At length a side door opened and the reader came in from his vestry. He had apparently waited in hope of a congregation, but now came in to perform his duty without their aid. Perhaps he was not so much disappointed as the curate was. It would have been very difficult to tell from looking at him what his emotions were. He was a stout large man with a coarse brown beard. There was little to be seen of his face but the hair upon it, and one gathered the suggestion, although it was hard to know from what, that the man and his beard were not as clean as might be. He wore a black gown and an ordinary high silk hat, although pushed much farther back on his head than an Englishman would have worn it. He walked heavily and clumsily inside the railing, and stood before the desk, slowly turning over backward the leaves of the great book. Then suddenly he began to chant in the Hebrew tongue. His voice fell mellow and sweet upon the silence, filling it with drowsy sound, as the soft music of a humble-bee will suddenly fill the silence of a woodland glade. There was no thought, only feeling, conveyed by the sound.
Issachar had gone out, and the Anglican priest sat erect, gazing at the Jew through the fading light, his attention painfully strained by the sense of loneliness and surprise. From mere habit he supposed the chant to be an introduction to a varied service, but no change came. On and on and on went the strange music, like a potent incantation, the big Jew swaying his body slightly with the rhythm, and at long intervals came the whisper of paper with the turning of the leaf.
The curate gazed and wondered until he forgot himself. Then he tried with an effort to recall who he was, and where he was, and all the details of the busy field of labour he had left just outside the door. He wished that the walls of the square room were not so thick, that some sound from the town might come in and mingle with the chant. He strained his ear in vain to catch a word of the Hebrew which might be intelligible to him. He wondered much what sort of a man this Jew might be, actuated by what motives, impelled by what impulses to his lonely task. All the sorrow of a hope deferred through ages, and a long torture patiently borne, seemed gathered in the cadence; but the man--surely the man was no refined embodiment of the high sentiment of his psalm! And still the soft rich voice chanted the unknown language, and the daylight grew more dim.