Miriam greedily tore out of the closet diamonds and pearls, rubies and emeralds, and concealed them among her ample robes—“Go! go! Escape from her! I will hide your jewels!”
“Ay, hide them, as mother earth does all things, in that all-embracing bosom. You will have doubled them before we meet again, no doubt. Farewell, mother!”
“But not forever, Raphael! not forever! Promise me, in the name of the four archangels, that if you are in trouble or danger, you will write to me, at the house of Eudaimon.”
“The little porter philosopher, who hangs about Hypatia’s lecture-room?”
“The same, the same. He will give me your letter, and I swear to you, I will cross the mountains of Kaf, to deliver you!—I will pay you all back. By Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob I swear! May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not account to you for the last penny!”
“Don’t commit yourself to rash promises, my dear lady. If I am bored with poverty, I can but borrow a few gold pieces of a rabbi, and turn peddler. I really do not trust you to pay me back, so I shall not be disappointed if you do not. Why should I?”
“Because—because—O God! No—never mind! You shall have all back. Spirit of Elias! where is the black agate? Why is it not among these?—The broken half of the black agate talisman!”
Raphael turned pale. “How did you know that I have a black agate?”
“How did I? How did I not?” cried she, clutching him by the arm. “Where is it? All depends on that! Fool!” she went on, throwing him off from her at arm’s length, as a sudden suspicion stung her—“you have not given it to the heathen woman?”
“By the soul of my fathers, then, you mysterious old witch, who seem to know everything, that is exactly what I have done.”
Miriam clapped her hands together wildly. “Lost! lost! lost! Not I will have it, if I tear it out of her heart! I will be avenged of her—the strange woman who flatters with her words, to whom the simple go in, and know not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell! God do so to me, and more also, if she and her sorceries be on earth a twelvemonth hence!”
“Silence, Jezebel! Heathen or none, she is as pure as the sunlight! I only gave it her because she fancied the talisman upon it.”
“To enchant you with it, to your ruin!”
“Brute of a slave-dealer! you fancy everyone as base as the poor wretches whom you buy and sell to shame, that you may make them as much the children of hell, if that be possible, as yourself!”
Miriam looked at him, her large black eyes widening and kindling. For an instant she felt for her poniard—and then burst into an agony of tears, hid her face in her withered hands, and rushed from the room, as a crash and shout below announced the bursting of the door.
“There she goes with my jewels. And here come my guests, with the young monk at their head.—One rising when the other sets. A worthy pair of Dioscuri! Come, Bran! … Boys! Slaves! Where are you? Steal everyone what he can lay his hands on, and run for your lives through the back gate.”
The slaves had obeyed him already. He walked smiling downstairs through utter solitude, and in the front passage met face to face the mob of monks, costermongers and dockworkers, fishwives and beggars, who were thronging up the narrow entry, and bursting into the doors right and left; and at their head, alas! the young monk who had just trampled the necklace into the mud … no other, in fact, than Philammon.
“Welcome, my worthy guests! Enter, I beseech you, and fulfil, in your own peculiar way, the precepts which bid you not be over anxious for the good things of this life. … For eating and drinking, my kitchen and cellar are at your service. For clothing, if any illustrious personage will do me the honour to change his holy rags with me, here are an Indian shawl-pelisse and a pair of silk trousers at his service. Perhaps you will accommodate me, my handsome young captain, choragus of this new school of the prophets?”
Philammon, who was the person addressed, tried to push by him contemptuously.
“Allow me, sir. I lead the way. This dagger is poisoned—a scratch and you are dead. This dog is of the true British breed; if she seizes you, red-hot iron will not loose her, till she hears the bone crack. If anyone will change clothes with me, all I have is at your service. If not, the first that stirs is a dead man.”
There was no mistaking the quiet, high-bred determination of the speaker. Had he raged and blustered, Philammon could have met him on his own ground: but there was an easy self-possessed disdain about him, which utterly abashed the young monk, and abashed, too, the whole crowd of rascals at his heels.
“I’ll change clothes with you, you Jewish dog!” roared a dirty fellow out of the mob.
“I am your eternal debtor. Let us step into this side room. Walk upstairs, my friends. Take care there, sir!—That porcelain, whole, is worth three thousand gold pieces: broken, it is not worth three pence. I leave it to your good sense to treat it accordingly. Now then, my friend!” And in the midst of the raging vortex of plunderers, who were snatching up everything which they could carry away, and breaking everything which they could not, he quietly divested himself of his finery, and put on the ragged cotton tunic, and battered straw hat, which the fellow handed over to him.
Philammon, who had had from the first no mind to plunder, stood watching Raphael with dumb wonder; and a shudder of regret, he knew not why, passed through him, as he saw the mob tearing
