The Maccabaean

I

It was late in the afternoon of a rainy September day. The wet sidewalks palpitated with the weird reflections of the street lamps and the echoes of steps were borne through the mist in fantastic and dreary forboding. To-day Anna Wilner wanted to be with her father. She dreaded to leave him alone with the thoughts he had been brooding over for the past month, betraying themselves through his exaggerated self-control and forced cheerfulness. This was the day on which her brother Herman was to be married. Her father professed his approval —he always claimed to be a liberal, broad-minded man, saying his children should marry whomsoever they choose to love. But his silence contradicted it. She knew that the silence of the past few months was the silence of pain. She had long intended to reproach him for his unhappiness. She would tell him how unreasonable he was. Had he not, time and again, confessed that he did not love a Jew for his Jewishness, nor dislike a Christian for his Christianity? And what charge had he against Herman's Elizabeth, except that she was no Jewess? She was a poem of frail delicacy whose universe revolved about Herman. And Herman thought of her as a zephyr, which kisses slumbering possibility into life. Besides, she knew as little and cared less about being a Catholic than Herman did about being a Jew. Her parents died when she was so young she could not recall them, and all others who had attempted to remind her of her religion, she despised. They always bothered about her goodness when they were afraid she was too happy, and now that she was supremely happy, she did not

even let them know about it—Anna rehearsed this argument prepared for her father, and every time she rehearsed it, it grew stronger and more convincing. She had postponed delivering it, always hoping he would call it forth by some complaint. But he never complained, he was only silent. Now she had summoned all her strength and courage. She would take the initiative. She ascended to her father’s room and found him gazing out of the window. He stood steeped in thought which was full of mystery and pathos. She suddenly felt herself merged into the dignity and power of her father’s prophetic silence. She felt ashamed of her pretence of bringing him to reason, and her prepared arguments were converted into silly giddiness which she gratefully suppressed. She stole up to her father with the tremulousness of a penitent offender. He shuddered to find her so near him. He pressed her fervently to him and kissed her with all the ardent passion of his suppressed and silent pain. His tears streamed down her face and mingled with her own.

II

Two hours later they were returning from the marriage rites. The ceremony was performed by an ethical culturist Anna had prepared to receive her brother and sister (she had always thought of her as such), for the first time in their home, for that same evening Herman and his bride were leaving for a strange city. Throughout it all, Abraham Wilner had remained silent and apparently passive. Anna had been watching him intently. As if for the first time, she noticed that his small eyes were of an indefinite brown