|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 64
"Or rather," replied the hunchback calmly, "to state the thing
correctly, my brother David would be required to share any
discovered personal property with me." Then he added: "I gave my
brother David a hundred dollars for his share in the folderol
about the premises, and took possession of the house and lands."
"And after that," said my father, "what happened?"
The hunchback uttered a queerly inflected expletive, like a
bitter laugh.
"After that," he answered, "we saw the real man in my brother
David, as my father, old and dying, had so clearly seen it.
After that he turned thief and fugitive."
At the words the girl in the chair before my father rose. She
stood beside him, her lithe figure firm, her chin up, her hair
spun darkness. The courage, the fine, open, defiant courage of
the first women of the world, coming with the patriarchs out of
Asia, was in her lifted face. My father moved as though he would
stop the hunchback's cruel speech. But she put her fingers
firmly on his arm.
"He has gone so far," she said, "let him go on to the end. Let
him omit no word, let us hear every ugly thing the creature has
to say."
Dillworth sat back in his chair at ease, with a supercilious
smile. He passed the girl and addressed my father.
"You will recall the details of that robbery," he said in his
complacent, piping voice. "My brother David had married a wife,
like the guest invited in the Scriptures. A child was born. My
brother lived with his wife's people in their house. One night
he came to me to borrow money."
He paused and pointed his long index finger through the doorway
and across the hall.
"It was in my father's room that I received him. It did not
please me to put money into his hands. But I admonished him with
wise counsel. He did not receive my words with a proper
brotherly regard. He flared up in unmanageable anger. He damned
me with reproaches, said I had stolen his inheritance, poisoned
his father's mind against him and slipped into the house and
lands. `Pretentious and perfidious' is what he called me. I was
firm and gentle. But he grew violent and a thing happened."
The man put up his hand and moved it along in the air above the
table.
"There was a secretary beside the hearth in my father's room.
It was an old piece with drawers below and glass doors above.
These doors had not been opened for many years, for there was
nothing on the shelves behind them - one could see that - except
some rows of the little wooden boxes that indigo used to be sold
in at the country stores."
The hunchback paused as though to get the details of his story
precisely in relation.
"I sat at my father's table in the middle of the room. My
brother David was a great, tall man, like Saul. In his anger, as
he gesticulated by the hearth, his elbow crashed through the
glass door of this secretary; the indigo boxes fell, burst open
on the floor, and a hidden store of my father's money was
revealed. The wooden boxes were full of gold pieces!"
He stopped and passed his fingers over his projecting chin.
"I was in fear, for I was alone in the house. Every negro was at
a distant frolic. And I was justified in that fear. My brother
leaped on me, struck me a stunning blow on the chest over the
heart, gathered up the gold, took my horse and fled. At daybreak
the negroes found me on the floor, unconscious. Then you came,
Pendleton. The negroes had washed up the litter from the hearth
where the indigo about the coins in the boxes had been shaken
out."
My father interrupted:
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|