Chapter VI: Part II: Uriel Acosta (1)

VII

With what emotion, as of a pilgrim reaching Palestine, Gabriel found himself at last in the city where a synagogue stood in the eye of day! The warmth at his heart annulled whatever of chill stole in at the grayness of the canaled streets of the northern city after the color and glow of Porto. His first care as soon as he was settled in the great, marble-halled house which his mother's old friends and relatives in the city had purchased on his behalf, was to betake himself on the Sabbath with his mother and brother to the Portuguese synagogue. Though his ignorance of his new creed was so great that he doffed his hat on entering, nor knew how to don the praying-shawl lent him by the beadle, and was rather disconcerted to find his mother might not sit at his side, but must be relegated to a gallery behind a grille, yet his attitude was too emotional to be critical. The prayer-book interested him keenly, and though he strove to follow the service, his conscious Hebrew could not at all keep pace with the congregational speed, and he felt unreasonably shamed at his failures to rise or bow. Vidal, who had as yet no Hebrew, interested himself in picking out ancient denizens of Porto and communicating his discoveries to his brother in a loud whisper, which excited Gabriel's other neighbor to point out scions of the first Spanish families, other members of which, at home, were props of Holy Church, bishops, and even archbishops. A curious figure, this red-bearded, gross-paunched neighbor, rocking automatically to and fro in his _taleth_, but evidently far fainer to gossip than to pray.

Friars and nuns of almost every monastic order were, said he, here regathered to Judaism. He himself, Isaac Pereira, who sat there safe and snug, had been a Jesuit in Spain.

"I was sick of the pious make-believe, and itched to escape over here. But the fools had let me sell indulgences, and I had a goodly stock on hand, and trade was slack"--here he interrupted himself with a fervent "Amen!" conceded to the service--"in Spain just then. It's no use carrying 'em over to the Netherlands, thinks I; they're too clever over there. I must get rid of 'em in some country free for Jews, and yet containing Catholics. So what should I do but slip over from Malaga to Barbary, where I sold off the remainder of my stock to some Catholics living among the Moors. No sooner had I pocketed the--Amen!--money than I declared myself a Jew. God of Abraham! The faces those Gentiles pulled when they found what a bad bargain they had made with Heaven! They appealed to the Cadi against what they called the imposition. But"--and here an irrepressible chuckle mingled with the roar of the praying multitude--"I claimed the privilege of a free port to sell any description of goods, and the Cadi had to give his ruling in accordance with the law."

In the exhilaration of his mood this sounded amusing to Gabriel, an answering of fools according to their folly. But 'twas not long before it recurred to him to add to his disgust and his disappointment with his new brethren and his new faith. For after he had submitted himself, with his brother, to circumcision, replaced his baptismal name by the Hebrew Uriel, and Vidal's by Joseph, Latinizing at the same time the family name to Acosta, he found himself confronted by a host of minute ordinances far more galling than those of the Church. Eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, washing, working; not the simplest action but was dogged and clogged by incredible imperatives.

Astonishment gave place to dismay, and dismay to indignation and abhorrence, as he realized into what a network of ceremonial he had entangled himself. The Pentateuch itself, with its complex codex of six hundred and thirteen precepts, formed, he discovered, but the barest framework for a parasitic growth insinuating itself with infinite ramifications into the most intimate recesses of life.

What! Was it for this Rabbinic manufacture that he had exchanged the stately ceremonial of Catholicism? Had he thrown off mental fetters but to replace them by bodily?

Was this the Golden Age that he had looked to find--the simple Mosaic theocracy of reason and righteousness?

And the Jews themselves, were these the Chosen People he had clothed with such romantic glamour?--fat burghers, clucking comfortably under the wing of the Protestant States-General; merchants sumptuously housed, vivifying Dutch trade in the Indies; their forms and dogmas alone distinguishing them from the heathen Hollanders, whom they aped even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the refuse-laden borders of treeless canals. Oh! he was tricked, trapped, betrayed!

His wrath gathered daily, finding vent in bitter speeches. If this was what had become of the Mosaic Law and the Holy People, the sooner a son of Israel spoke out the better for his race. Was it not an inspiration from on high that had given him the name of Uriel--"fire of God"? So, when his private thunders had procured him a summons before the outraged Rabbinic court, he was in no wise to be awed by the _Chacham_ and his Rabbis in their solemn robes.

"Pharisees!" he cried, and, despite his lost Christianity, all the scorn of his early training clung to the word.

"Epicurean!" they retorted, with contempt more withering still.

"Nay, Epicurus have I never read, and what I know of his doctrine by hearsay revolteth me. I am for God and Reason, and a pure Judaism."

"Even so talked Elisha Ben Abuya in Palestine of old," put in the second Rabbi more mildly. "He with his Greek culture, who stalked from Sinai to Olympus, and ended in Atheism."

"I know not of Elisha, but I marvel not that your teaching drove him to Atheism."

"Said I not 'twas Atheism, not Judaism, thou talkedst? And an Atheist in our ranks we may not harbor: our community is young in Amsterdam. 'Tis yet on sufferance, and these Dutchmen are easily moved to riot. We have won our ground with labor. Traitor! wouldst thou cut the dykes?"

