Reuben Sachs
Date: 2024-09-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: London (England) -- Fiction; Jews -- England -- London -- Fiction

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Title: Reuben Sachs
a sketch

Author: Amy Levy

Release date: September 15, 2024 [eBook #74419]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Macmillan and Co, 1888

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74419

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REUBEN SACHS ***

CHAPTER I., II., III., IV., V., VI., VII., VIII., IX., X., XI., XII., XIII., XIV., XV., XVI., XVII., XVIII., XIX., EPILOGUE.
Transcriber's note.

REUBEN SACHS

A SKETCH

REUBEN SACHS

A SKETCH

BY
AMY LEVY

AUTHOR OF “A MINOR POET” AND “THE ROMANCE OF A SHOP”

London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1888

The Right of Translation and Reproduction is reserved

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
LONDON AND BUNGAY.

REUBEN SACHS:

A SKETCH.

CHAPTER I.

This is my beloved Son.

Reuben Sachs was the pride of his family.

After a highly successful career at one of the great London day-schools, he had gone up on a scholarship to the University, where, if indeed he had chosen to turn aside from the beaten paths of academic distinction, he had made good use of his time in more ways than one.

The fact that he was a Jew had proved no bar to his popularity; he had gained many desirable friends and had, to some extent, shaken off the provincialism inevitable to one born and bred in the Jewish community.

At the bar, to which in due course he was called, his usual good fortune did not desert him.

Before he was twenty-five he had begun to be spoken of as “rising”; and at twenty-six, by unsuccessfully contesting a hard-fought election, had attracted to himself attention of another sort. He had no objection, he said, to the woolsack; but a career of political distinction was growing slowly but surely to be his leading aim in life.

“He will never starve,” said his mother, shrugging her shoulders with a comfortable consciousness of safe investments; “and he must marry money. But Reuben can be trusted to do nothing rash.” In the midst of so much that was highly promising, his health had broken down suddenly, and he had gone off grumbling to the antipodes.

It was a case of over-work, of over-strain, of nervous break-down, said the doctors; no doubt a sea-voyage would set him right again, but he must be careful of himself in the future.

“More than half my nervous patients are recruited from the ranks of the Jews,” said the great physician whom Reuben consulted. “You pay the penalty of too high a civilization.”

“On the other hand,” Reuben answered, “we never die; so we may be said to have our compensations.”

Reuben’s father had not borne out his son’s theory; he had died many years before my story opens, greatly to his own surprise and that of a family which could boast more than one nonogenarian in a generation.

He had left his wife and children well provided for, and the house in Lancaster Gate was rich in material comfort.

In the drawing-room of this house Mrs. Sachs and her daughter were sitting on the day of Reuben’s return from his six months’ absence.

He had arrived early in the day, and was now sleeping off the effects of a night passed in travelling, and of the plentiful supply of fatted calf with which he had been welcomed.

His devoted womankind meanwhile sipped their tea in the fading light of the September afternoon, and talked over the event of the day in the rapid, nervous tones peculiar to them.

Mrs. Sachs was an elderly woman, stout and short, with a wide, sallow, impassive face, lighted up by occasional gleams of shrewdness from a pair of half-shut eyes.

An indescribable air of intense, but subdued vitality characterized her presence; she did not appear in good health, but you saw at a glance that this was an old lady whom it would be difficult to kill.

“He looks better, Addie, he looks very well indeed,” she said, the dull red spot of colour on either sallow cheek alone testifying to her excitement.

“I have said all along,” answered her daughter, “that if Reuben had been a poor man the doctors would never have found out that he wanted a sea-voyage at all. Let us only hope that it has done him no harm professionally.” She emptied her tea-cup as she spoke, and cut herself a fresh slice of the rich cake which she was devouring with nervous voracity.

Adelaide Sachs, or to give her her right title, Mrs. Montagu Cohen, was a thin, dark young woman of eight or nine-and-twenty, with a restless, eager, sallow face, and an abrupt manner. She was richly and very fashionably dressed in an unbecoming gown of green shot silk, and wore big diamond solitaires in her ears. She and her mother indeed were never seen without such jewels, which seemed to bear the same relation to their owners as his pigtail does to the Chinaman.

Adelaide was the eldest of the family; she had married young a husband chosen for her, with whom she lived with average contentment.

Reuben was scarcely two years her junior; no one cared to remember the age of Lionel, the youngest of the three, a hopeless ne’er-do-weel, who had with difficulty been relegated to an obscure colony.

“There is always either a ne’er-do-weel or an idiot in every Jewish family!” Esther Kohnthal had remarked in one of her appalling bursts of candour.

The mother and daughter sat there in the growing dusk, amid the plush ottomans, stamped velvet tables, and other Philistine splendours of the large drawing-room, till the lamp-lighter came down the Bayswater Road and the gilt clock on the mantelpiece struck six.

Almost at the same moment the door was flung open and a voice cried:

“Why do women invariably sit in the dark?”

It was a pleasant voice; to a fine ear, unmistakably the voice of a Jew, though the accents of the speaker were free from the cockney twang which marred the speech of the two women.

“Reuben! I thought you were asleep,” cried his mother.

“So I was. Now I have arisen like a giant refreshed.”

A man of middle height and slender build had made his way across the room to the window; his face was indistinct in the darkness as he stooped and put his arm caressingly about the broad, fat shoulder of his mother.

“Dressed for dinner already, Reuben?” was all she said, though the hard eye under the cautious old eyelid grew soft as she spoke.

Her love for this son and her pride in him were the passion of her life.

“Dinner? You are never going to kill the fatted calf twice over? But seriously, I must run down to the club for an hour or two. There may be letters.”

He hesitated a moment, then added: “I shall look in at the Leunigers on my way back.”

“The Leunigers!” cried Adelaide in open disapproval.

“Reuben, there’s the old gentleman. He won’t like your going first to your cousins,” said his mother.

“My grandfather? Oh, but my arrival isn’t an official fact till to-morrow. We were sixteen hours before our time, remember. Good-bye, Addie. I suppose you and Monty will be dining in Portland Place to-morrow with the rest of us. What a gathering of the clans! Well, I must be off.” And he suited the action to the word.

“Why on earth need he rush off like that to the Leunigers?” said Mrs. Cohen as she drew on her gloves.

Her mother looked across at her through the dusk.

“Reuben will do nothing rash,” she said.

CHAPTER II.

Whatever my mood is, I love Piccadilly.

London Lyrics.

Reuben Sachs stepped into the twilit street with a distinct sense of exhilaration.

He was back again; back to the old, full, strenuous life which was so dear to him; to the din and rush and struggle of the London which he loved with a passion that had something of poetry in it.

With the eager curiosity, the vivid interest in life, which underlay his rather impassive bearing, it was impossible that foreign travel should be without charm for him; but he returned with unmixed delight to his own haunts; to the work and the play; the market-place, and the greetings in the market-place; to the innumerable pleasantnesses of an existence which owed something of its piquancy to the fact that it was led partly in the democratic atmosphere of modern London, partly in the conservative precincts of the Jewish community.

Now as he lingered a moment on the pavement, looking up and down the road for a hansom, the light from the street lamp fell full upon him, revealing what the darkness of his mother’s drawing-room had previously hidden from sight.

He was, as I have said, of middle height and slender build. He wore good clothes, but they could not disguise the fact that his figure was bad, and his movements awkward; unmistakably the figure and movements of a Jew.

And his features, without presenting any marked national trait, bespoke no less clearly his Semitic origin.

His complexion was of a dark pallor; the hair, small moustache and eyes, dark, with red lights in them; over these last the lids were drooping, and the whole face wore for the moment a relaxed, dreamy, impassive air, curiously Eastern, and not wholly free from melancholy.

He walked slowly in the direction of an advancing hansom, hailed it quickly and quietly, and had himself driven off to Pall Mall. To every movement of the man clung that indescribable suggestion of an irrepressible vitality which was the leading characteristic of his mother.

There were several letters for him at the club; having discussed them, and been greeted by half a dozen men of his acquaintance, he dined lightly off a chop and a glass of claret, and gave himself up to what was apparently an exceedingly pleasant reverie.

The club where he sat was not, as he himself would have been the first to acknowledge, in the front rank of such institutions; but it was respectable and had its advantages. As for its drawbacks, supported by his sense of better things to come, Reuben Sachs could tolerate them.

It was nearly half past eight when Reuben’s cab drew up before the Leunigers’ house in Kensington Palace Gardens, where a blaze of light from the lower windows told him that he had come on no vain errand.

Israel Leuniger had begun life as a clerk on the Stock Exchange, where he had been fortunate enough to find employment in the great broking firm of Sachs & Co. There his undeniable business talents and devotion to his work had met with ample reward. He had advanced from one confidential post to another; after a successful speculation on his own account, had been admitted into partnership, and finally, like the industrious apprentice of the story books, had married his master’s daughter.

In these days the reins of government in Capel Court had fallen almost entirely into his hands. Solomon Sachs, though a wonderful man of his years, was too old for regular attendance in the city, while poor Kohnthal, the other member of the firm, and, like Leuniger, son-in-law to old Solomon, had been shut up in a madhouse for the last ten years and more.

As Reuben advanced into the large, heavily upholstered vestibule, one of the many surrounding doors opened slowly, and a woman emerged with a vague, uncertain movement into the light.

She might have been fifty years of age, perhaps more, perhaps less; her figure was slim as a girl’s, but the dark hair, uncovered by a cap, was largely mixed with gray. The long, oval face was of a deep, unwholesome, sallow tinge; and from its haggard gloom looked out two dark, restless, miserable eyes; the eyes of a creature in pain. Her dress was rich but carelessly worn, and about her whole person was an air of neglect.

“Aunt Ada!” cried Reuben, going forward.

She rubbed her lean sallow hands together, saying in low, broken, lifeless tones: “We didn’t expect you till to-morrow, Reuben. I hope your health has improved.” This was quite a long speech for Mrs. Leuniger, who was of a monosyllabic habit.

Before Reuben could reply, the door opposite the one from which his aunt had emerged was flung open, and two little boys, dressed in sailor-suits, rushed into the hall.

One was dark, with bright black eyes; the other had a shock of flame-coloured hair, and pale, prominent eyes. “Reuben!” they cried in astonishment, and rushed upon their cousin.

“Lionel! Sidney!” protested their mother faintly as the boys proceeded to take all sorts of liberties with the new arrival.

The door by which they had come opened again, and a man’s voice cried, half in fun:

“Why on earth are you youngsters making this confounded row? Be off to bed, or you’ll be sorry for it!”

Reuben was standing under the light of a lamp, a smile on his face, as he lifted little red-haired Sidney from the ground and held him suspended by his wide sailor-collar.

“It’s Reuben, old Reuben come back!” cried the children.

An exclamation followed; the door was flung open wide; Reuben set down the child with a laugh and passed into the lighted room.

CHAPTER III.

How should Love,
Whom the cross-lightnings of four chance-met eyes
Flash into fiery life from nothing, follow
Such dear familiarities of dawn?
Seldom; but when he does, Master of all.
Aylmer’s Field.

The Leunigers’ drawing-room, in which Reuben now found himself, was a spacious apartment, hung with primrose coloured satin, furnished throughout in impeccable Louis XV. and lighted with incandescent gas from innumerable chandeliers and sconces. Beyond, divided by a plush-draped alcove, was a room of smaller size, where, at present, could be discerned the intent, Semitic faces of some half-dozen card-players.

In the front room four or five young people in evening dress were grouped, but at Reuben’s entrance they all came forward with various exclamations of greeting.

“Thought you weren’t coming back till to-morrow!”

“I shouldn’t have known you; you’re as brown as a berry!”

“See the conquering hero comes!”

This last from Rose Leuniger, a fat girl of twenty, in a tight-fitting blue silk dress, with the red hair and light eyes à fleur de tête of her little brother.

“I am awfully glad to see you looking so well,” added Leopold Leuniger, the owner of the voice.

He was a short, slight person of one or two-and-twenty, with a picturesque head of markedly tribal character.

The dark, oval face, bright, melancholy eyes, alternately dreamy and shrewd; the charming, humorous smile, with its flash of white even teeth, might have belonged to some poet or musician, instead of to the son of a successful Jewish stockbroker.

By his side stood a small, dark, gnome-like creature, apparently entirely overpowered by the rich, untidy garments she was wearing. She was a girl, or woman, whose age it would be difficult to determine, with small, glittering eyes that outshone the diamonds in her ears.

Her trailing gown of heavy flowered brocade was made with an attempt at picturesqueness; an intention which was further evidenced by the studied untidiness of the tousled hair, and by the thick strings of amber coiled round the lean brown neck.

This was Esther Kohnthal, the only child of poor Kohnthal; and, according to her own account, the biggest heiress and the ugliest woman in all Bayswater.

Shuffling up awkwardly behind her came Ernest Leuniger, the eldest son of the house, of whom it would be unfair to say that he was an idiot. He was nervous, delicate; had a rooted aversion to society; and was obliged by his state of health to spend the greater part of his time in the country.

Esther used to shrug her shoulders and smile shrewdly and unpleasantly whenever this description of what she chose to consider the family skeleton was given out in her hearing; she told every one, quite frankly, that her own father was in a madhouse.

Judith Quixano came up a little behind the others, with a hesitation in her manner which was new to her, and of which she herself was unconscious.

She was twenty-two years of age, in the very prime of her youth and beauty; a tall, regal-looking creature, with an exquisite dark head, features like those of a face cut on gem or cameo, and wonderful, lustrous, mournful eyes, entirely out of keeping with the accepted characteristics of their owner.

Her smooth, oval cheek glowed with a rich, yet subdued, hue of perfect health; and her tight-fitting fashionable white evening dress showed to advantage the generous lines of a figure which was distinguished for stateliness rather than grace.

Reuben Sachs had looked straight at this girl on entering the room; but he shook hands with her last of all, clasping her fingers closely and searching her face with his eyes. They were not cousins, her relationship to the Leunigers coming from the father’s side; but there had always been between them a fiction of cousinship, which had made possible what is rare all the world over, but rarer than ever in the Jewish community—an intimacy between young people of opposite sexes.

“I thought I had better come while I could. We were before our time,” said Reuben as they sat down, the whole party of them grouped close together, with the exception of Ernest, who returned to his solitaire board, a plaything which afforded him perpetual occupation. After several years of practice he had never arrived at leaving the glass marble in solitary state on the board; but he lived in hopes.

“While you could! Before, in fact, fashion had again claimed Mr. Reuben Sachs for her own,” cried Esther.

“I don’t know about fashion,” answered Reuben with perfect good temper; Esther was Esther, and if you began to mind what she said, you would never know where to stop; “but there are a hundred things to be attended to. I suppose every one is going to the grandpater’s feed to-morrow?”

Every one was going; then, turning to Leo, Reuben said: “When do you go up?”

“Not till October 14th.”

Leopold Leuniger was on the eve of his third year at Cambridge.

“What have you been doing this Long?”

“Oh ... staying about.”

“Leo has been stopping with Lord Norwood, but we are not allowed to mention it,” cried Rose in her loud, penetrating voice, “in case it should seem that we are proud.”

Leo, who was passing through a sensitive phase of his growth, winced visibly, and Reuben said in a matter-of-fact way: “Oh, by the by, I came across a cousin of Lord Norwood’s abroad—Lee-Harrison; a curious fellow, but a good fellow.”

“A howling swell,” added Esther, “with a double-barrelled name.”

“Exactly. But the point about him is that he has gone over body and soul to the Jewish community.”

There was an ironical exclamation all round. The Jews, the most clannish and exclusive of peoples, the most keen to resent outside criticism, can say hard things of one another within the walls of the ghetto.

“He says himself,” went on Reuben, “that he has a taste for religion. I believe he flirted with the Holy Mother for some years, but didn’t get caught. Then he joined a set of mystics, and lived for three months on a mountain, somewhere in Asia Minor. Now he has come round to thinking Judaism the one religion, and has been regularly received into the synagogue.”

“And expects, no doubt,” said Esther, “to be rejoiced over as the one sinner that repenteth. I hope you didn’t shatter his illusions by telling him that he would more likely be considered a fool for his pains?”

Reuben laughed, and with an amused expression on his now animated face went on: “He has a seat in Berkeley Street, and a brand new talith, but still he is not happy. He complains that the Jews he meets in society are unsatisfactory; they have no local colour. I said I thought I could promise him a little local colour; I hope to have the pleasure of introducing him to you all.”

They all laughed with the exception of Rose, who said, rather offended: “I don’t know about local colour. We don’t wear turbans.”

Reuben put back his head, laughing a little, and seeking Judith’s eyes for the answering smile he knew he should find there.

She had been keeping rather in the background to-night, quietly but intensely happy.

Reuben was back again! How delightfully familiar was every tone, every inflection of his voice! And how well she knew the changes of his face: the heavy dreaminess, the imperturbable air of Eastern gravity; then lo! the lifting of the mask; the flash and play of kindling features; the fire of speaking eyes; the hundred lights and shades of expression that she could so well interpret.

“What do his people say to it all?” asked Leo.

“Lee-Harrison’s? Oh, I believe they take it very sensibly. They say it’s only Bertie,” answered Reuben, rising and holding out his hand to his uncle, who sauntered in from the card-room.

He was a short, stout, red-haired man, closely resembling his daughter, and at the present moment looked annoyed. The play was high and he had been losing heavily.

“Let’s have some music, Leo,” he said, flinging himself into an arm-chair at some distance from the young people. Rose, who was a skilled musician, went over to the piano, and Leopold took his violin from its case.

Reuben moved closer to Judith, and, under cover of the violin tuning, they exchanged a few words.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to get back.”

“You look all the better for your trip. But you must take care and not overdo it again. It’s bad policy.”

“It is almost impossible not to.”

“But those committees and meetings and things” (she smiled), “surely they might be cut down?”

“They are often very useful, indirectly, to a man in my position,” answered Reuben, who had no intention of saying anything cynical.

There was a good deal of genuine benevolence in his nature, and an almost insatiable energy.

