In this little cabin lay the Jesuit missionary, René Drucquer, watching the moving reflections of the water, which played ceaselessly on the painted ceiling overhead. He had been sent home from India by a kind-hearted army surgeon; a doomed man, stricken by a climatic disease in which there was neither hope nor hurry. When the steamer arrived in the Seine it was found expedient to let the young missionary die where he lay. The local agent of the Society of Jesus was a kind-hearted man, and therefore a faithless servant. He acceded to René Drucquer's prayer to telegraph for Christian Vellacott.
And now Vellacott was actually coming down the cabin stairs. He entered the cabin and stood by the sick man's bed.
“Ah, you have come,” said the Frenchman, with that peculiar tone of pathetic humour which can only be rendered in the language that he spoke.
“But how old! Do I look as old as that, I wonder? And hard—yes, hard as steel.”
“Oh no,” replied Vellacott. “It may be that the hardness that was once there shows now upon my face—that is all.”
The Frenchman looked lovingly at him, with eyes like the eyes of a woman.
“And now you are a great man, they tell me.”
Vellacott shrugged his shoulders.
“In my way,” he admitted. “And you?”
“I—I have taught.”