“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.