“Vell, since you know it already, I may as well tell you,” said the scribe cunningly, glad to retain the cent and Jake’s patronage. “It is your father who has been freed; may he have a bright paradise.”
“Ha?” Jake asked aghast, with a wide gape.
The Galician resumed the reading in solemn, doleful accents. The melancholy passage was followed by a jeremiade upon the penniless condition of the family and Jake’s duty to send the ticket without further procrastination. As to his mother, she preferred the Povodye graveyard to a watery sepulchre, and hoped that her beloved and only son, the apple of her eye, whom she had been awake nights to bring up to manhood, and so forth, would not forget her.
“So now they will be here for sure, and there can be no more delay!” was Jake’s first distinct thought. “Poor father!” he inwardly exclaimed the next moment, with deep anguish. His native home came back to him with a vividness which it had not had in his mind for a long time.
“Was he an old man?” the scribe queried sympathetically.
“About seventy,” Jake answered, bursting into tears.
“Seventy? Then he had lived to a good old age. May no one depart younger,” the old man observed, by way of “consoling the bereaved.”
As Jake’s tears instantly ran dry he fell to wringing his hands and moaning.
“Good-night!” he presently said, taking leave. “I’ll see you to-morrow, if God be pleased.”
“Good-night!” the scribe returned with heartfelt condolence.