Dreamers of the Ghetto. Israel Zangwill

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СКАЧАТЬ He is one of us!"

      "What! a Jew!" cried Gabriel, thunderstruck.

      "Hush! hush! or we shall have him replaced by an enemy. 'Twas his fellow-feeling to me, both as a brother and a medicus, that made him declare me on the point of death when I was still as lusty as a false credo. For the rest, I had sufficient science to hold in my breath while the clown tied me with cords, else had I been too straitened to breathe. But thou needest a biscuit with thy wine. Ianthe!"

      A pretty little girl stepped in from an adjoining room, her dark eyes drooping shyly at the sight of the stranger.

      "Thou seest I have a witness against thee," laughed the physician; "while the evidence against me which the fools could not find we will eat up. The remainder of the Motsas, daughterling!" And drawing a key from under his pillow, he handed it to her. "Soft, now, my little one, and hide them well."

      When the child had gone, the father grumbled, over another glass of wine, at having to train her to a double life. "But it sharpens the wits," said he. "Ianthe should grow up subtle as the secret cupboard within a cupboard which she is now opening. But a woman scarcely needs the training." He was yet laughing over his jape when Ianthe returned, and produced from under a napkin some large, thick biscuits, peculiarly reticulated. Gabriel looked at them curiously.

      "Knowest thou not Passover cakes?" asked Dom Diego.

      Gabriel shook his head.

      "Thou hast never eaten unleavened bread?"

      "Unleavened bread! Ah, I was reading thereof in the Pentateuch but yesterday. Stay, is it not one of the Inquisition's tests? But I figured it not thus."

      "'Tis the immemorial pattern, smuggled in from Amsterdam," said the wine-flushed physician, throwing caution to the winds. "Taste! 'Tis more palatable than the Host."

      "Is Amsterdam, then, a Jewish town?"

      "Nay, but 'tis the Jerusalem of the West. Little Holland, since she shook off Papistry, hath no persecuting polity like the other nations. And natural enough, for 'tis more a ship than a country. Half my old friends have drifted thither—'tis a sad drain for our old Portuguese community."

      Gabriel's bosom throbbed. "Then why not join them?"

      The old physician shook his head. "Nay, I love my Portugal. 'Tis here that I was born, and here will I die. I love her—her mountains, her rivers, her valleys, her medicinal springs—always love Portugal, Ianthe—"

      "Yes, father," said the little girl gravely.

      "And, oh, her poets—her Rubeiro, her Falcão, her Camoëns—my own grandfather was thought worthy of a place in the 'Cancioneiro Geral'; and I too have made a Portuguese poem on the first aphorism of Hippocrates, though 'tis yet in manuscript."

      "But if thou darest not profess thy faith," said Gabriel, "'tis more than all the rest. To live a daily lie—intolerable!"

      "Hoity-toity! Thou art young and headstrong. The Catholic religion! 'Tis no more than fine manners; as we say in Hebrew, derech eretz, the way of the country. Why do I wear breeches and a cocked hat—when I am abroad, videlicet? Why does little Ianthe trip it in a petticoat?"

      "Because I am a girl," said Ianthe.

      Dom Diego laughed. "There's the question rhetorical, my little one, and the question interrogative. However, we'll not puzzle thee with Quintilian. Run away to thy lute. And so it is, Senhor da Costa. I love my Judaism more than my Portugal; but while I can keep both my mistresses at the cost of a little finesse—"

      "But the danger of being burnt alive!"

      "'Tis like hell to the Christian sinner—dim and distant."

      "Thou hast been singed, methinks."

      "Like a blasted tree. The lightning will not strike twice. Help thyself to more wine. Besides, my stomach likes not the Biscay Bay. God made us for land animals."

      But Gabriel was not to be won over to the worthy physician's view, and only half to the man himself. Yet was not this his last visit, for he clung to Dom Diego as to the only Jew he knew, and borrowed from him a Hebrew Bible and a grammar, and began secretly to acquire the sacred tongue, bringing toys and flowers to the little Ianthe, and once a costlier lute than her own, in return for her father's help with the idioms. Also he borrowed some of Dom Diego's own works, issued anonymously from the printing presses of Amsterdam; and from his new friend's "Paradise of Earthly Vanity," and other oddly entitled volumes of controversial theology, the young enthusiast sucked instruction and confirmation of his doubts. To Dom Diego's Portuguese fellow-citizens the old gentleman was the author of an erudite essay on the treatment of phthisis, emphatically denouncing the implicit reliance on milk.

      But Gabriel could not imitate this comfortable self-adjustment to surroundings. 'Twas but a half fight for the Truth, he felt, and ceased to cultivate the semi-recreant physician. For as he grew more and more in love with the Old Testament, with its simple doctrine of a people, chosen and consecrate, so grew his sense of far-reaching destinies, of a linked race sprung from the mysterious East and the dawn of history, defying destruction and surviving persecution, agonizing for its faith and its unfaith—a conception that touched the springs of romance and the source of tears—and his vision turned longingly towards Amsterdam, that city of the saints, the home of the true faith, of the brotherhood of man, and the fatherhood of God.

      VI

      "Mother," said Gabriel, "I have something to say to thee." They were in the half-orange room, and she had looked in to give her good-night kiss to the lonely student, but his words arrested her at the door. She sat down and gazed lovingly at her handsome eldest-born, in whom her dead husband lived as in his prime. "'Twill be of Isabella," she thought, with a stir in her breast, rejoiced to think that the brooding eyes of the scholar had opened at last to the beauty and goodness of the highborn heiress who loved him.

      "Mother, I have made a great resolution, and 'tis time to tell thee."

      Her eyes grew more radiant.

      "My blessed Gabriel!"

      "Nay, I fear thou wilt hate me."

      "Hate thee!"

      "Because I must leave thee."

      "'Tis the natural lot of mothers to be left, my Gabriel."

      "Ah, but this is most unnatural. Oh, my God! why am I thus tried?"

      "What meanest thou? What has happened?" The old woman had risen.

      "I must leave Portugal."

      "Wherefore? in Heaven's name! Leave Portugal?"

      "Hush, or the servants will hear. I would become," he breathed low, "a Jew!"

      Dona da Costa blenched, and stared at him breathless, a strange light in her eyes, but not that which he had expected.

      "'Tis the finger of God!" she whispered, awestruck.

      "Mother!" He was thrilled with a wild suspicion.

      "Yes, my father was a Jew. I was СКАЧАТЬ