Melmoth the Wanderer, Vol. 3
rest shall be in the bosom of Abraham, and who, reposing there, shall see the unbelieving crawling over the burning ashes of hell, and supplicate you in vain for a drop of water, according to the legends of their own prophet. And does not such a picture excite your pride to deny them a drop?”—“I would not deny them a drop,” sobbed the youth, “I would give them these tears.”—“Reserve them for your father’s grave,” added the Jew, “for to the grave you have doomed me.—I have lived, sparing, watching, temporizing, with these accursed idolaters, for you. And now—and now you reject a God who is alone able to save, and a father kneeling to implore you to accept that salvation.”—“No, I do not,” said the bewildered youth.—“What, then, do you determine?—I am at your feet to know your resolution. Behold, the mysterious instruments of your initiation are ready. There is the uncorrupted book of Moses, the prophet of God, as these idolaters themselves confess. There are all the preparations for the year of expiation—determine whether those rites shall now dedicate you to the true God, or seize your father, (who has put his life into your hands), and drag him by the throat into the prisons of the Inquisition. You may—you can—will you?”

“In prostrate and tremulous agony, the father held up his locked hands to his child. I seized the moment—despair had made me reckless. I understood not a word of what was said, except the reference to the Inquisition. I seized on that last word—I grasped, in my despair, at the heart of father and child. I rushed from behind the curtain, and exclaiming, “If he does not betray you to the Inquisition, I will.” I fell at his feet. This mixture of defiance and prostration, my squalid figure, my inquisitorial habit, and my bursting on this secret and solemn interview, struck the Jew with a horror he vainly gasped to express, till, rising from my knees, on which I had fallen from my weakness, I added, “Yes, I will betray you to the Inquisition, unless you instantly promise to shelter me from it.” The Jew glanced at my dress, perceived his danger and mine, and, with a physical presence of mind unparalleled, except in a man under strong impressions of mental excitation and personal danger, bustled about to remove every trace of the expiatory sacrifice, and of my inquisitorial costume, in a moment. In the same breath he called aloud for Rebekah, to remove the vessels from the table; bid Antonio quit the apartment, and hastened to clothe me in some dress that he had snatched from a wardrobe collected from centuries; while he tore off my inquisitorial dress with a violence that left me actually naked, and the habit in rags.

“There was 
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