Chapter XVII

Katharine looked up from the queer, absorbing letter, four pages of big plain note with the printed address of the Hospital, to meet the intent black stare of the representative of the House of Hazaël....

She said, returning the letter to the envelope, and keeping it in her hand as she went back to her chair opposite him:

"Your grandfather--was an old man?"

"He was nearly a hundred years of age, and mentally in topping condition when the War happened and swept away all his sons and grandsons too, except my brother and myself. And that broke his heart. Peace be upon him!" added John without intending it.

"Peace be upon him!" echoed Katharine Forbis. "I think that is a beautiful thing to say. He would have said it for my dear father had he known!" she added. "But they have met by now, in that good place where all good men foregather. Do you not think they have?"

"My grandfather was a devout Jew," said the big fleshy-lipped mouth opposite her.

"And my father was a faithful Catholic," said Miss Forbis. "And Catholics and Jews who have served God according to the light He gave them, are equal in His sight. Do you not believe so?"

"I've never given much time to theological and--ar--ar--dogmatic questions. But at Lloyds it stands that all ships are good ships if the insurance has been paid. Now as to these documents and things--" John reached down a long arm and hauled out from under his chair a business-like bag of shabby cowskin. "Here in this bag you see, I've got the whole caboodle!" (Really this was a very objectionable young man.) "But first, if you don't mind, the rings have got to be verified. That black agate you're wearing--and this of mine...."

He wagged a huge third finger. Katharine repressed a sense of this big, florid, hook-nosed young City insurance-broker's having taken a liberty, when she admitted, glancing at one of the large, beautiful hands lying lightly clasped together on her black lap:

"It is odd. This ring--which is a family heirloom worn up to the day of his death by my dear father--and that you have on, are practically identical...."

"With this difference, that mine is the original intaglio, and yours a facsimile of the design in relief. The 'mate to the gem' I rather think they'd call it." He looked at the black agate with the head of Hercules shouldering the club, and crowned with the lion-mask, once the signet of Philoremus Fabius, given by his patron to Hazaël the Jew.

"Would they? ... Oh, well, it's possible!" Katharine admitted. He went on:

"I was given to understand that this is no end of an heirloom. Been handed down in my grandfather's branch of the family--the trunk, I suppose I ought to call it--since the year 308...." He rubbed the antique greenish-gold setting on his sleeve, and looked at it closely, then drew it from his big third finger, and rose up from his chair.

It seemed to Katharine Forbis as though he would never have finished getting up. With a strange sensation she also realised that she was up against Antiquity and Tradition, in the person of this Territorial Tommy grafted upon a Cornhill insurance-broker; who spoke the colloquial English of the City, mingled with the slang of the camp and the trenches,--as a foreign language painstakingly acquired. Great as was her sense of race, it was belittled by Hazel's, with that history behind him that was written by the Eternal Finger on the living rock of Sinai....

And he was towering over her as she sat there--salient, masterful--endued with an authority ancient as the hills. Saying in his deep bass tones as he bent over her:

"It need not take a moment, Miss Forbis, but the form is absolutely necessary. It proves beyond doubt that you are you, and that I am--whom I say I am! ... May I ask you to hold out your left hand!"

She obeyed him, lightly resting the downward-turned palm of the hand that wore the black onyx upon the upturned palm of Hazel's. Now he brought the faces of the rings together, carefully adjusting them until the intaglio of his own ring covered the relievo of its counterpart, and the gems wedded into one chipped and shabby black onyx square....

"Good!" The young London business man was once more merged in the Jew of Syria. "There could be no proof more convincing than the marriage of these gems." He lifted his hand, and the rings were two again--and Katharine saw him return to his chair and become once more a large young London Territorial grafted on an insurance-broker, of Cornhill, E.C.

"Now I must hand you over these...." He was opening the cowskin bag, dipping in his big hands and bringing out--were these shrivelled things parchments? Wrapped in squares of faded yellowish silk, tanging the homely-sweet atmosphere of the room with myrrh and benzoin and other Eastern odours, spicy, pervasive, suggestive and queer. "First of all--" he handed the surprised Katharine the flat wallet of mouldy parchment sewn with antique silkworm gut--"this contains the original Title Deed of the Tower of Kir Saba, with the fields, streams, wells, vineyards and groves appertaining, granted to the Tribune Justus Martius of the Tenth Roman Legion by the divine Emperor Vespasian, on the tenth day of August in the second year of his reign...."

He paused to explain that the year was A.D. 70, when the old Roman Johnnies under Titus took the temple at Jerusalem, and then dealt with the remainder of the documents from the deed of mortgage between Sir Hew Forbis, and Issachar Ben Hazaël in the year 1146, down through the lengthy list of accounts and vouchers, the latest cleanly typed in purple ink on yellowish Levantine foolscap in the Jaffa offices of Messrs. Abel Manasseh, Ephraim and Co. Winding up:

"And I think you'll agree with me, Miss Forbis,--what with Wars, earthquakes, locusts and dry seasons; the raids of the Saracens and the Third and Fourth Crusades--not forgetting the Fifth in 1197 when Pope Innocent III issued a Bull dooming the people of the Ten Tribes to perpetual servitude,--that during what we Jews have got some excuse for calling the Dark Ages--there was nothing doing to any extent in the wine- and olive-trade."

