Neither he nor they seemed to take note of that profound irony.
"At supper."
"Tell us, Boaz; you knew about this money?"
The cobbler nodded his head.
"And did Manuel?"
He might have taken sanctuary in a legal doubt. How did he know what
Manuel knew? Precisely! As before, he nodded his head.
"After supper, Boaz, you were in the shop? But you heard something?"
He went on to tell them what he had heard: the footfalls, below and above, the extraordinary conversation which had broken for a moment the silence of the inner hall. The account was bare, the phrases monosyllabic. He reported only what had been registered on the sensitive tympanums of his ears, to the last whisper of footfalls stealing past the dark wall of the shop. Of all the formless tangle of thoughts, suspicions, interpretations, and the special and personal knowledge given to the blind which moved in his brain, he said nothing.
He shut his lips there. He felt himself on the defensive. Just as he distrusted the higher ramifications of finance (his house had gone down uninsured), so before the rites and processes of that inscrutable creature, the Law, he felt himself menaced by the invisible and the unknown, helpless, oppressed; in an abject sense, skeptical.
"Keep clear of the Law!" they had told him in his youth. The monster his imagination had summoned up then still stood beside him in his age.