“We shall see. What will you?”
“I am going to France to live as a private person”.
“Tut, you remain as simple as a child: the earth's not large enough to contain you, you couldn't now remain a private person for three weeks. Come, I have discrowned you: I will give you another crown, though I shall never see you wear it. Why not go to your own people?”
“Which people?”
“The Jews”.
“Don't talk that same madness”.
“My time with you is short, Raphael Spinoza”—O'Hara glanced at his watch—“in five minutes we part, never, I do assure you, to meet again. Listen, then, to me: you are a Jew. I knew your mother—the most intellectual woman, I suppose, who ever drew breath, the only one whom I have loved; and I should have known you merely from your resemblance to her at my first glance at you in Colmoor, though I had more precise data: the three moles, the bloodshot eye, for didn't I baptize you? haven't I rocked you in my arms? You know St. Hilda on the hill over Westring, which you found me examining that morning after our escape from the prison? I was priest there, three years, and twice I have confessed her—ah! and remember it! for when your foster-father wanted her to turn Methodist, she wouldn't stand that, and since she must needs be a meshumad (apostate), became a Catholic. Well, now, I once saw at Thring, and once in the Boodah, an old goat-hair trunk of yours: what is become of it?”
“I have it—” Hogarth was shivering, his eyes wide, and in his memory a strange singsong crooning of t'hillim, heard ages before in some other world over a cradle.
“Did you know that that trunk has a false bottom?” asked O'Hara.
“Yes”.