Still Shagarach looked nonplused. The syllables conveyed no meaning whatever. Yet Aronson felt sure of the substantial accuracy of his version.
"Very well." The lawyer dismissed the subject, sent Aronson off on irrelevant business and gave a few hours of attention to his other clients. The law's delay had not infected Shagarach. Whatever the matter he undertook, he was punctual as the clock in its performances, though not, in the ordinary sense of the word, a methodical man.
Early in the afternoon an unlooked-for visitor took his place among those waiting in the outer room. Jacob hastened to give him the chair of precedence, and announced his name to Shagarach, then in closet conference with an honest-appearing bookkeeper, whose acquittal on a charge of forgery he had just procured.
"I will see Mr. Rabofsky next," said the lawyer to Jacob.
The man so called was a short, bulky Hebrew, of 60-odd winters (one would prefer reckoning his years by the more rigorous season). His nose was like an owl's beak and his beard spread itself luxuriantly over his face, plainly undefiled of the scissors. The hair was indeterminately reddish and gray and his eyes were the color of steel. Shagarach bowed him into his private room, the caller strutting like one accustomed to homage.
Although the door was closed behind him as usual, Rabofsky glanced suspiciously around and spoke in the Hebrew jargon—that grafting of foreign idioms on a German patois which his tribe has carried all over eastern Europe, and latterly, via Hamburg, into the cities of America.
"It is a long time since we have met, kinsman Shagarach," he said.
"A long time since I have had that honor," replied the lawyer, bowing with the Hebrew's respect for age.
"Not since your respected father's funeral, I believe. He was one of my friends, whose memory always remains to uplift me—a glory to our race and religion."
"My respected father's friends are my friends to the end of my days."