“Where is Manuel?”

Boaz Negro still sat in his shop, impassive, monumental, his thick, hairy arms resting on the arms of his chair.  The tools and materials of his work remained scattered about him, as his irresolute gathering of the night before had left them.  Into his eyes no change could come.  He had lost his house, the visible monument of all those years of “skinning his fingers.”  It would seem that he had lost his son.  And he had lost something incalculably precious—­that hitherto unquenchable exuberance of the man.

“Where is Manuel?”

When he spoke his voice was unaccented and stale, like the voice of a man already dead.

“Yes, where is Manuel?”

He had answered them with their own question.

“When did you last see him?”

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.

Having exhausted his monosyllabic and superficial evidence, they could move him no farther.  He became deaf and dumb.  He sat before them, an image cast in some immensely heavy stuff, inanimate.  His lack of visible emotion impressed them.  Remembering his exuberance, it was only the stranger to see him unmoving and unmoved.  Only once did they catch sight of something beyond.  As they were preparing to leave he opened his mouth.  What he said was like a swan-song to the years of his exuberant happiness.  Even now there was no colour of expression in his words, which sounded mechanical.

“Now I have lost everything.  My house.  My last son.  Even my honour.  You would not think I would like to live.  But I go to live.  I go to work.  That cachorra, one day he shall come back again, in the dark night, to have a look.  I shall go to show you all.  That cachorra!”