He took naturally to the modern forms of philanthropy: the committees, the classes, the concerts and meetings. He found indeed that they had their uses, both social and political; higher motives for attending them were not wanting; and he liked them for their own sake besides. Out-door sports he detested; the pleasures of dancing he had exhausted long ago; the practice of philanthropy provided a vent for his many-sided energies.

The tuning had come to an end by now, and the musicians had taken up their position.

Immediately silence fell upon the little audience, broken only by the click of counters, the crackle of a bank-note in the room beyond; and the sound of Ernest’s solitaire balls as they dropped into their holes.

Mrs. Leuniger, at the first notes of the tuning, had stolen in and taken up a position near the door; Esther had moved to a further corner of the room, where she lay buried in a deep lounge.

Then, all at once, the music broke forth. The great, vulgar, over-decorated room, with its garish lights, its stifling fumes of gas, was filled with the sound of dreams; and over the keen faces stole, like a softening mist, a far-away air of dreamy sensuousness. The long, delicate hands of the violinist, the dusky, sensitive face, as he bent lovingly over the instrument, seemed to vibrate with the strings over which he had such mastery.

The voice of a troubled soul cried out to-night in Leo’s music, whose accents even the hard brilliance of his accompanist failed to drown.

As the bow was drawn across the strings for the last time, Ernest’s solitaire board fell to the ground with a crash, the little balls of Venetian glass rolling audibly in every direction.

The spell was broken; every one rose, and the card-players, who by this time were hungry, came strolling in from the other room.

Reuben found himself the centre of much handshaking and congratulation on his improved appearance. He was popular with his relatives, enjoying his popularity and accepting it gracefully.

“No airs, like that stuck up Leo,” the aunts and uncles used to say.

“There’s a spread in the dining-room; won’t you stay?” said Rose, as Reuben held out his hand in farewell.

“Not to-night.” He turned last of all to Judith, who stood there silent, with smiling eyes.

“To-morrow in Portland Place,” he said, clasping her hand with lingering fingers.

As he walked home in the warm September night he had for once neither ears nor eyes for the city pageant so dear to him.

He heard and saw nothing but the sound of Leo’s violin, and the face of Judith Quixano.

CHAPTER IV.

The full sum of me
Is an untutored girl, unschooled, unpractised.
Merchant of Venice.

Judith Quixano had lived with the Leunigers ever since she was fifteen years old.

Her mother, Israel Leuniger’s sister, had been thought to do very well for herself when she married Joshua Quixano, who came of a family of Portuguese merchants, the vieille noblesse of the Jewish community.

That was before the days of Leuniger’s prosperity; now here, as elsewhere, the prestige of birth had dwindled, that of money had increased. The Quixanos were a large family, and they had grown poorer with the years; very gratefully did they welcome the offer of the rich uncle to adopt their eldest daughter.

So Judith had been borne away from the little crowded house in a dreary region lying somewhere between Westbourne Park and Maida Vale to the splendours of Kensington Palace Gardens.

Here she had shared everything with her cousin Rose: the French and German governesses, the expensive music lessons, the useless, pretentious “finishing” lessons from innumerable masters.

Later on, the girls, who were about of an age, had gone together into such society as their set afforded; and here, again, no difference had been made between them. The gowns and bonnets of Rose were neither more splendid nor more abundant than those of her poor relation, nor her invitations to parties more numerous.

Rose, it is true, had a fortune of £50,000; but it was a matter of common knowledge that her uncle would settle £5000 on Judith when she married.

The cousins were good friends after a fashion. Rose was a materialist to her fingers’ ends; she was lacking in the finer feelings, perhaps even in the finer honesties. But on the other hand she was easy to live with, good-tempered, good-natured, high-spirited; qualities which cover a multitude of sins.

It will be seen that in their own fashion, and according to their own lights, the Leunigers had been very kind to Judith. She had no ground for complaint; nor indeed was there anything but gratitude in her thoughts of them. If, at times, she was discontented, she was only vaguely aware of her own discontent. To rail at fate, to cry out against the gods, were amusements she left to such people as Esther and Leo, for whom, in her quiet way, she had considerable contempt.

But the life, the position, the atmosphere, though she knew it not, were repressive ones. This woman, with her beauty, her intelligence, her power of feeling, saw herself merely as one of a vast crowd of girls awaiting their promotion by marriage.

She had, it is true, the advantage of good looks; on the other hand she was, comparatively speaking, portionless; and the marriageable Jew, as Esther was fond of saying, is even rarer and shyer than the marriageable Gentile.

To marry a Gentile would have been quite out of the question for her. Mr. Leuniger, thorough-going pagan as he was, would have set his foot mercilessly on such an arrangement; it would not have seemed to him respectable. He was no stickler for forms and ceremonies; though while old Solomon lived a certain amount of observance of them was necessary; you need only marry a Jew and be buried at Willesden or Ball’s Pond; the rest would take care of itself.

But, her uncle’s views apart, Judith’s opportunities for uniting herself to an alien were small.

The Leunigers had of course their Gentile acquaintance, chiefly people of the sham “smart,” pseudo-fashionable variety, whose parties at Bayswater or South Kensington they attended. But the business of their lives, its main interests, lay almost entirely within the tribal limits. It was as Hebrews of the Hebrews that Solomon Sachs and his son-in-law took their stand.

In the Community, with its innumerable trivial class differences, its sets within sets, its fine-drawn distinctions of caste, utterly incomprehensible to an outsider, they held a good, though not the best position. They were, as yet, socially on their promotion. The Sachses and the Leunigers, in their elder branches, troubled themselves, as we have seen, little enough about their relations to the outer world; but the younger members of the family, Reuben, Leo, even Adelaide and Esther in their own crude fashion, showed symptoms of a desire to strike out from the tribal duck-pond into the wider and deeper waters of society. Such symptoms, their position and training considered, were of course, inevitable; and the elders looked on with pride and approval, not understanding indeed the full meaning of the change.

But as for Judith Quixano, and for many women placed as she, it is difficult to conceive a training, an existence, more curiously limited, more completely provincial than hers. Her outlook on life was of the narrowest; of the world, of London, of society beyond her own set, it may be said that she had seen nothing at first hand; had looked at it all, not with her own eyes, but with the eyes of Reuben Sachs.

She could scarcely remember the time when she and Reuben had not been friends. Ever since she was a little girl in the schoolroom, and he a charming lad in his first terms at the University, he had thought it worth while to talk to her, to confide to her his hopes, plans and ambitions; to direct her reading and lend her books.

Books were a luxury in the Leuniger household. We all have our economies, even the richest of us; and the Leunigers, who begrudged no money for food, clothes or furniture, who went constantly into the stalls of the theatre, without considering the expense, regarded every shilling spent on books as pure extravagance.

Reuben indeed was the only person who had any conception of Judith’s possibilities, or, of those surrounding her, who even estimated at its full her rich and stately beauty. Their friendship, unusual enough in a society which retains, in relation to women at least, so many traces of orientalism, had sprung up at first unnoticed in the intimacy of family life.

It was not till the last year or two that it had attracted any serious attention. Adelaide Cohen openly did everything in her power to check it; and even Mrs. Sachs, with her rooted belief in her son’s discretion, her conviction that he would never fail to act up to his creed of doing the very best for himself, grew anxious at times, and was almost glad of the chance which had sent him off to the antipodes.

Aloud to her daughter, she scouted the notion of any serious cause for alarm.

“It is for the girl’s sake I am sorry. That sort of thing does a girl a great deal of harm. It is time she was married.”

“She has no money. Very likely she won’t marry at all,” cried Adelaide, who was dyspeptic and subject to fits of bad temper.

Meanwhile Judith, acquiescent, receptive, appreciative, took the good things this friendship offered her, and shut her eyes to the future. Not, as she believed, that she ever for a moment deceived herself. That would scarcely have been possible in the atmosphere in which she breathed.

She had known from the beginning, how could she fail to know? that Reuben must do great things for himself in every relation of life; must ultimately climb to inaccessible heights where she could not hope to follow.

Her pride and her humility went hand in hand, and she prided herself on her own good sense which made any mistake in the matter impossible. And that he was so sensible, was what she particularly admired in Reuben.

Leo was clever, she knew; and Esther after a fashion; but these two people had an uncomfortable, eccentric, undignified method of setting about things, from the way they did their hair, upwards.

But Reuben had sacrificed none of his dignity as a human being to his cleverness; he was eminently normal, though cleverer than any one she knew.

For the long-haired type of man, the professional person of genius, this thorough-going Philistine, this conservative ingrain, had no tolerance whatever. She never could understand the mania among some of the girls of her set, Rose Leuniger included, for the second-rate actors, musicians, and professional reciters with whom they came into occasional contact at parties.

She had, it is seen, distinct if unformulated notions as to the sanity of true genius.

And she herself? She was so sensible, oh, she was thoroughly sensible and matter-of-fact!

Esther fell in love half-a-dozen times a season, loudly bewailing herself throughout. Even Rose was not without her affairs de cœur; but she, Judith, was utterly free from such sentimental aberrations.

That was why perhaps a man like Reuben, who had not much opinion of women in general, considering them creatures easily snared, should find it possible to make a friend of her.

She understood perfectly Adelaide’s snubs, Mrs. Sachs’s repressive attitude, Esther’s clumsily veiled warnings.

She understood and was indignant. Did they think her such a fool; a person incapable of friendship with a man without misinterpretation of his motives?

But Reuben knew that it was not so; and therein of course lay her strength and her consolation.

It was this openly matter-of-fact attitude of hers which had not only added piquancy to his intercourse with her, but had made Reuben less careful with her than he would otherwise have been.

He had no wish to hurt the girl, either as regarded her feelings or her prospects; nor was the danger, he told himself, a serious one.

She liked him immensely, of course, but she was unsentimental, like most women of her race, and would settle down happily enough when the time came.

He told himself these things with a secret, pleasant consciousness of a subtler element in their relationship; of unsounded depths in the nature of this girl who trusted him so completely, and whom he had so completely in hand. Nor did he hide from himself that she charmed him and pleased his taste as no other woman had ever done.

A man does not so easily deceive himself in these matters, and during the last year or two he had been fully aware of a quickening in his sentiments towards her.

Yes, Reuben knew by now that he was in love with Judith Quixano. The situation was full of delights, of dangers, of pains and pleasantnesses.

A disturbing element in the serene course of his existence, it added a charm to existence of which he was in no haste to be rid.

CHAPTER V.

Quand il pâlit un soir, et que sa voix tremblante
S’éteignit tout à coup dans un mot commencé;
Quand ses yeux, soulevant leur paupière brûlante,
Me blessèrent d’un mal dont je le crus blessé;
. . . . . . . .
Il n’aimait pas—j’aimais.

M. Desbordes Valmore.

Old Solomon Sachs awaited his guests in the drawing-room of his house in Portland Place.

It was the night after Reuben’s arrival, in honour of which the feast was given.

Such feasts were by no means rare events, the old man liking to assemble his family round him in true patriarchal fashion. As for the family, it always grumbled and always went.

He was a short, sturdy-looking man, with a flowing white beard, which added size to a head already out of all proportion to the rest of him. The enormous face was both powerful and shrewd; there was power too in the coarse, square hands, in the square, firmly-planted feet.

You saw at a glance that he was blest with that fitness of which survival is the inevitable reward.

He wore a skull-cap, and, at the present moment, was pacing the room, performing what seemed to be an incantation in Hebrew below his breath.

As a matter of fact, he was saying his prayers, an occupation which helped him to get rid of a great deal of his time, which hung heavily on his hands, now that age had disabled him from active service on the Stock Exchange.

His daughter Rebecca, a woman far advanced in middle-life, stitched drearily at some fancy-work by the fire. She was unmarried, and hated the position with the frank hatred of the women of her race, for whom it is a peculiarly unenviable one.

Reuben’s mother, her daughter and son-in-law, were the first to arrive.

Old Solomon shook hands with them, still continuing his muttered devotions, and they received in silence a greeting to which they were too much accustomed to consider in any way remarkable.

“Grandpapa saying his prayers,” was an everyday phenomenon. Perhaps the younger members of the party remembered that it had never been allowed to interfere with the production of cake; the generous slices had not been less welcome from the fact that they must be eaten without acknowledgment.

Montague Cohen, Adelaide Sachs’s husband, belonged to that rapidly dwindling section of the Community which attaches importance to the observation of the Mosaic and Rabbinical laws in various minute points.

He would have half-starved himself sooner than eat meat killed according to Gentile fashion, or leavened bread in the Passover week.

Adelaide chafed at the restrictions imposed by this constant making clean of the outside of the cup and platter; but it was a point on which her husband, amenable in everything else, remained firm.

He was an anæmic young man, destitute of the more brilliant qualities of his race, with a rooted belief in himself and every thing that belonged to him.

He was proud of his house, his wife and his children. He was proud, Heaven knows why, of his personal appearance, his mental qualities, and his sex; this last to an even greater extent than most men of his race, with whom pride of sex is a characteristic quality.

“Blessed art Thou, O Lord my God, who hast not made me a woman.”

No prayer goes up from the synagogue with greater fervour than this.

This fact notwithstanding, it must be acknowledged that, save in the one matter of religious observation, Montague Cohen was led by the nose by his wife, whose intelligence and vitality far exceeded his own. Borne along in her wake, he passed his life in pursuit of a shadow which is called social advancement; going uncomplainingly over quagmires, into stony places, up and down uncomfortable declivities; following patiently and faithfully wherever the restless, energetic Adelaide led.

Esther and her mother were the next to arrive. Mrs. Kohnthal was old Solomon’s eldest child, a stout, dark, exuberant-looking woman, between whom and her daughter was waged a constant feud.

The whole party of the Leunigers, with the exception of Ernest, who never dined out, was not long in following: Mrs. Leuniger, dejected, monosyllabic, untidy as usual; Mr. Leuniger, cheerful, pompous, important; Rose, loud-voiced, overdressed, good-tempered; Judith, blooming, stately, calm, in her fashionable gown, which assorted oddly, a close observer might have thought, with the exotic nature of her beauty. Leo dragged in mournfully in the rear of his party; he was in one of his worst moods. He hated these family gatherings, and had only been prevailed on with great difficulty to put in an appearance.

“We are all here,” cried Adelaide, when greetings had been exchanged, “with the exception of the hero of the feast.”

“Who has evidently,” added Esther, “a sense of dramatic propriety.”

“Reuben is at his club,” explained Mrs. Sachs, looking under her eyelids at Judith, who had taken a seat opposite her.

She admired the girl immensely, and at the bottom of her heart was fond of her.

Judith, on her part, would have found it hard to define her feelings towards Mrs. Sachs.

With Reuben she was always calm; in his mother’s presence she was conscious of a strange agitation, of the stirrings of an emotion which was neither love, nor hate, nor fear, but which perhaps was compounded of all three.

They had not long to wait before the door was thrown open and the person expected entered.

He came straight across the room to old Solomon, a vivifying presence—Reuben Sachs, with his bad figure, awkward movements, and charming face, which wore to-night its air of greatest alertness.

The old man, who had finished his prayers and taken off his cap, greeted the newcomer with something like emotion. Solomon Sachs, if report be true, had been a hard man in his dealings with the world; never overstepping the line of legal honesty, but taking an advantage wherever he could do so with impunity.

But to his own kindred he had always been generous; the ties of race, of family, were strong with him. His love for his children had been the romance of an eminently unromantic career; and the death of his favourite son, Reuben’s father, had been a grief whose marks he would bear to his own dying day.

Something of the love for the father had been transferred to the son, and Reuben stood high in the old man’s favour.

The greater subtlety of ambition which had made him while, comparatively speaking, a poor man, prefer the chances of a professional career to the certainties of a good berth in Capel Court, appealed to some kindred feeling, had set vibrating some responsive cord in his grandfather’s breast. Such a personality as Reuben’s seemed the crowning splendour of that structure of gold which it had been his life-work to build up; a luxury only to be afforded by the rich.

For poor Leo’s attainments, his violin-playing, his classical scholarship, he had no respect whatever.

They went down to dinner without ceremony, taking their places, for the most part, as chance directed; Reuben sitting next to old Solomon, on the side of his best ear; Judith at the far end of the table opposite.

Conversation flagged, as it inevitably did at these family gatherings, until after the meal, when crabbed age and youth, separating by mutual consent, would grow loquacious enough in their respective circles.

Reuben, his voice raised, but not raised too much, for his grandfather’s benefit, recounted the main incidents of his recent travels, while doing ample justice to the excellent meal set before him.

It might have been thought that he did not show to advantage under the circumstances; that his introduction of “good” names, and of his own familiarity with their bearers was a little too frequent, too obtrusive; that altogether there was an unpleasant flavour of brag about the whole narration.

Esther smiled meaningly and lifted her shoulders. Leo frowned and winced perceptibly, his taste offended to nausea; there were times when the coarser strands woven into the bright woof of his cousin’s personality affected him like a harsh sound or evil odour.

But, these two cavillers apart, Reuben understood his audience.

Old Solomon listened attentively, nodding his great head from time to time with satisfaction; Mrs. Sachs, while apparently absorbed in her dinner, never lost a word of the beloved voice; Monty and Adelaide who, when all is said, were naïve creatures, were frankly impressed, and revelled in a sense of reflected glory.

As for Judith, shall it be blamed her if she saw no fault? She sat there silent, now and then lifting her eyes to the far-off corner of the table where Reuben was, divided between admiration and that unacknowledged sense of terror which came over her whenever the fact of Reuben’s growing importance was brought home to her. Shall it be blamed her, I say, that she saw no fault, she who, where others were concerned, had sense of humour and critical faculty enough? Shall it be blamed her that she had a kindness for everything he said and everything he did; that he was the king and could do no wrong?

Only once during the meal did their eyes meet, then he smiled quietly, almost imperceptibly—a smile for her alone.

