Part 8

Holding it in his hand, and examining it a little, before putting it into his pocket, and going on with his work, Elias felt himself suddenly carried backward, for an instant, to the period with which it was associated. Talismanic pencil, that had power to raise the dead, and annihilate the intervening years! There it lay, in shape, weight, color, in length, breadth, thickness, in all its attributes and dimensions, precisely the same as on that far-off birthday morning, when his mother, to whose care his aunt had entrusted it, delivered it to him, neatly boxed up in pasteboard, wrapped in tissue-paper, and sealed with red sealing-wax. How well he remembered! It might have been last week. It might almost have been yesterday. And yet, how much, indeed how much, had happened since. At the breakfast-table, she had said, “Here, Elias, here is something your Aunt Rachel has sent you--something that you will prize especially, because she is not at all rich, and has doubtless had to pinch and deny herself, in order to buy it.” Then she offered him the parcel, which he, touched, surprised, expectant, took and opened, finding within this same little pencil; and not it only, but wound around it, a bit of writing in his Aunt Rachel's hand--the traditional Hebrew _bensch_: “May the Lord make you to be great, like Ephraim and Manasseh!” And immediately, of course, in his boyish enthusiasm, he had set himself down, and put the pencil to its virgin use, by inditing with it a glowing note of thanks--about the only use he ever had put it to, for very soon afterward it disappeared. And then, the rest, the rest of that wonderful, never-to-be-forgotten day! The pride and the triumph of it! The masterpiece of a dinner that his mother had prepared. The check for a dazzling sum of money, that he had found adroitly folded in with his napkin! The toothsome nut-cake, with its twenty-one symbolic candles! The wine that had been drunken to his health! The speech that the rabbi had made, standing up at the head of the table, and haranguing away as though he had had an audience of a thousand, instead of only Elias and his mother--the mother, however, listening amid tears and smiles, and applauding and nodding her head, as the splendid achievements which the future was to behold at the hands of her son, were prophetically described. The watch the rabbi had given him!--the same that was ticking in his waistcoat-pocket at this very instant. And the prayer that the rabbi had chanted! And how Elias himself, with swelling heart, had joined in the invocation: “Holy, holy Lord, Thou Who art one God!” and had vowed silently that, by the Lord's help, he _would_ “strive to become good in the sight of men, and a pride unto his people.” How well he remembered, thanks to this little pencil, precisely the same now as then, quite unchanged. But oh, what a changed Elias, he in whose palm it lay! How all the conditions of his life, and all his interests and purposes in life, and all his convictions about life, had changed since then! How little he had dreamed in those days of what was coming! Strange, that he should have had no premonition of it. Strange, that he should have gone on in peace and contentment, treading his level path, forward, forward, unsuspectingly, and never have caught a glimpse, never have got an inkling, of what was waiting for him, of what each step was bringing him so much the nearer to, of what presently was to burst upon him in a glory like that of heaven, and utterly revolutionize himself and all his world. Strange, indeed! And yet, in those old, simple, tranquil days, he had been happy, very happy, in a simple, tranquil way; and now, as he looked back at them, they shone suffused in a rose-colored enchantment; and he could feel his heart reach out toward them, with a strong longing affection, which, though melancholy, was not unmixed with sweetness.

Deep, engrossing, and of long duration, was the train of associations that had thus been started. The church clock across the park rang the half hour, before Elias finally roused himself, and renewed his attack upon the lumber heap.

