Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 12

And thinking such thoughts in the dead language that befitted one cut off from life, to whom Dutch was never aught but the unintelligible jargon of an unspiritual race, he was leaving his house on a bleak evening when one clapped him on the shoulder, and turning in amaze, he was still more mazed to find, for the first time in fifteen years, a fellow-creature tendering a friendly smile and a friendly hand. He drew back instinctively, without even recognizing the aged, white-bearded, yet burly figure.

"What, Senhor Da Costa! thou hast forgotten thy victim?"

With a strange thrill he felt the endless years in Amsterdam slip off him like the coils of some icy serpent, as he recognized the genial voice of the Porto physician, and though he was back again in the dungeon of the Holy Office, it was not the gloom of the vault that he felt, but suns.h.i.+ne and blue skies and spring and youth. Through the soft mist of delicious tears he gazed at the kindly furrowed face of the now h.o.a.ry-headed physician, and clasped his great warm hand, holding it tight, forgetting to drop it, as though it were drawing him back to life and love and fellows.h.i.+p.

The first few words made it clear that Dom Diego had not heard of Uriel's excommunication. He was new in the city, having been driven there, pathetically enough, at the extreme end of his life by the renewed activity of the Holy Office. "I longed to die in Portugal," he said, with his burly laugh; "but not at the hands of the Inquisition."

Uriel choked back the wild impulse to denounce the crueller Inquisition of Jewry, from the sudden recollection that Dom Diego might at once withdraw from him the blessed privilege of human speech.

"Didst make a good voyage?" he asked instead.

"Nay, the billows were in the Catholic League," replied the old man, making a wry face. "However, the G.o.d of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and I rejoice to have chanced upon thee, were it only to be guided back to my lodgings amid this water labyrinth."

On the way, Uriel gave what answers he could to the old man's questionings. His mother was dead; his brother Vidal had married, though his wife had died some years later in giving birth to a boy, who was growing up beautiful as a cherub. Yes, he was prospering in worldly affairs, having long since intrusted them to Joseph--that was to say, Vidal--who had embarked all the family wealth in a Dutch enterprise called the West India Company, which ran a fleet of privateers, to prey upon the treasure-s.h.i.+ps in the war with Spain. He did not say that his own interests were paid to him by formal letter through a law firm, and that he went in daily fear that his estranged and pious brother, now a pillar of the synagogue, would one day religiously appropriate the heretic's property, backed by who knew what devilish provision of Church or State, leaving him to starve. But he wondered throughout their walk why Dom Diego, who had such constant correspondence with Amsterdam, had never heard of his excommunication, and his bitterness came back as he realized that the ban had extended to the mention of his name, that he was as one dead, buried, cast down to oblivion. Even before he had accepted the physician's invitation to cross his threshold, he had resolved to turn this silence to his own profit: he, whose inward boast was his stainless honor, had resolved to act a silent lie. Was it not fair to outwit the rogues with their own weapon? He had faded from human memory--let it be so. Was he to be cut off from this sudden joy of friends.h.i.+p with one of his blood and race, he whose soul was peris.h.i.+ng with drought, though, until this moment, he had been too proud to own it to himself?

But when he entered Dom Diego's lodging and saw the unexpected, forgotten Ianthe--Ianthe grown from that sweet child to matchless grace of early womanhood; Ianthe with her dark smiling eyes and her caressing voice and her gentle movements--then this resolution of pa.s.sive silence was exchanged for a determination to fight desperately against discovery. In the glow of his soul, in the stir of youth and spring in his veins, in the melting rapture of his mood, that first sight of a beautiful girl's face bent smilingly to greet her father's guest had sufficed to set his heart aflame with a new emotion, sweet, riotous, sacred. What a merry supper-party was that; each dish eaten with the sauce of joyous memories! How gaily he rallied Ianthe on her childish ways and sayings! Of course, she remembered him, she said, and the toys and flowers, and told how comically he had puckered his brow in argumentation with her father. Yes, he had the same funny lines still, and once she touched his forehead lightly for an instant with her slender fingers in facetious demonstration, and he trembled in painful rapture. And she played on her lute, too, on the lute he had given her of old, those slender fingers making ravis.h.i.+ng music on the many-stringed instrument, though her pose as she played was more witching still. What a beautiful glimpse of white shoulders and dainty lace her straight-cut black bodice permitted!