"You talk," Katharine murmured, "as though all this happened yesterday."

"Speaking in my sense," said John Hazel, "it happened in December last...."

He went on,--seeming to feel his way,--garnishing his sentences less and less with the argot of the City and the slang of the trenches,--falling unconsciously more and more into the dignified archaic English of the translated typescript:

"Christianity had a grudge to work off on us Hebrews. When one of those jolly old mediæval jossers wanted to cleanse his crime-stained soul, he had it rubbed into him at G.H.Q. that the best Sapolio was the blood of a Jew. If kings or nobles wanted to raise an extra bit of pocket-money, they'd only to squeeze a Jew between a brace of paving-stones"--Katharine shuddered--"and drain away the gold. Between imposts and confiscations, spoliations, expulsions and massacres, not only in Syria but in West, North and Central Europe,--we Hazaëls had hardly a fighting-chance to develop our own, or another's property! The lands of Kir Saba had long lain desert round the ruins of the Tower,--when my ancestors were driven into Spain, to join the Sephardim there.... In Spain we struck root and prospered, they tell me. Near the end of the fourteenth century Spain became too hot for us. With luck at low-water-mark and all the hounds of Torquemada's Inquisition baying at our blistered heels, we flew the coop into Mohammedan Turkey--and under the protection of the Infidel we spat upon--Sultan Bayazet the Second--settled on friendly soil and held up our heads again. By the middle of the Eighteenth Century things began to pick up. An astonishing discovery, originally touched upon by Shakespeare in _The Merchant of Venice_ blazed like a meteor--I've seen meteors blaze in France, but they were nothing to the German star-shell!--across the mentality of intellectual Christendom. 'The Jew pays better as a citizen than as a pariah. Pen him in the Ghetto and he cuts no ice--because Gentile laws cripple his energies. Let him out--he will be more useful still! His money is the golden manure of successful speculation. His Jewish brains are the pith and marrow of every progressive plan. In Law, Literature, Science, Poetry, Music and Art the alien leads--only God knows the reason!'"

The great clenched fist struck the mantelshelf heavily, making its vases of ancient Persian pottery tremble on their ebony pedestals:

"Fools! When He showered these flaming gifts upon the leaders of His Chosen People--did He not know that the Jew of all men would use to most advantage what he had received. So, from the kick-ball of the Dark Ages he has become the hub of Civilisation. The golden grease that oils the World's axles as it spins between the Poles!"

He pulled up and looked at his listener like a man suddenly awakened. His big black eyes burned with a dull red glow in their gaunt caves, and his bluish-shaded temples and prominent forehead shone with little beads of wet.

"These things were nothing to me once," he explained with a rather embarrassed shrug of his shoulders, "and now they pretty well run the show. Awfully sorry if I've talked too much about ourselves, Miss Forbis. But an explanation's necessary, especially after"--his big white teeth showed as he smiled--"our failure to hand in our accounts for nearly nine hundred years. Of course we have kept a base in Alexandria since the beginning of the Fourth Century, and later we established branches in Smyrna, Constantinople, Malta and so on.... But it wasn't until 1833 that we got foothold in Palestine and the vineyards of Kir Saba began to bear again...."

"You make wine there?" Katharine asked with interest.

"We used to, on rather a big scale. We have, or rather, we had vaults on the property, on an area of about 5 _hectares_--(we use the French method of mensuration)--with cellars and fermentation-rooms for use in vintage time, and an ice-machine and dynamo for running the machinery.... The Turks have smashed all that by now, and blown up the vaults I daresay,--as they did our vaults at Rehon and Zicron-Reuben. But I don't expect they let much of the wine run to waste. There are too many German officers with the Sultan's Army Corps--and our Medocs and Sauternes--sweet wines--to say nothing of our special Tokay--would be likely to appeal to 'em! Now may I trouble you with this cheque for a balance due to you."

He handed Miss Forbis a pale green-and-blue slip, representing a draft Payable to Order upon a London Branch of the _Crédit Lyonnais_ for £8,149.16.10, and requested her acknowledgment for the same.

"Please to write 'Received by cheque--'" (Did he guess what a wonderful windfall that eight thousand dropped into her lap at this pinched juncture, seemed to Miss Forbis of Kerr's Arbour, with an income reduced to microscopic proportions by the War-slump in Home and Foreign Securities.) "That's the best way to word it." He took the acknowledgment from her, adding: "That's posh!--I mean, correct! Perhaps you would kindly keep my card, in case you needed help of any kind--that I could possibly give."

