'Your Excellency frightened poor Judah into a fit,' said the physician, raising the beadle's head by its long red beard.
His Excellency shrugged his shoulders, sprang to his saddle, and cried a retreat. The Cossacks, unable to turn in the aisle, backed cumbrously with a manifold thudding and rearing and clanking, but ere the congregation had finished rubbing their eyes, the last conical hat and leaded knout had vanished, and only the tarry reek of their boots was left in proof of their actual passage. A deep silence hung for a moment like a heavy cloud, then it broke in a torrent of ejaculations.
But Ben Amram's voice rang through the din. 'Brethren!' He rose from wiping the frothing lips of the stricken creature, and his face had the fiery gloom of a seer's, and the din died under his uplifted palm. 'Brethren, the Lord hath saved us!'
'Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever and ever!' The Rabbi began the phrase, and the congregation caught it up in thunder.
'But hearken how. Last night at the Seder, as I opened the door for Elijah, there entered Maimon the Meshummad! 'Twas he quaffed Elijah's cup!'
There was a rumble of imprecations.
'A pretty Elijah!' cried the Rabbi.
'Nay, but God sends the Prophet of Redemption in strange guise,' the physician said. 'Listen! Maimon was pursued by a drunken mob, ignorant he was a deserter from our camp. When he found how I had saved him and dressed his bleeding face, when he saw the spread Passover table, his child-soul came back to him, and in a burst of tears he confessed the diabolical plot against our community, hatched through his instrumentality by some desperate debtors; how, having raised the cry of a lost child, they were to have its blood found beneath our Holy Ark as in some mystic atonement. And while you all lolled joyously at the Seder table, a bottle of blood lay here instead of the Consecration wine, like a bomb waiting to burst and destroy us all.'
A shudder of awe traversed the synagogue.
'But the Guardian of Israel, who permits us to sleep on Passover night without night-prayer, neither slumbers nor sleeps. Maimon had bribed the Shamash to let him enter the synagogue and replace the Consecration wine.'