She seemed overwrought beyond endurance. There followed a silence only less terrible than David's laughter.
'A Cohen,' burst forth David again. 'A holy Cohen up to date. Do you know what the boys say about us priests when we're blessing you common people? They say that if you look on us once during that sacred function, you'll get blind, and if you look on us a second time you'll die. A nice reverent joke that, eh! Ha! Ha! Ha! You're blind already, Reb Shemuel. Beware you don't look at me again or I'll commence to bless you. Ha! Ha! Ha!'
Again the terrible silence.
'Ah well,' David resumed, his bitterness welling forth in irony. 'And so the first sacrifice the priest is called upon to make is that of your daughter. But I won't, Reb Shemuel, mark my words; I won't, not till she offers her own throat to the knife. If she and I are parted, on you and you alone the guilt must rest. You will have to perform the sacrifice.'
'What God wishes me to do I will do,' said the old man in a broken voice. 'What is it to that which our ancestors suffered for the glory of the Name?'
'Yes, but it seems you suffer by proxy,' retorted David, savagely.
'My God! Do you think I would not die to make Hannah happy?' faltered the old man. 'But God has laid the burden on her-and I can only help her to bear it. And now, sir, I must beg you to go. You do but distress my child.'
'What say you, Hannah? Do you wish me to go?'
'Yes-What is the use-now?' breathed Hannah through white quivering lips.
'My child!' said the old man pitifully, while he strained her to his breast.
'All right!' said David in strange harsh tones, scarcely recognizable as his. 'I see you are your father's daughter.'
He took his hat and turned his back upon the tragic embrace.
'David!' She called his name in an agonized hoarse voice. She held her arms towards him. He did not turn round.
'David!' Her voice rose to a shriek. 'You will not leave me?'
He faced her exultant.
'Ah, you will come with me. You will be my wife.'
'No-no-not now, not now. I cannot answer you now. Let me think-good-bye, dearest, good-bye.' She burst out weeping. David took her in his arms and kissed her passionately. Then he went out hurriedly.
Hannah wept on-her father holding her hand in piteous silence.
'Oh, it is cruel, your religion,' she sobbed. 'Cruel, cruel!'
'Hannah! Shemuel! Where are you?' suddenly came the excited voice of Simcha from the passage. 'Come and look at the lovely fowls I've bought-and such Metsiahs. They're worth double. Oh, what a beautiful Yomtov we shall have!'
CHAPTER XXV. SEDER NIGHT.
'Prosaic miles of street stretch all around,
Astir with restless, hurried life, and spanned
By arches that with thund'rous trains resound,
And throbbing wires that galvanize the land;
Gin palaces in tawdry splendor stand;
The newsboys shriek of mangled bodies found;
The last burlesque is playing in the Strand-
In modern prose, all poetry seems drowned.
Yet in ten thousand homes this April night
An ancient people celebrates its birth
To Freedom, with a reverential mirth,
With customs quaint and many a hoary rite,
Waiting until, its tarnished glories bright,
Its God shall be the God of all the Earth.'
To an imaginative child like Esther, Seder night was a charmed time. The strange symbolic dishes-the bitter herbs and the sweet mixture of apples, almonds, spices and wine, the roasted bone and the lamb, the salt water and the four cups of raisin wine, the great round unleavened cakes, with their mottled surfaces, some specially thick and sacred, the special Hebrew melodies and verses with their jingle of rhymes and assonances, the quaint ceremonial with its striking moments, as when the finger was dipped in the wine and the drops sprinkled over the shoulder in repudiation of the ten plagues of Egypt cabalistically magnified to two hundred and fifty; all this penetrated deep into her consciousness and made the recurrence of every Passover coincide with a rush of pleasant anticipations and a sense of the special privilege of being born a happy Jewish child. Vaguely, indeed, did she co-ordinate the celebration with the history enshrined in it or with the prospective history of her race. It was like a tale out of the fairy-books, this miraculous deliverance of her forefathers in the dim haze of antiquity; true enough but not more definitely realized on that account. And yet not easily dissoluble links were being forged with her race, which has anticipated Positivism in vitalizing history by making it religion.
The Matzoth that Esther ate were not dainty-they were coarse, of the quality called 'seconds,' for even the unleavened bread of charity is not necessarily delicate eating-but few things melted sweeter on the palate than a segment of a Matso dipped in cheap raisin wine: the unconventionally of the food made life less common, more picturesque. Simple Ghetto children into whose existence the ceaseless round of fast and feast, of prohibited and enjoyed pleasures, of varying species of food, brought change and relief! Imprisoned in the area of a few narrow streets, unlovely and sombre, muddy and ill-smelling, immured in dreary houses and surrounded with mean and depressing sights and sounds, the spirit of childhood took radiance and color from its own inner light and the alchemy of youth could still transmute its lead to gold. No little princess in the courts of fairyland could feel a fresher interest and pleasure in life than Esther sitting at the Seder table, where her father-no longer a slave in Egypt-leaned royally upon two chairs supplied with pillows as the Din prescribes. Not even the monarch's prime minister could have had a meaner opinion of Pharaoh than Moses Ansell in this symbolically sybaritic attitude. A live dog is better than a dead lion, as a great teacher in Israel had said. How much better then a live lion than a dead dog? Pharaoh, for all his purple and fine linen and his treasure cities, was at the bottom of the Red Sea, smitten with two hundred and fifty plagues, and even if, as tradition asserted, he had been made to live on and on to be King of Nineveh, and to give ear to the warnings of Jonah, prophet and whale-explorer, even so he was but dust and ashes for other sinners to cover themselves withal; but he, Moses Ansell, was the honored master of his household, enjoying a foretaste of the lollings of the righteous in Paradise; nay, more, dispensing hospitality to the poor and the hungry. Little fleas have lesser fleas, and Moses Ansell had never fallen so low but that, on this night of nights when the slave sits with the master on equal terms, he could manage to entertain a Passover guest, usually some newly- arrived Greener, or some nondescript waif and stray returned to Judaism for the occasion and accepting a seat at the board in that spirit of camaraderie which is one of the most delightful features of the Jewish pauper. Seder was a ceremonial to be taken in none too solemn and sober a spirit, and there was an abundance of unreproved giggling throughout from the little ones, especially in those happy days when mother was alive and tried to steal the Afikuman or Matso specially laid aside for the final morsel, only to be surrendered to father when he promised to grant her whatever she wished. Alas! it is to be feared Mrs. Ansell's wishes did not soar high. There was more giggling when the youngest talking son-it was poor Benjamin in Esther's earliest recollections-opened the ball by inquiring in a peculiarly pitched incantation and with an air of blank ignorance why this night differed from all other nights-in view of the various astonishing peculiarities of food and behavior (enumerated in detail) visible to his vision. To which Moses and the Bube and the rest of the company (including the questioner) invariably replied in corresponding sing-song: 'Slaves have we been in Egypt,' proceeding to recount at great length, stopping for refreshment in the middle, the never-cloying tale of the great deliverance, with irrelevant
