Delgado and Tom Dupuy in one breath gave a full list of them. Counsel handed up a little written slip with the various doubtful days entered carefully upon it in ordinary English numbers. Edward ticked them off one by one in Delgado’s note-book, quietly to himself, smiling as he did so at the quaint Arabic translations of the Grove of Oranges and the Valley of Pimento. Every one of Delgado’s dates was quite accurately and carefully entered in his own account-book.
When they came to examine Tom Dupuy and his Scotch book-keeper, their account of the whole transaction was far less definite, clear, and consistent. Tom Dupuy, with a certain airy lordly indifference, admitted that his payments were often in arrears, and that his modes of book-keeping were often somewhat rough and ready. He didn’t pretend to keep an account personally of every man’s labour on his whole estate, he said; he was a gentleman himself, and he left that sort of thing, of course, to his book-keeper’s memory. The book-keeper didn’t remember that Louis Delgado had worked at Pimento Valley on those particular disputed mornings; though, to be sure, one naturally couldn’t be quite certain about it. But if you were going to begin taking a nigger’s word on such a matter against a white man’s, why, what possible security against false charges could you give in future to the white planter?
‘How often do you post up the entries in that book?’ Delgado’s counsel asked the Scotch book-keeper in cross-examination.
The book-keeper was quite as airy and easy as his master in this matter. ‘Well, whiles I do it at the time,’ he answered quietly, ‘and whiles I do it a wee bit later.’
‘An’ I put him down ebbery evening, de minute I home, sah, in dis note-book,’ Delgado shouted eagerly with a fierce gesticulation.
‘You must be quiet, please,’ Edward said, turning to him. ‘You mustn’t interrupt the witness or your counsel.’
‘Did Delgado work at Pimento Valley yesterday?’ the brown barrister asked, looking up from the books which Tom Dupuy had been forced to produce and hand in, in evidence.
The book-keeper hesitated and smiled a sinister smile. ‘He did,’ he answered after a moment’s brief internal conflict.
‘How is it, then, that the day’s work isn’t entered here already?’ the brown barrister went on pitilessly.
The book-keeper shuffled with an uneasy shuffle. ‘Ah, well, I should have entered it on Saturday evening,’ he answered evasively.