“Mr. Lee-Harrison,” said Adelaide, stretching forward her sallow, eager, inquisitive face, on either side of which the diamonds shone like lamps, and plunging her dark, ring-laden fingers into a dish of olives as she spoke; “Mr. Lee-Harrison was staying at our hotel one year at Pontresina. He was a High Churchman in those days, and hardly knew a Jew from a Mohammedan.”

“He is a cousin of Lord Norwood’s,” added Monty, who cultivated the acquaintance of the peerage through the pages of Truth. After several years’ study of that periodical he was beginning to feel on intimate terms with many of the distinguished people who figure weekly therein.

“A friend of yours, Leo!” cried Adelaide nodding across to her cousin.

She had a great respect for the lad, who affected to despise class distinctions, but succeeded in getting himself invited to such “good” houses.

“I know Lord Norwood,” answered Leo with an impassive air, that caused Reuben to smile under his moustache.

“He was at this year’s Academy private view, don’t you remember, Monty, with that sister of his, Lady Geraldine?” went on Adelaide, undisturbed.

“They are both often to be seen at Sandown,” chimed in the faithful Monty, “and at Kempton.”

The Montague Cohens, those two indefatigable Peris at the gate, patronized art, and never missed a private view; patronized the turf, and at every race-meeting, with any pretensions to “smartness,” were familiar figures.

There was but a brief separation of the sexes at the end of dinner, the whole party within a short space of time adjourning to the ugly, old-fashioned splendours of the drawing-room, where card-playing went on as usual.

A game of whist was got up among the elders for the benefit of old Solomon, the others preferring to embark on the excitements of Polish bank with the exception of Leo, who never played cards, and Judith, who was anxious to finish a piece of embroidery she was preparing for her mother’s birthday.

Reuben, who had dutifully offered himself as a whist-player and been cut out, lingered a few moments, divided between the expediency of challenging fortune at Polish bank, and the pleasantness of joining the girlish figure at the far end of the room.

Adelaide, shuffling her cards with deft, accustomed fingers, looked up and read something of his indecision in her brother’s face.

“There’s a place here, Reuben,” she called out, drawing her silken skirts from a chair on to which they had overflowed.

She was not a person of tact; her remark, and the tone of it, turned the balance.

“No, thanks,” said Reuben, dropping his lids and assuming his most imperturbable air.

It was not his custom to single out Judith for his attentions at these family gatherings, but to-night some irresistible magnetism drew him towards her. It only wanted that little goad from Adelaide to send him deliberately to the ottoman where she sat at work, her beautiful head bent over the many-coloured embroidery.

Leo, lounging discontentedly a few paces off, with something of the air of a petulant child who is ashamed of itself, twisted a bit of silk in his long-brown fingers and hummed the air of Ich grolle nicht below his breath.

“Judith,” said Reuben, taking a seat very close beside her and looking straight at her face, “poor Ronaldson, the member for St. Baldwin’s, is dangerously ill.”

She looked up eagerly.

“Then you will be asked to stand?”

He smiled; partly at her readiness of comprehension, partly at the frank, feminine hard-heartedness which realizes nothing beyond the circle of its own affections.

“You mustn’t kill him off in that summary fashion, poor fellow.”

“I meant, of course, if he should die.”

“Under those circumstances I believe they will ask me to stand. That’s the beauty of you, Judith,” he added, half-seriously, half jestingly, “one never has to waste one’s breath with needless explanation.”

She blushed, and smiled naïvely at the little compliment with its studied uncouthness.

There was something incongruous in the girl’s rich and stately beauty, in the deep, serious gaze of the wonderful eyes, the severe, almost tragic lines of the head and face, with her total lack of manner, her little, abrupt, simple air, her apparent utter unconsciousness of her own value and importance as a young and beautiful woman.

“Judith is not a woman of the world, certainly,” Reuben had said on one occasion, in reply to a criticism of his sister’s; “but neither is she a bad imitation of one.” And Adelaide, scenting a brotherly sarcasm, had allowed the subject to drop.

Leo, who had broken his bit of silk and hummed his song to the end, rose at this point, and went from the room without a word.

“Leo is in one of his moods,” said Judith looking after him. “I am sure I don’t know what is the matter with him.”

Reuben, who understood perhaps more of Leopold’s state of mind than any one suspected, of the struggles with himself, the revolt against his surroundings which the lad was undergoing, answered slowly: “He is in a ticklish stage of his growth. Horribly unpleasant, I grant you. But I like the boy, though he regards me at present as an incarnation of the seven deadly sins.”

“You know he is very fond of you.”

“That may be. All the same, he thinks I keep a golden calf in my bedroom for purposes of devotion.”

Judith laughed, and Reuben, his face very close to hers, said: “Can you keep a secret?”

“You know best.”

“Well, that poor boy is head over heels in love with Lord Norwood’s sister.”

She looked up with her most matter-of-fact air.

“He will have to get over that!”

“Judith!” cried Reuben, piqued, provoked, inflamed by her manner; “I believe there isn’t one grain of sentiment in your whole composition. Oh, I know it’s a fine thing to be calm and cool and have one’s self well in hand, but a woman is not always the worse for such a weakness as possessing a heart.”

There was a note in his voice new to her; a look in the brown depths of his eyes as they met hers which she had never seen there before. It seemed to her that voice and eyes entreated her, cried to her for mercy; that a wonderful answering emotion of pity stirred in her own breast.

A moment they sat there looking at one another, then came a rustle of skirts, the sound of a penetrating, familiar voice, and Adelaide was sitting beside them. She had lost her part in the game for the time being, and, full of sisterly solicitude, had borne down on the pair with the object of interrupting that dangerous tête-à-tête.

“Reuben,” she cried gaily, “I want you to dine with me to-morrow.”

“I don’t know that I can,” he answered ungraciously, the mask of apathy falling over his features which a moment before had been instinct with life.

“Caroline Cardozo is coming. She has £50,000, and will have more when her father dies. You see,” turning to Judith, “I am a good sister, and do not forget my duty.”

Judith made some commonplace rejoinder, and went on stitching, outwardly calm.

Reuben, bitterly annoyed, tugged at the silks in the basket with those broad, square hands of his, which, in spite of their superior delicacy, were so much like his grandfather’s.

“And, by the by,” went on Adelaide, nothing daunted, “you must bring Mr. Lee-Harrison to see me, and then I can ask him to dinner.”

“I don’t know about that,” answered Reuben slowly, looking at her from under his eyelids; “he might swallow your Jews; he walks by faith as regards them just at present. But as for the rest—a man doesn’t care to meet bad imitations of the people of his own set, does he?”

Having planted this poisoned shaft, and feeling rather ashamed of himself, Reuben rose sullenly and went to the card-table, where Rose was winning steadily, and Esther, who always sat down reluctantly and ended by giving herself up completely to the excitement of the game, fingered with flushed cheeks her own diminishing hoard.

Adelaide and Judith, each in her way shocked at this outburst of bad temper from the urbane Reuben, plunged into lame and awkward conversation. Only somewhere in the hidden depths of Judith’s being a voice was singing of triumph and delight.

CHAPTER VI.

He had a gentle, yet aspiring mind;
Just, innocent, with varied learning fed.

Shelley: Prince Athanase.

Judith rose early the next morning and put the finishing touches to her embroidery. It was her mother’s birthday, and she had planned going to the Walterton Road after breakfast with her gift.

But Rose claimed her for purposes of shopping, and the two girls set out together for the region of Westbourne Grove. It was a delicious autumn morning; Whiteley’s was thronged with familiar, sunburnt faces, and Greetings were exchanged on all sides.

The Community had come back in a body from country and seaside, in time for the impending religious festivals; the feast of the New Year would be celebrated the next week, and the great fast, or Day of Atonement, some ten days later.

“How glad every one is to get back,” cried Rose. “I know I hate the country; so do most people, only it isn’t the fashion to say so.”

And she nodded in passing to Adelaide, who, with her gloves off, was intently comparing the respective merits of some dress lengths in brocaded velvet.

Judith smiled rather dreamily, and remarked that they had better go first to the glove-department, that for the sale of dress-materials, for which they were bound, being so hopelessly overcrowded.

“Very well,” cried Rose. Then, in an undertone: “Look the other way; there’s Netta Sachs. What a howling cad!” as a bouncing, gaily attired daughter of Shem passed them in the throng.

Rose was in her element; she was an excellent shopping-woman, loving a bargain for its own sake, grudging no time to the matching of colours and such patience-trying operations, going through the business from beginning to end with a wholehearted enjoyment that was good to see.

Judith, who had all a pretty girl’s interest in dress, and was generally willing enough for such expeditions, followed her cousin from counter to counter, with a little amiable air of abstraction.

Was there some magic in the autumn morning, some intoxication in the hazy, gold-coloured air, that she, the practical, sensible Judith, went about like a hashish-eater under the first delightful influence of the dangerous drug?

“What a crowd!” ejaculated Adelaide, coming up to them as she turned from the contemplation of some cheap ribbons in a basket.

She had, to the full, the gregarious instincts of her race, and Whiteley’s was her happy hunting-ground. Here, on this neutral territory, where Bayswater nodded to Maida Vale, and South Kensington took Bayswater by the hand, here could her boundless curiosity be gratified, here could her love of gossip have free play.

“We are going to get some lunch,” said Rose, moving off; “Judith has to go and see her people.”

She, too, loved the social aspects of the place no less than its business ones. Her pale, prominent, sleepy eyes, under their heavy white lids, saw quite as much and as quickly as Adelaide’s dancing, glittering, hard little organs of vision.

The girls lunched in the refreshment room, having obtained leave of absence from the family meal, then set out together from the shop.

At the corner of Westbourne Grove they parted, Rose going towards home, Judith committing herself to a large blue omnibus.

The Walterton Road is a dreary thoroughfare, which, in respect of unloveliness, if not of length, leaves Harley Street, condemned of the poet, far behind.

It is lined on either side with little sordid gray houses, characterized by tall flights of steps and bow-windows, these latter having for frequent adornment cards proclaiming the practice of various humble occupations, from the letting of lodgings to the tuning of pianos.

About half way up the street Judith stopped the omnibus, and mounted the steps to a house some degrees less dreary-looking than the majority of its neighbours. Fresh white curtains hung in the clean windows, while steps, scraper and doorbell bore witness to the hand of labour.

Mrs. Quixano herself opened the door to her daughter, and drew her by the hand into the sitting-room, across the little hall to which still clung the odour of the midday mutton.

“Many happy returns of the day, mamma,” said Judith, kissing her and offering her parcel.

“I am sure it is very good of you to remember, my dear,” answered her mother, leaning back in her chair and taking in every detail of the girl’s appearance; her gown, her bonnet, the tinge of sunburn on her fresh young cheek, a certain indescribable air of softness, of maidenliness which was hers to-day.

Israel Leuniger’s sister was a stout, comely woman of middle-age; red-haired, white-skinned, plump, with a projecting under-lip and comfortable double chin.

She was disappointed with her life, but she made the best of it; loving her husband, though unable to sympathize with him; planning, working unremittingly for her six children; extracting the utmost benefit from the narrowest of means; a capable person who did her duty according to her own lights.

“So Reuben Sachs has come back,” she said, after some conversation.

Judith glanced up quickly with a bright, gentle look.

“Yes, and he is ever so much better; quite himself again.”

Mrs. Quixano grumbled some inarticulate reply. Personally, she would not have been sorry if he had failed to return from the antipodes.

As may be imagined, she had been one of the first people whom the gossip about Reuben and her daughter had reached.

She had begun to be jealously conscious that there was no one to protect Judith’s interests; that, after all, it might have been better for the girl to take her chance in the Walterton Road, than waste her time among a set of people too greedy or too ambitious to marry her.

Twenty-two, and no sign of a husband; only a troublesome flirtation that kept off the rest of the world, and was not in the least likely to end in anything but smoke.

And yet, thought Mrs. Quixano, with a sudden burst of maternal pride and indignation, any man might be proud of such a wife.

With her beauty, her health, and her air of breeding, surely she was good enough, and more than good enough, for such a man as Reuben Sachs, his enormous pretensions, and those of his family on his behalf notwithstanding?

The door opened presently to admit two little dark-eyed, foreign-looking children—children such as Murillo loved to paint—who had just returned from a walk with a very juvenile nursemaid.

They were Judith’s youngest brothers, and as she knelt on the floor with her arm round one of them, administering chocolate and burnt almonds, she was conscious of a new tenderness, of a strange yearning affection for them in her heart.

“The girls will be so sorry to miss seeing you,” said Mrs. Quixano, taking in the picture before her with her shrewd glance; “they are at the High School, and Jack, of course, is in the City.”

Jack Quixano, the eldest of the family, was also its chief hope and pride.

He had taken to finance as a duck to water, and from the humblest of berths at Sachs and Co.’s, had risen in a few years to the proud position of authorized clerk.

It had been evident, almost from the cradle, that he had inherited the true Leuniger ambition and determination to get on in the world, qualities which had shone forth so conspicuously in the case of his uncle Israel, and, unlike the ambition and determination of the Sachs family, were unrelieved by any touch of imagination or self-criticism.

“It is disappointing not to see the girls,” answered Judith, who was fond of her sisters, when she remembered them. “But papa, he is at home? I shall not be disturbing him?”

A moment later she was standing with her hand on the door of the room at the back of the house, where her father was accustomed to pass his time.

Turning the handle, in obedience to a voice from within, she entered slowly, a suggestion of shyness and reluctance in her manner, and found herself in a tiny apartment, into which the afternoon sun was streaming. It was lined and littered with books, all of them dusty and many dilapidated.

From the midst of this confusion of dust and sunlight rose a tall, lean, shabby figure: a middle-aged man, with stooping shoulders, a very dark skin, dark, straight, lank hair, growing close round the cheek-bones, deep-set eyes, and long features.

“Why, Judith, my dear,” he said, with his vague, pleasant smile, as she came forward and submitted her fresh cheek to his lips.

“I hope I don’t disturb you, papa. And how is the treatise getting on?”

He shook his head and smiled, and Judith was content with this for an answer. She only asked after the treatise from politeness, not from any interest in the subject.

Long ago in Portugal there had been Quixanos doctors and scholars of distinction. When Joshua Quixano had been stranded high and dry by the tides of modern commercial competition, he had reverted to the ancestral pursuits, and for many years had devoted himself to collecting the materials for a monograph on the Jews of Spain and Portugal.

Absorbed in close and curious learning, in strange genealogical lore, full of a simple, abstract, unthinking piety, he let the world and life go by unheeded.

Judith remained with her father for some ten minutes. Conversation between them was never an easy matter, yet there was affection on both sides.

Quixano’s manners and customs were accepted facts, unalterable as natural laws, over which his children had never puzzled themselves. Some of them indeed had inherited to some extent the paternal temperament, but in most cases it had been overborne by the greater vitality of the Leunigers. But to-day the dusty scholar’s room, the dusty scholar, struck Judith with a new force. She looked about her wistfully, from the book-laden shelves, the paper-strewn tables, to her father’s face and eyes, whence shone forth clear and frank his spirit—one of the pure spirits of this world.

. . . .

When Judith reached home it was already dusk, and afternoon tea was going on in the morning-room.

Mrs. Leuniger was absent, and Rose officiated at the tea-table, while Adelaide, her feet on the fender, her gloves off, was preparing for herself an attack of indigestion with unlimited muffins and strong tea.

She had been paying calls in the neighbourhood, clad in the proof-mail of her very best manners, an uncomfortable garment which she had now thrown off, and was reclining, metaphorically speaking, in dressing-gown and slippers.

A burst of laughter from both young women greeted Judith’s ears as she entered.

“How late you are,” cried Rose. “What filial piety!”

Judith knelt down by the fire smiling, and took her part with spirit in the girlish jokes and gossip.

It was six o’clock before Adelaide rose to go, by which time the attack of indigestion had set in. Her vivacity died out suddenly; her features looked thick, strained, and lifeless; her sallow skin took a positively orange tinge.

“Dear me,” she cried ill-temperedly, “I had no idea it was so late. I must fly. I have one or two people dining with me to-night: the Cardozos, the Hanbury-ffrenches—oh, and Reuben finds he can come.”

Judith felt suddenly as though a chill wind had struck her; but she called out gaily to Rose, who was escorting Adelaide to the door, that there was time before dinner to practise the new duet.

CHAPTER VII.

On this day shall He make an atonement for you, to purify you; you shall be clean from all your sins. Leviticus xvi. 30.

Herbert, or, as he was generally spoken of, Bertie Lee-Harrison, called at Lancaster Gate on the day of the New Year, to make acquaintance with Reuben’s people and offer his best wishes for the year 564-.

He was a small, fair, fluent person, very carefully dressed, assiduously polite, and bearing on his amiable, commonplace, neatly modelled little face no traces of the spiritual conflict which any one knowing his history might have supposed him to have passed through.

Esther, who happened to be calling on her aunt at the time of Bertie’s visit, classified him at once as an intelligent fool; but Adelaide professed herself delighted with the little man, and had had the joy of informing him that she had once met his sister, Lady Kemys, at a garden-party.

“Lady Kemys is charming,” Reuben said when the matter was being discussed. “Sir Nicholas, too, is a good fellow. They have a place some miles out of St. Baldwin’s.”

His mind ran a good deal on St. Baldwin’s in these days, and on poor Ronaldson, its Conservative member, lying hopelessly ill in Grosvenor Place.

Reuben, it may be added, was true to the traditions of his race, and wore the primrose; while Leo, who knew nothing about politics, gave himself out as a social democrat.

Mr. Lee-Harrison was to break his fast in Portland Place on the evening of the Day of Atonement, when it was old Solomon’s custom to assemble his family round him in great numbers.

Adelaide objected to this arrangement.

“It will give him such a bad impression,” she said.

“He asked for local colour, and local colour he shall have,” answered Reuben, amused.

“It is disloyal to your own people to assume such an attitude regarding them to a stranger. After all, he is not one of us,” cried Adelaide, taking a high tone.

“Your accusations are a little vague, Addie; but to tell you the truth I had no choice in the matter. I took him up yesterday to Portland Place, and the old man gave him the invitation. He simply jumped at it.”