For a good while he struck nothing more of interest--nothing that he cared to save, or even to look at twice. But by and by he fished out a sketch-book, which, to judge from the dilapidated state of its binding, must have been pretty old, and over which he paused, beating it against the floor, to rid it of some of its dust, and then opening it, to inspect its contents. On the fly-leaf he found his initials, “E. B.,” and a date, “January, 1876.” Listlessly turning the pages, he was somewhat amused, and a good deal ashamed, to perceive how poor and crude the drawings were--heads, for the most part, with only here and there a full-length figure; and he congratulated himself not a little that he had thus chanced to run across it, because now he could destroy it, and so make sure that nobody else should ever have the satisfaction of seeing what wretched stuff he had once been capable of perpetrating. He supposed that the sketches had nearly all been intended as portraits, but in the main he could not place them--could not remember the persons who had served as models. One face kept repeating itself; there were as many as a dozen separate studies of it; the face of a young man, aged, presumably, nineteen or twenty years; strangely familiar; the face of some one, beyond doubt, whom he must have known intimately; and yet, knitting his brows, and exerting his memory to the utmost, he was quite unable to recall the original. Odd; and intensely annoying, as baffled memory is apt to be; until, of a sudden, with a thrill of recognition that was by no means agreeable, he identified it as himself. A few pages further along, again with a sudden thrill, but this time with a far stronger and deeper one, he came upon a portrait of his mother. It was badly drawn, finical, over-elaborated; the draperies rigid as iron; the flesh wooden; the pose--she was seated, reading--awkward, and anatomically impossible; and yet, spite of all, it was an excellent, even a startling, likeness; and-happening upon it in this unexpected manner, Elias felt a not unnatural heart-leap and quickening of the pulse. When, or under what circumstances, he had made it, he could not think. He bent forward in his chair, gazed intently at it, and tried hard to recollect. If the date on the fly-leaf was trustworthy, it must, of course, have been after the first of January, 1876; but in his own memory, ransack it as he might, he could find no record; This struck him as exceedingly singular; because, he believed, he had been careful to preserve all the sketches of his mother that he had ever taken, even the most primitive and rudimentary; and how this one could not only have got mislaid, but entirely have escaped his mind, besides, he was at a complete loss to understand. So bending forward, and gazing intently at it, he tried his best to recollect.

Of what now befell, or seemed to befall, I shall give an account written some two years later by Elias himself, in a letter to Christine:

“Gradually--as is apt to happen, if you fix your eyes for any length of time upon a single spot in some small object--gradually the picture blurred, becoming simply a formless smudge upon the white surface of the paper; a lapse on the part of my eyesight, which I, absorbed in the effort I was making to remember, did not attempt to correct, but which in due time, as was natural, corrected itself; and again the picture stood out as distinct as before. Now, however, at once, every other thought and every other feeling were swept away, clean out of my head, by a sensation--I shall not be able to define it; you will easily conceive it; a sensation half of amazement, half of terror; for, without having changed in size, the face seemed to have changed totally in quality; it seemed to have ceased to be a face drawn with black lead upon paper, and to have become a face in veritable flesh and blood. The hair had apparently become hair. There was color in the cheeks. And the eyes were liquid, living eyes. They--the eyes--were what most affected me. Large, black, mournful, as her eyes had been in life, they looked into my eyes with an expression--I can't describe it. It was what you would call an expression of intense agony, and of appeal; as though it were an agony of my causing, and one that she appealed to me to relieve. The lips--bluish white, as her lips were, toward the end of her life--the lips seemed to move, and kept moving, as if trying to speak, but unable to; until at last _they succeeded_; and I could have vowed that I heard, in her own recognizable voice, just a little above a whisper, these words: 'There is no more chance of its taking place than there is of the sun's failing to rise. Beware!'--the words that my uncle had spoken down stairs. I was so much startled, so much terrified, that I jumped up from my chair. Thereat, instantly, the illusion ended. Again it was only a crude pencil drawing upon the page of my sketch-book. I can't tell how long it had lasted. Very likely not longer than two or three seconds, though it seemed at least as many minutes. I don't think I had breathed once. I don't think my heart had given a single beat. It had literally paralyzed me with fear.

