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"How long was that ago?" she said anxiously. "I remember exactly. It was the night before the first Seder night." "Was he well?" "Perfectly." "Oh, I am so glad." She told Esther of Levi's strange failure to appear at the annual family festival. "My father went out to look for him. Our anxiety was intolerable. He did not return until half-past one in the morning. He was in a terrible state.
For one awful instant, that seemed an eternity, the old man and the young faced each other across the chasm which divided their lives. To the son the shock was scarcely less violent than to the father. The Seder, which the day's unwonted excitement had clean swept out of his mind, recurred to him in a flash, and by the light of it he understood the puzzle of his father's appearance.
But Seder was over and yet no sign of the missing guest; no word of explanation. In poignant anxiety, the old man walked the three miles that lay between him and tidings of the beloved son. At his chambers he learned that their occupant had not been in all day.
No little princess in the courts of fairyland could feel a fresher interest and pleasure in life than Esther sitting at the Seder table, where her father no longer a slave in Egypt leaned royally upon two chairs supplied with pillows as the Din prescribes. Not even the monarch's prime minister could have had a meaner opinion of Pharaoh than Moses Ansell in this symbolically sybaritic attitude.
Yet in ten thousand homes this April night An ancient people celebrates its birth To Freedom, with a reverential mirth, With customs quaint and many a hoary rite, Waiting until, its tarnished glories bright, Its God shall be the God of all the Earth." To an imaginative child like Esther, Seder night was a charmed time.
And at the Passover Seder Service he still repeats the Psalmist's appeal to God to pour out His wrath on the heathen who have consumed Jacob and laid waste his dwelling. "Pursue them in anger and destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!" Much might, of course, be adduced to mitigate the seeming ferocity or egotism of these passages.
So excited was Mendel over the arrival of his parents that he could scarcely compose himself sufficiently to follow the seder and ask the conventional question concerning the significance of the Pesach festival.
And thus it was that she sat at the Seder table, as in a dream, with images of desperate adventure flitting in her brain. The face of her lover floated before her eyes, close, close to her own as it should have been to-night had there been justice in Heaven. Now and again the scene about her flashed in upon her consciousness, piercing her to the heart.
"I'll do so next year," her mother said, with an affectionate smile that kindled life in her diabetic eyes. "The two of you will then have to pass Passover with us." "I accept the invitation at once," I said "Provided you attend the seder, too," remarked Kaplan, referring to the elaborate and picturesque ceremony attending the first two suppers of the great festival
Besides, she's naturally grumpy, and she doesn't go out of her way to make herself agreeable to young men. It's my belief she'll die an old maid. Well, there's no accounting for tastes." "And your father and mother?" "They're all right, I believe. I shall see them to-morrow night Passover, you know. I haven't missed a single Seder at home," he said, with conscious virtue.
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