They were abashed before him, and tried to edge out of the patio into the street; but he put his back to the passage, and faced them again.
“You will not drink?” he said. “Then listen to me.” He dashed the winecup out of his hand and it broke into fragments on the floor. His laughter was gone, his face was aflame, and his voice rose to a shrill cry. “You foretold the doom of God upon me, you brought me low, you made me ashamed: but behold how the Lord has lifted me up! You set your women to prophesy that God would not suffer me to raise up children to be a reproach and a curse among my people; but God has this day given me a son like the best of you. More than that—more than that—my son shall yet see—”
The slave woman was touching his arm. “It is a girl,” she said; “a girl!”
For a moment Israel stammered and paused. Then he cried, “No matter! She shall see your own children fatherless, and with none to show them mercy! She shall see the iniquity of their fathers remembered against them! She shall see them beg their bread, and seek it in desolate places! And now you can go! Go! go!”
He had stepped aside as he spoke, and with a sweep of his arm he was driving them all out like sheep before him, dumfounded and with their eyes in the dust, when suddenly there was a low cry from the inner room.
It was Ruth calling for her husband. Israel wheeled about and went in to her hurriedly, and his enemies, by one impulse of evil instinct, followed him and listened from the threshold.
Ruth’s face was a face of fear, and her lips moved, but no voice came from them.
And Israel said, “How is it with you, my dearest, joy of my joy and pride of my pride?”
Then Ruth lifted the babe from her bosom and said, “The Lord has counted my prayer to me as sin—look, see; the child is both dumb and blind!”
Israel sinks yet deeper in the contempt of his countrymen because of what seems to them a manifest judgment of God. And he, knowing his condemnation to be unjust, is soured by the knowledge, and, in rebellion against God and man, changes his hitherto upright dealings, becoming in very deed a persecutor of the people. Meanwhile he has taken into his household a little negro waif as a companion for his stricken child Naomi. He grows up to be the devoted follower of Israel in his adversities. When Naomi has reached her seventh year, her mother dies, and is buried in the Jewish cemetery by six State prisoners from the jail, for none other in his isolation can Israel find to help him. He returns to his orphaned child and wraps around her all his thought, all his tenderness. Nightly he reads to her from the Koran, doing his best to dispel the terrible fear that she, knowing nothing of God, may stand condemned in the next life; for in a vision of the night, he has seen Naomi going out into the wilderness as the scapegoat for his sins. So seven more years pass and Israel’s heart softens towards the people under him, and he begins to hate the tyrannies that are exercised over them. And in the disturbance of his heart he takes a journey out to where the prophet Mohammed of Mequinez, a man who has given up all to the cause of the poor and afflicted, holds his camp of refugees. The prophet tells him: “Exact no more than is just; do violence to no man; accuse none falsely; part with your riches and give to the poor:” and with the hope in his heart that such sacrifice will turn God’s face towards Naomi, Israel returns home on foot, giving away all that he carries with him except that which his necessities require. He reaches home in tattered Moorish clothing which at first prevents his recognition.