He left the house drunk, exalted, and as the cold night air smote the forehead she had touched he was thrilled with fiery energy. He was young still, thank G.o.d, though fifteen years had been eaten out of his life, and he had thought himself as old and gray as the marshes.

He was young still, he told himself fiercely, defiantly. At home his note-book lay open, as usual, on his desk, like a friend waiting to hear what thoughts had come to him in his lonely walk. How far off and alien seemed this cold confidant now, how irrelevant, and yet, when his eye glanced curiously at his last recorded sentence, how relevant!

"All evils come from not following Right Reason and the Law of Nature." How true! How true! He had followed neither Right Reason nor the Law of Nature.

X

In the morning, when the cold, pitiless eye of the thinker penetrated through the sophisms of desire as clearly as his bodily eye saw the gray in his hair and the premature age in his face, he saw how impossible it was to keep the secret of his situation from Dom Diego.

Honor forbade it, though this, he did not shrink from admitting to himself, might have counted little but for the certainty of discovery.

If he went to the physician's abode he could not fail to meet fellow-Jews there. To some, perhaps, of the younger generation, his forgotten name would convey no horrid significance; but then, Dom Diego's cronies would be among the older men. No; he must himself warn Dom Diego that he was a leper--a pariah. But not--since that might mean final parting--not without a farewell meeting. He sent Pedro with a note to the physician's lodgings, begging to be allowed the privilege of returning his hospitality that same evening; and the physician accepting for himself and daughter, a charwoman was sent for, the great cobwebbed house was scrubbed and furbished in the living chambers, the ancient silver was exhumed from mildewed cupboards, the heavy oil-paintings were dusted, a lively canary in a bright cage was hung on a marble pillar of the dining-room, over the carven angels; flowers were brought in, and at night, in the soft light of the candles, the traces of year-long neglect being subdued and hidden, a spirit of festivity and gaiety pervaded the house as of natural wont, while the Moorish attendant's red knee-breeches, gold-braided coat, and blue-feathered turban, hitherto so incongruous in the general grayness, now seemed part of the normal color. And Uriel, too, grown younger with the house, made a handsome be-ruffed figure as he sat at the board, exchanging merry sallies with the physician and Ianthe.

After the meal and the good wine that alone had not had its cobwebs brushed shamefacedly away, Dom Diego fell conveniently asleep, looking so worn and old when the light of his lively fancy had died out of his face, that the speech of Uriel and Ianthe took a tenderer tone for fear of disturbing him. Presently, too, their hands came together, and--such was the swift sympathy between these shapely creatures--did not dispart. And suddenly, kindled to pa.s.sion by her warm touch and breathing presence, stabbed with the fear that this was the last time he would see her, he told her that for the first time in his life he knew the meaning of love.

"Oh, if thou wouldst but return my love!" he faltered with dry throat.

"But no! that were too much for a man of my years to hope. But whisper at least, that I am not repugnant to thee."

She was about to reply, when he dropped her hand and stayed her with a gesture as abrupt as his avowal.

"Nay, answer me not. Not till I have told thee what honor forbids I should withhold."

And he told the story of his ban and his long loneliness, her face flas.h.i.+ng 'twixt terror and pity.

"Answer me, now," he said, almost sternly. "Couldst thou love such a man, proscribed by his race, a byword and a mockery, to whom it is a sin against Heaven even to speak?"

"They would not marry us," she breathed helplessly.

"But couldst thou love me?"

Her eyes drooped as she breathed, "The more for thy sufferings."

But even in the ecstasy of this her acknowledgment, he had a chill undercurrent of consciousness that she did not understand; that, never having lived in an unpersecuted Jewish community, she had no real sense of its own persecuting power. Still, there was no need to remain in Amsterdam now: they would live together in some lonely spot, in the religion of Right Reason that he would teach her. So their hands came together again, and once their lips met. But the father was yet to be told of their sudden-born, sudden-grown love, and this with characteristic impulse Uriel did as soon as the old physician awoke.

"G.o.d bless my soul!" said Dom Diego, "am I dreaming still?"

His sense of dream increased when Uriel went on to repeat the story of his excommunication.

"And the ban--is it still in force?" he interrupted.

"It has not been removed," said Uriel sadly.

The burly graybeard sprang to his feet. "And with such a brand upon thy brow thou didst dare speak to my daughter!"

