Charley did not answer for a moment. He was wondering how he should put his reply. But his look did not waver, and the Cure saw the honesty of the gaze. At length he replied: “If you mean, have I committed any crime which the law may punish?--I answer no, Monsieur. If you mean, have I robbed or killed, or forged--or wronged a woman as men wrong women? No. These, I take it, are the things that matter first. For the rest, you can think of me as badly as you will, or as well, for what I do henceforth is the only thing that really concerns the world, Monsieur le Cure.”
The Cure came forward and put out his hand with a kindly gesture. “Monsieur, you have suffered,” he said.
“Never, never at all, Monsieur. Never for a moment, until I was dropped down here like a stone from a sling. I had life by the throat; now it has me there--that is all.”
“You are not a Catholic, Monsieur?” asked the priest, almost pleadingly, and as though the question had been much on his mind.
The Cure made no rejoinder. If he was not a Catholic, what matter what he was? If he was not a Catholic, were he Buddhist, pagan, or Protestant, the position for them personally was the same. “I am very sorry,” he said gently. “I might have helped you had you been a Catholic.”
The eye-glass came like lightning to the eye, and a caustic, questioning phrase was on the tongue, but Charley stopped himself in time. For, apart from all else, this priest had been his friend in calamity, had acted with a charming sensibility. The eye-glass troubled the Cure, and the look on Charley’s face troubled him still more, but it passed as Charley said, in a voice as simple as the Cure’s own:
“You may still help me as you have already done. I give you my word, too”--strange that he touched his lips with his tongue as he did in the old days when his mind turned to Jean Jolicoeur’s saloon--“that I will do nothing to cause regret for your humanity and--and Christian kindness.” Again the tongue touched the lips--a wave of the old life had swept over him, the old thirst had rushed upon him. Perhaps it was the force of this feeling which made him add, with a curious energy, “I give you my word, Monsieur le Cure.” At that moment the door opened and Jo entered.