know he must read to-morrow, as usual," he said conclusively.
Jossel went home, sighing, but silenced. Zillah however, was not so easily subdued. "But my Brum will read it as truly as an angel!" she cried, pressing the boy's head to her breast. "And suppose he does make a mistake! Haven't I heard the congregation correct Winkelstein scores of times?"
"Hush!" said Jossel, "you talk like an Epicurean. Satan makes us all err at times, but we must not play into his hands. The Din (judgment) is that only those who see may read the Law to the congregation."
"Brum will read it much better than that snuffling old Winkelstein."
"Sha! Enough! The Din is the Din!"
"It was never meant to stop my poor Brum from—"
"The Din is the Din. It won't let you dance on its head or chop wood on its back. Besides, the synagogue refuses, so make an end."
"I will make an end. I'll have Minyan (congregation) here, in our own house."
"What!" and the poor man stared in amaze. "Always she falls from heaven with a new idea!"
"Brum shall not be disappointed." And she gave the silent boy a passionate hug.
"But we have no Scroll of the Law," Brum said, speaking at last, and to the point.
"Ah, that's you all over, Zillah," cried Jossel, relieved—"loud drumming in front and no soldiers behind!"
"We can borrow a Scroll," said Zillah.
Jossel gasped again. "But the iniquity is just the same," he said.
"As if Brum made mistakes!"
"If you were a Rabbi, the congregation would baptize itself!" Jossel quoted.
Zillah writhed under the proverb. "It isn't as if you went to the Rabbi; you took the word of the Beadle."
"He is a learned man."
Zillah donned her bonnet and shawl.
"Where are you going?"
"To the minister."
Jossel shrugged his shoulders, but did not stop her.
The minister, one of the new school of Rabbis who preach sermons in English and dress like Christian clergymen, as befitted the dignity of Dalston villadom, was taken aback by the ritual problem, so new and so tragic. His acquaintance with the vast casuistic literature of his race was of the shallowest. "No doubt the Beadle is right," he observed profoundly.
"He cannot be right; he doesn't know my Brum."
Worn out by Zillah's persistency, the minister suggested going to the Beadle's together. Aware of the Beadle's prodigious lore, he had too much regard for his own position to risk congregational odium by flying in the face of an exhumable Din.
At the Beadle's, the Din was duly unearthed from worm-eaten folios, but Zillah remaining unappeased, further searching of these Rabbinic scriptures revealed a possible compromise.
If the portion the boy recited was read over again by a reader not blind, so that the first congregational reading did not count, it might perhaps be permitted.
It would be of course too tedious to treat the whole Sedrah thus, but if Brum were content to recite his own particular seventh thereof, he should be summoned to the Rostrum.
So Zillah returned to Jossel, sufficiently triumphant.
VI
"Abraham, the son of Jossel, shall stand."
In obedience to the Cantor's summons, the blind boy, in his high hat and silken praying-shawl with the blue stripes, rose, and guided by his father's hand ascended the platform, amid the emotion of the synagogue. His brave boyish treble, pursuing its faultless way, thrilled the listeners to tears, and inflamed Zillah's breast, as she craned down from the gallery, with the mad hope that the miracle had happened, after all.
The house-gathering afterward savoured of the grewsome conviviality of a funeral assemblage. But the praises of Brum, especially after his great speech, were sung more honestly than those of the buried; than whom the white-faced dull-eyed boy, cut off from the gaily coloured spectacle in the sunlit room, was a more tragic figure.
But Zillah, in her fineries and forced smiles, offered the most tragic image of all. Every congratulation was a rose-wreathed dagger, every eulogy of Brum's eloquence a reminder of the Rabbi God had thrown away in him.
VII
Amid the endless babble of suggestions made to her for Brum's cure, one—repeated several times by different persons—hooked itself to her distracted brain. Germany! There was a great eye-doctor in Germany, who could do anything and everything. Yes, she would go to Germany.
This resolution, at which Jossel shrugged his shoulders in despairing scepticism, was received with rapture by Brum. How he had longed to see foreign countries, to pass over that shining sea which whispered and beckoned so, at Brighton and Ramsgate! He almost forgot he would not see Germany, unless the eye-doctor were a miracle-monger indeed.
But he was doomed to a double disappointment; for instead of his going to Germany, Germany came to him, so to speak, in the shape of the specialist's annual visit to London; and the great man had nothing soothing to say, only a compassionate head to shake, with ominous warnings to make the best of a bad job and fatten up the poor boy.
Nor did Zillah's attempts to read take her out of the infant primers, despite long hours of knitted brow and puckered lips, and laborious triumphs over the childish sentences, by patient addition of syllable to syllable. She also tried to write, but got no further than her own name, imitated from the envelopes.
To occupy Brum's days, Jossel, gaining enlightenment in the ways of darkness, procured Braille books. But the boy had read most of the stock works thus printed for the blind, and his impatient brain fretted at the tardiness of finger-reading. Jossel's one consolation was that the boy would not have to earn his living. The thought, however, of how his blind heir would be cheated by agents and rent-collectors was a touch of bitter even in this solitary sweet.
VIII
It was the Sabbath Fire-Woman who, appropriately enough, kindled the next glimmer of hope in Zillah's bosom. The one maid-of-all-work, who had supplied all the help and grandeur Zillah needed in her establishment, having transferred her services to a husband, Zillah was left searching for an angel at thirteen pounds a year. In the interim the old Irishwoman who made a few pence a week by attending to the Sabbath fires of the poor Jews of the neighbourhood, became necessary on Friday nights and Saturdays, to save the household from cold or sin.
"Och, the quare little brat!" she muttered, when she first came upon the pale, gnome-like figure by the fender, tapping the big book, for all the world like the Leprechaun cobbling.
"And can't he see at all, at all?" she asked Zillah confidentially one Sabbath, when the boy was out of the room.
Zillah shook her head, unable to speak.
"Nebbich!" compassionately sighed the Fire-Woman, who had corrupted her native brogue with "Yiddish." "And wud he be borrun dark?"
"No, it came only a few months ago," faltered Zillah.
The Fire-Woman crossed herself.
"Sure, and who'll have been puttin' the Evil Oi on him?" she asked.
Zillah's face was convulsed.
"I always said so!" she cried; "I always said so!"
"The divil burrun thim all!" cried the Fire-Woman, poking the coals viciously.
"Yes, but I don't know who it is. They envied me my beautiful child, my lamb, my only one. And nothing can be done."