"She does not go about at all now," I said freezingly. But this set Yarchi cachinnating worse than ever.
"He daren't trust even his own disciples, you see! Ha! ha! ha!"
"Yarchi!" I cried angrily, "you know Bethulah must be kept sacred from this rabble," and I switched with my riding-whip at the poppies that grew among the maize in the little front garden, as if they were pilgrims and I a Tarquin.
"Yes, I know that's Ben David's game. But I wish some man would marry her and ruin his business. Ha! ha! ha!"
"It would ruin yours too," I reminded him, more angrily. "You are ready enough to let lodgings to the pilgrims."
Yarchi shrugged his hump. "If fools are fools, wise men are wise men," he replied oracularly.
I strode away, but he had heated my brain with a new idea, or one that I now allowed myself to see clearly. Some man might marry her. Then why should I not be that man? Why should I not carry Bethulah back to America with me—the most precious curiosity of the Old World—a frank, virginal creature with that touch of the angel which I had dreamed of but had never met among our smart girls—up to then. And even if it were true that Ben David was a fraud, and needed the girl for his Cabalistic mystifications, even so I was rich enough to recoup him. The girl herself was no conscious accessory; of that I felt certain.
When my brain cooled, suggestions of the other aspects of the question began to find entrance. What of Bethulah herself? Why should she care to marry me? Or to go to the strange, raw country? And such a union—was it not too incongruous, too fantastic, for practical life? Thus I wrestled with myself for three days, all the while watching Bethulah's turret or the roads she might come by. On the third night I saw a wild mob of men at the turret end of the house, dancing in a ring and singing, with their eyes turned upward to the light that burnt on high. Their words I could not catch at first through the tumultuous howl, but it went on and on, like their circumvolutions, over and over again, till my brain reeled. It seemed to be an appeal to Bethulah to plead their cause on the coming Yom-Hadin (New-Year day of Judgment):—
"By thy soul without sin,
Enter heaven within,
This divine Yom-Hadin,
Holy Maid.
"Undertake thou our plea;
Let the Poison God be
Answered stoutly by thee,
Holy Queen."