A drunken leer overspread his sallow face, and was rendered more ghastly by the flame leaping up from the expiring candle.
"Roshah, sinner!" thundered the woman. Then looking straight into the cruel eyes of the hunchback, her wan face shining with the stress of a great emotion, her meagre form convulsed with fury, "Avaunt, Satan Mekatrig!" she screamed. "Get thee down from my house—get thee down. In God's name, get thee down—to hell."
Even the brazen-faced hunchback trembled before her passion; but he grasped his friend's hot hand in his long, nervous fingers, and seemed to draw courage from the contact.
"If I go, I take your husband!" he hissed, his great eyes blazing in turn. "He will leave me no more. Send me away, if you will."
"Yes, thou must not send my friend away like this," hiccoughed Moshé Grinwitz. "Come, make him welcome, like the good wife thou wast wont to be."
Rebecca uttered a terrible cry, and, cowering down on the ground, rocked herself to and fro.
The drunkard appeared moved. "Get up, Rivkoly," he said, with a tremour in his tones. "To see thee one would think thou wast sitting Shivah over my corpse." He put out his hand as if to raise her up.
"Back!" she screamed, writhing from his grasp. "Touch me not; no longer am I wife of thine."
"Hear you that, man?" said the hunchback eagerly. "You are free. I am here as a witness. Think of it; you are free."
"Yes, I am free," repeated Moshé, with a horrible, joyous exultation on his sickly visage. The gigantic shadow of himself that bent over him, cast by the dying flame of the Yom Kippur Candle, seemed to dance in grim triumph, his long side-curls dangling in the spectral image like barbaric ornaments in the ears of a savage, while the unshapely, fantastic shadow of the hunchback seemed to nod its head in applause. Then, as the flame leaped up in an irregular jet, the distorted shadow of the Tempter intertwined itself in a ghastly embrace with her own. With frozen blood and stifled breath the tortured woman turned away, and, as her eyes fell upon the many-cracked looking-glass which adorned the mantelpiece, she saw, or her overwrought fancy seemed to see—her husband's dead face, wreathed with a slavering serpent in the place of the phylacteries he had ceased to wear, and surrounded by endless perspectives of mocking marble-browed visages, with fiery snakes for hair and live coals for eyes.