"Traitor thou!" retorted Uriel. "Traitor to God and His holy Law."

"Hold thy peace!" thundered the _Chacham_, "or the ban shall be laid upon thee."

"Hold my peace!" answered Uriel scornfully. "Nay, I expatriated myself for freedom; I shall not hold my peace for the sake of the ban."

Nor did he. At home and abroad he exhausted himself in invective, in exhortation.

"Be silent, Uriel," begged his aged mother, dreading a breach of the happiness her soul had found at last in its old spiritual swathings. "This Judaism thou deridest is the true, the pure Judaism, as I was taught it in my girlhood. Let me go to my grave in peace."

"Be silent, Uriel," besought his brother Joseph. "If thou dost not give over, old Manasseh and his cronies will bar me out from those lucrative speculations in the Indies, wherein also I am investing thy money for thee. They have already half a hundred privateers, and the States-General wink at anything that will cripple Spain, so if we can seize its silver fleet, or capture Portuguese possessions in South America, we shall reap revenge on our enemies and big dividends. And he hath a comely daughter, hath Manasseh, and methinks her eye is not unkindly towards me. Give over, I beg of thee! This religion liketh me much--no confession, no damnation, and 'tis the faith of our fathers."

"No damnation--ay, but no salvation either. They teach naught of immortality; their creed is of the earth, earthy."

"Then why didst thou drag me from Portugal?" inquired Joseph angrily.

But Uriel--the fire of God--was not to be quenched; and so, not without frequent warning, fell the fire of man. In a solemn conclave in the black-robed synagogue, with awful symbolisms of extinguished torches, the ban was laid upon Uriel Acosta, and henceforth no man, woman, or child dared walk or talk with him. The very beggars refused his alms, the street hawkers spat out as he passed by. His own mother and brother, now completely under the sway of their new Jewish circle, removed from the pollution of his presence, leaving him alone in the great house with the black page. And this house was shunned as though marked with the cross of the pestilence. The more high-spirited Jew-boys would throw stones at its windows or rattle its doors, but it was even keener sport to run after its tenant himself, on the rare occasions when he appeared in the streets, to spit out like their elders at the sight of him, to pelt him with mud, and to shout after him, "Epicurean!" "Bastard!" "Sinner in Israel!"

VIII

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_!

IX

And so the seasons and the years wore on, each walling in the lonely thinker with more solid ice, and making it only the more difficult ever to break through or to melt his prison walls. Nigh fifteen long winter years had passed in a solitude tempered by theological thought, and Uriel, nigh forgotten by his people, had now worked his way even from the religion of Moses. It was the heart alone that was the seat of religion; wherefore, no self-styled Revelation that contradicted Nature could be true. Right Religion was according to Right Reason; but no religion was reasonable that could set brother against brother. All ceremonies were opposed to Reason. Goodness was the only true religion. Such bold conclusions sometimes affrighted himself, being alone in the world to hold them. "All evils," his note-book summed it up in his terse Latin, "come from not following Right Reason and the Law of Nature."

And thinking such thoughts in the dead language that befitted one cut off from life, to whom Dutch was never aught but the unintelligible jargon of an unspiritual race, he was leaving his house on a bleak evening when one clapped him on the shoulder, and turning in amaze, he was still more mazed to find, for the first time in fifteen years, a fellow-creature tendering a friendly smile and a friendly hand. He drew back instinctively, without even recognizing the aged, white-bearded, yet burly figure.

"What, Senhor Da Costa! thou hast forgotten thy victim?"

With a strange thrill he felt the endless years in Amsterdam slip off him like the coils of some icy serpent, as he recognized the genial voice of the Porto physician, and though he was back again in the dungeon of the Holy Office, it was not the gloom of the vault that he felt, but sunshine and blue skies and spring and youth. Through the soft mist of delicious tears he gazed at the kindly furrowed face of the now hoary-headed physician, and clasped his great warm hand, holding it tight, forgetting to drop it, as though it were drawing him back to life and love and fellowship.

The first few words made it clear that Dom Diego had not heard of Uriel's excommunication. He was new in the city, having been driven there, pathetically enough, at the extreme end of his life by the renewed activity of the Holy Office. "I longed to die in Portugal," he said, with his burly laugh; "but not at the hands of the Inquisition."

Uriel choked back the wild impulse to denounce the crueller Inquisition of Jewry, from the sudden recollection that Dom Diego might at once withdraw from him the blessed privilege of human speech.

"Didst make a good voyage?" he asked instead.

"Nay, the billows were in the Catholic League," replied the old man, making a wry face. "However, the God of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and I rejoice to have chanced upon thee, were it only to be guided back to my lodgings amid this water labyrinth."