Something in the tone made Miss Forbis look round from the Chippendale writing-chair in front of the old rosewood bureau to whose drawer she had transferred the papers, and the pale green and blue cheque on the _Crédit Lyonnais_.

"You are most kind, Mr. Hazel, but there can be no legitimate reason why I should trouble you...."

"There's a reason, if it comes to that, and a thundering good one!"

She laid down her pen and turned to him in smiling inquiry:

"We of the House of Hazaël are bound to serve you and yours.... It follows that we do so."

"You do not mean that you are bound by any provision or clause in that old mortgage of the Tower?"

He returned in the calm authoritative tone that alternated so oddly with his modern slanginess:

"I speak of a great debt of gratitude incurred by a remote ancestor of mine to an early founder of your House--Philoremus Florens Fabius, Prætor of the Egyptian taxes at Alexandria--at the close of the Third Century, in my ancestor's early youth."

"'Philoremus Florens Fabius, Prætor of Egyptian taxes at Alexandria.' ..."

She leaned her cheek upon her hand, thoughtfully repeating the name. And all that was noble, patrician and austere in her proud, frank, healthful, vigorous beauty irresistibly appealed to the man who looked on her. Not at all in the sexual sense, though his was a sensuous nature. But once and for all he throned her in his heart as the noblest, dearest, most worship-worthy of living women; and knew that she would reign there as long as life should last....

She seemed to have forgotten John, so unrebuked he feasted, revelling in the grace of the long limbs, the fair hands lying folded together in her lap, the exquisite bend of the musing head upon the long white throat. No beauty she owned but went home to him with a sudden poignant joy of recognition, such as a man might experience, if, after years of hopeless separation, he were to find himself face to face with a beloved friend:--"As if a chap with a bayonet had jabbed me in the ribs!" he thought,--puzzled by the bliss that hurt,--reverting to Private Hazel.... And then he caught his breath, for her eyes had come back to his again. And they were kind as she asked:

"This money--this eight thousand pounds odd, you have just paid me. Can your firm afford to part with so much, when you have suffered such losses since the Turks joined the War?"

"We've got a bit put by against a rainy day." His face was mask-like in imperturbability as he recalled that trifling balance of three-hundred-and-eighty-thousand. Noting the smoothing of the slight, anxious line between Miss Forbis' handsome eyebrows, John guessed that the family were not over-flush. Who knew but that the eight thousand hadn't dropped into the lap of Katharine in the very nick of time. Proving his acumen, for indeed those unexpected thousands were a Godsend. But she was saying with a rather bewildered smile:

"I shall take a little time to get quite used to the idea of having property in the Holy Land.... And how odd that there should be one Kerr's Arbour here--and another over in Palestine--and that my father should never have heard of the existence of such a place!"

"The papers will make all that clear to you.... And--'Kerr's Arbour' is merely a corruption of 'Kir Saba,' as Kir Saba is a contraction of Kirjath Saba. The Tower of Kir Saba in Palestine has given this place its name.... 'The Walled Place of Saba' is the English translation from the Hebrew."

"Good Heavens! ..." murmured Katharine.

The huge dark man got up from his chair and leaned an elbow on the mantelshelf, and went on speaking in a deep slow tone that seemed the very voice of Time....

"The Philistines built the stronghold in the Year of the World 1160--when they came from the nor'west in their bird-beaked galleys, with shields set round the carven bulwarks, and scarlet lug-sails.... They set their ships on waggons drawn by great teams of oxen, and pushed up from the southward into Northern Syria and took the Coastal Plain.... Ashdod was Aasgaard then, and the Sons of Odin held revel there--with deer and hogs roasted whole, and barley-loaves baked in the ashes, and wine and beer and mead. Making sacrifices and libations to the stone image of their bearded long-staffed god, with the high hat and travelling mantle--just as blue-painted Teutons with long yellow hair, worshipped the wooden effigy in the clay, wattle and tree-trunk temples of Alemannia--and under the tall hanging-stones of Britain's Holy Rings.... But it was razed to the ground--I speak of the stronghold later known as Kir Saba--in the time of Solomon the King. And when King Solomon,--peace be upon him!--gave the City of Gaza to Balkis, Queen of Sheba,--woman-like she coveted, and asked, and got for her asking, the new Tower built by the King among the vineyards north of Joppa--that were famous for the greatness and sweetness of their grapes."

He removed a great brown hand from the marble to rub his forehead, and went on in the deep slow tone:

"Long after the glory of the King, like the beauty of the Queen--had passed into a dusty legend,--the Philistines possessed the land once more. And Kir Saba was destroyed again,--and again rebuilt--and burned, as I have said, by the Kharezmian Tartars in the year of the Christian Era, 1244."

He coughed, stuck a thumb in his belt and continued in quite a different tone:

"As for the building as it stands now--supposing the Turks have left any of it,--it dates from somewhere in the Tenth Century, rather more than a hundred and seventy years before the time of Sir Hew."