“But now that it was over, I fell back upon my chair, and my heart began to pound like a hammer against my side; and I sat there, panting and perspiring, like a man exhausted by some tremendous physical exertion. I felt sick and dizzy, and had a racking headache.--Of course, it was a mere optical delusion; a mere hallucination; not an actual, objective phenomenon, not a _ghost_; a mere projection from my own imagination. A long time afterward I talked with a physician about it. The substance of what he said was this: Consider the steadily increasing excitement under which my mind had been laboring for many days, in view of our approaching marriage; consider the interview that I had had with my uncle, only an hour or two earlier, and the high pitch of agitation to which it had wrought me up; consider that it was long past my customary bedtime, and that my brain was irritated by lack of sleep, for I had not slept much of any the night before; consider that my mother was just then the one person uppermost in my thoughts, having been vividly recalled to me first by the pencil I had found, and then by the drawing that I was looking at; consider finally that my bodily posture--bending over till my chest nearly touched my knees--was such as to keep the blood pent up in my head; and the occurrence becomes very easily explicable, especially so, as such hallucinations, when people are excited, are not uncommon experiences. This is what the medical man said. It is undoubtedly true; and something like it I had wit enough to tell myself immediately, at the time. But telling did no good. It is one thing to satisfy your judgment; another to tranquilize your feelings and hush your imagination. _They_ choose to accept the direct testimony of your eyes and ears, rather than the deductions of your common sense.

“I knew, as I have said, that my nerves had simply played me a trick; but that knowledge did not prevent me from passing a most wretched, uncomfortable night--the rest of that night, till day-break. The memory of the thing persisted in haunting me, in spite of the efforts I made to forget it. Strive as I might, I could not shake off the fear, the uneasiness, that it had inspired. Thinking of it, even at this distance, I still wince a little. It produced a very deep impression, and must have been, I believe, in large part accountable for, as it was of a piece with, what happened next day--or, rather, the evening of the same day, for it was now early morning.”

XI.

ELIAS speaks of “day-break”; but it can not accurately be said that the day broke at all that morning. The blackness of the night slowly faded into a dismal, lifeless drab. It rained. The wind blew from the north-east. Under it, the branches of the trees, across in the park, swayed strenuously to and fro. The sparrows, with sadly bedraggled plumage, huddled together upon the window-sills, and raised their voices in noisy disputation, as if thereby seeking to screw their courage up, and not mind the%sorry weather. The milkman's wagon came rattling down the street. The milkman wore a rubber overcoat. His war-whoop sounded less spirited, less defiant, than its wont.

By and by Elias looked at his watch. It was getting along toward seven o'clock. Just then somebody rapped upon his studio door. Elias's nerves must indeed have been in a bad way. He started, paled, trembled, recovered himself, and called out, “Come in.”

It was the rabbi.

“Good morning, Elias,” the rabbi said.

“Good morning,” responded Elias, with a none too hospitable inflection.

“So, you haven't been abed? You've been sitting up all night?” the rabbi questioned.

“How do you know that?” was Elias's counter-question.

“I looked for you in your bedroom, and saw that your bed had not been slept in.”

“Oh.”

After a pause, “What have you been doing, up alone all night?” the rabbi asked.

“Lots of things. A man on the eve of his marriage has plenty to do.”

The rabbi stood still for a little while, glancing around the room. Then he sat down. At which, Elias rose.

“If you'll excuse me,” he said, “I'll go down stairs. I haven't taken my bath yet.”

“Have you said your prayers yet?” inquired the rabbi.

But Elias was already beyond ear-shot in the hall.

When, perhaps a quarter hour later, Elias, emerging from his bath, entered his bedroom, he discovered the rabbi established there at the window.

Wheeling about, and facing his nephew, “You didn't answer my question,” the rabbi said.

“What question?”

“I asked whether you had said your prayers this morning.”

“Oh.”

“Well, have you?”

“No.”

“Perhaps lately you have got out of the habit of saying your prayers--yes?”

Elias made no reply. He appeared not to have heard. He was busy fastening the buttons into a shirt-bosom.

“I'll wait till you've finished dressing,” said the rabbi.

He went to the window, and stood looking out.

The rabbi's presence troubled Elias exceedingly. But, he thought, considering every thing, the least he could do would be to put up with it as graciously as possible and not grumble. “What do you want with me, any how?” it was his impulse to demand. But he held his tongue, and proceeded with his toilet.

When at last he had tied his cravat and buttoned his coat, “Are you ready now to come down stairs with me?” the rabbi began.

“What for?”

“Several things. Are you ready? Will you come?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” Elias answered, and followed the old man from the room.