On the way, Uriel gave what answers he could to the old man's questionings. His mother was dead; his brother Vidal had married, though his wife had died some years later in giving birth to a boy, who was growing up beautiful as a cherub. Yes, he was prospering in worldly affairs, having long since intrusted them to Joseph--that was to say, Vidal--who had embarked all the family wealth in a Dutch enterprise called the West India Company, which ran a fleet of privateers, to prey upon the treasure-ships in the war with Spain. He did not say that his own interests were paid to him by formal letter through a law firm, and that he went in daily fear that his estranged and pious brother, now a pillar of the synagogue, would one day religiously appropriate the heretic's property, backed by who knew what devilish provision of Church or State, leaving him to starve. But he wondered throughout their walk why Dom Diego, who had such constant correspondence with Amsterdam, had never heard of his excommunication, and his bitterness came back as he realized that the ban had extended to the mention of his name, that he was as one dead, buried, cast down to oblivion. Even before he had accepted the physician's invitation to cross his threshold, he had resolved to turn this silence to his own profit: he, whose inward boast was his stainless honor, had resolved to act a silent lie. Was it not fair to outwit the rogues with their own weapon? He had faded from human memory--let it be so. Was he to be cut off from this sudden joy of friendship with one of his blood and race, he whose soul was perishing with drought, though, until this moment, he had been too proud to own it to himself?

But when he entered Dom Diego's lodging and saw the unexpected, forgotten Ianthe--Ianthe grown from that sweet child to matchless grace of early womanhood; Ianthe with her dark smiling eyes and her caressing voice and her gentle movements--then this resolution of passive silence was exchanged for a determination to fight desperately against discovery. In the glow of his soul, in the stir of youth and spring in his veins, in the melting rapture of his mood, that first sight of a beautiful girl's face bent smilingly to greet her father's guest had sufficed to set his heart aflame with a new emotion, sweet, riotous, sacred. What a merry supper-party was that; each dish eaten with the sauce of joyous memories! How gaily he rallied Ianthe on her childish ways and sayings! Of course, she remembered him, she said, and the toys and flowers, and told how comically he had puckered his brow in argumentation with her father. Yes, he had the same funny lines still, and once she touched his forehead lightly for an instant with her slender fingers in facetious demonstration, and he trembled in painful rapture. And she played on her lute, too, on the lute he had given her of old, those slender fingers making ravishing music on the many-stringed instrument, though her pose as she played was more witching still. What a beautiful glimpse of white shoulders and dainty lace her straight-cut black bodice permitted!

He left the house drunk, exalted, and as the cold night air smote the forehead she had touched he was thrilled with fiery energy. He was young still, thank God, though fifteen years had been eaten out of his life, and he had thought himself as old and gray as the marshes. He was young still, he told himself fiercely, defiantly. At home his note-book lay open, as usual, on his desk, like a friend waiting to hear what thoughts had come to him in his lonely walk. How far off and alien seemed this cold confidant now, how irrelevant, and yet, when his eye glanced curiously at his last recorded sentence, how relevant! "All evils come from not following Right Reason and the Law of Nature." How true! How true! He had followed neither Right Reason nor the Law of Nature.

X

In the morning, when the cold, pitiless eye of the thinker penetrated through the sophisms of desire as clearly as his bodily eye saw the gray in his hair and the premature age in his face, he saw how impossible it was to keep the secret of his situation from Dom Diego. Honor forbade it, though this, he did not shrink from admitting to himself, might have counted little but for the certainty of discovery. If he went to the physician's abode he could not fail to meet fellow-Jews there. To some, perhaps, of the younger generation, his forgotten name would convey no horrid significance; but then, Dom Diego's cronies would be among the older men. No; he must himself warn Dom Diego that he was a leper--a pariah. But not--since that might mean final parting--not without a farewell meeting. He sent Pedro with a note to the physician's lodgings, begging to be allowed the privilege of returning his hospitality that same evening; and the physician accepting for himself and daughter, a charwoman was sent for, the great cobwebbed house was scrubbed and furbished in the living chambers, the ancient silver was exhumed from mildewed cupboards, the heavy oil-paintings were dusted, a lively canary in a bright cage was hung on a marble pillar of the dining-room, over the carven angels; flowers were brought in, and at night, in the soft light of the candles, the traces of year-long neglect being subdued and hidden, a spirit of festivity and gaiety pervaded the house as of natural wont, while the Moorish attendant's red knee-breeches, gold-braided coat, and blue-feathered turban, hitherto so incongruous in the general grayness, now seemed part of the normal color. And Uriel, too, grown younger with the house, made a handsome be-ruffed figure as he sat at the board, exchanging merry sallies with the physician and Ianthe.

After the meal and the good wine that alone had not had its cobwebs brushed shamefacedly away, Dom Diego fell conveniently asleep, looking so worn and old when the light of his lively fancy had died out of his face, that the speech of Uriel and Ianthe took a tenderer tone for fear of disturbing him. Presently, too, their hands came together, and--such was the swift sympathy between these shapely creatures--did not dispart. And suddenly, kindled to passion by her warm touch and breathing presence, stabbed with the fear that this was the last time he would see her, he told her that for the first time in his life he knew the meaning of love.

"Oh, if thou wouldst but return my love!" he faltered with dry throat. "But no! that were too much for a man of my years to hope. But whisper at least, that I am not repugnant to thee."