"Father!" cried Ianthe.

"Father me not! He hath beguiled us here under false pretences. He hath made us violate the solemn decree of the synagogue. He is outlawed--he and his house and his food.--Sinner! The viands thou hast given us, what of them? Is thy meat ritually prepared?"

"Thou, a man of culture, carest for these childish things?"

"Childish things? Wherefore, then, have I left my Portugal?"

"All ceremonies are against Right Reason," said Uriel in low tones, his face grown deadly white.

"Now I see that thou hast never understood our holy and beautiful religion. Men of culture, forsooth! Is not our Amsterdam congregation full of men of culture--grammarians, poets, exegetes, philosophers, jurists, but flesh and blood, mark you, not diagrams, cut out of Euclid? Whence the cohesion of our race? Ceremony! What preserves and unifies its scattered atoms throughout the world? Ceremony! And what is ceremony? Poetry. 'Tis the tradition handed down from h.o.a.ry antiquity; 'tis the color of life."

"'Tis a miserable thraldom," interposed Uriel more feebly.

"Miserable! A happy service. Hast never danced at the Rejoicing of the Law? Who so joyous as our brethren? Where so cheerful a creed? The trouble with thee is that thou hast no childish a.s.sociations with our glorious religion, thou camest to it in manhood with naught but the cold eye of Reason."

"But thou dost not accept every invention of Rabbinism. Surely in Porto thou didst not practise everything."

"I kept what I could. I believe what I can. If I have my private doubts, why should I set them up to perplex the community withal?

There's a friend of mine in this very city--not to mention names--but a greater heretic, I ween, than even thou. But doth he shatter the peace of the vulgar? Nay, not he: he hath a high place in the synagogue, is a blessing to the Jewry, and confideth his doubts to me in epistles writ in elegant Latin. Nay, nay, Senhor Da Costa, the world loves not battering-rams."

And as the old physician spoke, Uriel began dimly to suspect that he had misconceived human life, taken it too earnestly, and at his heart was a hollow aching sense of futile sacrifice. And with it a suspicion that he had mistaken Judaism, too--missed the poetry and humanity behind the forms, and, as he gazed wistfully at Ianthe's tender clouded face, he felt the old romantic sense of brotherhood stirring again. How wonderful to be reabsorbed into his race, fused with Ianthe!

But Right Reason resurged in relentless ascendency, and he knew that his thought could never more go back on itself, that he could never again place faith in any Revelation.

"I will be an ape among apes," he thought bitterly.

XI

And the more he pondered upon this resolution, after Dom Diego had indignantly shaken off the dust of his threshold, the more he was confirmed in it. To outwit the Jewry would be the bitterest revenge, to pay lip-service to its ideals and laugh at it in his sleeve. And thus, too, he would circ.u.mvent its dreaded design to seize upon his property. Deception? Ay, but the fault was theirs who drove him to it, leaving him only a leper's life. In the Peninsula they had dissembled among Christians; he would dissemble among Jews, aping the ancient apes. He foresaw no difficulty in the recantation. And--famous idea!--his brother Joseph, poor, dear fool, should bring it about under the illusion that he was the instrument of Providence: for to employ Dom Diego as go-between were to risk the scenting of his real motive. Then, when the Synagogue had taken him to its sanctimonious arms, Ianthe--overwhelming thought!--would become his wife. He had little doubt of that; her farewell glance, after her father's back was turned, was sweet with promises and beseechments, and a brief note from her early the next morning dissipated his last doubts.

"My poor Senhor Da Costa," she wrote, "I have lain awake all night thinking of thee. Why ruin thy life for a mere abstraction? Canst thou not make peace!--Thy friend, Ianthe."

He kissed the note; then, his wits abnormally sharpened, he set to work to devise how to meet his brother, and even as he was meditating how to trick him, his heart was full of affection for his little Vidal. Poor Vidal! How he must have suffered to lose his beautiful wife!

There were days on which Joseph's business or pleasure took him past his brother's house, though he always walked on the further side, and Uriel now set himself to keep watch at his study window from morning to night, the pair of Dutch mirrors fixed slantingly outside the window enabling him to see all the street life without being seen.

After three days, his patience was rewarded by the reflected image of the portly pillar of the synagogue, and with him his little boy of six. He ran downstairs and into the street and caught up the boy in his arms--