Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Again he fixed his eyes on Unorna’s face and faintly smiled. Apparently she was displeased.

  “What is it that you would say?” she asked coldly. “What is this that you tell us of rocks and rain, and death-wounds, and the rest? You say you loved me once — that was a madness. You say that I never loved you — that, at least, is truth. Is that your story? It is indeed short enough, and I marvel at the many words in which you have put so little!”

  She laughed in a hard tone. But Israel Kafka’s eyes grew dark and the sombre fire beamed in them as he spoke again. The weary, tortured smile left his wan lips, and his pale face grew stern.

  “Laugh, laugh, Unorna!” he cried. “You do not laugh alone. And yet — I love you still, I love you so well in spite of all that I cannot laugh at you as I would, even though I were to see you again clinging to the rock and imploring it to take pity on your thirst. And he who dies for you, Unorna — of him you ask nothing, save that he will crawl away and die alone, and not disturb your delicate life with such an unseemly sight.”

  “You talk of death!” exclaimed Unorna scornfully. “You talk of dying for me because you are ill to-day. To-morrow, Keyork Arabian will have cured you, and then, for aught I know, you will talk of killing me instead. This is child’s talk, boy’s talk. If we are to listen to you, you must be more eloquent. You must give us such a tale of woe as shall draw tears from our eyes and sobs from our breasts — then we will applaud you and let you go. That shall be your reward.”

  The Wanderer glanced at her in surprise. There was a bitterness in her tone of which he had not believed her soft voice capable.

  “Why do you hate him so if he is mad?” he asked.

  “The reason is not far to seek,” said Kafka. “This woman here — God made her crooked-hearted! Love her, and she will hate you as only she has learned how to hate. Show her that cold face of yours, and she will love you so that she will make a carpet of her pride for you to walk on — ay, or spit on either, if you deign to be so kind. She has a wonderful kind of heart, for it freezes when you burn it, and melts when you freeze it.”

  “Are you mad, indeed?” asked the Wanderer, suddenly planting himself in front of Kafka. “They told me so — I can almost believe it.”

  “No — I am not mad yet,” answered the younger man, facing him fearlessly. “You need not come between me and her. She can protect herself. You would know that if you knew what I saw her do with you, first when I came here.”

  “What did she do?” The Wanderer turned quickly as he stood, and looked at Unorna.

  “Do not listen to his ravings,” she said. The words seemed weak and poorly chosen, and there was a strange look in her face as though she were either afraid or desperate, or both.

  “She loves you,” said Israel Kafka calmly. “And you do not know it. She has power over you, as she has over me, but the power to make you love her she has not. She will destroy you, and your state will be no better than mine to-day. We shall have moved on a step, for I shall be dead and you will be the madman, and she will have found another to love and to torture. The world is full of them. Her altar will never lack sacrifices.”

  The Wanderer’s face was grave.

  “You may be mad or not,” he said. “I cannot tell. But you say monstrous things, and you shall not repeat them.”

  “Did she not say that I might speak?” asked Kafka with a bitter laugh.

  “I will keep my word,” said Unorna. “You seek your own destruction. Find it in your own way. It will not be the less sure. Speak — say what you will. You shall not be interrupted.”

  The Wanderer drew back, not understanding what was passing, nor why Unorna was so long-suffering.

  “Say all you have to say,” she repeated, coming forward so that she stood directly in front of Israel Kafka. “And you,” she added, speaking to the Wanderer, “leave him to me. He is quite right — I can protect myself if I need any protection.”

  “You remember how we parted, Unorna?” said Kafka. “It is a month to-day. I did not expect a greeting of you when I came back, or, if I did expect it, I was foolish and unthinking. I should have known you better. I should have known that there is one half of your word which you never break — the cruel half, and one thing which you cannot forgive, and which is my love for you. And yet that is the very thing which I cannot forget. I have come back to tell you so. You may as well know it.”

  Unorna’s expression grew cold, as she saw that he abandoned the strain of reproach and spoke once more of his love for her.

