never be able to read them," he sobbed.
"Yes, you will."
"No, I won't."
"Then I'll read them to you," she cried, with sudden resolution.
"But you can't read."
"I can learn."
"But you will be so long. I ought to have taught you myself. And now it is too late!"
V
In order to insure perfection, and prevent stage fright, so to speak, it had been arranged that Brum should rehearse his reading of the Sedrah on Friday in the synagogue itself, at an hour when it was free from worshippers. This rehearsal, his mother thought, was now all the more necessary to screw up Brum's confidence, but the father argued that as all places were now alike to the blind boy, the prominence of a public platform and a large staring audience could no longer unnerve him.
"But he will feel them there!" Zillah protested.
"But since they are not there on the Friday—?"
"All the more reason. Since he cannot see that they are not there, he can fancy they are there. On Saturday he will be quite used to them."
But when Jossel, yielding, brought Brum to the synagogue appointment, the fusty old Beadle who was faithfully in attendance held up his hands in holy and secular horror at the blasphemy and the blindness respectively.
"A blind man may not read the Law to the congregation!" he explained.
"No?" said Jossel.
"Why not?" asked Brum sharply.
"Because it stands that the Law shall be read. And a blind man cannot read. He can only recite."
"But I know every word of it," protested Brum.
The Beadle shook his head. "But suppose you make a mistake! Shall the congregation hear a word or a syllable that God did not write? It would be playing into Satan's hands."
"I shall say every word as God wrote it. Give me a trial."
But the fusty Beadle's piety was invincible. He was highly sympathetic toward the human affliction, but he refused to open the Ark and produce the Scroll.
"I'll let the Chazan (cantor) know he must read to-morrow, as usual," he said conclusively.
Jossel went home, sighing, but silenced. Zillah however, was not so easily subdued. "But my Brum will read it as truly as an angel!" she cried, pressing the boy's head to her breast. "And suppose he does make a mistake! Haven't I heard the congregation correct Winkelstein scores of times?"
"Hush!" said Jossel, "you talk like an Epicurean. Satan makes us all err at times, but we must not play into his hands. The Din (judgment) is that only those who see may read the Law to the congregation."
"Brum will read it much better than that snuffling old Winkelstein."
"Sha! Enough! The Din is the Din!"
"It was never meant to stop my poor Brum from—"
"The Din is the Din. It won't let you dance on its head or chop wood on its back. Besides, the synagogue refuses, so make an end."
"I will make an end. I'll have Minyan (congregation) here, in our own house."
"What!" and the poor man stared in amaze. "Always she falls from heaven with a new idea!"
"Brum shall not be disappointed." And she gave the silent boy a passionate hug.
"But we have no Scroll of the Law," Brum said, speaking at last, and to the point.
"Ah, that's you all over, Zillah," cried Jossel, relieved—"loud drumming in front and no soldiers behind!"
"We can borrow a Scroll," said Zillah.
Jossel gasped again. "But the iniquity is just the same," he said.
"As if Brum made mistakes!"
"If you were a Rabbi, the congregation would baptize itself!" Jossel quoted.
Zillah writhed under the proverb. "It isn't as if you went to the Rabbi; you took the word of the Beadle."
"He is a learned man."
Zillah donned her bonnet and shawl.
"Where are you going?"
"To the minister."
Jossel shrugged his shoulders, but did not stop her.
The minister, one of the new school of Rabbis who preach sermons in English and dress like Christian clergymen, as befitted the dignity of Dalston villadom, was taken aback by the ritual problem, so new and so tragic. His acquaintance with the vast casuistic literature of his race was of the shallowest. "No doubt the Beadle is right," he observed profoundly.
"He cannot be right; he doesn't know my Brum."
Worn out by Zillah's persistency, the minister suggested going to the Beadle's together. Aware of the Beadle's prodigious lore, he had too much regard for his own position to risk congregational odium by flying in the face of an exhumable Din.
At the Beadle's, the Din was duly unearthed from worm-eaten folios, but Zillah remaining unappeased, further searching of these Rabbinic scriptures revealed a possible compromise.
If the portion the boy recited was read over again by a reader not blind, so that the first congregational reading did not count, it might perhaps be permitted.
It would be of course too tedious to treat the whole Sedrah thus, but if Brum were content to recite his own particular seventh thereof, he should be summoned to the Rostrum.
So Zillah returned to Jossel, sufficiently triumphant.
VI
"Abraham, the son of Jossel, shall stand."
In obedience to the Cantor's summons, the blind boy, in his high hat and silken praying-shawl with the blue stripes, rose, and guided by his father's hand ascended the platform, amid the emotion of the synagogue. His brave boyish treble, pursuing its faultless way, thrilled the listeners to tears, and inflamed Zillah's breast, as she craned down from the gallery, with the mad hope that the miracle had happened, after all.
The house-gathering afterward savoured of the grewsome conviviality of a funeral assemblage. But the praises of Brum, especially after his great speech, were sung more honestly than those of the buried; than whom the white-faced dull-eyed boy, cut off from the gaily coloured spectacle in the sunlit room, was a more tragic figure.
But Zillah, in her fineries and forced smiles, offered the most tragic image of all. Every congratulation was a rose-wreathed dagger, every eulogy
