"With a little contrivance one can burn rum in it," he added. "There are times when I wish it was a furnace."
Ormsgill smiled and shook his head. "You and other well meaning persons occasionally go the wrong way to work, padre," he said. "Would you pile up the Hamburg gin merchants' profits, or encourage the folks here to build new sugar factories? You can't stop the trade in question while the soil is fruitful and the African is what he is."
"What the white man has made him," said Father Tiebout.
"I believe the nigger knew how to produce tolerably heady liquors and indulged in them before the white man brought his first gin case in," said Ormsgill reflectively. "In any case, Lamartine was a trader, which is, after all, a slightly less disastrous profession to the niggers here than a government officer, and I did what I could for him. From your point of view I've no doubt I acquired a certain responsibility. Could you do anything useful with £200 or £300 sterling, padre?"
"Ah," said the little priest, "one cannot buy absolution."
Nares smiled. It was seldom he let slip an opportunity of inveigling Father Tiebout into a good-humored discussion on a point of this kind. "I fancied it was only we others who held that view," he said. Then he turned to Ormsgill. "He is forgetting, or, perhaps, breaking loose from his traditions. After all, one does break away in Africa. It is possible it was intended that one should do so."
"Still," persisted Ormsgill, "with £300 sterling one could, no doubt, do something."
Father Tiebout, who ignored Nares' observations, tinkered with his lamp before he turned to Ormsgill with a little light in his eyes. "Taking the value of a man's body at just what it is just now one could, perhaps, win twenty human souls. Of these three or four could be sent back into the darkness when we were sure of them. Ah," and there was a little thrill in his voice, "if one had only two or three to continue the sowing with."
"In this land," said Ormsgill, "the reaper is Death. Their comrades would certainly sell them to somebody or spear them in the bush. The priests of the Powers of Darkness would see they did it."
"Where that seed is once sown there must be a propagation. One can burn the plant with fire or cut it down, but it springs from the root again, or a grain or two with the germ of life indestructible in it remains. Flung far by scorching winds or swept by bitter floods, one of those grains finds a resting place where the soil is fertile. Here a little and there a little, that crop is always spreading."