The Grandchildren of the Ghetto Part 43

'No, father, not that! Levi could not always be a baby. He had to walk alone some day.'

'Yes, and did I not teach him to walk alone?' asked the Reb eagerly.

'My G.o.d, Thou canst not say I did not teach him Thy Law day and night.' He uplifted his eyes in anguished appeal.

'Yes, but he is not all to blame,' she repeated. 'Thy teaching did not reach his soul; he is of another generation, the air is different, his life was cast amid conditions for which the Law doth not allow.'

'Hannah!' Reb Shemuel's accents became harsh and chiding again. 'What sayest thou? The Law of Moses is eternal; it will never be changed.

Levi knew G.o.d's commandments, but he followed the desire of his own heart and his own eyes. If G.o.d's Word were obeyed, he should have been stoned with stones. But Heaven itself hath punished him; he will die, for it is ordained that whosoever is stubborn and disobedient that soul shall surely be cut off from among his people. "Keep My commandments, that thy days may be long in the land," G.o.d Himself hath said it. Is it not written: "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart and in the sight of thine eyes; but know thou that for all these things the Lord will bring thee into judgment"? But thou, my Hannah,' he started caressing her hair again, 'art a good Jewish maiden. Between Levi and thee there is naught in common. His touch would profane thee. Sadden not thy innocent eyes with the sight of his end. Think of him as one who died in boyhood. My G.o.d! why didst Thou not take him then?' He turned away, stifling a sob.

'Father,' she put her hand on his shoulder, 'we will go with thee to Stockbridge--I and the mother.'

He faced her again, stern and rigid.

'Cease thy entreaties. I will go alone.'

'No, we will all go.'

'Hannah,' he said, his voice tremulous with pain and astonishment, 'dost thou, too, set light by thy father?'

'Yes,' she cried, and there was no answering tremor in her voice. 'Now thou knowest! I am not a good Jewish maiden. Levi and I are brother and sister. His touch profane me, forsooth!' She laughed bitterly.

'Thou wilt take this journey though I forbid thee?' he cried in acrid accents, still mingled with surprise.

'Yes; would I had taken the journey thou wouldst have forbidden ten years ago!'

'What journey? thou talkest madness.'

'I talk truth. Thou hast forgotten David Brandon; I have not. Ten years last Pa.s.sover I arranged to fly with him, to marry him, in defiance of the Law and thee.'

A new pallor overspread the Reb's countenance, already ashen. He trembled and almost fell backwards.

'But thou didst not?' he whispered hoa.r.s.ely.

'I did not, I know not why,' she said sullenly; 'else thou wouldst never have seen me again. It may be I respected thy religion, although thou didst not dream what was in my mind. But thy religion shall not keep me from this journey.'

The Reb had hidden his face in his hands. His lips were moving: was it in grateful prayer, in self-reproach, or merely in nervous trembling?

Hannah never knew. Presently the Reb's arms dropped, great tears rolled down towards the white beard. When he spoke, his tones were hushed as with awe.

'This man--tell me, my daughter, thou lovest him still?'

She shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of reckless despair.

'What does it matter? My life is but a shadow.'

The Reb took her to his breast, though she remained stony to his touch, and laid his wet face against her burning cheeks.

'My child, my poor Hannah! I thought G.o.d had sent thee peace ten years ago, that He had rewarded thee for thy obedience to His Law.'

She drew her face away from his.

'It was not His Law; it was a miserable juggling with texts. Thou alone interpretedst G.o.d's Law thus. No one knew of the matter.'

He could not argue; the breast against which he held her was shaken by a tempest of grief, which swept away all save human remorse, human love.

'My daughter,' he sobbed, 'I have ruined thy life!' After an agonised pause he said: 'Tell me, Hannah, is there nothing I can do to make atonement to thee?'

'Only one thing, father,' she articulated chokingly; 'forgive Levi.'

There was a moment of solemn silence. Then the Reb spake.

'Tell thy mother to put on her things and take what she needs for the journey. Perchance we may be away for days.'

They mingled their tears in sweet reconciliation. Presently the Reb said:

'Go now to thy mother, and see also that the boy's room be made ready as of old. Perchance G.o.d will hear my prayer, and he will yet be restored to us.'

A new peace fell upon Hannah's soul. 'My sacrifice was not in vain after all,' she thought, with a throb of happiness that was almost exultation.

But Levi never came back. The news of his death arrived on the eve of _Yom Kippur_, the Day of Atonement, in a letter to Esther, who had been left in charge of the house.

