"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 Passover 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 hoarsely.
"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 God 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 God'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 agonized 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 God 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 gray. 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 passage was booked-a steerage passage 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 shipped 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 chance 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 worship having been indefinitely increased to accommodate those who made their appearance for this occasion only.