To himself: “I don't care what he does or says. It may be annoying, but it can't do any serious harm. To-day is the last day; and I'll let him him have his own way in every thing, no matter how absurd and exasperating it may be. I'll keep my temper and treat him respectfully, no matter how hard he may try me.”

They had reached the front hall of the house. The rabbi put his hand upon the knob of the front parlor door.

“Oh,” Elias exclaimed, drawing back, “are you going in there?”

“Yes.”

Calling to mind his resolution, Elias gulped down his unwillingness, and said, “Oh, well; all right.” But it cost him an effort to do so.

Even during his mother's life-time, the front parlor had been but very seldom used. Since her death, it had not been used at all. Indeed, since the day of her funeral, now nearly three years gone by, Elias had not crossed its threshold. The blinds and windows were kept permanently closed, save when, once a week, the servants entered to sweep and dust.

Now the rabbi pushed open the door, and, stepping aside, signalled Elias to pass in. Elias obeyed. The rabbi followed.

It was dark inside. Only a few pallid rays of daylight leaked through at the edges of the curtains. The air was cold and at the same time oppressive--laden with that stuffy, musty odor, which always pervades an uninhabited, shut-up room. At first, Elias could scarcely see an arm's-length before his face; but, as his eyesight gradually accustomed itself to the obscurity, he was able to make out the forms of the furniture, and to discern upon the walls sundry large black patches which he knew to be pictures.

The rabbi struck a match.

“Take it,” he said to Elias, “and light the gas; I'm not tall enough.”

Elias did as he was bidden.

The gas-burner, from disuse, had got clogged with dust. It shot a long, slim tongue of flame up into the air, and gave off a shrill, continuous whistle. Every now and then the flame had a convulsion, the whistle dropped a note or two; then both returned to their original conditions.

For a New York dwelling-house, it was a spacious room, this parlor; say, in width twenty feet, by forty in depth. The chairs and sofas, scrupulously wrapped in linen, were ranged along the walls. Over the carpet, completely covering it, stretched a broad sheet of grayish crash. The piano wore a rubber jacket, and had its legs swathed in newspapers. The books in the bookcases--books of the decorative, rather than of the readable order, for the most part--were locked up behind glass doors. The tall mirror, between the windows, shone through a veil of pink mosquito-netting. Supplies of the same material had been stretched across all the pictures.

In front of one of these pictures--that which hung above the mantel-piece--the rabbi now paused, and, raising his arm, pointed to it, in silence.

It was the portrait of a gentleman, full length, life-size, done in oils. The gentleman rested one hand upon a pile of ponderous, calf-bound volumes--law-books, or medical works, they looked like--that towered aloft from the floor. In his other hand, he held an unrolled scroll of parchment, upon which big black Hebrew characters were inscribed. Of artistic value the picture had little, or none at all; but it had another sort of value: it was a portrait of Elias's father.

The rabbi pointed to it in silence. Elias thought the rabbi's proceeding a little theatrical; but he made no comment.

By and by the rabbi lowered his arm, and faced about. Having done which, he raised his other arm, and this time brought his index finger to bear upon a portrait of Elias's mother.

Theatrical, certainly; disagreeably so, too; Elias thought.

At this point there befell an interruption which had somewhat the effect of an anti-climax. The breakfast-bell rang.

“Well,” said the rabbi, “let's go to breakfast.”

Elias turned off the gas. They left the parlor, and went down stairs to the dining-room.

There, having taken their places at the table, the rabbi extracted a handkerchief from his pocket, and with it covered his head. Elias did likewise. Whereupon the rabbi chanted the usual grace before meat. At its conclusion, both he and Elias replaced their handkerchiefs in their pockets, and the maid-servant brought the coffee.

For a while neither nephew nor uncle spoke.

At last, “What are you thinking about, Elias?” the rabbi asked.

“I was thinking, if you wish to know,” Elias answered, “of my great happiness--of the fact that to-day the lady whom I love is to become my wife.”

“Ah, so? It doesn't seem to improve your appetite,” returned the rabbi. “You're not eating especially well.”

