But although by this isolation the Rabbis had practically cut out the
heretic's tongue--for he knew no Dutch, nor, indeed, ever learned to
hold converse with his Christian neighbors--yet there remained his
pen, and in dread of the attack upon them which rumor declared him to
be inditing behind the shuttered windows of his great lonely house,
they instigated Samuel Da Silva, a physician equally skilled with the
lancet and the quill, to anticipate him by a counterblast calculated
to discredit the thunderer. He denied immortality, insinuated the
horrified Da Silva, in his elegant Portuguese treatise, _Tradado da
Immortalide_, probably basing his knowledge of Uriel's "bestial and
injurious opinions" on the confused reports of the heretic's brother,
but refraining from mentioning his forbidden name.
"False slanders!" cried Uriel in his reply--completed--since he had
been anticipated--at his leisure; but he only confirmed the popular
conception of his materialistic errors, seeming, indeed, of wavering
mind on the subject of the future life. His thought had marched on:
and whereas it had been his complaint to Joseph that Rabbinism laid no
stress on immortality, further investigation of the Pentateuch had
shown him that Moses himself had taken no account whatsoever of the
conception, nor striven to bolster up the morality of to-day by the
terrors of a posthumous to-morrow.
So Uriel stood self-condemned, and the Rabbis triumphed, superfluously
justified in the eyes of their flock against this blaspheming
materialist. Nay, Uriel should fall into the pit himself had digged.
The elders of the congregation appealed to the magistrates; they
translated with bated breath passages from the baleful book,
_Tradiçoens Phariseas conferidos con a Ley escrida_. Uriel was
summoned before the tribunal, condemned to pay three hundred guldens,
imprisoned for eight days. The book was burnt.
No less destructive a flame burnt at the prisoner's heart, as,
writhing on his dungeon pallet, biting his lips, digging his nails
into his palms, he cursed these malignant perverters of pure Judaism,
who had shamed him even before the Hollanders. He, the proud and
fearless gentleman of Portugal, had been branded as a criminal by
these fish-blooded Dutchmen. Never would he hold intercourse with his
fellow-creatures again--never, never! Alone with God and his thoughts
he would live and die.
And so for year after year, though he lingered in the city that held
his dear ones, he abode in his cold marble-pillared house, save for
his Moorish servant, having speech with man nor woman. Nor did he ever
emerge, unless at hours when his childish persecutors were abed, so
that in time they turned to fresher sport. But at night he would
sometimes be met wandering by the dark canals, with eyes that kept the
inward look of the sequestered student, seeming to see nothing of the
sombre many-twinkling beauty of starlit waters, or the tender coloring
of mist and haze, but full only of the melancholy of the gray marshes,
and sometimes growing wet with bitter yearning for the sun and the
orange-trees and the warmth of friendly faces. And sometimes in the
cold dawn the early market-people met him riding madly in the
environs, in the silk doublet of a Portuguese grandee, his sword
clanking, and in his hand a silver-mounted pistol, with which he
snapped off the twigs as he flew past. And when his beloved brother
was married to the daughter of Manasseh, the millionaire and the
president of the India Company--which in that wonderful year paid its
shareholders a dividend of seventy-five in the hundred--some of the
wedding-guests averred that they had caught a glimpse of Uriel's dark,
yearning face amid the motley crowd assembled outside the synagogue to
watch the arrival of Joseph Acosta and his beautiful bride; and there
were those who said that Uriel's hands were raised as in blessing. And
once on a moonless midnight, when the venerable Dona Acosta had passed
away, the watchman in the Jews' cemetery, stealing from his turret at
a suspicious noise, turned his lantern upon--no body-snatcher, but--O
more nefarious spectacle!--the sobbing figure of Uriel Acosta across a
new-dug grave, polluting the holy soil of the _Beth-Chayim_!