She was about to reply, when he dropped her hand and stayed her with a gesture as abrupt as his avowal.

"Nay, answer me not. Not till I have told thee what honor forbids I should withhold."

And he told the story of his ban and his long loneliness, her face flashing 'twixt terror and pity.

"Answer me, now," he said, almost sternly. "Couldst thou love such a man, proscribed by his race, a byword and a mockery, to whom it is a sin against Heaven even to speak?"

"They would not marry us," she breathed helplessly.

"But couldst thou love me?"

Her eyes drooped as she breathed, "The more for thy sufferings."

But even in the ecstasy of this her acknowledgment, he had a chill undercurrent of consciousness that she did not understand; that, never having lived in an unpersecuted Jewish community, she had no real sense of its own persecuting power. Still, there was no need to remain in Amsterdam now: they would live together in some lonely spot, in the religion of Right Reason that he would teach her. So their hands came together again, and once their lips met. But the father was yet to be told of their sudden-born, sudden-grown love, and this with characteristic impulse Uriel did as soon as the old physician awoke.

"God bless my soul!" said Dom Diego, "am I dreaming still?"

His sense of dream increased when Uriel went on to repeat the story of his excommunication.

"And the ban--is it still in force?" he interrupted.

"It has not been removed," said Uriel sadly.

The burly graybeard sprang to his feet. "And with such a brand upon thy brow thou didst dare speak to my daughter!"

"Father!" cried Ianthe.

"Father me not! He hath beguiled us here under false pretences. He hath made us violate the solemn decree of the synagogue. He is outlawed--he and his house and his food.--Sinner! The viands thou hast given us, what of them? Is thy meat ritually prepared?"

"Thou, a man of culture, carest for these childish things?"

"Childish things? Wherefore, then, have I left my Portugal?"

"All ceremonies are against Right Reason," said Uriel in low tones, his face grown deadly white.

"Now I see that thou hast never understood our holy and beautiful religion. Men of culture, forsooth! Is not our Amsterdam congregation full of men of culture--grammarians, poets, exegetes, philosophers, jurists, but flesh and blood, mark you, not diagrams, cut out of Euclid? Whence the cohesion of our race? Ceremony! What preserves and unifies its scattered atoms throughout the world? Ceremony! And what is ceremony? Poetry. 'Tis the tradition handed down from hoary antiquity; 'tis the color of life."

"'Tis a miserable thraldom," interposed Uriel more feebly.

"Miserable! A happy service. Hast never danced at the Rejoicing of the Law? Who so joyous as our brethren? Where so cheerful a creed? The trouble with thee is that thou hast no childish associations with our glorious religion, thou camest to it in manhood with naught but the cold eye of Reason."

"But thou dost not accept every invention of Rabbinism. Surely in Porto thou didst not practise everything."

"I kept what I could. I believe what I can. If I have my private doubts, why should I set them up to perplex the community withal? There's a friend of mine in this very city--not to mention names--but a greater heretic, I ween, than even thou. But doth he shatter the peace of the vulgar? Nay, not he: he hath a high place in the synagogue, is a blessing to the Jewry, and confideth his doubts to me in epistles writ in elegant Latin. Nay, nay, Senhor Da Costa, the world loves not battering-rams."

And as the old physician spoke, Uriel began dimly to suspect that he had misconceived human life, taken it too earnestly, and at his heart was a hollow aching sense of futile sacrifice. And with it a suspicion that he had mistaken Judaism, too--missed the poetry and humanity behind the forms, and, as he gazed wistfully at Ianthe's tender clouded face, he felt the old romantic sense of brotherhood stirring again. How wonderful to be reabsorbed into his race, fused with Ianthe!

But Right Reason resurged in relentless ascendency, and he knew that his thought could never more go back on itself, that he could never again place faith in any Revelation.

"I will be an ape among apes," he thought bitterly.

XI

And the more he pondered upon this resolution, after Dom Diego had indignantly shaken off the dust of his threshold, the more he was confirmed in it. To outwit the Jewry would be the bitterest revenge, to pay lip-service to its ideals and laugh at it in his sleeve. And thus, too, he would circumvent its dreaded design to seize upon his property. Deception? Ay, but the fault was theirs who drove him to it, leaving him only a leper's life. In the Peninsula they had dissembled among Christians; he would dissemble among Jews, aping the ancient apes. He foresaw no difficulty in the recantation. And--famous idea!--his brother Joseph, poor, dear fool, should bring it about under the illusion that he was the instrument of Providence: for to employ Dom Diego as go-between were to risk the scenting of his real motive. Then, when the Synagogue had taken him to its sanctimonious arms, Ianthe--overwhelming thought!--would become his wife. He had little doubt of that; her farewell glance, after her father's back was turned, was sweet with promises and beseechments, and a brief note from her early the next morning dissipated his last doubts.

"My poor Senhor Da Costa," she wrote, "I have lain awake all night thinking of thee. Why ruin thy life for a mere abstraction? Canst thou not make peace!--Thy friend, Ianthe."

