A RECANTATION.
Saul Aronson was not the only person who found pleasure in the company
of Miss Lamb. There were others, with eyes not glamoured by any golden
mist of love, who would have found it hard to select an adjective strong
enough to express their approbation of the petite devotee. About a year
before she had come down from the country to be a companion to her aunt,
Mrs. Wolfe, who had just lost her husband.
Mrs. Wolfe (according to neighbors' gossip) had been no more than a
moderately loving wife, but she made a devoted widow. She had the waist
of a wasp and a temper to match it. Her frame was angular, and her
disposition, too, revealed shoulder blades and elbows. If she loved
anything in this world it was her marbled cat, which was hated by every
boarder in the house, and a pariah among its tribe. From constant
visiting of her husband's grave her manners had assumed a cast which
would have been appropriate to a cemetery, but was most depressing in
everyday converse. Even her smile had something acrid about it, like a
shopworn lemon, and the acidity of her scowl would have reddened blue
litmus paper.
People wondered why her niece, such a tender little body, should be
doomed to the martyrdom of waiting upon "Old Tabby Wolfe and her
boarders." Mrs. Gubbins, who was the landlady's most intimate
crony--probably because among her other virtues she had a keen sense of
the doleful--spread the report that Serena would inherit her aunt's
property, and that her own mother, Mrs. Wolfe's sister, had had an eye
to this when she parted with the eldest of her household. However that
might be, the girl put up patiently with all the widow's quirks and
oddities; entered into religious work enthusiastically, and in six
months had rubbed off the slight rusticity with which eighteen years of
choring on a farm, before she came down to the city, had touched her
accent and manner.
There were hardly any traces of kinship between aunt and niece. To be
sure, Serena had the slenderest slip of a waist that nature ever
fashioned, and just the least suggestion of cheek bones, too, which were
not at all disagreeable, however. When occasion demanded, she could give
a sharp order, much as she may have rebuked Spot and Bossy for switching
when she milked them in the cowshed at home. But to the boarders these
bursts of impatience only gave their sweet waitress a piquancy like the
tartness of the full-ripe strawberry.
With them she was a general favorite. They used to declare that she put
yeast in their beds, for they were like pans of dough, feathery and
white, when she made them of a morning; and Serena, spinning the
pie-plates round, scalloping the edges of the crust with a four-tined
fork, or knitting in the sitting-room from a ball of pink yarn that
danced on the carpet as she unraveled it, was a spectacle of domesticity
at which they never tired of gazing. Yet her dignity, which was far
beyond her years, prevented their making her a plaything. Though
cordial, she was very reserved. Young ladies called her set; young men,
seraphic but cold.
You may imagine how Aronson's heart hopped in his bosom when Jupiter
presented him to this goddess.
"I have seen you at our meetings, Mr. Aronson," she graciously observed.
She had noticed him, then. He knew it before, but the assurance from her
lips gave him measureless joy. But this joy swelled to rapture
inexpressible, such as only the saints in the ninth heaven and happy
lovers on earth are privileged to know, when she invited him to call
upon her and pressed his hand a second time on bidding him adieu. The
thrill of her fingertips did not die out all that day; but it was a week
again (for Aronson was a bashful youth) before he presumed to accept her
invitation.
His mother marveled why Saul furbished himself up so carefully that
evening. He had risen from the supper table prematurely and spent
exactly fifty-five minutes smoothing his hair, tidying his cravat and
drawing on his new pair of gloves. When he went out, instead of
soliciting admiration for this array, he seemed to avoid it.
As he drew toward the mansion whose door-plate still bore the name of
the departed Ephraim Wolfe, an unwelcome surprise met Aronson. There in
the doorway, silhouetted against the hall lamp, was the form which he
knew to be Serena's. She was admitting a visitor--a youth. The door
quickly closed and a rosy light came through the tinted curtains behind.
But Aronson's spirits had sunk, his resolution departed. Instead of
crossing the street, as he had planned to, and ringing the bell, with a
little speech of greeting all prepared, he walked on to the next corner
and irresolutely turned back.
This time a shadow fell on the white curtain of the front room. It was
Serena rocking herself placidly in the rocking-chair. Every forward
inclination brought her sweet profile into view, every backward one
removed it. Her lips moved. She was conversing, doubtless, with the
youth whose stolid shadow occupied the center of the opposite curtain.
Eight times Saul Aronson passed and repassed that house-front before he
could tear himself away and return home to divest himself downheartedly
of all his finery.
Two days later, however, he saw Serena again; and she renewed the
invitation. This time, when he approached, there was no hostile youth at
the door. Serena herself admitted him to the portals of the paradise
which she inhabited in common with Mrs. Wolfe and the seven boarders,
and 10 o'clock had long ceased striking when, incoherent with ecstasy,
Saul Aronson uttered his last lingering doorstep adieu and promised to
return.