  “Yes, I see what you mean,” he said, very quietly. “You mean to show me by your face that you give me no hope. I should have known that by other things I have seen here. God knows, I have seen enough! But I meant to find you alone. I went to your home, I saw you go out, I followed you, I entered here — I heard all — and I understood, for I know your power, as this man cannot know it. Do you wonder that I followed you? Do you despise me? Do you think I still care, because you do? Love is stronger than the woman loved and for her we do deeds of baseness, unblushingly, which she would forbid our doing, and for which she despises us when she hates us, and loves us the more dearly when she loves us at all. You hate me — then despise me, too, if you will. It is too late to care. I followed you like a spy, I saw what I expected to see, I have suffered what I knew I should suffer. You know that I have been away during this whole month, and that I have travelled thousands of leagues in the hope of forgetting you.”

  “And yet I fancied I had seen you within the month,” Unorna said, with a cruel smile.

  “They say that ghosts haunt the places they have loved,” answered Kafka unmoved. “If that be true I may have troubled your dreams and you may have seen me. I have come back broken in body and in heart. I think I have come back to die here. The life is going out of me, but before it is quite gone I can say two things. I can tell you that I know you at last, and that, in spite of the horror of knowing what you are, I love you still.”

  “Am I so very horrible?” she asked scornfully.

  “You know what you are, better than I can tell you, but not better than I know. I know even the secret meaning of your moods and caprices. I know why you are willing to listen to me, this last time, so patiently, with only now and then a sneer and a cutting laugh.”

  “Why?”

  “In order to make me suffer the more. You will never forgive me now, for you know that I know, and that alone is a sin past all forgiveness, and over and above that I am guilty of the crime of loving when you have no love for me.”

  “And as a last resource you come to me and recapitulate your misdeeds. The plan is certainly original, though it lacks wit.”

  “There is least wit where there is most love, Unorna. I take no account of the height of my folly when I see the depth of my love, which has swallowed up myself and all my life. In the last hour I have known its depth and breadth and strength, for I have seen what it can bear. And why should I complain of it? Have I not many times said that I would die for you willingly — and is it not dying for you to die of love for you? To prove my faith it were too easy a death. When I look into your face I know that there is in me the heart that made true Christian martyrs — —”

  Unorna laughed.

  “Would you be a martyr?” she asked.

  “Nor for your Faith — but for the faith I once had in you, and for the love that no martyrdom could kill. Ay — to prove that love I would die a hundred deaths — and to gain yours I would die the death eternal.”

  “And you would have deserved it. Have you not deserved enough already, enough of martyrdom, for tracking me to-day, following me stealthily, like a thief and a spy, to find out my ends and my doings?”

  “I love you, Unorna.”

  “And therefore you suspect me of unimaginable evil — and therefore you come out of your hiding-place and accuse me of things I have neither done nor thought of doing, building up falsehood upon lie, and lie upon falsehood in the attempt to ruin me in the eye
s of one who has my friendship and who is my friend. You are foolish to throw yourself upon my mercy, Israel Kafka.”

  “Foolish? Yes, and mad, too! And my madness is all you have left me — take it — it is yours! You cannot kill my love. Deny my words, deny your deeds! Let all be false in you — it is but one pain more, and my heart is not broken yet. It will bear another. Tell me that what I saw had no reality — that you did not make him sleep — here, on this spot, before my eyes — that you did not pour your love into his sleeping ears, that you did not command, implore, entreat — and fail! What is it all to me, whether you speak truth or not? Tell me it is not true that I would die a thousand martyrdoms for your sake, as you are, and if you were a thousand times worse than you are! Your wrong, your right, your truth, your falsehood, you yourself are swallowed up in the love I bear you! I love you always, and I will say it, and say it again — ah, your eyes! I love them, too! Take me into them, Unorna — whether in hate or love — but in love — yes — love — Unorna — golden Unorna!”

  With the cry on his lips — the name he had given her in other days — he made one mad step forwards, throwing out his arms as though to clasp her to him. But it was too late. Even while he had been speaking her mysterious influence had overpowered him, as he had known that it would, when she so pleased.

