Tom Dupuy nodded acquiescence.
‘And the case was heard in the first instance by Mr Theodore Dupuy of Orange Grove, who, if I am rightly informed, happens to be your own uncle?’
‘Rightly informed!’ Tom Dupuy sneered half angrily—‘rightly informed, indeed! Why, you know he is, of course, as well as I do. Didn’t we both call upon you together the other day? I should say, considering what sort of interview we had, you can’t already have quite forgotten it!’
Edward winced a little, but answered nothing. He merely allowed the plaintiff to be put in the box, and proceeded to listen carefully to his rambling evidence. It wasn’t very easy, even for the sharp, half-Jewish brown barrister who was counsel for the plaintiff, to get anything very clear or definite out of Louis Delgado with his vague rhetoric. Still, by dint of patient listening, Edward Hawthorn was enabled at last to make out the pith and kernel of the old African’s excited story. He worked, it seemed, at times on Orange Grove estate, and at times, alternately, at Pimento Valley. The wages on both estates, as frequently happens in such cases, were habitually far in arrears; and Delgado claimed for many days, on which, he asserted, he had been working at Tom Dupuy’s cane-pieces; while Tom Dupuy had entered a plea of never indebted on the ground that no entry appeared in his own book-keeper’s account for those dates of Delgado’s presence. Mr Theodore Dupuy had heard the case, and he and a brother-magistrate had at once decided it against Delgado. ‘But, I know, sah,’ Delgado said vehemently, looking up to the new judge with a certain defiant air, as of a man who comes prepared for injustice, ‘I know I work dem days at Pimento Valley, becase I keep book meself, an’ put down in him in me own hand all de days I work anywhere.’
‘Can you produce the book?’ Edward inquired of the excited negro.
‘It isn’t any use,’ Tom Dupuy interrupted angrily. ‘I’ve seen the book myself, and you can’t read it. It’s all kept in some heathenish African language or other.’
‘I must request you, Mr Dupuy, not to interrupt,’ Edward Hawthorn said in his sternest voice. ‘Please to remember, I beg of you, that this room is a court of justice.’
‘Not much justice here for white men, I expect,’ Tom Dupuy muttered to himself in a half-audible undertone. ‘The niggers’ll have it all their own way in future, of course, now they’ve got one of themselves to sit upon the bench for them.’
‘Produce the book,’ Edward said, turning to Delgado, and restraining his natural anger with some difficulty.
‘It doan’t no good, sah,’ the African answered, with a sigh of despondency, pulling out a greasy account-book from his open bosom, and turning over the pages slowly in moody silence. ‘It me own book, dat I hab for me own reference, an’ I keep him all in me own handwriting.’