In a little Polish town, early one summer morning, two Jewish women,
passing by the cemetery, saw a spirit fluttering whitely among the
tombs.
They shrieked, whereupon the figure turned, revealing a beautiful girl
in her night-dress, her face, albeit distraught, touched unmistakably
with the hues of life.
"Ah, ye be daughters of Israel!" cried the strange apparition. "Help
me! I have escaped from the nunnery."
"Who art thou?" said they, moving towards her.
"The Messiah's Bride!" And her face shone. They stood rooted to the
soil. A fresh thrill of the supernatural ran through them.
"Nay, come hither," she cried. "See." And she showed them nail-marks
on her naked flesh. "Last night my father's ghostly hands dragged me
from the convent."
At this the women would have run away, but each encouraged the other.
"Poor creature! She is mad," they signed and whispered to each other.
Then they threw a mantle over her.
"Ye will hide me, will ye not?" she said, pleadingly, and her wild
sweetness melted their hearts.
They soothed her and led her homewards by unfrequented byways.
"Where are thy friends, thy parents?"
"Dead, scattered--what know I? O those days of blood!" She shuddered
violently. "Baptism or death! But they were strong. I see a Cossack
dragging my mother along with a thong round her neck. 'Here's a red
ribbon for you, dear,' he cries with laughter; they betrayed us to the
Cossacks, those Greek Christians within our gates--the Zaporogians
dressed themselves like Poles--we open the gates--the gutters run
blood--oh, the agonies of the tortured!--oh! father!"
They hushed her cries. Too well they remembered those terrible days of
the Chmielnicki massacres, when all the highways of Europe were
thronged with haggard Polish Jews, flying from the vengeance of the
Cossack chieftain with his troops of Haidamaks, and a quarter of a
million of Jewish corpses on the battle-fields of Poland were the
blunt Cossack's reply to the casuistical cunning engendered by the
Talmud.
"They hated my father," the strange beautiful creature told them, when
she was calmer. "He was the lessee of the Polish imposts; and in order
that he might collect the fines on Cossack births and marriages, he
kept the keys of the Greek church, and the Pope had to apply to him,
ere he could celebrate weddings or baptisms--they offered to baptize
him free of tax, but he held firm to his faith; they impaled him on a
stake and lashed him--oh, my God! And the good sisters found me
weeping, a little girl, and they took me to the convent and were kind
to me, and spoke to me of Christ. But I would not believe, no, I could
not believe. The psalms and lessons of the synagogue came back to my
lips; in visions of the night I saw my father, blood-stained, but
haloed with light.
"'Be faithful,' he would say, 'be faithful to Judaism. A great destiny
awaits thee. For lo! our long persecution draws to an end, the days
of the Messiah are at hand, and thou shalt be the Messiah's bride,'
And the glory of a great hope came into my life, and I longed to
escape from my prison into the sunlit world. I, the bride of the
cloister!" she cried, and revolt flung roses into her white face.
"Nay, the bride of the Messiah am I, who shall restore joy to the
earth, who shall wipe the tears from off all faces. Last night my
father came to me again, and said, 'Be faithful to Judaism.' Then I
replied, 'If thou wert of a truth my father, thou wouldst cease thy
exhortations, thou wouldst know I would rather die than renounce my
faith, thou wouldst rescue me from these hated walls, and give me unto
my Bridegroom.' Thereupon he said, 'Stretch out thine hand,' and I
stretched out my hand, and I felt an invisible hand clasp it, and when
I awoke I found myself by his grave-side, where ye came upon me. Oh,
take me to the Woman's Bath forthwith, I pray ye, that I may wash off
the years of pollution."
They took her to the Woman's Bath, admiring her marvellous beauty.
"Where is the Messiah?" she asked.
"He is not come yet," they made answer, for the rising up of Sabbataï
was as yet known to but a few disciples.
"Then I will go find Him," she answered.
She wandered to Amsterdam--the capital of Jewry--and thence to
Frankfort-on-the-Main, and thence, southwards, in vain search to
Livorne.
And there in the glory of the Italian sunshine, her ardent, unbalanced
nature, starved in the chilly convent, yielded to passion, for there
were many to love her. But to none would she give herself in marriage.
"I am the Messiah's destined bride," she said, and her wild eyes had
always an air of waiting.