“Those dreadful Samuel Sachses!” groaned Adelaide.

“Oh, they are a remarkable survival. You should learn to take them in the right spirit,” answered her brother.

He was dining that night at the house of an important Conservative M.P., and was disposed to take a cheerful view of things.

. . . .

The Fast Day, or Day of Atonement, is the greatest national occasion of the whole year.

Even those lax Jews who practise their callings on Saturdays and other religious holidays, are withheld by public opinion on either side the tribal barrier from doing so on this day of days.

The synagogues are thronged; and if the number of people who rigidly adhere to total abstinence from food for twenty-four hours is rapidly diminishing, there are still many to be found who continue to do so.

Solomon Sachs, his daughter Rebecca, and the Montague Cohens worshipped in the Bayswater synagogue; the rest of the family had seats in the Reformed synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street, an arrangement to which the old man was too liberal-minded to take objection.

The Quixano family attended the synagogue of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in Bryanston Street, with the exception of Judith, who shared with her cousins the simplified service, the beautiful music, and other innovations of Upper Berkeley Street.

The morning of the particular Day of Atonement of which I write dawned bright and clear; and from an early hour, in all quarters of the town, the Chosen People—a breakfastless band—might have been seen making their way to the synagogues.

Many of the women were in white, which is considered appropriate wear for the occasion; and if traces of depression were discernible on many faces, in view of the long day before them, it is scarcely to be wondered at.

It was about ten o’clock when the Leunigers, who had all breakfasted, made their way into the great hall of the synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street, where the people were streaming in, in great numbers. As they paused a moment at the bottom of the staircase leading to the ladies’ gallery, for their party to divide according to sex, Reuben came up to them with Bertie Lee-Harrison in his wake.

There was a general hand-shaking, and Reuben, as he pressed her fingers, smiled a half-humorous, half-rueful smile at Judith—a protest against the rigours and longueurs of the day which lay before them.

She managed to say to him over her shoulder:

“How is Mr. Ronaldson?”

“He has taken a turn for the better.”

They laughed in one another’s faces.

Bertie, struck by the effect of that sudden, rapidly checked wave of mirth passing over the beautiful, serious face, remarked to Reuben as they turned towards the entrance to their part of the building, that the Jewish ladies were certainly very lovely. Reuben said nothing; they were by this time well within the synagogue, but he glanced quickly and coldly under his eyelids at Bertie picking his way jauntily to his seat.

Ernest Leuniger, who was very devout, and who loved the exercise of his religion even more than the game of solitaire, had already enwound himself in his talith, exchanged his tall hat for an embroidered cap, and was muttering his prayers in Hebrew below his breath.

Leo, his small, slight, picturesque figure swathed carelessly in the long white garment, with the fringes and the border of blue, his hat tilted over his eyes, leaned against a porphyry column, lost to everything but the glorious music which rolled out from the great organ.

He had come to-day under protest, to prevent a definite break with his father, who exacted attendance at synagogue on no other day of the year.

The time was yet to come when he should acknowledge to himself the depth of tribal feeling, of love for his race, which lay at the root of his nature. At present he was aware of nothing but revolt against, almost of hatred of, a people who, as far as he could see, lived without ideals, and was given up body and soul to the pursuit of material advantage.

Behind him his two little brothers were quarrelling for possession of a prayer-book. Near him stood his father, swaying from side to side, and mumbling his prayers in the corrupt German-Hebrew of his youth—a jargon not recognized by the modern culture of Upper Berkeley Street.

Reuben and his friend had seats opposite; seats moreover which commanded a good view of the ladies of the Leuniger household in the gallery above: Mrs. Leuniger, in a rich lace shawl, very much crumpled, and a new bonnet hopelessly askew; Rose, in a tight-fitting costume of white, with blue ribbons; Judith, in white also, her dusky hair, the clear, soft oval of her face surmounted by a flippant French bonnet—the very latest fashion.

It was a long day, growing less and less endurable as it went on; the atmosphere getting thicker and hotter and sickly with the smell of stale perfume.

The people, for the most part, stuck to their posts throughout. A few disappeared boldly about lunch time, returning within an hour refreshed and cheerful. Some—these were chiefly men—fidgeted in and out of the building to the disturbance of their neighbours. One or two ladies fainted; one or two others gossiped audibly from morning till evening; but, on the whole, decorum was admirably maintained.

Judith Quixano went through her devotions upheld by that sense of fitness, of obedience to law and order, which characterized her every action.

But it cannot be said that her religion had any strong hold over her; she accepted it unthinkingly.

These prayers, read so diligently, in a language of which her knowledge was exceedingly imperfect, these reiterated praises of an austere tribal deity, these expressions of a hope whose consummation was neither desired nor expected, what connection could they have with the personal needs, the human longings of this touchingly ignorant and limited creature?

Now and then, when she lifted her eyes, she saw the bored, resigned face of Reuben opposite, and the respectful, attentive countenance of Mr. Lee-Harrison, who was going through the day’s proceedings with all the zeal of a convert.

Leo had absented himself early in the day, and was wandering about the streets in one of those intolerable fits of restless misery which sometimes laid their hold on him.

Esther was not in synagogue. She had had a sharp wrangle with her mother the night before, which had ended in her staying in bed with Good-bye, Sweetheart! for company.

She, poor soul, was of those who deny utterly the existence of the Friend of whom she stood so sorely in need.

CHAPTER VIII.

My lord, will’t please you to fall to?
Richard II.

A limp, drab-coloured group was assembled in the drawing-room at Portland Place.

It was nearly half-past seven, and it only wanted the arrival of the Samuel Sachses—who came from the St. John’s Wood synagogue—for the whole party to descend into the dining-room, where the much-needed meal awaited them.

The Leunigers were there, of course, with the exception of Ernest and his mother, who had gone home; the Sachses; the Montague Cohens; Mrs. Kohnthal and Esther, who had left her bed at the eleventh hour prompted by a desire for society; Judith; Mr. and Mrs. Quixano, their son Jack, and two young sisters.

Bertie Lee-Harrison, who had come in with Reuben, pale, exhausted, but prepared to be impressed by every thing and every one he saw, confided to his friend that the twenty-four hours’ fast had been the severest ordeal he had as yet undergone in the service of religion—his experiences in Asia Minor not excepted.

Leo, whose mood had changed, overheard this confidence with an irresistible twitching of the lips. He was sitting on the big sofa with his two little brothers, making jokes below his breath to their immense delight; while Rose, at the other end of the same piece of furniture, was maintaining an animated conversation with her cousin Jack.

Jack Quixano was a spruce, dapper, polite young man of some twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. Perhaps he was a little too spruce, a little too dapper, a little too anxious to put himself en évidence by his assiduity in picking up handkerchiefs and opening doors. But few of his family noticed these defects, least of all Rose, on whom he was beginning to cast aspiring eyes, and whom he closely resembled in personal appearance.

The door opened at last, to every one’s relief, to admit the expected guests: a party of six—father, mother, grown-up son and daughter, a little girl and a little boy.

Samuel Sachs was the unsuccessful member of his family.

From the beginning, the atmosphere of the Stock Exchange had proved too strong for his not very strong brains, and his career had been inaugurated by a series of gambling debts.

His father paid his debts and forbade him the office, and he had gone his own way for many years, settling down ultimately in a humble way of business as a lithographer.

He had married a Polish Jewess with some money of her own, and in these latter days old Solomon made him an allowance, so there was enough and to spare in the home in Maida Vale where he and his family were established.

They came now into the crowded drawing-room with a curious mixture of deference and self-assertion.

To their eminently provincial minds, the Bayswater Sachses, the Leunigers and the Kohnthals were very great people indeed, and they derived no little prestige in Maida Vale from their connection with so distinguished a family.

But as regarded their occasional admittance into the charmed circle, that was a privilege which, though they would on no account have foregone it, was certainly not without its drawbacks.

It was splendid, but it was not comfortable.

Mrs. Sachs was a stout, dark-haired matron, who entirely overshadowed her shambling, neutral-tinted husband. Netta, the eldest daughter, was a black-eyed, richly coloured, bouncing maiden of two or three-and-twenty, wearing a white dress, with elbow sleeves, cut open a little at the neck, and a great deal of silver jewellery.

Alec, her brother, was a short, fair, exuberant-looking youth, with a complexion both glossy and florid, in whom the Sachses fitness for survival had re-asserted itself. He practised painless dentistry with great success in the heart of Maida Vale, and was writing a manual—destined to pass through several editions—on Diseases of the Teeth and Gums.

Adèle and Bernard (pronounced Adale and Bernàrd), the two children, strutted in behind the others, in all the glory of white cambric and black velveteen, respectively, much impressed by the situation, but no less on the defensive than the elder members of their family.

There was languid greeting all round; languor, under the circumstances, was excusable; and then the whole party poured down into the dining-room, where an abundant meal was set out.

Old Solomon prided himself on his hospitality, and the great table, which shone with snowy linen, gleaming china, and glittering silver, groaned, as the phrase goes, with good things to eat.

There were golden-brown blocks of cold fried fish in heavy silver dishes; rosy piles of smoked salmon; saffron-tinted masses of stewed fish; long twisted loaves covered with seeds; innumerable little plates of olives, pickled herrings, and pickled cucumbers; and the quick eyes of Lionel and Sidney had lighted at once on the many coloured surfaces of the almond puddings, which awaited the second course on the sideboard.

Aunt Rebecca, faint and yellow, behind a the silver urns, dispensed tea and coffee with rapid hand; while old Solomon, none the worse for his rigid fast, wielded the fish slice at the other end of the table.

Bertie, respectful, wondering, interested through all his hunger, was seated between Reuben and Mrs. Kohnthal.

Adelaide had chosen her seat as far as possible from the Samuel Sachses, whose presence was an offence to her. They, on their part, regarded her with a mixture of respect and dislike. She never gave them more than two fingers in her grandfather’s house, and ignored them altogether when she met them anywhere else. This conduct impressed them by its magnificence, and they followed the ups and downs of her career, as far as they were able, with a passionate interest that had in it something of the pride of possession.

Nor was Adelaide above taking an interest in the affairs of her humbler relatives behind their backs. I cannot help wishing that they had known this; it would have been to them the source of so much innocent gratification.

Reuben, who had his cousin Netta on the other side of him, and whose vanity was a far subtler, more complicated affair than his sister’s, was making himself agreeable with his accustomed urbanity, beneath which the delighted maiden was unable to detect a lurking irony.

The humours of the Samuel Sachses, their appearance, gestures, their excruciating method of pronouncing the English language, the hundred and one tribal peculiarities which clung to them, had long served their cousins as a favourite family joke into which it would have been difficult for the most observant of outsiders to enter.

They were indeed, as Reuben had said, a remarkable survival.

Born and bred in the very heart of nineteenth century London, belonging to an age and a city which has seen the throwing down of so many barriers, the levelling of so many distinctions of class, of caste, of race, of opinion, they had managed to retain the tribal characteristics, to live within the tribal pale to an extent which spoke worlds for the national conservatism.

They had been educated at Jewish schools, fed on Jewish food, brought up on Jewish traditions and Jewish prejudice.

Their friends, with few exceptions, were of their own race, the making of acquaintance outside the tribal barrier being sternly discouraged by the authorities. Mrs. Samuel Sachs indeed had been heard more than once to observe pleasantly that she would sooner see her daughters lying dead before her than married to Christians.

Netta tossed her head defiantly at these remarks, but contented herself with sowing her little crop of wild oats on the staircases of Bayswater and Maida Vale, where she “sat out” by the hour with the very indifferent specimens of Englishmen who frequented the dances in her set.

Generally speaking, the race instincts of Rebecca of York are strong, and she is less apt to give her heart to Ivanhoe, the Saxon knight, than might be imagined.

Bernard Sachs, a very smug-looking little boy, with inordinately thick lips and a disagreeable nasal twang, had been placed between the two young Leunigers, who regarded him with a mixture of disgust and amusement, which they were at small pains to conceal.

“Did you fast all day?” he said, by way of opening the conversation. “I did. I was bar-mitz-vah last month. Is either of you fellows bar-mitz-vah?”

“I am thirteen, if that’s what you mean,” said Lionel, with his most man of-the-world air. He considered the introduction of the popular tribal phrases very bad form indeed.

“I suppose you were in shool all day?” went on Bernard unabashed, and much on his dignity.

“I was only in synagogue in the morning,” answered Lionel. Then he kicked Sidney violently under the table, and the two little brothers went off into a series of chuckles; while Bernard, with a vague sense of being insulted, turned his attention to his fried salmon and Dutch herring.

Meanwhile Alec, who had been rather subdued at the beginning of the evening, was regaining his native confidence as the meal proceeded.

He happened to be sitting opposite Bertie, and having elicited from his neighbour, Mrs. Quixano, the explanation of an alien presence among them on such an occasion, had fixed his attention with great frankness on the stranger.

Very soon he was leaning across the table, and with much use of his fat red hands, and many liftings of his round shoulders, was expatiating to the astonished Bertie on the beauties and advantages of the faith which he had just embraced.

“Mr. Harrison,” he cried at last—he preferred to skip the difficulties of the double-barrelled name—“Mr. Harrison, take my word for it, it is the finest religion under the sun. Those who have left it for reasons of their own have always come back in the end. They’re bound to, they’re bound to!” (He pronounced the word “bound” with an indescribable twang.) “Look at Lord Beaconsfield”—he pointed with his short forefinger—“everyone knows he died with the shemang on his lips!”

There was a sudden stifled explosion of laughter from Leo’s quarter of the table; and Judith glanced across rather anxiously at Reuben, on whose polite, impassive face she at once detected a look of annoyance.

She was sitting next to her father in the close-fitting white gown which displayed to advantage the charming lines of her arms and shoulders.

Now and then she caught the glance of Mr. Lee-Harrison, who was far too well-bred to obtrude his admiration by staring, fixed momentarily on her face.

The hunger and weariness natural, under the circumstances, to her youth and health had in no way marred the perfect freshness of her appearance; and there was a gentle kindliness in her manner to her father which added a charm, not always present, to her beauty.

Perhaps she felt instinctively, what Quixano himself was far too much in the clouds to notice, that no one made much account of him, that it behoved her to take him under her protection. He was one of this world’s failures; and the Jewish people, so eager to crown success in any form, so determined in laying claim to the successful among their number, have scant love for those unfortunates who have dropped behind in the race.

The meal came to an end at last, and there was a pushing back of chairs on the part of the men.

Bertie, about to rise, felt himself held down by main force; Reuben was gripping him hard by the wrist with one hand, and with the other was engaged in fishing out his hat from under the table; while Netta, leaning across her cousin, explained with her most fascinating smile that grandpa was going to bench.

Bertie, at a sign from Reuben, rose to the situation, and stooping for his own hat with alacrity, drew it from its place of concealment and placed it on his head. By this time all the men had unearthed and assumed their head-gear, with the exception of Samuel Sachs, whose hat by some mischance was not forthcoming; however, to avoid delay, he covered his head in all gravity with his table-napkin.

Bertie glanced round him, from one face to another, puzzled and inquiring.

It seemed to him a solemn moment, this gathering together of kinsfolk after the long day of prayer, of expiation; this offering up of thanksgiving; this performance of the ancient rites in the land of exile.

He could not understand the spirit of indifference, of levity even, which appeared to prevail.

A finer historic sense, other motives apart, should, it seemed, have prevented so obvious a display of the contempt which familiarity had bred.

Alec had put his hat on rakishly askew, and was winking across to him re-assuringly, as though to intimate that the whole thing was not to be taken seriously.

Rose, led on by Jack Quixano, giggled hysterically behind her pocket-handkerchief.

Leo and Esther took on airs of aggressive boredom. Judith, lifting her eyes, met Reuben’s in a smile, and even Montague Cohen permitted himself to yawn.

Only old Solomon at the head of the table, mumbling and droning out the long grace in his corrupt Hebrew—his great face impenetrably grave—appeared to take any interest in the proceeding, with perhaps the exception of his son Samuel, who joined in now and then from beneath the drooping shelter of his table-napkin.

Bertie stared and Bertie wondered. Needless to state, he was completely out of touch with these people whose faith his search for the true religion had led him, for the time being, to embrace.

Grace over, the women went up stairs, the men, with the exception of old Solomon, remaining behind to smoke.

Bertie, who was thoroughly tired out, soon rose to go.

“I will make your excuses up stairs,” said Reuben.

But the polite little man preferred to go to the drawing-room and perform his farewells in person.

“Thanks so much,” he said in the hall, where Leo and Reuben were speeding him.

“I hope you have been edified—that’s all.” Reuben laughed.

“I am deeply interested in the Jewish character,” answered Bertie; “the strongly marked contrasts; the underlying resemblances; the elaborate differentiations from a fundamental type—!”

“Ah, yes,” broke in Reuben, secretly irritated, his tribal sensitiveness a little hurt, “you will find among us all sorts and conditions of men.”

“Except perhaps Don Quixote, or even King Cophetua,” added Leo.

“King Cophetua,” repeated Reuben in a slow, reflective tone, as the door closed on Mr. Lee-Harrison; “King Cophetua had an assured position. It isn’t every one that can afford to marry beggar-maids.”

CHAPTER IX.

Never by passion quite possessed,
And never quite benumbed by the world’s sway.
Matthew Arnold.

The party was never prolonged to a late hour on these occasions, and by ten o’clock there was no one left in the drawing-room in Portland Place except Mrs. Sachs, Mr. Leuniger, Mrs. Kohnthal and the young people in their respective trains.

The elders had got up a game of whist for the amusement of old Solomon, the termination of which their juniors awaited in conclave at the other end of the room.

Lionel and Sidney meanwhile, sleepy and overfed, quarrelled in a corner over the possession of a bound volume of the Graphic.

“Judith,” said Reuben, who had taken a seat opposite her, “do you know that you have made a conquest?”

“Is that such an unheard-of occurrence?”