He made Elias the object of a curious, meditative glance; then pursued: “Don't misunderstand me, Elias. It isn't at all my aim to dissuade you from this marriage. That, as I told you last night, would be a work of supererogation. But I _should_ like to ask you just a single question. Suppose your mother were still alive, would you entertain for an instant the idea of marrying a Christian?”

“I don't know?”

“You don't know?”

“Well, probably not.”

“Good. That is what I thought. And now, let me ask you one question more. Is it your opinion that, simply because your mother has died, you are absolved from all obligations toward her, and are at liberty to act in a way, which, if she were still with us, it would break her heart to have you act in? Is that your opinion?”

Elias did not reply. He colored up, however, and bit his lip.

The rabbi waited a moment, then queried, “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“You don't answer.”

“I don't mean to answer. It isn't a fair question,” said Elias.

The rabbi gave a short, contemptuous laugh.

Again for a while neither of them spoke. Elias was uncomfortably conscious that the rabbi's eyes were fixed upon his face. He stood it as long as he could. Then, abruptly, he got up.

“Please excuse me,” he said, “I have something to do up-stairs.”

With which he left the room.

He went to his studio and locked the door behind him. He had told the rabbi that he had something to do. But the truth was that he had nothing to do, except to kill time as best he could until the hour should arrive for him to start for Sixty-third Street. He had arranged not to call upon Christine at all that day. He thought it would be more considerate to leave her alone with her father. Now, the day stretched out like an eternity before his imagination. Would it ever wear away?

It occurred to him that it might not be a bad plan to get some sleep, if he could; so he retired to his bedroom, and threw himself all dressed upon his bed.

Pretty soon he heard a rap upon the door.

“Who is it?” he demanded.

“I,” the rabbi's voice responded. .

“He'll end by driving me mad,” thought Elias. “What do you want?” he asked aloud.

“I want to see you.”

“Well, I'm busy.”

“I shan't interfere with your business.”

“I'm going to sleep.”

“I shan't prevent you from sleeping.”

Elias said nothing further. The rabbi came in. “I only wanted to sit with you. It is better that I should be on hand,” explained the rabbi, and sat down near the window.

Elias closed his eyes and tried hard to sleep. But he could not sleep. It is doubtful whether, in view of his approaching wedding, he could have slept, under the most soothing circumstances. Under the actual circumstances, it was like trying to sleep while some one is sticking pins into you. Elias strove to be philosophical. “Why should I allow his mere presence to irritate me as it does?” he asked himself. Whatever the correct answer to this inquiry may have been, the fact remained that the rabbi's mere presence did irritate him to an excessive degree. He bore it for a few minutes silently. At length, flinging his philosophy overboard, he jumped up from his bed, and announced vehemently, “Well, I'm going out.”

“Ah,” said the rabbi, quietly, “I'll go with you.”

“Thanks,” replied Elias, “but I prefer to go alone.”

“I'm sorry,” said the rabbi; “but it is my duty.”

“What's your duty?”

“It is my duty not to let you leave my sight today.”

At this Elias lost his self-control.

“In heaven's name,” he blurted out, “do--do you mean to say that you're going to stick to me like this all day?”

“I should fail in my duty toward you, if I did not.”

“Well then, do you--do you know what you'll do?” cried Elias, in a loud, infuriated voice.

“No; what?” questioned the rabbi, composedly.

“Good God! You--you'll drive me out of my senses. You make me feel as though my head would split open. You--you--” His voice choked in his throat. His face had become burning red.

“Look out,” said the rabbi. “You'll burst a blood-vessel, if you carry on like that.”

“Well, then, for mercy's sake, leave me alone. Go down stairs about your business. Leave me here to attend to mine.”

The rabbi did not speak. He made no move to obey.

“Don't you hear?” Elias cried.

“Yes.”

“Well, why don't you go?”

“I have told you. It is my duty to stay.”

“God help me, if you weren't an old man, and my uncle, I--I'd--” Elias faltered. His clenched fists completed the sentence.

“Put me out? But I _am_ an old man, and your uncle; and so you won't, eh?” rejoined the rabbi, with maddening coolness.