He kissed the note; then, his wits abnormally sharpened, he set to work to devise how to meet his brother, and even as he was meditating how to trick him, his heart was full of affection for his little Vidal. Poor Vidal! How he must have suffered to lose his beautiful wife!

There were days on which Joseph's business or pleasure took him past his brother's house, though he always walked on the further side, and Uriel now set himself to keep watch at his study window from morning to night, the pair of Dutch mirrors fixed slantingly outside the window enabling him to see all the street life without being seen. After three days, his patience was rewarded by the reflected image of the portly pillar of the synagogue, and with him his little boy of six. He ran downstairs and into the street and caught up the boy in his arms--

"Oh, Vidal!" he said, real affection struggling in his voice.

"Thou!" said Joseph, staggering with the shock, and trembling at the sound of his submerged name. Then, recovering himself, he said angrily, "Pollute not my Daniel with thy touch."

"He is my nephew. I love him, too! How beautiful he is!" And he kissed the wondering little fellow. He refused to put him down. He ran towards his own door. He begged Vidal to give him a word in pity of his loneliness. Joseph looked fearfully up and down the street. No Jew was in sight. He slipped hastily through the door. From that moment Uriel played his portly brother like a chess-piece, which should make complicated moves and think it made them of its own free will. Gradually, by secret conversations, daily renewed, Joseph, fired with enthusiasm and visions of the glory that would redound upon him in the community--for he was now a candidate for the dignity of treasurer--won Uriel back to Judaism. And when the faith of the revert was quite fixed, Joseph made great talk thereof, and interceded with the Rabbis.

Uriel Acosta was given a document of confession of his errors to sign; he promised to live henceforward as a true Jew, and the ban was removed. On the Sabbath he went to the synagogue, and was called up to read in the Law. The elders came to shake him by the hand; a wave of emotion traversed the congregation. Uriel, mentally blinking at all this novel sunshine, had moments of forgetfulness of his sardonic hypocrisy, thrilled to be in touch with humanity again, and moved by its forgiving good-will. The half-circle of almond and lemon trees from Portugal, planted in gaily-painted tubs before the Holy Ark, swelled his breast with tender, tearful memories of youth and the sun-lands. And as Ianthe's happy eyes smiled upon him from the gallery, the words of the Prophet Joel sang in his ears: "And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten."

It was a glad night when Dom Diego and Ianthe sat again at his table, religiously victualled this time, and with them his beloved brother Joseph, not the least happy of the guests in the reconciliation with Uriel and the near prospect of the treasuryship. What a handsome creature he was! thought Uriel fondly. How dignified in manners, yet how sprightly in converse!--no graven lines of suffering on his brow, no gray in his hair. The old wine gurgled, the old memories glowed. Joseph was let into the secret of the engagement--which was not to be published for some months--but was too sure of the part he had played to suspect he had been played with. He sang the Hebrew grace jubilantly after the meal, and Ianthe's sweet voice chimed in happily. Ere the brothers parted, Uriel had extracted a promise that little Daniel should be lent him for a few days to crown his happiness and brighten the great lonely house for the coming of the bride.

XII

Uriel Acosta sat at dinner with little Daniel, feasting his eyes on the fresh beauty of the boy, whose prattle had made the last two days delightful. Daniel had been greatly exercised to find that his great big uncle could not talk Dutch, and that he must talk Portuguese--which was still kept up in families--to be understood. He had hitherto imagined that grown-up people knew everything. Pedro, his black face agrin with delight, waited solicitously upon the little fellow.

He changed his meat plate now, and helped him lavishly to tart. "Cream?" said Uriel, tendering the jug.

"No, no!" cried Daniel, with a look of horror and a violent movement of repulsion.

Uriel chuckled. "What! Little boys not like cream! We shall find cats shuddering at milk next." And pouring the contents of the jug lavishly over his own triangle of tart, he went on with his meal.

But little Daniel was staring at him with awe struck vision, forgetting to eat.

"Uncle," he cried at last, "thou art not a Jew."

Uriel laughed uneasily. "Little boys should eat and not talk."

"But, Uncle! We may not eat milk after meat."

"Well, well, then, little Rabbi!" And Uriel pushed his plate away and pinched the child's ear fondly.

But when the child went home he prattled of his uncle's transgressions, and Joseph hurried down, storming at this misleading of his boy, and this breach of promise to the synagogue. Uriel retorted angrily with that native candor of his which made it impossible for him long to play a part.

"I am but an ape among apes," he said, using his pet private sophism.

"Say rather an ape among lynxes, who will spy thee out," said Joseph, more hotly. "Thy double-dealing will be discovered, and I shall become the laughing-stock of the congregation."

It was the beginning of a second quarrel--fiercer, bitterer than the first. Joseph denounced Uriel privily to Dom Diego, who thundered at the heretic in his turn.

"I give not my daughter to an ape," he retorted, when Uriel had expounded himself as usual.

"Ianthe loves the ape; 'tis her concern," Uriel was stung into rejoining.

"Nay, 'tis my concern. By Heaven, I'll grandsire no gorillas!"

"Methinks in Porto thou wast an ape thyself," cried Uriel, raging.