'He died quietly at the end,' Hannah wrote, 'happy in the consciousness of father's forgiveness, and leaning trustfully upon his interposition with Heaven; but he had delirious moments, during which he raved painfully. The poor boy was in great fear of death, moaning prayers that he might be spared till after _Yom Kippur_, when he would be cleansed of sin, and babbling about serpents that would twine themselves round his arm and brow, like the phylacteries he had not worn. He made father repeat his "Verse" to him over and over again, so that he might remember his name when the angel of the grave asked it; and borrowed father's phylacteries, the headpiece of which was much too large for him with his shaven crown. When he had them on, and the _Talith_ round him, he grew easier, and began murmuring the death-bed prayers with father. One of them runs: "O may my death be an atonement for all the sins, iniquities and transgressions of which I have been guilty against Thee!" I trust it may be so indeed. It seems so hard for a young man full of life and high spirits to be cut down, while the wretched are left alive. Your name was often on his lips. I was glad to learn he thought so much of you. "Be sure to give Esther my love," he said almost with his last breath, "and ask her to forgive me." I know not if you have anything to forgive, or whether this was delirium. He looks quite calm now--but oh! so worn. They have closed the eyes. The beard he shocked father so by shaving off has sprouted scrubbily during his illness. On the dead face it seems a mockery, like the _Talith_ and phylacteries that have not been removed.'

A phrase of Leonard James vibrated in Esther's ears: 'If the chappies could see me!'

CHAPTER XVIII

HOPES AND DREAMS

The morning of the Great White Fast broke bleak and grey. Esther, alone in the house save for the servant, wandered from room to room in dull misery. The day before had been almost a feast-day in the Ghetto--everybody providing for the morrow. Esther had scarcely eaten anything. Nevertheless she was fasting, and would fast for over twenty-four hours, till the night fell. She knew not why. Her record was unbroken, and instinct resented a breach now. She had always fasted--even the Henry Goldsmiths fasted, and greater than the Henry Goldsmiths! Q.C.'s fasted, and peers, and prize-fighters, and actors.

And yet Esther, like many far more pious persons, did not think of her sins for a moment. She thought of everything but them--of the bereaved family in that strange provincial town; of her own family in that strange distant land. Well, she would soon be with them now. Her pa.s.sage was booked--a steerage pa.s.sage it was, not because she could not afford cabin fare, but from her morbid impulse to identify herself with poverty. The same impulse led her to choose a vessel in which a party of Jewish pauper immigrants was being s.h.i.+pped farther West. She thought also of Dutch Debby, with whom she had spent the previous evening; and of Raphael Leon, who had sent her, _via_ the publishers, a letter which she could not trust herself to answer cruelly, and which she deemed it most prudent to leave unanswered. Uncertain of her powers of resistance, she scarcely ventured outside the house for fear of his stumbling across her. Happily every day diminished the chances of her whereabouts leaking out through some unsuspected channel.

About noon her restlessness carried her into the streets. There was a festal solemnity about the air. Women and children, not at synagogue, showed themselves at the doors, pranked in their best. Indifferently pious young men sought relief from the ennui of the day-long service in lounging about for a breath of fresh air; some even strolled towards the Strand, and turned into the National Gallery, satisfied to reappear for the twilight service. On all sides came the fervent roar of prayer which indicated a synagogue or a _Chevrah_, the number of places of wors.h.i.+p having been indefinitely increased to accommodate those who made their appearance for this occasion only.

Everywhere friends and neighbours were asking one another how they were bearing the fast, exhibiting their white tongues and generally comparing symptoms, the physical aspects of the Day of Atonement more or less completely diverting attention from the spiritual.

Smelling-salts pa.s.sed from hand to hand, and men explained to one another that, but for the deprivation of their cigars, they could endure _Yom Kippur_ with complacency.

Esther pa.s.sed the Ghetto school, within which free services were going on even in the playground, poor Russians and Poles, fanatically observant, foregathering with lax fishmongers and welshers; and without which hulking young men hovered uneasily, feeling too out of tune with religion to go in, too conscious of the terrors of the day to stay entirely away. From the interior came from sunrise to nightfall a throbbing thunder of supplication, now pealing in pa.s.sionate outcry, now subsiding to a low rumble. The sounds of prayer that pervaded the Ghetto, and burst upon her at every turn, wrought upon Esther strangely; all her soul went out in sympathy with these yearning outbursts; she stopped every now and then to listen, as in those far-off days when the Sons of the Covenant drew her with their melancholy cadences.

At last, moved by an irresistible instinct, she crossed the threshold of a large _Chevrah_ she had known in her girlhood, mounted the stairs and entered the female compartment without hostile challenge. The reek of many breaths and candles nearly drove her back, but she pressed forwards towards a remembered window, through a crowd of bewigged women, shaking their bodies fervently to and fro.

This room had no connection with the men's; it was simply the room above part of theirs, and the declamation of the unseen cantor came but faintly through the flooring, though the glamour of the general masculine chorus kept the pious _au courant_ with their husbands. When weather or the whims of the more important ladies permitted, the window at the end was opened; it gave upon a little balcony, below which the men's chamber projected considerably, having been built out into the back-yard. When this window was opened simultaneously with the skylight in the men's synagogue, the fervid roulades of the cantor were as audible to the women as to their masters.

Esther had always affected the balcony; there the air was comparatively fresh, and on fine days there was a glimpse of blue sky, and a perspective of sunny red tiles, where brown birds fluttered and cats lounged and little episodes arose to temper the tedium of endless invocation; and farther off there was a back view of a nunnery, with visions of placid black-hooded faces at windows; and from the distance came a pleasant drone of monosyllabic spelling from fresh young voices to relieve the ear from the monotony of long stretches of meaningless mumbling.