Part 1 (2/2)

One more little building, snuggled up against the entry-gate and evidently intended for the porter, was occupied only by a Jew and his wife. The couple this evening were chatting in a lower room whose half-open door communicated with the vaulted pa.s.sage running to the street.

David Samuel was in the neighborhood of thirty, his wife Bathsheba, twenty-five. The lineage of Israel was strongly stamped on their features. Bathsheba, seated before a little table lighted by a copper lamp, was preparing to write at her husband's dictation. The latter, sunk in an arm-chair, his forehead in his hands, was in grave mood, and said to his wife after a silence of several minutes:

”The more I think over the present state of affairs, the more am I convinced that it is the part of prudence and necessity for us to prepare against unfortunate eventualities. In spite of our precautions within and without, what goes on here may one day be uncovered by the creatures of the Lieutenant of Police. We would then both be imprisoned, my dear Bathsheba! Then, if I should die in prison--”

”Ah, my friend, what gloomy forebodings! Think not of such sad chances.”

”Everything must be reckoned with. So, then, in case I die, our cousin Levi, on whom I count as on myself--you know him--”

”Your confidence is well placed.”

”I am sure of it. I wish to charge him, in that case, to take my place in the sacred mission which my grandfather and father have handed down to me. That is why I wish to hold ready, in advance, the memorandum which will place our relative in possession of the knowledge he will need in order to replace me. Come then, write as I dictate.”

At the moment that Samuel uttered these last words, he heard a knocking in a peculiar manner at the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d gate. First there were three blows, then two, separated from the others by a pause; and then two again; total, seven, the cabalistic number.

Samuel manifested no surprise at the signal. He left the room, traversed the pa.s.sage, drew close to the wicket, and asked in an undertone:

”Who knocks?”

”_A blind one._”

”What does he seek?”

”_The light._”

”What time is it?”

”_The hour of darkness, my brother!_”

Immediately upon the last response, Samuel swung back the gate. Two persons wrapped in cloaks hurried through the pa.s.sage and disappeared in the garden. The Jew secured again the gate, and returned to his wife, who, no more surprised than he by the mysterious entrance of the two newcomers, said:

”Dictate, my friend; I shall write.”

”In the year 1660,” began Samuel, ”Monsieur Marius Rennepont, a rich Protestant s.h.i.+powner and captain, lay in Lisbon. He had carried from France, on his s.h.i.+p, Monsieur the Duke of San Borromeo, one of Portugal's greatest lords. The very day of his arrival in Lisbon, Monsieur Rennepont saw from his hotel on the Plaza Mayor, the preparations for an auto-da-fe. On inquiry he learned that the next day a Jew named Samuel was to be burnt in the cause of religion. Monsieur Rennepont, being a humane and generous-minded man, and, moreover, having sympathy for the fate of heretics as his own Protestant co-religionists were beginning in France to be persecuted in spite of the Edict of Nantes, resolved to s.n.a.t.c.h this Jew from the torture, and counted on the support and protection of the Duke of San Borromeo.

”The latter, more than once during the pa.s.sage, had made tender of his services to the captain. Chance so willed it that he was the elder brother of the Inquisitor of Lisbon. Monsieur Rennepont's hopes were realized. The Duke of San Borromeo by his credit obtained from the tribunal of the Inquisition a commutation of the Jew's sentence from capital punishment to one of perpetual banishment. Monsieur Rennepont, having saved his protege, made inquiries as to his character, and received the best accounts thereof. He proposed that the Jew accompany him to France, an offer which the latter accepted with grat.i.tude. Later on Monsieur Rennepont entrusted him with the money matters of his trade; and Samuel devoted himself body and soul to his benefactor.

”That Hebrew, my grandfather, was soon able to prove his grat.i.tude to Monsieur Marius Rennepont. The Protestant persecutions increased in fury. Those who refused to be converted were exposed to violence and exactions of every sort. Monsieur Rennepont had a son whom he loved pa.s.sionately. In order to ensure to this son the enjoyment of his goods by sheltering them from confiscation, he abjured the Protestant faith.

Dearly he paid for that moment of weakness. The Jesuit Society, for some hidden reason which my grandfather never could fathom, pursued from age to age with their secret surveillance and hatred a certain Lebrenn family, with which one of Monsieur Rennepont's ancestors had been connected by marriage in the middle of the Sixteenth Century.[1] For reasons to be revealed later, that branch of the Renneponts had broken off its relations with the Lebrenns; it was even ignorant of whether its former allies had left any descendants.

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