"Dog!" shrieked the old physician, his venerable countenance contorted; "dost count it equal to deceive the Christians and thine own brethren?" And he flung from the house.

Uriel wrote to Ianthe. She replied--

"I asked thee to make thy peace. Thou hast made bitterer war. I cannot fight against my father and all Israel. Farewell!"

Uriel's face grew grim: the puckers in his brow that her fingers had touched showed once more as terrible lines of suffering; his teeth were clenched. The old look of the hunted man came back. He took out her first note, which he kept nearest his heart, and re-read it slowly--

"Why ruin thy life for a mere abstraction? Canst thou not make peace?"

A mere abstraction! Ah! Why had that not warned him of the woman's calibre? Nay, why had he forgotten--and here he had a vivid vision of a little girl bringing in Passover cakes--her training in a double life? Not that woman needed that--Dom Diego was right. False, frail creatures! No sympathy with principles, no recognition of the great fight he had made. Tears of self-pity started to his eyes. Well, she had, at least, saved him from cowardly surrender. The old fire flamed in his veins. He would fight to the death.

And as he tore up her notes, a strange sense of relief mingled with the bitterness and fierceness of his mood; relief to think that never again would he be called upon to jabber with the apes, to grasp their loathly paws, to join in their solemnly absurd posturings, never would he be tempted from the peace and seclusion of his book-lined study. The habits of fifteen years tugged him back like ropes of which he had exhausted the tether.

He seated himself at his desk, and took up his pen to resume his manuscript. "All evils come from not following Right Reason and the Law of Nature." He wrote on for hours, pausing from time to time to select his Latin phrases. Suddenly a hollow sense of the futility of his words, of Reason, of Nature, of everything, overcame him. What was this dreadful void at his breast? He leaned his tired, aching head on his desk and sobbed, as little Daniel had never sobbed yet.

XIII

To the congregation at large, ignorant of these inner quarrels, the backsliding of Uriel was made clear by the swine-flesh which the Christian butcher now openly delivered at the house. Horrified zealots remonstrated with him in the streets, and once or twice it came to a public affray. The outraged elders pressed for a renewal of the ban; but the Rabbis hesitated, thinking best, perhaps, henceforward to ignore the thorn in their sides.

It happened that a Spaniard and an Italian came from London to seek admission into the Jewish fold, Christian sceptics not infrequently finding peace in the bosom of the older faith. These would-be converts, hearing the rumors anent Uriel Acosta, bethought themselves of asking his advice. When the House of Judgment heard that he had bidden them beware of the intolerable yoke of the Rabbis, its members felt that this was too much. Uriel Acosta was again excommunicated.

And now began new years of persecution, more grievous, more determined than ever. Again his house was stoned, his name a byword, his walks abroad a sport to the little ones of a new generation. And now even the worst he had feared came to pass. Gradually his brother, who had refused on various pretexts to liberate his capital, encroached on his property. Uriel dared not complain to the civil magistrates, by whom he was already suspect as an Atheist; besides, he still knew no Dutch, and in worldly matters was as a child. Only his love for his brother turned to deadly hate, which was scarcely intensified when Joseph led Ianthe under the marriage canopy.

So seven terrible years passed, and Uriel, the lonely, prematurely aged, found himself sinking into melancholia. He craved for human companionship, and the thought that he could find it save among Jews never occurred to him. And at last he humbled himself, and again sought forgiveness of the synagogue.

But this time he was not to be readmitted into the fold so lightly. Imitating the gloomy forms of the Inquisition, from which they had suffered so much, the elders joined with the Rabbis in devising a penance, which would brand the memory of the heretic's repentance upon the minds of his generation.

Uriel consented to the penance, scarcely knowing what they asked of him. Anything rather than another day of loneliness; so into the great synagogue, densely filled with men and women, the penitent was led, clothed in a black mourning garb and holding a black candle. He whose earliest dread had been to be shamed before men, was made to mount a raised stage, wherefrom he read a long scroll of recantation, confessing all his ritual sins and all his intellectual errors, and promising to live till death as a true Jew. The _Chacham_, who stood near the sexton, solemnly intoned from the seventy-eighth Psalm: "But He, being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity and destroyed them not: yea, many a time turned He his anger away and did not stir up all his wrath. For He remembered that they were but flesh: a wind that passeth away and cometh not again."

He whispered to Uriel, who went to a corner of the synagogue, stripped as far as the girdle, and received with dumb lips thirty-nine lashes from a scourge. Then, bleeding, he sat on the ground, and heard the ban solemnly removed. Finally, donning his garments, he stretched himself across the threshold, and the congregation passed out over his body, some kicking it in pious loathing, some trampling on it viciously. The penitent remained rigid, his face pressed to the ground. Only, when his brother Joseph trampled upon him, he knew by subtle memories of his tread and breathing who the coward was.

