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It was getting perilously close to the time when the Secret Service men would be pounding at the door out there, and the margin of time left for that grim interview with Hunchback Joe was narrowing rapidly; but there was a strange, calm, cold patience possessing Jimmie Dale the man would come, and come in time he knew that, knew it as he knew that he sat there and lived and breathed.
And as he talked the man kept describing imaginary geometrical figures with the end of his walking-stick; he very seldom raised his eyes from the ground, and the stoop in his shoulders grew more and more pronounced, until at a little distance one might have taken him for a hunchback.
As for the hunchback himself, he stood quietly by his chair, with his hands resting on the pommel of his rapier, and a disagreeable smile twisting new hints of malignity into features that were malign enough in repose.
Nearer and nearer came the sounds, and the villagers stood at their cottage doors waiting for the musicians to pass. Next to the firing of rockets nothing can be more heart-stirring than the martial sound of the pipes and drums. The big drum was, on this occasion, played most masterly by the auctioneer and clown of the parish church, called José Carcunda, or Joseph the Hunchback.
"Where do you go, dwarf?" he said. "I go to the Ancient House," he made answer to himself. "What do you get?" "I do not go to get; I go to give." "What do you go to give?" "I go to leave an empty basket at the door, and the lantern that the Shopkeeper set in the hand of the pedlar." "Who is the pedlar, hunchback?" "The pedlar is he that carries the pack on his back."
Four poor women, poor beyond poverty, came to ask me not to go into the convent. 'The convent will be always able to get on without you, miss. Such poverty as theirs is silent, they only asked me not to leave them, not to go to the convent. Among them was poor Lena, a hunchback seamstress, who has never been able to do more than keep herself from starving.
The two men went past the hunchback and walked up to a bed that there was in the great room, and in which they had put the gentleman with the big portmanteau, the one that passed for a negromancer. The taller man holds up the lantern and takes the gentleman by the feet, and the short one, that had pretended to be drunk, clutches hold of his head and cuts his throat, clean, with one stroke, swish!
He is sure to have some other exit. I will give the word while the little yellow devil is down here. You are nearer and will have to go first, but if the hunchback follows, I can then deal with him." Our whispered colloquy was interrupted by the return of the dacoit, who recrossed the room as the Chinaman had done, and immediately took his departure.
A bell-pull, as rusty as the railings outside, depended by the jamb. Captain Jemmy tugged at it. It was noteworthy that whenever any effort had to be put forth, however small, the tall man stepped forward and the hunchback looked on. It was Captain Jemmy, for instance, who had, a moment before, pushed back the gate.
My publisher is giving me a large advance. But ah, I must not say it I am incurable." He went immediately into a better wine-restaurant. A horse hobbled by, pulling a carriage, like an old man. The hunchback Kohn idly leaned against a Catholic church, thinking about existence. He said to himself: "Yet how odd existence really is.
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