He never returned. As she informed Inspector McCausland, Serena had
never looked on that lovelorn visage again.
This was how he came to break his promise: One Sunday afternoon a
messenger came to the Aronson door with a request from Simon Rabofsky
that Saul should favor him with a visit. The young man had misgivings,
but he dared not disobey.
Up a squalid flight, into a dingy back room, Aronson took his way
reluctantly. The clamor of voices died when he crossed the threshold and
six pairs of inimical eyes, he thought, were lifted to his face. At a
table in the midst sat Rabofsky, his yellowish earlocks dangling beneath
his skull-cap and a great book spread open before him.
"Peace be with you, Saul Aronson," he said in the jargon.
"The angel Dumah spare you, Simon Rabofsky," answered Aronson.
"I rejoice to see that you have not forgotten the holy salutations."
The twelve eyes sharpened their glances at Aronson and he knew the
ordeal was come. They were six of the strictest in the congregation,
from old Silberstein, who sat on the left of the ark and led the
recitation of the eighteen psalms of a morning, to young Cohen, the
Jewish butcher, a zealot of zealots, than whom none more devoutly beat
his bosom in prayer or observed the allotted holy days.
"Brother Silberstein was just proposing that your place in the
synagogue be disposed of. It is a pity to see a seat vacant, when so
many must stand. But I bade him not be hasty, for perhaps you had been
ill of late."
"Why play the innocent, Simon Rabofsky," broke in Cohen, "when you know
as well as we that he has been consorting with the gentiles?"
"It is because I am loath to believe it," answered Rabofsky, in a
sorrowful tone, as if rebuking Cohen. "I am loath to believe one of
Isaac Aronson's household would turn away to bow before the idols of
Babylon."
"Is it forbidden to search for wisdom?" said Aronson.
"You do not search for it in the book where it is found," said Rabofsky,
laying his finger on the book before him. It was printed in Semitic
characters, but the language was the jargon, for Rabofsky was no master
of Hebrew and Aramaic, "the divine talmud, which our fathers have
preserved through their hundred persecutions."
"But its wisdom is obscure," answered Aronson.
"Are there not doctors to explain those parts which are dark?" rejoined
Rabofsky. "And behold, in this edition, which a Hebrew so enlightened as
Saul Aronson should possess, are not all the lengthy passages shortened
and the unnecessary omitted by the labors of that light of Israel, born
at Cordova, Moses ben Maimon, whom the gentiles miscall Maimonides?"
"Why plead with the apostate?" cried Silberstein, angrily. "He is no
longer a Jew. He toileth on the Sabbath. He goeth not down to the
waterside to lament."
"It is false," said Aronson, hotly.
"I said so," nodded Rabofsky.
"Who are you to reprove me, Simon Rabofsky," continued Aronson, "because
I cannot lie idle two days in the week? Do you rest from your
money-getting on the Sabbath? I think your wife, Rebecca, could answer
me that. Did I not see her selling jewels to a Christian on the seventh
day of this very week?"
"It is written," answered Rabofsky, his steel-blue eyes contracting,
"that the high priests in the hour of necessity made food of the bread
of the tabernacle. So saith the holy book," he laid his finger again on
the page, "which Jehovah hath covered with the wings of His protection
so that torches could not destroy it. Behold it has arisen from a
thousand burnings uncharred!"
All the Hebrews plucked their garments and with bowed heads muttered a
prayer, in which Aronson found himself joining.
"Too many of our youth are beguiled by the flatteries of the gentiles,"
continued Rabofsky, not unwilling to divert the conversation.
"But such are only the lax ones, who worship no God," said Cohen. "Few
grovel before idols, like this one."
"And hath Saul Aronson done this?" asked Rabofsky, as if in surprise.
"Did you not see him yourself at the gentile ceremony raising his
hands?"
"You wrong the Christians," protested Aronson. "They are not all cruel
and there is much sweetness of love in their doctrine."
"Not cruel!" rejoined Cohen. "How have they not poured out our blood in
the ages!"
"Jehovah hath stored it up," added a gentler voice, piteously. It was
Abraham Barentzen, the patriarch of the colony, who had not spoken
before, but kept looking at the backslider kindly, as if more in sorrow
than bitterness.
"Sweetness of love!" cried Silberstein. "Love indeed and enough. How
they love each other! Sect embracing sect! Pah!"
"They hate us; they mock us, and our children court them," droned
another in a minor key.
"They call us cheats and usurers," cried Cohen, "because we make wealth
out of the waste they cast away."
"Psh!" said old Barentzen, raising his hands. "Be just. Those are only
the few."