  She caught his two hands in the air, and pressed him back and held him against the tall slab. The whole pitilessness of her nature gleamed like a cold light in her white face.

  “There was a martyr of your race once,” she said in cruel tones. “His name was Simon Abeles. You talk of martyrdom! You shall know what it means — though it be too good for you, who spy upon the woman whom you say you love.”

  The hectic flush of passion sank from Israel Kafka’s cheek. Rigid, with outstretched arms and bent head, he stood against the ancient gravestone. Above him, as though raised to heaven in silent supplication, were the sculptured hands that marked the last resting-place of a Kohn.

  “You shall know now,” said Unorna. “You shall suffer indeed.”

  CHAPTER XV[*]

  [*] The deeds here described were done in Prague on the

  twenty-first day of February in the year 1694. Lazarus and

  his accomplice Levi Kurtzhandel, or Brevimanus, or “the

  short-handed,” were betrayed by their own people. Lazarus

  hanged himself in prison, and Levi suffered death by the

  wheel — repentant, it is said, and himself baptized. A full

  account of the trial, written in Latin, was printed, and a

  copy of it may be seen in the State Museum in Prague. The

  body of Simon Abeles was exhumed and rests in the Teyn

  Kirche, in the chapel on the left of the high altar. The

  slight extension of certain scenes not fully described in

  the Latin volume will be pardoned in a work of fiction.

  Unorna’s voice sank from the tone of anger to a lower pitch. She spoke quietly and very distinctly as though to impress every word upon the ear of the man who was in her power. The Wanderer listened, too, scarcely comprehending at first, but slowly yielding to the influence she exerted until the vision rose before him also with all its moving scenes, in all its truth and in all its horror. As in a dream the deeds that had been passed before him, the desolate burial-ground was peopled with forms and faces of other days, the gravestones rose from the earth and piled themselves into gloomy houses and remote courts and dim streets and venerable churches, the dry and twisted trees shrank down, and broadened and swung their branches as arms, and drew up their roots out of the ground as feet under them and moved hither and thither. And the knots and bosses and gnarls upon them became faces, dark, eagle-like and keen, and the creaking and crackling of the boughs and twigs under the piercing blast that swept by, became articulate and like the voices of old men talking angrily together. There were sudden changes from day to night and from night to day. In dark chambers crouching men took counsel of blood together under the feeble rays of a flickering lamp. In the uncertain twilight of winter, muffled figures lurked at the corner of streets, waiting for some one to pass, who must not escape them. As the Wanderer gazed and listened, Israel Kafka was transformed. He no longer stood with outstretched arms, his back against a crumbling slab, his filmy eyes fixed on Unorna’s face. He grew younger; his features were those of a boy of scarcely thirteen years, pale, earnest and brightened by a soft light which followed him hither and thither, and he was not alone. He moved with others through the old familiar streets of the city, clothed in a fashion of other times, speaking in accents comprehensible but unlike the speech of to-day, acting in a dim and far-off life that had once been.

  The Wanderer looked, and, as in dreams, he knew that what he saw was unreal, he knew that the changing walls and streets and houses and public places were built up of gravestones which in truth were deeply planted in the ground, immovable and incapable of spontaneous motion; he knew that the crowds of men and women were not human beings but gnarled and twisted trees rooted in the earth, and that the hum of voices which reached his ears was but the sound of dried branches bending in the wind; he knew that Israel Kafka was not the pale-faced boy who glided from place to place followed everywhere by a soft radiance; he knew that Unorna was the source and origin of the vision, and that the mingling speeches of the actors, now shrill in angry altercation, now hissing in low, fierce whisper, were really formed upon Unorna’s lips and made audible through her tones, as the chorus of indistinct speech proceeded from the swaying trees. It was to him an illusion of which he understood the key and penetrated the secret, but it was marvellous in its way, and he was held enthralled from the first moment when it began to unfold itself. He understood further that Israel Kafka was in a state different from this, that he was suffering all the reality of another life, which to the Wanderer was but a dream. For the moment all his faculties had a double perception of things and sounds, distinguishing clearly between the fact and the mirage that distorted and obscured it. For the moment he was aware that his reason was awake though his eyes and his ears might be sleeping. Then the unequal contest between the senses and the intellect ceased, and while still retaining the dim consciousness that the source of all he saw and heard lay in Unorna’s brain, he allowed himself to be led quickly from one scene to another, absorbed and taken out of himself by the horror of the deeds done before him.

