“He appears to have qualities,” I observed.
“He has—some of them ones with which you would not credit him. We were once involved in an affair, and there are few men for whom I have more respect.
“I first met Rosenthal in Curaçao, where he and his younger brother, Jacob, as poisonous a cripple as ever drew breath, were doing a nice little business which combined gambling and pawnbroking. Their method was this: Having the entrée to the select circle of South American exiles and refugees and conspirators—for you must know that almost every South and Central American revolution is hatched under the protection of the Dutch flag—Jacob, who was rather expert at cards, would manage to start a game. No doubt the play was honest; his policy was neither to lose nor to win a great deal, but simply to keep things moving. In time some one would lose heavily, for Jacob had a talent for drawing the others out and was liberal with cognac and champagne. These South Americans, as you have observed, possess a passion for jewelry; the first thing which your South American who has made a successful financial coup will buy is a gem; on the other hand, when he loses heavily he is open for a good offer on his solitaire or brilliants, and this was Isidore’s department. He would manage to be about with some stones to show the winner and ready cash with which to purchase from a loser, or perhaps to negotiate a loan, and he was diplomatic enough to accomplish this without becoming unpopular. He had a manner of loud and blatant camaraderie, was ready to give way in trifles, and I have even known him to loan out a good round sum without any security whatever. He was a friend of the friendless and had the reputation of being honest and liberal.
“Between them the pair should have done very well had Jacob been designed on the large scale of Isidore, but he was not. I think he envied Isidore’s physique and manner and popularity, whereas the elder brother loved Jacob devotedly and would nurse him like a mother through his occasional attacks of illness, for one of Jacob’s lungs was far gone with tuberculosis. I remember Isidore’s boarding the steamer once in Vera Cruz when I was returning from an expedition into Yucatan. It seems that he had heard of my being aboard, and he came to me haggard with watching and worry and told me that he feared that Jacob was dying of fever.
“‘These doctors are a set of fools!’ he cried, in his big, discordant bass. ‘They do not know the fever when they see it; they say it is the lung, but I know that it is the fever, also.’
“‘But, my dear fellow,’ I protested, ‘I am not a physician; I am nothing but a collector.’
“‘Peste!’ he answered, for, as he was an Austrian and I a Hollander, we talked in French. ‘There is no one who knows more of the pernicious malaria than yourself. Will you come and see the little Jacob?’
“‘But I am already overdue with my specimens,’ I objected.
“‘Diable!’ he growled. ‘What are weeds and stones and ancient rubbish to the life of my dear little Jacob? You shall lose nothing, and if you save his life’—he hauled a chamois bag from some recess of himself and threw a glittering handful of gems upon my bunk—‘help yourself; take them all, if you like. Some of them I hold as security, but it makes no difference’—the man grinned—‘I get them all in the end.’
“‘Put up your ill-gotten gains,’ said I, much provoked. ‘I’ll wait over a steamer and see what I can do because I like your affection for your brother.’