THE STEADFAST HEART
clean and it appeared to be his chief pleasure to humiliate his son by parading himself before Rainbow’s eyes. He harbored a snarling, snapping, vindictive hatred for his son—a resentment against the young man’s prosperity and decency. Publicly and privately he complained, accusing Angus of meannesses, harping constantly on the string that Angus was ashamed of him—and in the same breath boasting of his own iniquities…. His ingenuities were quite diabolical.
The resident of Rainbow who manifested the keenest interest in Titus Burke was none other than Jake Schwartz. Titus intrigued Jake and irritated him. He remembered well that meeting with Titus Burke years ago—in the presence of Lydia Canfield—when Titus had sought to drag away his son; and ever since that day, in odd moments, he had tried to fit the man into the proper slot in his memory. Jake was sure he had known Titus, sure he had worked with him, but when or where he could not recall. It ruffled Jake’s truculent disposition to be thus frustrated, and he went out of his way to observe Titus, to talk to him, to scrutinize him, to pry into him.
“I tell you,” he said to Bishwhang, “I’ve knowed that feller some’eres. You can’t fool me on faces….”
At last he intruded upon Titus’s moroseness,
325