Reuben laughed gently, and Rose cried:

“It is Mr. Lee-Harrison! I know it from the way he looked at supper.”

“Yes, it is Bertie.” Reuben looked straight in Judith’s eyes. “He says you exactly fulfil his idea of Queen Esther.”

“Ah,” cried Esther Kohnthal, “I have always had a theory about her. When she was kneeling at the feet of that detestable Ahasuerus, she was thinking all the time of some young Jew whom she mashed, and who mashed her, and whom she renounced for the sake of her people!”

A momentary silence fell among them, then Reuben, looking down, said slowly: “Or perhaps she preferred the splendours of the royal position even to the attractions of that youth whom you suppose her to—er—have mashed.”

He was not fond of Esther at the best of times; now he glanced at her under his eyelids with an expression of unmistakable dislike.

“I wonder,” cried Rose, throwing herself into the breach, “what Mr. Lee-Harrison thought of it all.”

“I think,” said Leo, “that he was shocked at finding us so little like the people in Daniel Deronda.”

“Did he expect,” cried Esther, “to see our boxes in the hall, ready packed and labelled Palestine?”

“I have always been touched,” said Leo, “at the immense good faith with which George Eliot carried out that elaborate misconception of hers.”

“Now Leo is going to begin,” cried Rose; “he never has a good word for his people. He is always running them down.”

“Horrid bad form,” said Reuben; “besides being altogether a mistake.”

“Oh, I have nothing to say against us at all,” answered Leo ironically, “except that we are materialists to our fingers’ ends. That we have outlived, from the nature of things, such ideals as we ever had.”

“Idealists don’t grow on every bush,” answered Reuben, “and I think we have our fair share of them. This is a materialistic age, a materialistic country.”

“And ours the religion of materialism. The corn and the wine and the oil; the multiplication of the seed; the conquest of the hostile tribes—these have always had more attraction for us than the harp and crown of a spiritualized existence.”

“It is no good to pretend,” answered Reuben in his reasonable, pacific way, “that our religion remains a vital force among the cultivated and thoughtful Jews of to-day. Of course it has been modified, as we ourselves have been modified, by the influence of western thought and western morality. And belief, among thinking people of all races, has become, as you know perfectly, a matter of personal idiosyncrasy.”

“That does not alter my position,” said Leo, “as to the character of the national religion and the significance of the fact. Ah, look at us,” he cried with sudden passion, “where else do you see such eagerness to take advantage; such sickening, hideous greed; such cruel, remorseless striving for power and importance; such ever-active, ever-hungry vanity, that must be fed at any cost? Steeped to the lips in sordidness, as we have all been from the cradle, how is it possible that any one among us, by any effort of his own, can wipe off from his soul the hereditary stain?”

“My dear boy,” said Reuben, touched by the personal note which sounded at the close of poor Leo’s heroics, and speaking with sudden earnestness, “you put things in too lurid a light. We have our faults; you seem to forget what our virtues are. Have you forgotten for how long, and at what a cruel disadvantage, the Jewish people has gone its way, until at last it has shamed the nations into respect? Our self-restraint, our self-respect, our industry, our power of endurance, our love of race, home and kindred, and our regard for their ties—are none of these things to be set down to our account?”

“Oh, our instincts of self-preservation are remarkably strong; I grant you that.”

Leo tossed back his head with its longish hair as he spoke, and Reuben went on:

“And where would you find a truer hospitality, a more generous charity than among us?”

“A charity whose right hand is so remarkably well posted up in the doings of its left!”

“Oh, come, that’s a libel—and not even true.”

“There is one good thing,” cried Leo, taking a fresh start, “and that is the inevitability—at least as regards us English Jews—of our disintegration; of our absorption by the people of the country. That is the price we are bound to pay for restored freedom and consideration. The Community will grow more and more to consist of mediocrities, and worse, as the general world claims our choicer specimens for its own. We may continue to exist as a separate clan, reinforced from below by German and Polish Jews for some time to come: but absorption complete, inevitable—that is only a matter of time. You and I sitting here, self-conscious, discussing our own race-attributes, race-position—are we not as sure a token of what is to come as anything well could be?”

“Yours is a sweeping theory,” said Reuben; “and at present, I don’t feel inclined to go into the rights and wrongs of it; still less to deny its soundness. I can only say that, should I live to see it borne out, I should be very sorry. It may be a weakness on my part, but I am exceedingly fond of my people. If we are to die as a race, we shall die harder than you think. The tide will ebb in the intervals of flowing. That strange, strong instinct which has held us so long together is not a thing easily eradicated. It will come into play when it is least expected. Jew will gravitate to Jew, though each may call himself by another name. If prejudice died, if difference of opinion died, if all the world, metaphorically speaking, thought one thought and spoke one language, there would still remain those unspeakable mysteries, affinity and—love.”

Reuben’s voice sounded curiously moved, and in his eyes, as he spoke, glowed a dreamy flame, as of some deep and tender emotion.

Judith, leaning forward with parted lips, lifted her shining eyes to his face in a long, unconscious gaze. Reuben with his sword in his hand, fighting the battle for his people, seemed to her a figure noble and heroic beyond speech.

In her own breast was kindled the flame of a great emotion; she felt the love of her race grow stronger at every word.

Reuben, conscious to the finger-tips of Judith’s presence, of her gaze, which he did not return, was stirred, on his part, with a new enthusiasm.

He praised her in the race, and the race in her; and this was conveyed in some subtle manner to her consciousness.

Thus they acted and reacted on one another, deceiving and deceived, with that strange, unconscious hypocrisy of lovers.

. . . .

The game of whist had come to an end, and every one rose, preparatory to departure.

“Good-night, uncle Solomon,” said Reuben’s mother. She, too, was a Sachs, who had married her cousin.

“Come along, mamma,” cried Esther yawning, “I am dead beat. The domestic habits of the cobra are not adapted to the human constitution, that is clear.”

Reuben was standing in the hall with his mother, as Rose and Judith came down stairs in their outdoor clothes.

“Your carriage is at the door,” said Israel Leuniger to Mrs. Sachs as he lit his cigar.

Mrs. Sachs turned to her son:

“Aren’t you coming, Reuben?”

“No, but I do not expect to be late.” He answered gently and seriously, stooping down and folding a shawl about her shoulders as he spoke.

Mrs. Sachs raised her wide, sallow, wrinkled face to her son’s, looked at him a moment, then, with a sudden impulse of tenderness, lifted her hand and stroked back the hair from his forehead.

Ah, what had come to Judith, standing in a corner of the hall watching the little scene?

Ah, what did it mean, what was it, this beating and throbbing of all her pulses, this strange, choked feeling in her throat, this mist that swam before her eyesight?

The dining-room door, near which she stood, was ajar; moved by the blind impulse of her terror, she pushed it open; and trembling, ashamed, not daring to analyse her own emotions, she sought the shelter of the darkness.

. . . .

While Judith was being driven to Kensington Palace Gardens, lying back pale and tired in a corner of the carriage, Reuben was sauntering towards Piccadilly with a cigar in his mouth.

For the moment, his mind dwelt on the fact that he had not been able to say good-night to Judith.

“Where did she make off to?” he asked himself persistently.

He was strangely irritated and baffled by the little accident.

As he went slowly down Regent Street, which was full of light and of people returning from the theatres, the thought of Judith took more and more possession of him, till his pulses beat and his senses swam.

Ah, why not, why not?

Children on his hearth with Judith’s eyes, and Judith there herself amongst them: Judith, calm, dignified, stately, yet a creature so gentle withal, so sweet, so teachable!

He looked again and again at this picture of his fancy, fascinated, alarmed at his own fascination.

Whatever happened, he would never be a poor man. There was the money which would come to him at his grandfather’s death, and at his mother’s: no inconsiderable sums. There was his own little income, besides what his practice brought him.

But it was not altogether a question of money. He had no wish to fetter himself at this early stage of his career; his ambition was boundless; and the possibilities of the future looked almost boundless too.

He had an immense idea of his own market value; an instinctive aversion to making a bad bargain.

From his cradle he had imbibed the creed that it is noble and desirable to have everything better than your neighbour; from the first had been impressed on him the sacred duty of doing the very best for yourself.

Yes, he was in love; cruelly, inconveniently, most unfortunately in love. But ten years hence, when he would still be a young man, the fever would certainly have abated, would be a dream of the past, while his ambition he had no doubt would be as lusty as ever.

Thus he swayed from side to side, balancing this way and that; pitying himself and Judith as the victims of fate; full of tenderness, of sentiment for his own thwarted desires.

He believed himself to hesitate, to waver; but at the bottom of Reuben’s heart there was that which never wavered.

He put the question by at last, wearied with the conflict, and gave himself up to pleasant dreams.

He thought of the look in Judith’s eyes, of the vibration in her voice when she spoke to him.

“Ah, she does not know it herself!”

Triumph, joy, compunction, an overwhelming tenderness, set his pulses beating, his whole being aglow.

It was late when, tired and haggard, he reached his home and let himself in with the key.

His mother came out on the landing with a candle.

She did not present a charming spectacle en déshabille, her large, partially bald head deprived of the sheltering, softening cap, her withered neck exposed, the lines of her figure revealed by a dingy old dressing-gown.

She gave an exclamation as she saw him; the wide, yellow expanse of her face, with its unwholesome yet undying air, lighted up by the twinkling diamonds on either side of it, looked agitated and alarmed.

“My dear boy, thank God it is you! I have been dreaming about you—a terrible dream.”

CHAPTER X.

Dusty purlieus of the law.
Tennyson.

Leopold Leuniger came slouching down Chancery Lane, his hat at the back of his head, a woe-begone air on his expressive face, dejection written in his graceless, characteristic walk, and in the droop of his picturesque head, which was, it must be owned, a little too large for his small, slight figure. He turned up under the archway leading to Lincoln’s Inn, and made his way to New Square, where Reuben’s chambers were situated.

Reuben, the clerk told him, was in court, but was expected every minute, and Leo passed into the inner room, which was his cousin’s private sanctum. It was two or three days after the Day of Atonement, and in less than a week he would be back in Cambridge.

He paced restlessly to and fro in the little dingy room with its professional litter of books and papers, pausing now and then to look out of window, or to examine the mass of cards, photographs, notes and tickets which adorned the mantelpiece.

Leo was by no means free from the tribal foible of inquisitiveness.

It was not long before the door burst open, and Reuben rushed in, in his wig and gown. The former decoration imparted a curious air of sageness to his keen face, and brought out more strongly its peculiarities of colour: the clear, dark pallor of the skin, the red lights in the eyes and moustache.

“Hullo!” said Leo, still standing by the mantelpiece, his hat tilted back at a very acute angle, his restless fingers busy with the cards on the mantelpiece, “a nice gay time you appear to be having, old man: Jewish Board of Guardians, committee meeting; Anglo-Jewish Association, committee meeting; Bell Lane Free Schools, committee meeting—shall I go on?”

Reuben laughed.

“You see, it consolidates one’s position both ways to stand well with the Community; and I am a very good Jew at heart, as I have often told you. But if you continue your investigations among my list of engagements you will find a good many meetings of all sorts, which are not communal; not to speak of first nights at the Terpischore and the Thalian.”

Leo, abandoning the subject, flung himself into a chair and said: “Ah, by the by, how is Ronaldson?”

“Much the same as ever. It may be a long business. The doctors have left off issuing bulletins.”

Reuben took the chair opposite his cousin, then said shortly:

“You have come to tell me something.”

“Yes. I have been having it out with my governor.”

“Ah?” interrogatively.

“I told him,” went on Leo, leaning forward and speaking with some excitement, “that I hadn’t the faintest idea of going on the Stock Exchange, or even of reading for the bar; that my plan was this: to work hard for my degree, and then stay on, on chance of a fellowship. Every one up there seems to think the matter lies virtually in my own hands.”

“What did my uncle say to that?”

“Oh, he was furious; wouldn’t listen to reason for a moment. I think”—with a boyish, bitter laugh—“that he rather confounds a fellow of Trinity with the assistant-master at a Jewish boarding-school. The word ‘usher’ figured very largely in his arguments.”

“I think,” said Reuben slowly, “that you are making a mistake.”

“Ah,” cried Leo, flinging out his hand, “you don’t understand. I can’t live—I can’t breathe in this atmosphere; I should choke. Up there, somehow, it is freer, purer; life is simpler, nobler.”

Reuben looked down: “I quite agree with you on that point. All the same, you were never cut out for a University don. Do you want me to tell you that you are a musician?”

Leo blushed like a girl, and his face quivered. He did not altogether approve of Reuben, but Reuben’s approval was very precious to him.

Moreover he greatly respected his cousin’s intelligent appreciation of music.

“Do you think so?” he cried. “That’s what Norwood says. But there is plenty of opportunity for cultivating music; we have Silver up there, remember. He is immensely kind.”

“You might talk it over with Silver. But think it well over and do nothing rash. There is plenty of time between now and taking your degree.”

He rose and proceeded to take off his wig and gown.

“I don’t know that my advice is worth much,” he said, “but I should say a year or two in Germany—Leipsic, Berlin, Vienna—and if by then you feel justified in setting your face against the substantial attractions of Capel Court, no doubt your governor can be brought round.”

“You will have to put it to him, Reuben. He believes in no one as he does in you.”

“Very handsome of him. But doubtless he will welcome the idea after the usher scheme.”

“You will have to paint the splendours of a musical success,” cried Leo, his spirits rising, his white teeth flashing as he smiled. “You must employ rather crude colours, and go in for obvious effects—such as the Prince of Wales, the Lord Mayor, and the Archbishop of Canterbury seated in the front row of the stalls at St. James’s Hall.”

Reuben laughed as he put on his well brushed hat before the glass.

“I will impress upon him how fashionable is the pursuit of the arts in these democratic days.” He added slowly, looking furtively at the lad: “And shall I tell him that one of these days you will marry very well indeed?”

Leo rose hastily, jarred discomposed.

“Aren’t you coming to lunch, Reuben?”

“Yes, I am ready.” He smiled to himself, and the two young men passed out together into the paved court-yard of the old inn.

They made their way up Chancery Lane into Holborn. Leo hated London almost as vehemently as his cousin loved it. It was the place, he said, which had succeeded better than any other in reducing life to a huge competitive examination. Its busy, characteristic streets, which Reuben regarded with an interest both passionate and affectionate, filled him with a dreary sensation of disgust and depression.

As they sat down to lunch at the First Avenue Hotel, Lord Norwood came into the dining-room. He was a tall, fair, aristocratic-looking young man, with a refined and thoughtful face, which, as he advanced towards his friend, broke into a peculiarly charming smile.

Leo exclaimed with impetuosity: “Oh, there’s Norwood!” But as the latter approached he stiffened into self-consciousness; somehow, he did not welcome the juxtaposition of his cousin and his friend. Acting on a sudden impulse he rose and met the latter half-way, and the two young men stood talking together in the middle of the room.

Reuben, after a moment’s hesitation, rose also and joined them. He greeted Lord Norwood, whom he had met once or twice before, with a little emphasis of deference, which was not lost on poor Leo, who hated himself at the same time for noticing it. Lord Norwood returned Reuben’s greeting with marked hauteur; that cousin of Leuniger’s was a snob, was not a person to be encouraged. In the young nobleman’s delicate, fastidious, but exceedingly borné mind there was no mercy for such as he.

Reuben, though he showed no signs of it, was keenly alive to the fact that he had been snubbed; was alive no less keenly to the many points in favour of the offender.

The Norwoods were people whom it hurt the subtler part of his vanity not to stand well with.

They were not rich, not “smart,” not politically important; but in their own fashion they were people of the very best sort, true aristocrats, such as few remain to us in these degenerate days.

For generations they had borne the reputation of high personal character and of scholarly attainment. They were, in the true sense of the word, exclusive; and their pride was of that nature which, as the poet has it, asserts an inward honour by denying outward show.

The friendship existing between Lord Norwood and Leo was founded on mutual admiration.

The Jew’s many-sided talent, his brilliant scholarship, his mental quickness and versatility, above all, his musical genius, had fairly dazzled the scholarly young Englishman, who loved art, but had not a drop of artist’s blood in his veins.

Leo, on his part, had fallen down before the other’s refinement of mind and soul and body, and before the delicate strength of his character.

It was a strange friendship perhaps, but one which had stood, and was destined long to stand, the test of time.

Meanwhile Reuben, who knew that it is half the battle not to know when you are vanquished, quietly invited Lord Norwood to join them at table.

He pleaded, coldly, an appointment with a friend, and after a few words with Leo withdrew to a further apartment.

Leo had taken in the slight, brief, yet significant episode in all its bearings, hating himself meanwhile for his own shrewdness, which he considered a mark of latent meanness.

Reuben returned thoughtfully, if quite composedly, to the discussion of his roast pheasant and potato chips.

His method of wiping out a snub was the grandly simple one of making a conquest of the snubber. Persons less completely equipped for the battle of life have been known to prefer certain defeat to the chances of such a victory.

But Reuben was possessed of a bottomless fund of silent energy, of quiet resistance and persistence, which had stood him ere now in good stead under like circumstances.

He appraised Lord Norwood very justly; recognized instinctively the charms of mind and manner which had cast such glamour over him in his cousin’s eyes; recognized also his limitations, with an irritated consciousness that he, Reuben, was being judged at a far less open-minded tribunal. In such cases, it is always the more intelligent person who is at a disadvantage—he appreciates, and is not appreciated.

I have no intention of following out Reuben’s relations with Lord Norwood, throughout which, it may be added, he had little to gain, even in the matter of social prestige, for he numbered people far more important among his acquaintance. But it was not long before an invitation to Norwood Towers was given and accepted. By one at least of the people concerned however, the circumstances which had marked the earlier stages of their acquaintance were never forgotten.

. . . .

A few days later saw Leo back at Trinity with his lexicon, his violin, and the friend of his heart. Here he alternately worked furiously and gave himself up to spells of complete idleness; to sauntering, sociable days spent in cheerful, excited discussion of the vexed problems of the universe, or long days of moody solitude. At these latter times he pondered deeply on the unsatisfactoriness of life in general, and of his own life in particular, and underwent a good many uncomfortable sensations which he ascribed to a hopeless passion for his friend’s sister.