"Perhaps it is some gentle girl that is tempting Saul Aronson, even as
the Philistine women of old weakened the faith of Samson," said
Rabofsky, keenly.
"Are there not black-eyed daughters of Israel," cried old Barentzen,
mild-voiced and reproving, "who will make him a home? If he wants a wife
comely, buxom, well-dowered, modest, a good housekeeper and free from
tittle-tattle, are there not such by scores in the neighborhood?"
"I fear it is Meyer Shagarach's doing," murmured Silberstein.
"Not so," spoke Cohen, sharply. Though young, he seemed a leader.
"Shagarach is lost to the fold of Israel, but does he chant with cracked
voice out of a tattered hymn-book? Pretty soon we shall see Saul Aronson
shivering in the waters of baptism, and then he will change his name to
Paul, like that other traitor, the fire-brand of Tarsus?"
"Traitor yourself!" cried Aronson, stung by Cohen's irony.
The word has terrible force in Israel. The whole past of the race is
vivid in the minds of the wanderers, and recollection of its sorrows
makes a bond so strong that no temptation can break it. Aronson paused
to think. The dim traditions, all tears and fire and blood--the exodus
from Egypt, the Babylonian captivity, the burning of Jerusalem, the
dispersion, the persecutions without number--could he forget all those,
snapping ties so sacred?
"After all, I think Saul Aronson's heart is not with the gentiles," said
old Barentzen, in a soothing voice. "Would he rather be buried when he
dies under some idolatrous mound stuck with the symbol of him whom Judas
righteously delivered----"
"There never was such a Nazarene," broke in Cohen impetuously. "It is
all a fable and the text in Josephus was written in by the gentiles."
"I say the Christ was real and rightly condemned as a creator of
sedition," said Rabofsky, with authoritative pomp. Like the misers of
every race, he was both devotee and formalist.
"He is not mentioned in the talmud," argued Cohen. "Nor elsewhere,
until the history of our race crosses the history of the pagans. It is
all an invention."
Thereupon the two zealots wrangled and jangled till Aronson's ears
ached. But his mind was dwelling upon old Barentzen's saying and sadly
acknowledging its truth. His heart was not really with the Christians.
What did he know of their teachings? He had been given a bible, but it
was locked in his office drawer, unread. Besides, these were deep
questions. Who was he to dispute the great doctors, like Moses ben
Maimon?
"So be it, obstinate youth," said Rabofsky at last, waving his hands to
end the discussion.
"I had begun to ask Saul Aronson a question," resumed Barentzen, in a
tone of rebuke. "Would you not rather lie like your fathers with the
shards on your eyelids and a handful of earth from the land of Israel
thrown over your resting-place?"
Aronson hung his head.
"Enough of this pleading and coaxing," snarled Cohen. "He is
stiff-necked, I see. I will put his name with the other traitors. There
are twenty in all. They shall be published in the next issue."
"Stay," said Aronson.
"On the first page," said Silberstein. "And the first page shall be hung
outward in my store window."
"That the very children may know them for apostates and greedy
hypocrites," added Rabofsky, to clinch the threat.
"Hold," cried Aronson. He foresaw the fatal result of his misstep. He
could hear the storm rising around him; the clamor of children on the
streets, the pointed fingers of men and women, the ironical comments
from the doorstep groups when he passed, the sly digs at the supper
table, the estranged glances of his mother. "It is all wrong," he cried.
"Then, why do you haunt the gentile mountebanks?" asked Cohen, seizing
his sleeve.
"Fangled like a fop!" said Silberstein, catching his lapel.
"And shun the blessed synagogue?" added another, fumbling at his vest
buttons.
"Are you a gentile or a Jew?" questioned Rabofsky, as chief inquisitor.
"I am a Jew!" cried Aronson, in honest wrath, tousled and clapperclawed
until his patience had given away. Then he rushed from the room.
The list of "traitors" appeared in the Jewish Messenger without Saul
Aronson's name. The old, old conflict between love and honor had ended
with another defeat for the imperious boy-god. But it is no discredit to
Serena Lamb that her influence yielded to a passion which is hardly
second to any in the world for intensity--the Israelite's devotion to
his race. All that she retained of the young convert from whom so much
had been expected was a confused memory of the conversation in her
sitting-room. What had Aronson told her in his agitation during that
confidential interview? It would seem that he had been too frank. At
least, for several weeks after Serena's visit to McCausland, he was
strangely conscious that some one was dogging his footsteps, both at
home and about the office. Naturally, he ascribed this espionage to the
sacred brotherhood, whose power is great in Israel, and, fearing their
vigilance, redoubled his evening invocations and waxed regular in his
attendance at the synagogue.