  At first, indeed, the vision, though vivid, seemed objectless and of uncertain meaning. The dark depths of the Jews’ quarter of the city were opened, and it was towards evening. Throngs of gowned men, crooked, bearded, filthy, vulture-eyed, crowded upon each other in a narrow public place, talking in quick, shrill accents, gesticulating, with hands and arms and heads and bodies, laughing, chuckling, chattering, hook-nosed and loose-lipped, grasping fat purses in lean fingers, shaking greasy curls that straggled out under caps of greasy fur, glancing to right and left with quick, gleaming looks that pierced the gloom like fitful flashes of lightning, plucking at each other by the sleeve and pointing long fingers and crooked nails, two, three and four at a time, as markers, in their ready reckoning, a writhing mass of humanity, intoxicated by the smell of gold, mad for its possession, half hysteric with the fear of losing it, timid, yet dangerous, poisoned to the core by the sweet sting of money, terrible in intelligence, vile in heart, contemptible in body, irresistible in the unity of their greed — the Jews of Prague, two hundred years ago.

  In one corner of the dusky place there was a little light. A boy stood there, beside a veiled woman, and the light that seemed to cling about him was not the reflection of gold. He was very young. His pale face had in it all the lost beauty of the Jewish race, the lips were clearly cut, even, pure in outline and firm, the forehead broad with thought, the features noble, aquiline — not vulture-like. Such a face might holy Stephen, Deacon and Protomartyr, have turned upon the young men who laid their garments at the fee of the unconverted Saul.

  He stood there
, looking on at the scene in the market-place, not wondering, for nothing of it was new to him, not scorning, for he felt no hate, not wrathful, for he dreamed of peace. He would have had it otherwise — that was all. He would have had the stream flow back upon its source and take a new channel for itself, he would have seen the strength of his people wielded in cleaner deeds for nobler aims. The gold he hated, the race for it he despised, the poison of it he loathed, but he had neither loathing nor contempt nor hatred for the men themselves. He looked upon them and he loved to think that the carrion vulture might once again be purified and lifted on strong wings and become, as in old days, the eagle of the mountains.

  For many minutes he gazed in silence. Then he sighed and turned away. He held certain books in his hand, for he had come from the school of the synagogue where, throughout the short winter days, the rabbis taught him and his companions the mysteries of the sacred tongue. The woman by his side was a servant in his father’s house, and it was her duty to attend him through the streets, until the day when, being judged a man, he should be suddenly freed from the bondage of childish things.

  “Let us go,” he said in a low voice. “The air is full of gold and heavy. I cannot breathe it.”

  “Whither?” asked the woman.

  “Thou knowest,” he answered. And suddenly the faint radiance that was always about him grew brighter, and spread out arms behind him, to the right and left, in the figure of a cross.

  They walked together, side by side, quickly and often glancing behind them as though to see whether they were followed. And yet it seemed as though it was not they who moved, but the city about them which changed. The throng of busy Jews grew shadowy and disappeared, their shrill voices were lost in the distance. There were other people in the street, of other features and in different garbs, of prouder bearing and hot, restless manner, broad-shouldered, erect, manly, with spur on heel and sword at side. The outline of the old synagogue melted into the murky air and changed its shape, and stood out again in other and ever-changing forms. Now they were passing before the walls of a noble palace, now beneath long, low galleries of arches, now again across the open space of the Great Ring in the midst of the city — then all at once they were standing before the richly carved doorway of the Teyn Kirche, the very doorway out of which the Wanderer had followed the fleeting shadow of Beatrice’s figure but a month ago. And then they paused, and looked again to the right and left, and searched the dark corners with piercing glances.