“There was a martyr of your race once,” she said in cruel tones.  “His name was Simon Abeles.  You talk of martyrdom!  You shall know what it means—­though it be too good for you, who spy upon the woman whom you say you love.”

The hectic flush of passion sank from Israel Kafka’s cheek.  Rigid, with outstretched arms and bent head, he stood against the ancient gravestone.  Above him, as though raised to heaven in silent supplication, were the sculptured hands that marked the last resting-place of a Kohn.

“You shall know now,” said Unorna.  “You shall suffer indeed.”

CHAPTER XV[*]

[*] The deeds here described were done in Prague on the twenty-first day of February in the year 1694.  Lazarus and his accomplice Levi Kurtzhandel, or Brevimanus, or “the short-handed,” were betrayed by their own people.  Lazarus hanged himself in prison, and Levi suffered death by the wheel—­repentant, it is said, and himself baptized.  A full account of the trial, written in Latin, was printed, and a copy of it may be seen in the State Museum in Prague.  The body of Simon Abeles was exhumed and rests in the Teyn Kirche, in the chapel on the left of the high altar.  The slight extension of certain scenes not fully described in the Latin volume will be pardoned in a work of fiction.

Unorna’s voice sank from the tone of anger to a lower pitch.  She spoke quietly and very distinctly as though to impress every word upon the ear of the man who was in her power.  The Wanderer listened, too, scarcely comprehending at first, but slowly yielding to the influence she exerted until the vision rose before him also with all its moving scenes, in all its truth and in all its horror.  As in a dream the deeds that had been passed before him, the desolate burial-ground was peopled with forms and faces of other days, the gravestones rose from the earth and piled themselves into gloomy houses and remote courts and dim streets and venerable churches, the dry and twisted trees shrank down, and broadened and swung their branches as arms, and drew up their roots out of the ground as feet under them and moved hither and thither.  And the knots and bosses and gnarls upon them became faces, dark, eagle-like and keen, and the creaking and crackling of the boughs and twigs under the piercing blast that swept by, became articulate and like the voices of old men talking angrily together.  There were sudden changes from day to night and from night to day.  In dark chambers crouching men took counsel of blood together under the feeble rays of a flickering lamp.  In the uncertain twilight of winter, muffled figures lurked at the corner of streets, waiting for some one to pass, who must not escape them.  As the Wanderer gazed and listened, Israel Kafka was transformed.  He no longer stood with outstretched arms, his back against a crumbling slab, his filmy eyes fixed on Unorna’s face.  He grew younger; his features were those of a boy of scarcely thirteen years, pale, earnest and brightened by a soft light which followed him hither and thither, and he was not alone.  He moved with others through the old familiar streets of the city, clothed in a fashion of other times, speaking in accents comprehensible but unlike the speech of to-day, acting in a dim and far-off life that had once been.