Part 43 (2/2)

”But what is it you want?”

”He told me to give the Regent this 'ere”--showing the envelope.

”Weally! then, give it to me”.

”He said I was to give it to the Regent's self”.

”Then, go to blazes quickly, will you? and let Captain Macnaghten know fwom me that he has been dwinking”.

Harris could not penetrate the ten-fold barrier; but he lay in wait; watched from some coign every Royal exit and entrance, careful that Hogarth never saw his face; and he cherished the knife-edge.

One night, four days before the debate, he stood by the Green Park railings, listless, smoking, when--he started: saw a hurried figure come out--face m.u.f.fled--Hogarth!--alone.

Hogarth walked a little, entered a cab; Harris, in another, shadowed him.

Down Piccadilly, the Hammersmith Road, into the Addison: Hogarth alighted; Harris followed.

Now, at this time Hogarth had a spy, who presented him reports of the doings of Rebekah Frankl--a species of literature which the Regent found agreeable; and, as for two days Rebekah had, for some reason, been at a villa of Addison Road, this escapade of the Lord Regent was motived by his hope of catching there some glimpse of her, the house being small, he having seized his first chance of secret escape from state-affairs near midnight: and behind him, like the shadow of death, stole the a.s.sa.s.sin.

Hogarth, going soft up to the house, leaned aside from the frontage steps to peer; but Venetian blinds barred him from the least sight of the interior, though he could hear sounds, strange sounds, as of wailing; and, as the villa was in the midst of quite a s.p.a.cious ground, well grown with trees and shrubberies, he stole round to the back, peered into an open door level with the garden, and within saw a doorway of twilight in the midst of darkness; had hoped to see a servant, who might talk gossip, or even contrive him sight of the Sacred Body; had ready bribe in hand: but n.o.body there. So, after some hesitation, he entered; and Harris, just then come to the house-corner on tiptoe, discerned him go in, ran on hot bricks to the door, and now distinctly saw Hogarth, who had pa.s.sed through a kitchen, standing on three wooden steps before a doorway which framed a faint light in the room beyond.

On which a s.h.i.+vering of eagerness, quick as winking sheet-lightning, shook Harris' right knee.

Hogarth, meantime, having seen the chamber before him empty, in his headlong way had entered, and the guess now in Harris' mind was this: ”It's a girl: a night out”....

He hesitated, Hogarth being once within the house and lost to him, but after some minutes dared to follow.

Hogarth, meantime, had seen that the light came from a death-taper, with which was a vessel of water for ceremonial purification, and a napkin, here being all the preparations for _tahara_ (was.h.i.+ng); and suddenly, in a near room, arose the clamorous dole of _s.h.i.+vah_ (the seven mourning-days), Rachel weeping for her children, because they are not: a Jew was dead: ”shema, Yisrael...”: and this explained Rebekah's stay there, for the bereaved may not leave the house. A peer at the bed--a covered face--pierced him with a compunction like shame: here was _kodesh_, and he a desecrator with his earthy pa.s.sion: so he turned to beat a retreat by the way he had come--when a faint sound that way, made by Harris; and, instead, he leapt lightly through a window five feet above the garden.

Some moments later Harris, entering on prowling all-fours, and seeing the bed-clothes hang immediately near, stole under; waited: no sound save the singsong lament; and ”O Gawd”, thought he, cynic even in his palest agitation, ”there shall be weeping and wailing and gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth”....But that Hogarth had not come to wail and gnash he felt convinced: if he heard no sound above him, that might be because of the sounds around; so he crawled barely out, and, kneeling, put up a most cautious groping hand, the bed being in the darkest part of the room; someone there: and swiftly as a dolphin twists to dart and snap, his knife was in a breast and instantly ready to strike its expected bedfellow.

But the breast was alone, the breast of Estrella, the Prophetess, four days dead.

Harris s.n.a.t.c.hed off the face-cloth, peered upon a n.o.ble old visage, fixed now in trance, and said: ”Well, I'm--”

Now he ran, but in the kitchen stopped wild-eyed. It I might be murder-he was not certain; at least it was out-rage, and he might be traced: there was the cabman who had brought him--his absence from the Palace---”Bah! it can't be proved....” But still, if he were even arrested, and Hogarth got to hear of his presence about the Court--that would spoil all. He listened: all that part of the house a settled solitude, the servants themselves sitting _s.h.i.+vah_; and back he ran, seized upon the little old body, not now stiff, _rigor mortis_ having pa.s.sed, saw that the sheet was unstained, and s.n.a.t.c.hed her away out to the bottom of the garden where shrubbery and holly-hedge formed a jungle.

Now he set to dig with hissing haste; and, even as he hissed and digged, he talked without pause, envenomed, heaping her sanct.i.ty with insult: ”Old cat you...dust to dust and ashes to ashes, it is....What you want to do that for? under you go in the cold, cold sod....Who arst you to put your little finger in the pie? There's another one for you, fair in the gullet! Now take her up tenderly, lift her with care-and down she goes”....

Such were Estrella's _kaddish_ and ”House of Life”....As he had only the knife, and the work was slow, and in the midst of it an outcry from the house, the body missed, he stopped, listening, but without acute fear, knowing it improbable that they could dream of seeking in the grounds, and as a matter of fact their minds were a mere paralysis of holy wonder; so presently he had the little body in a two-foot grave, arranged surface and dead leaves to naturalness, leapt a wall, and got away.

Never did act of a.s.sa.s.sin have result so momentous: for though the predictions of Estrella had lately spread far among upper-cla.s.s Jews, it was only on the day after her burial by Harris that her fame reached to each Jew under the sun.

It was given out that divine confirmation had been vouchsafed to her prophecies by the s.n.a.t.c.hing of her body, like Enoch's, into Heaven, or by its burial, like Moses', by Jahvah: for when no explanation but one is extant, the brain fastens upon that, and embraces it.

And as Estrella, who, in life, had guarded her hard sayings for the few, had left papers revealing for her whole race what she had dreamed, like wildfire now ran her message among the Chosen.

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