though it were usual speech with him, a something that belonged, not an acquired language. There was the old impulse to ask a question, and he put the monocle to his eye, but his lips did not open, and the eye-glass fell again. He had seen familiarity with sacred names and things in the uneducated, in excited revivalists, worked up to a state clairvoyant and conversational with the Creator; but he had never heard an educated man speak as this man did.