“Yes, Antonio, I’m listening.”
“Well, I––how begin? It is a story long, not pleasant.”
“Wait. Open your mouth and I will feed you. Yes, do.”
His black eyes stared at her, astonished. In her place had anybody done him the ill that he had done her, he would have let his enemy starve and have rejoiced at a suffering well deserved. But this child––he wished she would turn her face away, and not look upon him with that innocent compassion. She was too like her dead father, and his one best friend; whom in life he had really loved and in death had not scrupled to despoil.
“Come, Antonio, eat. Afterward you’ll be stronger to talk,” she said, as coaxingly as if he had been her little brother, Ned; and thus persuaded, he opened his mouth and received the morsel she forced upon him. Thus it continued; she feeding, he resting and with halting eagerness relating the story of his own misdeeds.
“For I must go to pay the price. Si. But the poor lad, my half-wit brother Ferd, ugly, sinful, desolate––he will be left alone. Is it not? For him, if I restore all, there may still be kindness and a home at Sobrante, that should all be his––if–––”
“No, Antonio; you know better. That is a poor, foolish notion that has been put into your head. You know; for Mr. Hale, who is a lawyer and understands everything like that, told you and us that you hadn’t a bit of right to a bit of land anywhere in this world. Unless, indeed, you may have bought it since that little while ago in Los Angeles. And if you have, where did you get the money?”
“Lo dicho dicho,” he muttered the Spanish phrase: “What I have said I have said,” and sighed profoundly, as one hopelessly aggrieved.
Jessica lost her temper. She forgot that he was ill and remembered only that he was imputing treachery to her parents and to others whom she loved, and retorted, warmly: