[KyleGoetz]

This is pretty close to what I had come up with (if not the exact words, the similar tone and structure of concept-expressions, except for that first part. I kept thinking of 聞こえ as "reputation" or "renown," which made me keep thinking the narrator was trying to say (with a similar tone as your translation) something about how taking care of them would bring make him seem like a good fellow.

I'm trying not to get too much into making an appearance of asking for specific translation help because this is a competition I'm entering, and I don't want to inadvertently cheat. Saying "Hey, I don't understand this grammar structure" strikes me as OK, but "can someone help me translate this paragraph?" seems not OK.

Suffice to say, I'm doing more heavy duty research into Japanese grammar in Japanese than I ever have before. I am fairly certain this other, even longer, sentence, containing a structure like "〜たという意味と、〜long long phrase her〜のだ、という、かすかなand on and onである," is a really good example of parallelism (the parallel という), but I haven't managed to puzzle my way through that sentence yet.

It's amazing how I can comprehend, fairly easily, a certain length of sentence, but there's some fixed length that, once a sentence surpasses it, the entire meaning just flees from my mind instantaneously. It's some sort of mental fatigue. Hopefully with time I overcome it.