"He was a fine young fellow, cool-headed, afraid of nothing, and was a great help to me and very popular with every one in the camp. Having been sent out by the company to which I belonged, as were many others during the first years of our stay on the Congo, he had already mastered both the language and the ways of the natives. When a powwow was to be held I always sent him to conduct it if I could not go myself. I did so, too, when he had to teach the natives a lesson--lessons they needed and never forgot, for he was as plucky as he was politic.
"I knew nothing of his people except that he was a Belgian whose mother, Madame Brion, occupied a villa outside of Brussels, where she lived with a married daughter.
"On presenting my card I was shown into a small library where the young woman received me with tender cordiality, and, after closing the door so that we might not be overheard, she gave me an outline of the ordeal I was about to go through. With her eyes brimming tears she told me how her mother had only allowed her son to leave home because of the pressure brought to bear upon her by his uncle, who was interested in the company; how she daily, almost hourly, blamed herself for his death; how, during the years of his absence, she had lived on his letters, and when mine came, telling her of his end, she had sat dazed and paralyzed for hours, the open page in her lap--no word escaping her--no tears--only the dull pain of a grief which seemed to freeze the blood in her veins. Since that time she had counted the days to my coming, that she might hear the details of his last illness and suffering.
"You can imagine how I felt. I have never been able to face a woman when she is broken down with grief, and but that she was expecting me every minute, and had set her heart on my coming, I think I should have been cowardly enough to have left the house.
"When the servant returned, I was conducted up the broad staircase and into a small room hung with wonderful embroideries and pictures and filled with flowers. In one corner on an easel was Brion's portrait in the uniform of an officer, while all about were other portraits--some taken when he was a child, others as a boy--a kind of sanctuary, really, in which the mother worshipped this one idol of her life."