Lady Geraldine Sydenham was a gentle, kindly, cultivated young woman, who had not the faintest idea of having inspired any one with hopeless passion, least of all young Leuniger.

She was two or three years older than Leo—a thin, pale person, with faint colouring, a rather receding chin, and slightly prominent teeth.

She dressed dowdily, and even Leo did not credit her with being pretty. Indeed he took a fanciful pleasure in dwelling on the fact that she was plain, and in quoting to himself the verse from Browning’s Too Late:

“ ... There never was to my mind
Such a funny mouth, for it would not shut;
And the dented chin too—what a chin!...
You were thin, however; like a bird’s
Your hand seemed—some would say the pounce
Of a scaly-footed hawk—all but!
The world was right when it called you thin.”

Meanwhile in London Bertie Lee-Harrison was celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles as best he could.

He had given up with considerable reluctance his plan of living in a tent, the resources of his flat in Albert Hall Mansions not being able to meet the scheme.

He consoled himself by visits to the handsome succouth which the Montague Cohens had erected in their garden in the Bayswater Road.

CHAPTER XI.

I do not like this manner of a dance,
This game of two and two; it were much better
To mix between the pauses than to sit
Each lady out of earshot with her friend.
Swinburne: Chastelard.

The Leunigers were giving a dance at the beginning of November, and the female part of the household was greatly taken up with preparations for the event.

There was much revising of invitation lists, discussion of the social claims of their friends and acquaintance, and the usual anxious beating up of every available dancing-man.

“Addie will bring Mr. Griffiths, and Esther Mr. Peck,” said Rose. “They go well, look nice, and one sees them everywhere, although Reuben calls them ‘outsiders.’”

Rose loved dances, as well she might, for from the first she had been a success.

Rose, with her fair, plump shoulders and blonde hair, her high spirits and good-nature, her nimble feet and nimble tongue; Rose with her £50,000 and twenty guinea ball-gowns; Rose went down—magic phrase!—as not one girl in ten succeeds in doing.

“I suppose,” said Judith, “that the Samuel Sachses will have to be asked?”

She, though of course she had her admirers, was by no means such a success as her cousin.

“Yes, isn’t it a nuisance?” cried Rose; “and the Lazarus Harts.”

If there is a strong family feeling among the children of Israel, it takes often the form of acute family jealousy.

The Jew who will open his doors in reckless ignorance to every sort and condition of Gentile is morbidly sensitive as regards the social standing of the compatriot whom he admits to his hospitality.

The Leunigers, as we know, were not people of long standing in the Community, and numbered among their acquaintance Jews of every rank and shade; from the Cardozos, who were rich, cultivated, could almost trace their descent from Hillel, the son of David, and had a footing in English society, to such children of nature as the Samuel Sachses.

“We must have Nellie Hepburn and the Strettel girls,” went on Rose, consulting her list; “the men all rush at them, though I don’t see that they are so pretty myself.”

“I suppose they make a change from ourselves,” answered Judith smiling, “whose faces are known by heart.”

Judith was entering with spirit, with a zeal that was almost feverish, into the preparations for the forthcoming festivity.

She and Reuben had scarcely spoken to one another since the Day of Atonement. They had met once or twice at family gatherings, at which, either by accident, or design on Reuben’s part, there had been no opportunity for private conversation.

Perhaps an instinctive feeling that the old relations were imperilled and that no new ones could ever be so satisfactory held them apart.

Meanwhile Judith unconsciously fixed her mind on the one definite fact that Reuben would be at the Leunigers’ dance. It was in the crowded solitude of ball-rooms that they had hitherto found their best opportunity.

The night so much prepared for came round at last, and the house in Kensington Palace Gardens became for the time being the scene of ceaseless activity.

Ernest had gone away into the country with the person who was always talked of as his valet; and Leo, of course, was in Cambridge; but the rest of the family—not excepting Lionel and Sidney, who handed programmes—had mustered in great force to do honour to the event.

From an early hour poor Mrs. Leuniger had taken up her station in the doorway of the primrose-coloured drawing-room, where she stood dejectedly welcoming her guests. She was wearing a quantity of valuable lace, very much crumpled, and had a profusion of diamonds scattered about her person, but had apparently forgotten to do her hair.

Rose, in short, voluminous skirts of pink tulle, and a pale pink satin bodice fitting close about her plump person, defining the lines of her ample hips, was performing introductions with noisy zeal, with the help of Jack Quixano, whom she had constituted her aide-de-camp. The Montague Cohens had come early, and Adelaide, in a very grand gown, scrutinized the scene with breathless interest, secretly wondering why more people had not asked her to dance.

Judith was looking very well. Her short, diaphanous white ball-gown, with its low-cut, tight-fitting satin bodice was not exactly a dignified garment, but she managed to maintain, in spite of it, her customary air of stateliness.

Moreover to-night some indefinable change had come over the character of her beauty, heightening it, intensifying it, giving it new life and colour. The calm, unawakened look which many people had found so baffling, had left her face; the eyes, always curiously mournful, shone out with a new soft fire.

Bertie Lee-Harrison, tripping jauntily into the ball-room, remained transfixed a moment in excited admiration.

What a beautiful woman was this cousin, or pseudo-cousin, of Sachs’s! How infinitely better bred she seemed than the people surrounding her!

The Quixanos, as Reuben had told him, were sephardim, for whose claim to birth he had the greatest respect. But as for that red-headed young man, her brother—there were no marks of breeding about him!

Bertie was puzzled, as the stranger is so often puzzled, by the violent contrasts which exist among Jews, even in the case of members of the same family.

Judith was standing some way off, where Bertie stood observing her, while two or three men wrote their names on her dancing-card.

She was one of the few people of her race who look well in a crowd or at a distance. The charms of person which a Jew or Jewess may possess are not usually such as will bear the test of being regarded as a whole.

Some quite commonplace English girls and men who were here to-night looked positively beautiful as they moved about among the ill-made sons and daughters of Shem, whose interesting faces gain so infinitely on a nearer view, even where it is a case of genuine good-looks.

Bertie waited a minute till the men had moved off, then advanced to Miss Quixano and humbly asked for two dances. Judith gave them to him with a smile. He was a poor creature, certainly, but he was Reuben’s friend, and she knew that, in one way at least, Reuben thought well of him: he was one of the few Gentiles of her acquaintance whom he had not stigmatized as an “outsider.”

Moreover Bertie’s little air of deference was a pleasant change from the rather patronizing attitude of the young men of her set, whose number was very limited, and who were aggressively conscious of commanding the market.

Bertie, his dances secured, moved off regretfully. He would have liked to sue for further favours, but his sense of decorum restrained him. Had he but known it, he might without exciting notice have claimed a third, at least, of the dances on Judith’s card. Hard flirtation was the order of the day, and the chaperons, who were few in number, gossiped comfortably together, while their charges sat out half the night with the same partner.

Rose fell upon Bertie at this point, and fired him off like a gun at one or two partnerless damsels; while Judith, her partner in her wake, moved over to the doorway, where Adelaide was standing with Caroline Cardozo.

It was eleven o’clock and Reuben had not come. Judith had, it must be owned, changed her position with a view to consulting the hall-clock, and perhaps Adelaide had some inkling of this, for she said very loudly to her companion:

“It is a first night at the Thalian; my brother never misses one. I don’t expect we shall see him to-night. Young men have so many ways of amusing themselves, I wonder they care about dances at all.”

The musicians struck up a fresh waltz, and Bertie came over to claim the first of his dances with Judith.

He danced very nicely, in a straightforward, unambitious way, never reversing his partner round a corner without saying, “I beg your pardon.”

Esther, her sharp brown shoulders shuffling restlessly in and out of a gold-coloured gown of moiré silk, and with a string of pearls round her neck worth a king’s ransom, surveyed the scene with shrewd, miserable eyes, while rattling on aimlessly to her partner and protégé, Mr. Peck.

It was indeed a motley throng which was whirling and laughing and shouting across the music, in the bare, bright, flower-scented apartment.

The great majority of the people were Jews—Jews belonging to varying shades of caste and clique in that socially sensitive Community. But besides these, there was a goodly contingent of Gentile dancing men—“outsiders,” according to Reuben, every one—and a smaller band of Gentile ladies who were the fashion of the hour among the sons of Shem.

(“Bad form” was the label affixed by Reuben to these attractive maids and matrons.)

To give distinction to the scene, there were a well-known R.A., who had painted Rose’s portrait for last year’s Academy; two or three pretty actresses; an ex-Lord Mayor, who had been knighted while in office; and last, though by no means least in the eyes of the clannish children of Israel, Caroline Cardozo and her father.

“‘What a pretty girl’?” did you say, remarked Esther as the music died away. “Yes, Judith Quixano is very good-looking, but I don’t know that she goes down particularly well.”

Mr. Peck made some complimentary remark, of a general character, as to the beauty of Jewish ladies.

“Yes, we have some pretty women,” Esther answered; “but our men! No, the Jew, unlike the horse, is not a noble animal.”

Esther, it will be seen, was of those who walk naked and are not ashamed.

At this point, a fashionably late hour, a new arrival was announced, and in marched Netta and Alec Sachs, their heads very much in the air, the self-assertion of self-distrust written on every line of their ingenuous countenances.

Netta, who had had a new dress from Paris for the occasion, really looked rather well in her own style, which was of the exuberant, black-haired, highly-coloured kind, and was at once greeted by one of the “outsiders” as an old friend.

This was no less a person than Adelaide’s particular protégé, Mr. Griffiths, who, ignorant of the fine shades of Community class-distinction, engaged Miss Sachs for several dances under the eyes of his mortified patroness. Mr. Griffiths indeed was an impartial person, who, so long as you gave him a good floor, a decent supper, and a partner who could “go,” would lend the light of his presence to any ball-room whatever, whether situated in South Kensington or Maida Vale.

Alec Sachs was less fortunate than his sister. There were plenty of men, and the girls whom he thought worthy of inviting to dance for the most part declared themselves engaged.

This was a new experience to him. His skilful dancing—it was of the acrobatic or gymnastic order—his powers of “chaff” and repartee, above all, his reputation as a parti, had secured him a high place among the maidens of Maida Vale.

He stood now, his back to the wall, an air of contempt for the whole proceeding written on his florid face, exclaiming loudly and petulantly to his sister, whenever he had an opportunity: “They don’t introduce, they don’t introduce!”

Twelve o’clock was striking as Reuben Sachs stepped into the hall, which by this time was filled with couples “sitting out”; a few of them really enjoying themselves, the great majority gay with that rather spurious gaiety, that forcing of the note, which is so marked a characteristic of festivities. Sounds of waltz music were borne from the drawing-room, and the draped aperture of the doorway—the door itself had been removed—showed a capering throng of dancers of varying degrees of agility.

Reuben advanced languidly; his face wore the mingled look of exhaustion and nerve-tension which with him denoted great fatigue.

It had been a long day: in and out of court all the morning; two committee meetings, political and philanthropical, respectively, later on; a hurried club dinner; and an interminable first night, with hitches in the scene-shifting, and long waits between the acts.

He had told himself over and over again that he would “cut” the dance at his uncle’s, and here he was—alleging to himself as an excuse the impossibility of getting to sleep directly after the theatre.

It was little more than a month that he had been home, and already his old enemy, insomnia, showed signs of being on the track.

Reuben made his way to a position near the foot of the stairs, which afforded a good view of the ball-room.

He could not see Judith, a circumstance which irritated him, as he did not wish to go in search of her.

Beyond, in the crowded refreshment room, he had a glimpse of Rose, who was exceedingly friande, giggling behind a large pink ice, while Jack Quixano, a look of conscious waggishness on his face, dropped confidential remarks into her ear. Esther, on the stairs behind him, was delivering herself freely of cheap epigrams to an impecunious partner; and in a rose-lit recess was to be seen Montague Cohen, his pale, pompous, feeble face wreathed in smiles, enjoying himself hugely with a light-hearted matron from the Gentile camp.

The whole scene was familiar enough to Reuben, who from his boyhood upward had taken part in the festivities of his tribe, with their gorgeously gowned and bejewelled women, elaborate floral decorations and costly suppers.

The Jew, it may be remarked in passing, eats and dresses at least two degrees above his Gentile brother in the same rank of life.

The music came to an end, and the dancers streamed out from the ball-room.

Alec Sachs, who had been dancing with his sister, brushed past Reuben in the throng, and the latter was mechanically aware of hearing him say to his partner:

“Mixed, very mixed! A scratch lot of people I call it.”

Lionel Leuniger came rushing up to him in all the glory of an Eton suit and a white gardenia.

“So you’ve come at last, Reuben! You are very late, and all the pretty girls are engaged. Have a programme?”

Reuben did not answer. By this time the ball-room was almost empty, and he could see clearly into the room beyond, where a red cloth recess had been built in from the balcony.

CHAPTER XII.

There are flashes struck from midnights, there are fire-flames noondays kindle,
Whereby piled-up honours perish, whereby swollen ambitions dwindle....
. . . . . .
Oh, observe! Of course, next moment, the world’s honours, in derision,
Trampled out the light for ever.
Browning: Christina.

There were two people sitting there, to all appearance completely absorbed in one another. In the distance, Judith’s head bending slightly forward, her profile, the curves of her neck and bosom, and the white mass of her gown, were to be seen clearly outlined against the red. And another figure, in close proximity to the first, defined itself against the same background. Reuben started—Judith and Lee-Harrison!

His apathy, his fatigue, his uncertainty as to seeking Judith vanished as by magic. Outwardly he looked impassive as ever as he strolled into the all but deserted ball-room. It would have taken a close observer to perceive, the repressed intensity of his every movement.

There was a draped alcove dividing the front and back drawing-rooms where Caroline Cardozo and Adelaide were standing as Reuben sauntered towards them.

“I hardly expected to see you,” cried his sister as Reuben stopped and greeted the ladies. Adelaide was not enjoying herself. Her social successes, such as they were, were not usually obtained in the open competition of the ball-room.

“Am I too late for a dance?” asked Reuben, turning with deference to Miss Cardozo.

She handed him her card with a faint smile; there were two or three vacant places on it.

A great fortune (I am quoting Esther), though it always brings proposals of marriage, does not so invariably bring invitations to dance. Caroline Cardozo was a plain, thin, wistful girl, with a shy manner that some people mistook for stand-offishness, who was declared by the men of the Leunigers’ set to be without an atom of “go.”

Her wealth and importance notwithstanding, she was, as Rose in her capacity of hostess explained, difficult to get rid of.

Reuben, his dance duly registered, stood talking urbanely, while scrutinizing from beneath his lids the pair on the balcony.

A nearer view showed him the unmistakable devotion on Bertie’s little fair face, which was lifted close to Judith’s; he appeared to be devouring her with his eyes.

And Judith?

It seemed to Reuben that never before had he seen that light in her eyes, never that flush on her soft cheek, never that strange, indescribable, almost passionate air in her pose, in her whole presence.

His own heart was beating with a wild, incredulous anger, an astonished contempt. He to be careful of Judith; he to beware of engaging her feelings too deeply, he, who after all these years had never been able to bring that look into her eyes!

Bertie? it was impossible!

In any case (with sudden vindictiveness) it was unlikely that Bertie himself meant anything; and yet—yet—he was just the sort of man to do an idiotic thing of the kind.

The music struck up, and the dancers drifted back to the ball-room.

Reuben, bowing himself away, turned to see Judith and her escort standing behind him, while the latter, gathering courage, wrote his name again and again on her card.

Reuben remained a moment in doubt, then went straight up to her.

“Good-evening, Miss Quixano.”

There was a note of irony in his voice, a look of irony on his pale, tense face; the glance that he shot at her from his brilliant eyes was almost cruel.

“Ah, good-evening, Reuben.”

She gave a little gasp, thrilled, bewildered. Long ago, her searching glance travelling across the two crowded rooms had distinguished the top of Reuben’s head in the hall beyond. She knew just the way the hair grew, just the way it was lifted from the forehead in a sidelong crest, just the way it was beginning to get a little thin at the temples.

Bertie moved off in search of his partner, with a bow and a reminder of future engagements.

“May I have the pleasure of a dance?”

Reuben retained his tone of ironical formality, but looking into her uplifted face his jealousy faded and was forgotten.

She held up her card with a smile; it was quite full.

Reuben took it gently from her hand, glanced at it, and tore it into fragments.

Judith said not a word.

To both of them the little act seemed fraught with strange significance, the beginning of a new phase in their mutual relations.

Reuben gave her his arm in silence; she took it, half frightened, and he led her to the furthermost corner of the crimson recess.

The dancers, overflowing from the ball-room beyond, closed about it, and they were screened from sight.

Reuben leaned forward, looking at her with eyes that seemed literally alight with some inward flame. The precautions, the restraints, the reserves which had hitherto fenced in their intercourse, were for the moment overthrown. Each was swept away on a current of feeling which was bearing them who knew whither?

To Judith, Reuben was no longer a commodity of the market with a high price set on him; he was a piteous human creature who entreated her with his eyes, yet held her chained: her suppliant and her master.

A soft wind blew in suddenly through the red curtains and stirred the hair on Judith’s forehead.

“Aren’t you cold?”

Reuben broke the silence for the first time.

“No, not at all.” She smiled, then holding back the red drapery with her hand, looked out into the night.

The November air was damp, warm, and filled full of a yellow haze which any but a Londoner would have called a fog.

Across the yard and a half of garden which divided the house from the street, she could see the long deserted thoroughfare with its double line of lamps, their flames shining dull through the mist.

Reuben watched her. The clear curve of the lifted arm, the beautiful lines of the half-averted face stirred his already excited senses.

“Judith!”

She turned her face, with its almost ecstatic look, towards him, letting fall the curtain.

There were some chrysanthemums like snowflakes in her bodice, scarcely showing against the white, and as she turned, Reuben bent towards her and laid his hand on them.

