other.”
“The foul fiends!” muttered Zalman.
“Help me, Barbara! Help me to plead with your father,” urged Reuben. But
Barbara, abashed, could not find courage to raise her voice. Besides,
she kept her kerchief pressed tightly against her lips.
“Would you make your own daughter unhappy for the rest of her life?”
Reuben went on. (At every sentence Zalman murmured as far as “The foul
fiends!” then stopped.) “Everything is ready save your consent. The good
Rabbi Elsberg is here. He can marry us on the spot. We can dispense with
the betrothal. Our hearts have been betrothed for more than a year. I
want no dowry. I only want Barbara. Can you be so cruel as to keep us
apart?”
The glass slipped from his fingers as if by accident, but deftly his
hand swooped below it and caught it, unharmed. The tailor almost
swooned.
“Take her!” he cried, hoarsely. “In the foul fiend’s name take her! And
give me the glass!” He held out his trembling hands. With a joyful cry
Reuben pressed the girl tightly against his heart, and was about to kiss
her when the rabbi’s voice rang out:
“This is outrageous! I refuse to have anything to do with marrying
them!”
Reuben turned pale. To be so near victory, and now to lose everything
through the desertion of his old friend, was an unexpected,
disheartening blow. The tailor’s face brightened. Barbara, who had
looked up quickly when the rabbi spoke, began to cry softly.
“I have consented,” said Zalman. “That was what you asked, was it not?
Now give me back my wine glass. I can do no more.”
A faint smile had come into his face. It must have been his evil
guardian who prompted that smile, for it gave Reuben heart.
“If the rabbi will not marry us immediately,” said Reuben, “then I have
lost everything, and have nothing more to live for.” With the utmost
deliberation he raised an enormous iron that lay upon the counter,
placed the glass carefully upon the floor, and held the iron directly
over it.
“I shall crush the glass into a million tiny bits beneath this ponderous
weight!”
“Hold!” screamed the tailor. “He shall marry you! Please, oh, please!
Marry them, rabbi! For my sake, marry them! I beg it of you! I cannot
bear to see my precious glass under that horrible weight! Don’t let it
fall! For God’s sake, hold it tight! Oh, rabbi, marry them, marry them,
marry them! Let me have my glass!”
The rabbi glared at Reuben, then at the tailor, who was almost on his
knees before him, and then at the face of the connoisseur, who, somewhat
embarrassed at finding himself observed in that exciting moment, said,
apologetically, “I—I don’t mind being a witness.”
The rabbi married them.
“It is not for either of you that I am doing this,” he said, in stern
accents. “You have disgraced yourselves—both of you. But for the sake of
this old man, my friend, who holds that bauble so high that I fear he
will lose his reason if any harm befall it, I yield.”
They were married. And then—and not until then—Reuben raised the
precious wine glass, glittering and sparkling with multi-coloured fire,
gently from the floor and placed it upon the counter. But he held fast
to the iron. Zalman pounced upon his heirloom, examined it carefully to
see whether the faintest mishap had marred its beauty, held it tightly
against his breast, and with upraised arm turned upon his daughter and
her husband. With flashing eyes and pallid lips, he cried:
“May the foul fiends curse you! May God, in His righteousness——”
There was a sound of crashing glass. Whether in his excitement the
tailor’s fingers had, for one instant, relaxed their grip; whether
mysterious Fate, through some psychic or physical agency had playfully
wrought a momentary paralysis of his nerves; whether—but who may
penetrate these things? The glass had slipped from his hand. That
exquisite creation of a skill that had perished centuries ago, that
fragile relic of a forgotten art which, only a moment ago, had sparkled
and glittered as though a hundred suns were imprisoned within its frail
sides, now lay upon the floor in a thousand shapeless fragments.
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Transcriber’s note:
1. Silently corrected typographical errors.
2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.