When the last of the congregants had passed over his body, Uriel arose and went through the pillared portico, speaking no word. The congregants, standing in groups about the canal-bridge, still discussing the terrible scene, moved aside, shuddering, silenced, as like a somnambulist that strange figure went by, the shoulders thrown back, the head high, in superb pride, the nostrils quivering, but the face as that of the dead. Never more was he seen of men. Shut up in his study, he worked feverishly day and night, writing his autobiography. _Exemplar Humanae Vitae_--an Ensample of Human Life, he called it, with tragic pregnancy. Scarcely a word of what the world calls a man's life--only the dry account of his abstract thought, of his progress to broader standpoints, to that great discovery--"All evils come from not following Right Reason and the Law of Nature." And therewith a virulent denunciation of Judaism and its Rabbis: "They would crucify Jesus even now if He appeared again." And, garnering the wisdom of his life-experience, he bade every man love his neighbor, not because God bids him, but by virtue of being a man. What Judaism, what Christianity contains of truth belongs not to revealed, but to natural religion. Love is older than Moses; it binds men together. The Law of Moses separates them: one brings harmony, the other discord into human society.

His task was drawing to an end. His long fight with the Rabbis was ending, too. "My cause is as far superior to theirs as truth is more excellent than falsehood: for whereas they are advocates for a fraud that they may make a prey and slaves of men, I contend nobly in the cause of Truth, and assert the natural rights of mankind, whom it becomes to live suitably to the dignity of their nature, free from the burden of superstitions and vain ceremonies."

It was done. He laid down his quill and loaded his pair of silver-mounted pistols. Then he placed himself at the window as of yore, to watch in his two mirrors for the passing of his brother Joseph. He knew his hand would not fail him. The days wore on, but each sunrise found him at his post, as it was reflected sanguinarily in those fatal mirrors.

One afternoon Joseph came, but Daniel was with him. And Uriel laid down his pistol and waited, for he yet loved the boy. And another time Joseph passed by with Ianthe. And Uriel waited.

But the third time Joseph came alone. Gabriel's heart gave a great leap of exultation. He turned, took careful aim, and fired. The shot rang through the startled neighborhood, but Joseph fled in panic, uninjured, shouting.

Uriel dropped his pistol, half in surprise at his failure, half in despairing resignation.

"There is no justice," he murmured. How gray the sky was! What a cold, bleak world!

He went to the door and bolted it. Then he took up the second pistol. Irrelevantly he noted the "G." graven on it. Gabriel! Gabriel! What memories his old name brought back! There were tears in his eyes. Why had he changed to Uriel? Gabriel! Gabriel! Was that his mother's voice calling him, as she had called him in sunny Portugal, amid the vines and the olive-trees?

Worn out, world-weary, aged far beyond his years, beaten in the long fight, despairing of justice on earth and hopeless of any heaven, Uriel Acosta leaned droopingly against his beloved desk, put the pistol's cold muzzle to his forehead, pressed the trigger, and fell dead across the open pages of his _Exemplar Humanae Vitae_, the thin, curling smoke lingering a little ere it dissipated, like the futile spirit of a passing creature--"a wind that passeth away and cometh not again."

THE TURKISH MESSIAH

SCROLL THE FIRST

I

In the year of the world five thousand four hundred and eight, sixteen hundred and forty-eight years after the coming of Christ, and in the twenty-third year of his own life on earth, Sabbataï Zevi, men said, declared himself at Smyrna to his disciples--the long-expected Messiah of the Jews. They were gathered together in the winter midnight, a little group of turbaned, long-robed figures, the keen stars innumerable overhead, the sea stretching sombrely at their feet, and the swarming Oriental city, a black mystery of roofs, minarets, and cypresses, dominated by the Acropolis, asleep on the slopes of its snow-clad hill.

Anxiously they had awaited their Prophet's emergence from his penitential lustration in the icy harbor, and as he now stood before them in naked majesty, the water dripping from his black beard and hair, a perfect manly figure, scarred only by self-inflicted scourgings, awe and wonder held them breathless with expectation. Inhaling that strange fragrance of divinity that breathed from his body, and penetrated by the kingliness of his mien, the passionate yet spiritual beauty of his dark, dreamy face, they awaited the great declaration. Some common instinct told them that he would speak to-night, he, the master of mystic silences.

The _Zohar_--that inspired book of occult wisdom--had long since foretold this year as the first of the epoch of regeneration, and ever since the shrill ram's horn had heralded its birth, the souls of Sabbataï Zevi's disciples had been tense for the great moment. Surely it was to announce himself at last that he had summoned them, blessed partakers in the greatest moment of human and divine history.

What would he say?

Austere, silent, hedged by an inviolable sanctity, he stood long motionless, realizing, his followers felt, the Cabalistic teaching as to the Messiah, incarnating the Godhead through the primal Adam, pure, sinless, at one with himself and elemental Nature. At last he raised his luminous eyes heavenwards, and said in clear, calm tones one word--

YAHWEH!

He had uttered the dread, forbidden Name of God. For an instant the turbaned figures stood rigid with awe, their blood cold with an ineffable terror, then as they became conscious again of the stars glittering on, the sea plashing unruffled, the earth still solid under their feet, a great hoarse shout of holy joy flew up to the shining stars. "_Messhiach! Messhiach!_ The Messiah!"