“I am going to commit a theft,” he said, and his low voice shook a little.

Judith yielded, passive, rapt, as his fingers fumbled with the gold pin.

It was like a dream to her, a wonderful dream, with which the whirling maze of dancers, the heavy scents, the delicious music were inextricably mingled. And mingling with it also was a strange, harsh sound in the street outside, which, faint and muffled at first, was growing every moment louder and more distinct.

Reuben had just succeeded in releasing the flowers from their fastening; but he held them loosely, with doubtful fingers, realizing suddenly what he had done.

Judith shivered, vaguely conscious of a change in the moral atmosphere.

The noise in the street was very loud, and words could be distinguished.

“What is it they are saying?” he cried, dropping the flowers, springing to the aperture, and pulling back the curtain.

Outside the house stood a dark figure, a narrow crackling sheet flung across one shoulder. A voice mounted up, clear in discordance through the mist:

“Death of a Conservative M.P.! Death of the member for St. Baldwin’s!”

“Ah, what is it?”

Cold, white, trembling, she too heard the words, and knew that they were her sentence.

He turned towards her; on his face was the look of a man who has escaped a great danger.

“Poor Ronaldson is dead. It has come suddenly at the last. No doubt I shall find a telegram at home.”

He spoke in his most every-day tones, but he did not look at her.

She summoned all her strength, all her pride:

“Then I suppose you will be going down there to-morrow?”

Her voice never faltered.

“No; in any case I must wait till after the funeral.”

He looked down stiffly. It was she who kept her presence of mind.

“Don’t you want to buy a paper and to tell Adelaide?”

“If you will excuse me. Where shall I leave you?”

“Oh, I will stop here. The dance is just over.”

He moved off awkwardly; she stood there white and straight, and never moving.

At her feet lay her own chrysanthemums, crushed by Reuben’s departing feet.

She picked them up and flung them into the street.

At the same moment a voice sounded at her elbow:

“I have found you at last.”

“Is this our dance, Mr. Lee-Harrison?”

CHAPTER XIII.

We did not dream, my heart, and yet
With what a pang we woke at last.
A. Mary F. Robinson.

Rose, with a candle in her hand, stood at the top of the stairs and yawned.

It was half-past three; the last waltz had been waltzed, the last light extinguished, the last carriage had rolled away.

Bertie, on his road to Albert Hall Mansions, was dreaming dreams; and Reuben, as he tossed on his sleepless bed, pondering plans for the coming contest, was disagreeably haunted by the recollection of some white chrysanthemums which he had let fall—on purpose.

“It has been a great success,” said Judith, passing by her cousin and going towards her own room.

Rose followed her, and sitting down on the bed, began drawing out the pins from her elaborately dressed hair.

“Yes, I think it went off all right. Caroline Cardozo stuck now and then, and no one would dance with poor Alec, so I had to take him round myself.”

Judith laughed. She had danced straight through the programme, had eaten supper, had talked gaily in the intervals of dancing. Rose got up from the bed and went over to Judith.

“Please unfasten my bodice. I have sent Marie to bed.”

Then, as Judith complied:

“What was Reuben telling Adelaide, and why did he make off so soon?”

“Mr. Ronaldson, the member for St. Baldwin’s, is dead. A man came and shouted the news down the street.”

Her voice was quite steady.

“What a ghoul Reuben is! He has been waiting to step into that dead man’s shoes this last month and more.—‘Reuben Sachs, M.P.’—‘My brother, the member for St. Baldwin’s’—‘A man told me in the House last night’—‘My son cannot get away while Parliament is sitting.’—The whole family will be quite unbearable.”

Judith bent her head over an obstinate knot in the silk dress-lace.

“He is not elected yet,” she said.

Rose, her bodice unfastened, sprang round and faced her cousin.

“Reuben is as hard as nails!” she cried with apparent inconsequence. “Under all that good-nature, he is as hard as nails!”

“Undo my frock, please,” said Judith, yawning with assumed sleepiness. “It must be nearly four o’clock.”

Rose’s capable fingers moved quickly in and out the lace; as she drew the tag from the last hole, she said: “Well, Judith, when are we to congratulate you?”

Judith did not affect to misunderstand the allusion. Bertie’s open devotion had acted as a buffer between her and her smarting pride.

“Poor little person!” she said, and smiled.

“You might do worse,” said Rose, gathering herself up for departure.

The mask fell off from Judith’s face as the door closed on her cousin. She stood there stiff and cold in the middle of the room, her hands hanging loosely at her side.

Rose put her head in at the door—

“Do you know what Jack says?” she began, then stopped suddenly.

“Judith, don’t look like that, it is no good.”

“No,” said Judith, lifting her eyes, “it is no good.” Then she went over to the door and shut it.

She sat down on the edge of her little white bed, supporting one knee with a smooth, solid arm, while she stared into vacancy.

Nothing had happened—nothing; yet henceforward life would wear a different face for her and she knew it.

It was impossible any longer to deceive himself. Her wide, vacant eyes saw nothing, but her mental vision, grown suddenly acute, was confronted by a thronging array of images.

Yes, she was beginning to see it all now; dimly and slowly indeed at first, but with ever increasing clearness as she gazed; to see how it had all been from the beginning; how slowly and surely this thing had grown about her life; how in the night a silent foe had undermined the citadel.

She had been caught, snared in a fine, strong net of woven hair, this young, strong creature. Her strength mocked her in the clinging, subtle toils.

She got up from the bed slowly, stiffly, and stood again upright in the middle of the room. Forced into a position alien to her whole nature, to the very essence of her decorous, law-abiding soul, it was impossible that she should not seek to strike a blow in her own behalf.

“It is no good,” Rose had said, and she had echoed the words.

She did not put her thought into words, but her heart cried out in sudden rebellion, “Why was it no good?”

She went over mentally almost every incident in her intercourse with Reuben; saw how from day to day, from month to month, from year to year they had been drawn closer together in ever strengthening, ever tightening bonds. She remembered his voice, his eyes, his face—his near face—as she had heard and seen them a few short hours ago.

The conventions, the disguises, which she had been taught to regard as the only realities, fell down suddenly before the living reality of this thing which had grown up between her and Reuben. She recognized in it a living creature, wonderful, mysterious, beautiful and strong, with all the rights of its existence. It was impossible that they who had given it breath should do violence to it, should stain their hands with its blood—it was impossible.

She stood there still, her head lifted up, glowing with a strange exultation as her pride re-asserted itself.

Opposite was a mirror, a three-sided toilet mirror, hung against the wall, and suddenly Judith caught sight of her own reflected face with its wild eyes and flushed cheeks; her face which was usually so calm.

Calm? Had she ever been calm, save with the false calmness which narcotic drugs bestow? She was frightened of herself, of her own daring, of the wild, strange thoughts and feelings which struggled for mastery within her. There is nothing more terrible, more tragic than this ignorance of a woman of her own nature, her own possibilities, her own passions.

She covered her face with her hands, and in the darkness the thoughts came crowding (was it thought, or vision, or feeling?).

The inexorable realities of her world, those realities of which she had so rarely allowed herself to lose sight, came pressing back upon her with renewed insistence.

That momentary glow of exultation, of self-vindication faded before the hard daylight which rushed in upon her soul.

She saw not only how it had all been, but how it would all be to the end.

Then once more his low, broken voice was in her ear, his supplicating eyes before her; the music, the breath of dying flowers assailed once more her senses; she lived over again that near, far-off, wonderful moment.

Again Judith dropped her hands to her side; she clenched them in an intolerable agony; she took a few steps and flung herself face forwards on the pillow.

Shame, anger, pride, all were swept away in an overwhelming torrent of emotion; in a sudden flood of passion, of longing, of desolation.

Baffled, vanquished, she lay there, crushing out the sound of unresisted sobs.

From her heart rose only the cry of defeat:—

“Reuben, Reuben, have mercy on me!”

CHAPTER XIV.

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;
’Tis woman’s whole existence.
Byron.

Judith slept far into the morning the sound, deep sleep of exhaustion; that sleep of the heavy-hearted from which, almost by an effort of will, the dreams are banished.

The first thing of which she was aware was the sound of Rose’s voice, and then of Rose herself standing over her with a plate and a cup of coffee in her hand. Judith raised herself on her elbow; a vague sense of calamity clung to her; her eyes were heavy with more than the heaviness of sleep.

“It is ten o’clock,” cried Rose. “I have brought you your breakfast. Rather handsome of me, isn’t it?”

“Yes, very,” said Judith, smiling faintly. “How came I to sleep so late?”

It was quite an event in her well-ordered existence; she realized it with a little shock which set her memory in motion.

Judith drank her coffee hastily and sprang out of bed. She went through her toilet with even more care and precision than usual; there is nothing more conducive to self respect than a careful toilet.

Nothing had happened; everything had happened. Judith felt that she had grown older in the night.

All day long people came and went and gossiped; gossiped loudly and ceaselessly of last night’s party; more cautiously and at intervals of Mr. Ronaldson’s death.

In the evening Adelaide, Esther, and Mrs. Sachs came in, but not Reuben. Not Reuben—she knew her sentence.

That brief moment of clear vision, of courage, had faded, as we know, even as it came. Now she dared not even look back upon it—dared not think at all.

Nothing had happened—nothing.

She fell back upon the unconsciousness, the unsuspiciousness of her neighbours. For them the world was not changed; how was it possible that great things had taken place?

She talked, moved about, and went through all the little offices of her life.

Now and then she repeated to herself the formulæ on which she had been brought up, which she had always accepted, as to the unseriousness, the unreality of the romantic, the sentimental in life.

Two or three days went by without any event to mark them. On the fourth, Bertie Lee-Harrison paid a call of interminable length, when Judith, with bright eyes and flushed cheeks, talked to him with unusual animation.

In her heart she was thinking: “Reuben will never come again, and what shall I do?”

But the very next day Reuben came.

It was of course impossible that he should stay away for any length of time.

The Leunigers were at tea in the drawing-room after dinner when the door was pushed open, and he entered, as usual, unannounced.

Judith’s heart leapt suddenly within her. The misery of the last few days melted like a bad dream. After all, were things any different from what they had always been?

Here was Reuben, here was she, face to face—alive—together.

He came slowly forwards, his eyelids drooping, an air of almost wooden immobility on his face. The black frock-coat which he wore, and in which he had that day attended Mr. Ronaldson’s funeral, brought out the unusual sallowness of his complexion. There was a withered, yellow look about him to-night which forcibly recalled his mother.

Judith’s heart grew very soft as she watched him shaking hands with her aunt and uncle.

“He is not well,” she thought; then: “He always comes last to me.”

But even as this thought flitted across her mind Reuben was in front of her, holding out his hand.

For a moment she stared astonished at the stiff, outstretched arm, the downcast, expressionless face, taking in the exaggerated, self-conscious indifference of his whole manner, then, with lightning quickness, put her hand in his.

It was as though he had struck her.

She looked round, half-expecting a general protest against this public insult, saw the quiet, unmoved faces, and understood.

She, too, to outward appearance, was quiet and unmoved enough, as she sat there on a primrose-coloured ottoman, bending over a bit of work. But the blood was beating and surging in her ears, and her stiff, cold fingers blundered impotently with needle and thread.

Reuben finished his greetings, then sat down near his uncle. He had come, he explained, to say “good-bye” before going down to St. Baldwin’s, for which, as he had expected, he had been asked to stand.

There was every chance of his being returned, Mr. Leuniger believed?

Well, yes. There was a small Radical party down there, certainly, beginning to feel its way, and they had brought forward a candidate. Otherwise there would have been no opposition.

Sir Nicholas Kemys, who had a place down there, and who was member for the county of which St. Baldwin’s was the chief town, had been very kind about it all. Lady Kemys was Lee-Harrison’s sister.

Judith listened, cold as a stone.

How could he bear to sit there, drawling out these facts to Israel Leuniger, which in the natural course of things should have been poured forth for her private benefit in delicious confidence and sympathy?

Esther, who was spending the evening with her cousins, came and sat beside her.

“You are putting green silk instead of blue into those cornflowers,” she cried.

Judith lifted her head and met the other’s curious, penetrating glance.

“When I was a little girl,” cried Esther, still looking at her, “a little girl of eight years old, I wrote in my prayer-book: ‘Cursed art Thou, O Lord my God, Who hast had the cruelty to make me a woman.’ And I have gone on saying that prayer all my life—the only one.”

Judith stared at her as she sat there, self-conscious, melodramatic, anxious for effect.

She never knew if mere whim or a sudden burst of cruelty had prompted her words.

“According to your own account, Esther,” she said, “you must always have been a little beast.”

Esther chuckled. Judith went on sewing, but changed her silks.

She wondered if the evening would never end, and yet she did not want Reuben to go.

He rose at last and made his farewells.

Judith put out her hand carelessly as he approached her, then, drawn by an irresistible magnetism, lifted her eyes to his.

As she did so, from Reuben’s eyes flashed out a long melancholy glance of passion, of entreaty, of renunciation; and once again, even from the depths of her own humiliation, arose that strange, yearning sentiment of pity, with which this man, who was strong, ruthless and successful, had such power of inspiring her.

Only for a moment did their eyes meet, the next she had turned hers away—had in her turn grown cold and unresponsive.

How dared he look at her thus? How dared he profane that holiest of sorrows, the sorrow of those who love and are by fate separated?

CHAPTER XV.

Wer nie sein Brod mit Thraenen ass,
Wer nie die kummervollen Naechte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Der Kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlische Maechte!
Goethe.

There was a little set of shelves in Judith’s bedroom which contained the whole of her modest library, some twenty books in all—Lorna Doone; Carlyle’s Sterling; Macaulay’s Essays; Hypatia; The Life of Palmerston; the Life of Lord Beaconsfield: these were among her favourites, and they had all been given to her by Reuben Sachs.

Like many wholly unliterary people, she preferred the mildly instructive even in her fiction. It was a matter of surprise to her that clever creatures, like Leo and Esther for instance, should pass whole days when the fit was on in the perusal of such works as Cometh Up as a Flower, and Molly Bawn.

But it was not novels, even the less frivolous ones, that Judith cared for.

Rose, whose own literary tastes inclined towards the society papers, varied by an occasional French novel, had said of her with some truth, that the drier a book was, the better she liked it. Reuben had long ago discovered Judith’s power of following out a train of thought in her clear, careful way, and had taken pleasure in providing her with historical essays and political lives, and even in leading her through the mazes of modern politics.

Perhaps he did not realize, what it is always hard for the happy, objective male creature to realize, that if he had happened to be a doctor, Judith might have developed scientific tastes, or if a clergyman, have found nothing so interesting as theological discussion and the history of the Church.

Judith stood before her little library in the dark November dawn, with a candle in her hand, scanning the familiar titles with weary eyes. She was so young and strong, that even in her misery she could sleep the greater part of the night; but these last few days she had taken to waking at dawn, to lying for hours wide-eyed in her little white bed, while the slow day grew.

But to-day it was intolerable, she could bear it no longer, to lie and let the heavy, inarticulate sorrow prey on her.

She would try a book; not a very hopeful remedy in her own opinion, but one which Reuben, Esther, and Leo, who were all troubled by sleeplessness, regarded, she knew, as the best thing under the circumstances.

So she scanned the familiar bookshelves, then turned away; there was nothing there to meet her case.

She put on her dressing-gown and stole out softly across the passage to Leo’s empty room, where she remembered to have seen some books.

Here she set down the candle, and, as she looked round the dim walls, her thoughts went out suddenly to Leo himself, went out to him with a new tenderness, with something that was almost beyond comprehension.

She knew, though she did not use the word to herself, that after some blind, groping fashion of his own, Leo was an idealist—poor Leo!

There were books on a table near, and she took them up one by one: some volumes of Heine, in prose and verse; the operatic score of Parsifal; Donaldson on the Greek Theatre; and then two books of poetry, each of which, had she but known it, appealed strongly to two strongly marked phases of Leo’s mood—Poems and Ballads, and a worn green copy of the poems of Clough.

She turned over the leaves carelessly.

Poetry? Yes, she would try a little poetry. She had always enjoyed reading Tennyson and Shakespeare in the schoolroom. So she put the books under her arm, went back to her room, and crept into her little cold bed.

She took up the volume of Swinburne and began reading it mechanically by the flickering candlelight.

The rolling, copious phrases conveyed little meaning to her, but she liked the music of them. There was something to make a sophisticated onlooker laugh in the sight of this young, pure creature, with her strong, slow-growing passions, her strong, slow-growing intellect, bending over the diffuse, unreserved, unrestrained pages. She came at last to one poem, the Triumph of Time, which seemed to have more meaning than the others, and which arrested her attention, though even this was only comprehensible at intervals. She read on and on:—

“I have given no man of any fruit to eat;
I have trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine.
Had you eaten and drunken and found it sweet,
This wild new growth of the corn and vine,
This wine and bread without lees or leaven,
We had grown as gods, as the gods in heaven,
Souls fair to look upon, goodly to greet,
One splendid spirit, your soul and mine.

“In the change of years, in the coil of things,
In the clamour and rumour of life to be,
We, drinking love at the furthest springs,
Covered with love as a covering tree,
We had grown as gods, as the gods above,
Filled from the heart to the lips with love,
Held fast in his arms, clothed warm with his wings,
O love, my love, had you loved but me!

“We had stood as the sure stars stand, and moved
As the moon moves, loving the world; and seen
Grief collapse as a thing disproved,
Death consume as a thing unclean.
Twin halves of a perfect heart, made fast
Soul to soul while the years fell past;
Had you loved me once, as you have not loved;
Had the chance been with us that has not been.”

The slow tears gathered in her eyes, and forcing themselves forward fell down her cheeks.

Then there was, after all, something to be said for feelings which had not their basis in material relationships. They were not mere phantasmagoria conjured up by silly people, by sentimental people, by women. Clever men, men of distinction, recognized them, treated them as of paramount importance.

