'How can you say that, Yenta?' Yossel broke in again.
'Why else did you refuse my money?' the _Bube_ retorted. 'Twice, ten, twenty times I asked him to go to Palestine with me. But obstinate as a pig he keeps grunting "I can't--I've got no money." Sooner than I should pay his fare he'd have seen us both die here.'
The artist collapsed upon the bundle; astonishment, anger, and self-ridicule made an emotion too strong to stand under. So this was all his Machiavellian scheming had achieved--to bring about the very marriage it was meant to avert! He had dug a pit and fallen into it himself. All this would indeed amuse Rozenoffski and Leopold Barstein. He laughed bitterly.
'Nay, it was no laughing matter,' said the _Bube_ indignantly. 'For I know well how Yossel longed to go with me to die in Jerusalem. And at last the All-High sent him the fare, and he was able to come to me and invite me to go with him.'
Here the artist became aware that Yossel's eyes and lips were signalling silence to him. As if, forsooth, one published one's good deeds! He had yet to learn on whose behalf the hunchback was signalling.
'So! You came into a fortune?' he asked Yossel gravely.
Yossel looked the picture of misery. The _Bube_ unconsciously cut through the situation. 'A wicked man gave it to him,' she explained, 'to pray away his sins in Jerusalem.'
'Indeed!' murmured the artist. 'Anyone you know?'
'Heaven has spared her the pain of knowing him,' ambiguously interpolated her anxious protector.
'I don't even know his name,' added the _Bube_. 'Yossel keeps it hidden.'
'One must not shame a fellow-man,' Yossel urged. 'The sin of that is equal to the sin of shedding blood.'
The grandmother nodded her head approvingly. 'It is enough that the All-High knows his name. But for such an Epicurean much praying will be necessary. It will be a long work. And your first prayer, Yossel, must be that you shall not die very soon, else the labourer will not be worthy of his hire.'
Yossel took her yellow withered hand as in a lover's clasp. 'Be at peace, Yenta! He will be redeemed if only by _your_ merits. Are we not one?'
Aaron Ben Amram removed from the great ritual dish the roasted shankbone of lamb (symbolic residuum of the Paschal Sacrifice) and the roasted egg (representative of the ancient festival-offering in the Temple), and while his wife and children held up the dish, which now contained only the bitter herbs and unleavened cakes, he recited the Chaldaic prelude to the _Seder_--the long domestic ceremonial of the Passover Evening.