The Kingdom was come.

The Messianic Era had begun.

II

How long, O Lord, how long?

That desolate cry of the centuries would be heard no more.

While Israel was dispersed and the world full of sin, the higher and lower worlds had been parted, and the four letters of God's name had been dissevered, not to be pronounced in unison. For God Himself had been made imperfect by the impeding of His moral purpose.

But the Messiah had pronounced the Tetragrammaton, and God and the Creation were One again. O mystic transport! O ecstatic reunion! The joyous shouts died into a more beatific silence.

From some near mosque there broke upon the midnight air the solemn voice of the _muëddin_ chanting the _adán_--

"God is most great. I testify that there is no God but God. I testify that Mohammed is God's Prophet."

Sabbataï shivered. Was it the cold air or some indefinable foreboding?

III

It was the day of Messianic dreams. In the century that was over, strange figures had appeared of prophets and martyrs and Hebrew visionaries. From obscurity and the far East came David Reubeni, journeying to Italy by way of Nubia to obtain firearms to rid Palestine of the Moslem--a dark-faced dwarf, made a skeleton by fasts, riding on his white horse up to the Vatican to demand an interview, and graciously received by Pope Clement. In Portugal--where David Reubeni, heralded by a silken standard worked with the Ten Commandments, had been received by the King with an answering pageantry of banners and processions--a Marrano maiden had visions of Moses and the angels, undertook to lead her suffering kinsfolk to the Holy Land, and was burnt by the Inquisition. Diogo Pires--handsome and brilliant and young, and a Christian by birth--returned to the faith of his fathers, and, under the name of Solomon Molcho, passed his brief life in quest of prophetic ecstasies and the pangs of martyrdom. He sought to convert the Pope to Judaism, and predicting a great flood at Rome, which came to pass, with destructive earthquakes at Lisbon, was honored by the Vatican, only to meet a joyful death at Mantua, where, by order of the Emperor, he was thrown upon the blazing funeral pyre. And in these restless and terrible times for the Jews, inward dreams mingled with these outward portents. The _Zohar_--the Book of Illumination, composed in the thirteenth century--printed now for the first time, shed its dazzling rays further and further over every Ghetto.

The secrets reserved for the days of the Messiah had been revealed in it: Elijah, all the celestial conclave, angels, spirits, higher souls, and the Ten Spiritual Substances had united to inspire its composers, teach them the bi-sexual nature of the World-Principle, and discover to them the true significance of the _Torah_ (Law), hitherto hidden in the points and strokes of the Pentateuch, in its vowels and accents, and even in the potential transmutations of the letters of its words. Lurya, the great German Egyptian Cabalist, with Vital, the Italian alchemist, sojourned to the grave of Simon bar Yochai, its fabled author. Lurya himself, who preferred the silence and loneliness of the Nile country to the noise of the Talmud-School, who dressed in white on Sabbath, and wore a fourfold garment to signify the four letters of the Ineffable Name, and who by permutating these, could draw down spirits from Heaven, passed as the Messiah of the Race of Joseph, precursor of the true Messiah of the Race of David. The times were ripe. "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," cried the Cabalists with one voice. The Jews had suffered so much and so long. Decimated for not dying of the Black Death, pillaged and murdered by the Crusaders, hounded remorselessly from Spain and Portugal, roasted by thousands at the _autos-da-fé_ of the Inquisition, everywhere branded and degraded, what wonder if they felt that their cup was full, that redemption was at hand, that the Lord would save Israel and set His people in triumph over the heathen! "I believe with a perfect faith that the Messiah will come, and though His coming be delayed, nevertheless will I daily expect Him."

So ran their daily creed.

In Turkey what time the Jews bore themselves proudly, rivalling the Venetians in the shipping trade, and the Grand Viziers in the beauty of their houses, gardens, and kiosks; when Joseph was Duke of Naxos, and Solomon Ashkenazi Envoy Extraordinary to Venice; when Tiberias was turned into a new Jerusalem and planted with mulberry-trees; when prosperous physicians wrote elegant Latin verses; in those days the hope of the Messiah was faint and dim. But it flamed up fiercely enough when their strength and prestige died down with that of the Empire, and the harem and the Janissaries divided power with the Prætorians of the Spahis, and the Jews were the first objects of oppression ready to the hand of the unloosed pashas, and the black turban marked them off from the Moslem. It was a Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire who wrote the religious code of "The Ordered Table" to unify Israel and hasten the coming of the Messiah, and his dicta were accepted far and wide.

And not only did Israel dream of the near Messiah, the rumor of Him was abroad among the nations. Men looked again to the mysterious Orient, the cradle of the Divine. In the far isle of England sober Puritans were awaiting the Millennium and the Fifth Monarchy of the Apocalypse--the four "beasts" of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman monarchies having already passed away--and when Manasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam petitioned Cromwell to readmit the Jews, his plea was that thereby they might be dispersed through all nations, and the Biblical prophecies as to the eve of the Messianic age be thus fulfilled. Verily, the times were ripe for the birth of a Messiah.

IV