“Sware! Well, then—” said the elder Jew—“an oath must be fulfilled, Cohen?”
“That depends on circumstances,” returned the Rabbi in Jesuitical wise. “For instance, if Countess sware by any idol of the Goyim, it is void. If she sware by her troth, or faith, or any such thing, it may be doubtful, and might require a synod of the Rabbins to determine it. But if she sware by the Holy One (blessed be He!) then the oath must stand. But of course, daughter, thou wilt have the boy circumcised, and bring him up as a proselyte of Israel.”
The expression in the eyes of Countess did not please the Rabbi.
“Thus I sware,” she said: “‘God do so to me and more also, if I bring not the child to you unhurt!’ How can I meet that man at the day of doom, if I have not kept mine oath—if I deliver not the boy to him unhurt, as he will deem hurting?”
“But that were to teach him the idolatries of the Goyim!” exclaimed the Rabbi in horror.
“I shall teach him no idolatry. Only what his father would have taught him—and I know what that was. I have listened to him many a day on Presthey and Pary’s Mead.”
“Countess, I shall not suffer it. Such a thing must not be done in my house.”
“It has to be done in mine,” said Countess doggedly.
“I do not forbid thee to show mercy to the child. If he be, as thou sayest, an orphan and an exile, and thou moreover hast accepted some fashion of trust with regard to him (however foolish it were to do so), I am willing that thou shouldst keep him a day or two, till he has recovered. But then shelter must be sought for him with the Goyim.”
“Do you two know,” said Countess, in a low voice of concentrated determination, “that this child’s parents, and all of their race that were with them, have been scourged by the Goyim?—branded, and cast forth as evil, and have died in the night and in the snow, because they would not worship idols? These are not of the brood of the priests, who hate them. The boy is mine, and shall be brought up as mine. I sware it.”