Ormsgill met his gaze thoughtfully, with steady gray eyes, and it was a moment or two before he spoke.
"Whether a vicarious reparation will be of any benefit to the soul of Lamartine I naturally do not know," he said. "It is enough for me that he and the padre seemed to fancy it might be, and, as it happens, I owe Lamartine a good deal. This is why I practically promised to undertake his responsibility. I am not sure that either of you know I first arrived in this Colony trimming coal among the niggers in a steamer's stokehold."
Father Tiebout made a little gesture with his hands which seemed to imply that there was very little he was not acquainted with, and Ormsgill went on—
"Still, I do not think you know I was quietly compelled to abandon the service of a British Colony for a fault I never committed. My friends at home very naturally turned against me. I had brought them discredit—and it did not matter greatly whether I was guilty. How I made a living afterwards along this coast does not concern you; but I went down in one sense as far as a white man may, and the struggle has left a mark that will never quite come out on me. Still, I met with kindness from other outcasts and benighted heathen, as one usually does from the outcast and the trodden on, and, when I was flung ashore after nearly pounding the life out of a brutal second engineer, Lamartine, who had gone down to the coast on business, held out a hand to me. As I said, I feel that I owe him a little."
He stopped for a moment with a little grim smile. "Herrero has gone South somewhere, taking the girl with him, but if she is alive I think I can promise that he will give her up. After that it would not be so very difficult to send her back to where she comes from in the bush."
"For the repose of the soul of Lamartine!" and Nares glanced at Father Tiebout, with a challenge in his eyes.
The little priest's gesture seemed to imply that he declined to be drawn into a controversy, and it was Ormsgill who answered the American.
"To discharge a debt—among other reasons—and as a protest. I have been driven to exhaustion myself more than once. Have you any hope at all to offer these African people, I mean in this world, padre?"
Father Tiebout smiled. "Yes," he said simply. "One does what one can, and waits patiently. How long, I do not know, but slowly or suddenly, in our time, or in the time of these people's children, the change will come."
He looked at Nares, the man of action, who bore with waiting ill, and he, flushed with fever, laid a hand that was clenched hard upon the table.