The practical, if not the theoretical, teaching of her life had been to treat as absurd any close or strong feeling which had not its foundations in material interests. There must be no undue giving away of one’s self in friendship, in the pursuit of ideas, in charity, in a public cause. Only gushing fools did that sort of thing, and their folly generally met with its reward.

And this teaching, sensible enough in its way, had been accepted without question by the clannish, exclusive, conservative soul of Judith.

Where your interests lie, there should lie your duties; and where your duties, your feelings. A wholesome doctrine no doubt, if not one that will always meet the far-reaching and complicated needs of a human soul.

And if this doctrine applied to friendship, to philanthropy, to art and politics, in how much greater a degree must it apply to love, to the unspoken, unacknowledged love between a man and woman; a thing in its very essence immaterial, and which, in its nature, can have no rights, no duties attached to it?

It was the very hatred of the position into which she had been forced, the very loathing of what was so alien to her whole way of life and mode of thought that was giving Judith courage; if she could not vindicate herself, she must be simply crushed beneath the load of shame.

On one point, the nature and extent of her feeling for Reuben, there could no longer be illusion or self-deception; she would have walked to the stake for him without a murmur, and she knew it.

She knew, too, that Reuben loved her as far as in him lay; knew, with a bitter humiliation, how far short of hers fell his love.

Yet deep in her heart lay the touching obstinate belief of the woman who loves—that she was necessary to him, that she alone could minister to his needs; that in turning away from her and her large protection, her infinite toleration, he was turning away from the best which life had to offer him.

In the first sharp agony of awakening, Judith, as we know, had recognized that which had grown up between her and Reuben as a reality with rights and claims of its own. And the conviction of this was slowly growing upon her in the intervals of the swinging back of the pendulum, when she judged herself by conventional standards and felt herself withered by her own scorn, the scorn of her world, and the scorn of the man she loved.

A great tear splashing down across the Triumph of Time recalled her to herself.

She shut the book and sat up in bed, sweeping back the heavy masses of hair from her forehead.

Often and often, with secret contempt and astonishment, had she seen Esther dissolved in tears over her favourite poets.

Should she grow in time to be like Esther, undignified, unreserved? Would people talk about her, pity her, say that she had had unfortunate love affairs?

Oh, yes, they would talk, that was the way of her world; even Rose who was kind, and her own mother who loved her; no doubt they had begun to talk already.

Then, with a sense of unutterable weariness, she fell back on the pillows and slept.

CHAPTER XVI.

....What help is there?
There is no help, for all these things are so.
A. C. Swinburne.

“Come over here, Judith, and I will show you something,” said Ernest Leuniger as he sat by the fire in the morning-room.

It was two days after Reuben’s departure for St. Baldwin’s, and Ernest had returned from the country that morning.

She went over to him, drawing a chair close to his. Judith was always very kind to him, and he admired her immensely, treating her at intervals with a sort of gallantry.

“Now look at me!” He had the solitaire board on his knee, and a little glass ball, with coloured threads spun into it, between his fingers.

“There, and there, and there!”

Judith bent forward dutifully, watching how he lifted the marbles, one after the other, from their holes.

“Don’t you see?”

He looked at her triumphantly, but a little irritated at her obtuseness.

“Oh, yes,” said Judith vaguely.

“The figure eight—don’t you see?”

He pointed to the balls remaining on the board.

“So it is! Where did you learn to do that?” she asked, smiling gently.

“Ah, that’s telling, isn’t it?” He chuckled slily, swept the balls together with his hand, and announced his intention of going in search of his man, with a view to a game of billiards.

Judith sank back in her chair as the door closed on him. The firelight played about her face, which, though not less beautiful, had grown to look older. She had been living hard these last few days.

The door opened, and Rose came in with her hat on and a parcel in her hand.

“No tea?” she cried, kneeling down on the hearthrug and holding out her hands to the fire.

“It isn’t five o’clock yet.”

There was an air of tension, of expectancy almost about Judith which contrasted markedly with her habitual serenity.

Rose turned suddenly. “When, Judith, when?” she cried with immense archness.

“I don’t know,” said Judith quietly.

There had been a dance the night before at the Kohnthals, where Bertie’s unconcealed devotion to herself had been one of the events of the hour.

“Judith!”—Rose regarded her with excitement—“do you mean to say he has—spoken? Or are you humbugging in that serious way of yours?”

“Mr. Lee-Harrison has not proposed to me, if that is what you want to know.”

Rose unfastened her fur mantle in silence. Something in Judith’s manner puzzled her.

“He really is a nice little person,” Rose went on after a pause; “such beautiful manners!”

“Oh, he hands plates and opens doors very prettily.”

Judith spoke with a certain weary scorn, which Rose accepted as the tone of depreciation natural to a woman who discusses an undeclared admirer.

As a matter of fact, Judith recognized clearly the marks of breeding, the hundred and one fine differences which distinguished Bertie from the people of her set, whose manners were almost invariably tinged with respect of persons—that sure foe to respect of humanity. She recognized them and their value as hallmarks, wondering all the time with a dreary wonder, that any one should attach importance to such things as these.

For in her heart she despised the man. His intelligent fluency, his unfailing, monotonous politeness were a weariness to her.

His very readiness to fall down utterly before her, seemed to her—alas, poor Judith!—in itself a brand of inferiority.

“Tea at last,” cried Rose, as the door opened. “And Adelaide. What a scent you have for tea, Addie.”

Mrs. Montague Cohen swept in past the servant with the tray and took possession of the best chair.

“Mamma is here too,” she cried; “she and aunt Ada will be in in a minute.”

She drew off her gloves and the two girls rose to greet Mrs. Sachs, who at this point came with Mrs. Leuniger into the room.

Judith gave her hand very quietly to Reuben’s mother, then took her seat at some distance from the group round the tea-table, occupying herself with cutting the leaves of a novel that had just arrived from Mudie’s.

“Reuben is nominated,” cried Adelaide, as she helped herself liberally to tea-cake. “We had a telegram this morning.”

“He expects to get in this time?” said Mrs. Leuniger, her pessimistic mind reverting naturally to her nephew’s first unsuccessful attempt at embarking on a political career.

“It won’t be for want of interest if he doesn’t,” said Mrs. Sachs; “Sir Nicholas Kemys and his wife are working day and night for him—day and night.”

“And Miss Lee-Harrison, Lady Kemys’ sister, she seems to be quite specially zealous in the good cause,” put in Adelaide with meaning.

Secretly she was mortified at not having been asked down to St. Baldwin’s for the campaign, Reuben having met her hints on the subject in a very decided manner. There was some satisfaction in venting her feelings on Judith, for whose benefit her last remark was uttered.

“When is the election?” said Rose, turning to her aunt.

“Not till to-day week. But I may safely say there is no real cause for anxiety.”

“Did you see last night’s Globe?” cried Adelaide, “and the St. James’s? They cracked up Reuben no end.”

Judith had seen them; she had seen also the Pall Mall Gazette, which expressed itself in very different terms.

She had put back Poems and Ballads on its shelf, and had taken to reading all the articles respecting the prospects of the St. Baldwin’s elections that she could lay hands on.

At least she had a right to be interested in what she had been told so much about, but there were times when she felt, as she read, that her interest was intrusive, a thing to be ashamed of.

“I suppose,” said Rose, “that he is too busy to write much.”

“We had a letter yesterday—just a line. He seemed in splendid spirits, and has promised to wire from time to time,” answered Adelaide.

“A good son,” said Mrs. Sachs half tenderly, half jestingly, very proudly, “who never forgets his mother.”

So the talk went on.

Judith sat there listening, cutting open her novel, and throwing in a remark from time to time.

Every word that was uttered seemed a brick in the wall that was building between herself and Reuben.

In this crisis of his career, so long looked forward to, so often discussed, he had no need, no thought of her. Adelaide, Esther, Rose, all had more claim on him than she; she was shut out from his life.

Reuben, disappointed, defeated: in such a one she would always, in spite of himself, have felt her rights. But Reuben, hopeful, successful, surrounded by admiring friends and relatives, fenced in more closely still by his mother’s love: from the contemplation of this glittering figure, cruel, triumphant, she turned away in a stony agony of self-contempt.

There was a sound of carriage wheels outside, and Lionel, who had been reconnoitring in the hall, burst in with the announcement, “Grandpapa has come.”

Mrs. Leuniger received the news with something like agitation. Old Solomon’s visits were few and far between, and now as he came, with pompous uncertainty of step across the room, the whole group by the fireplace rose hastily and went to meet him.

“Reuben is nominated,” cried Adelaide, when the old man had been established in a chair.

“Yes, yes,” said Solomon Sachs, “so I hear.”

He turned to his niece: “He ain’t looking well, that boy of yours.”

Mrs. Sachs shifted uneasily.

“You saw him just before he went, uncle Solomon, when he was tired out and not himself. He had been running from pillar to post all the week.”

Mrs. Leuniger muttered dejectedly: “He is getting to look like his father.”

Old Solomon raised his square hand to his beard, lifting his eyebrows high above the grave, shrewd, melancholy eyes.

Mrs. Sachs started; a sudden look of terror came into her face; the whites of her little hard eyes grew visible.

“Why don’t he marry?” said Solomon Sachs after a pause; “why don’t he marry that daughter of Cardozo’s? She’s not much to look at, certainly,” he added, and a wave of whimsical amusement broke out suddenly over the large, grave face.

“Yes,” put in Mrs. Leuniger, unusually loquacious, “his wife might see that he didn’t work himself to death.”

“I don’t see how he can work less,” cried Adelaide; “he has his way to make. And making your way, in these days, means pulling a great many strings.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Sachs, relieved by this view of the case, “he must get on.”

Judith began to feel that her powers of endurance had their limits. She rose slowly, went over to the fireplace for a moment, threw a casual remark to Rose, and went from the room.

As she made her way up stairs the postman’s knock sounded through the house, and then Lionel came running to her with a letter.

Her correspondence was very small, and she glanced with but faint interest at the little packet in her cousin’s hand.

He was carrying it seal upwards, and suddenly her heart beat with a wild, mad beating, and the colour leapt to her pale cheeks.

She could see that it was sealed with wax. There was only one person that she knew who fastened his letters so. Reuben invariably made use of the signet ring which had belonged to his father, engraved with a crest duly bought and paid for at the Heralds’ College.

She took the precious thing in her hand, closing her fingers over it, and smiled radiantly at the little boy.

“Thank you, Lionel.”

Her room gained, she locked the door, sat down on the bed, and looked at her letter—

“To Miss Judith Quixano.”

The writing was certainly not Reuben’s, and he never used the “To.”

Then she turned it over and examined the seal, the seal that was totally unfamiliar. She felt a little sick, a little dazed, and leaned her head against the wall.

After a time she opened the letter and read it.

It was from Bertie Lee-Harrison, who asked her to be his wife.

It was a long letter, and stated, amongst other things, that he had already obtained his uncle’s permission to address her.

Old Solomon’s words as to his grandson’s marriage flashed into her mind. It struck her that these plans for Reuben, for herself, were nothing less than an outrage.

It struck her also that she might marry Bertie.

All her courage had deserted her, all her daring of thought and feeling, in the face of a world where thought and feeling were kept apart from word and deed.

She too must fall down and worship at the shrine of the great god Expediency.

For how, otherwise, could she live her life?

Thrust out from Reuben’s friendship, from all that made her happiness; shorn of self-respect, of the respect of her world; how could she bear to go on in the old track?

To her blind misery, her ignorance, Bertie was nothing more than a polite little figure holding open for her a door of escape.

CHAPTER XVII.

O’ Thursday let it be: o’ Thursday, tell her,
She shall be married to this noble earl.
Romeo and Juliet.

The news of Bertie’s proposal spread like fire in the family.

Rose had a vision of bridesmaids’ gowns and of belted earls at the wedding. Lionel and Sidney, who always knew everything without being told, scented wedding-cake from afar, and indulged in a great deal of chaff sotto voce at their cousin’s expense.

Adelaide was so excited when the news reached her, that she flattened her nose with the handle of her parasol, and exclaimed with her usual directness: “I wonder if the Norwood people will receive her.”

Like every one else, she took for granted that Judith would not be allowed to let slip so brilliant an opportunity.

A little maidenly hesitation, a little genuine reluctance perhaps—for Bertie was not the man to take a girl’s fancy—and Judith would give further proof of her good sense; would open her mouth and shut her eyes and swallow what the Fates had sent her.

Poor Mrs. Quixano, greatly agitated, vibrated between the Walterton Road and Kensington Palace Gardens, expending quite a little fortune on blue omnibuses.

It took a long time for her brother to convince her that Bertie’s spurious Judaism could for a moment be accepted as the real thing.

“He is not a Jew,” she reiterated obstinately; “would you let your own daughter marry him?”

Israel Leuniger evaded the question.

“My dear Golda, he is as much a Jew as you or I. Her father is perfectly satisfied, as well he may be—it is a brilliant match.”

Mrs. Leuniger realized perfectly the meaning of £5000 a year. Bertie’s other advantages, such, for instance, as his connection with the Norwoods, had little weight with her. If he had been one of the Cardozos, or of the Silberheims—the great Jewish bankers—she could have understood all this fuss about his family.

“Who are the girls to marry in these days?” Mrs. Sachs said later on, as she, Mrs. Quixano, and Mrs. Leuniger sat in consultation. “If I had unmarried daughters I should tell them they would have to marry Germans.”

The extreme nature of this statement did not fail to impress her hearers.

While the matrons sat in conclave in the primrose-coloured drawing-room, Judith up stairs in her own little domain was trying to come to a decision on the subject of their discussion.

She had asked for time, for a few days in which to make up her mind, and of these, three had already gone by. But from the first there had always been this thing in her mind, this thing from which she shrank—that she would marry Bertie.

Her loneliness, her utter isolation of spirit in that crowded house where she was for the moment a centre of interest, a mark for observation, are difficult to realize. A severance of home ties had been to a certain extent involved in her change of homes. Her nearest approach to intimate women friends were Rose and Esther. As for the one friend who had wound his way into her reserved, exclusive soul, who had made a path into her inclosed, restricted life, he was her friend no more.

Reuben, oh, humiliation! had shown her plainly that he was afraid of her; afraid of any claims she might choose to base on the friendship which had existed between them. There was always this thought in her mind goading her.

On the faces round her she read nothing but anxiety that she would make up her mind without delay. She knew what was expected of her.

Sometimes she thought she could have borne it better if some one had said outright:

“We know that you love Reuben; that Reuben loves you after a fashion. But it is no good crying for the moon; take your half loaf and be thankful for it.”

It was this absolute, stony ignoring of all that had gone before which seemed to crush the life out of her.

She was growing to feel that in loving Reuben she had committed a crime too shameful for decent people even to speak of.

That Reuben had ever loved her she now doubted. It had all been a chimera of the emotional female brain, of which Reuben, who was subject, as we know, to occasional lapses of taste, had often confided to her his contempt. Yet even now there were moments when, remembering all that had gone before, it seemed to her impossible that Reuben should do long without her.

If she flew in the face of nature and said “Yes” to Bertie, surely he would come forward and protest against such an outrage.

Every day she devoured the scraps of news which the papers contained respecting the coming election at St. Baldwin’s.

Sometimes her mind dwelt on the splendours of the prospect held out before her; splendours which, in her ignorance, she was disposed to exaggerate. Reuben, climbing to those social heights, which for herself she had always deemed inaccessible, Reuben reaching the summit, would find her there before him. That would impress him greatly, she knew.

Let this thought be forgiven her; let it be remembered who was her hero, and how little choice there had been for her in the matter of heroes.

Yet such are the contradictions of our nature, that had the Admirable Crichton stood before her, Don Quixote, or Sir Galahad himself, I cannot answer for Judith that she would not have turned from them to the mixed, imperfect human creature—Reuben Sachs.

So she sat there swaying this way and that, and then the door opened and her mother came in. Mrs. Quixano, we know, was not pleased at heart, but she had become very anxious for the marriage.

Judith listened passively as the advantages of her future position were laid before her.

Then she made her protest, fully conscious of its weakness.

“I do not like Mr. Lee-Harrison.”

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Quixano. “I should be sorry to hear that you did. No girl likes her intended—at first.”

Judith bowed her head, conscious, ashamed.

Only that afternoon Rose had said to her:

“We all have to marry the men we don’t care for. I shall, I know, although I have a lot of money. I am not sure that it is not best in the end.”

And she sighed, as a red-headed, cousinly vision rose before her mental sight.

“You are coming home with me,” went on Mrs. Quixano, “then we can talk it over comfortably. You mustn’t keep the poor man waiting much longer.”

Mrs. Leuniger came in as Judith was tying her bonnet strings.

“Judith is coming with me,” said her mother.

Aunt Ada drifted slowly across the room to where Judith was standing. She looked at her with her miserable eyes, rubbing her hands together as she said:

“You had better write to Mr. Lee-Harrison before you go. You won’t get such an opportunity as this every day.”

Judith stared at her aunt in a sort of desperation.

She, too? Aunt Ada, who all the days of her life had known wealth, splendour, importance, and, as far as could be seen, had never enjoyed an hour’s happiness!

She looked at the dejected, untidy figure, with the load of diamonds on the fingers, the rich lace round neck and wrists, the crumpled gown of costly silk.

Aunt Ada still believed in these things then; in diamonds, lace and silk? Did not wring her hands and cry, “all is vanity!”

Hers was truly an astonishing manifestation of faith.

. . . .

Judith sat in her father’s study in the Walterton Road.

On the desk before her lay the letter which she had written and sealed to Mr. Lee-Harrison, containing her acceptance of his offer.

A certain relief had come with the deed. She had opened up for herself a new field of action; she would be reinstated in the eyes of her world, in Reuben’s eyes, in her own.

She was so strong, so cruelly vital that it never for an instant occurred to her that she might pine and fade under her misery. She would have laughed to scorn such a thought.

Not thus could she hope for escape. A new field of action—there lay her best chance.

Her father came up to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She lifted her mournful glance to his; the kind, vague regard was inexpressibly soothing after the battery of eyes to which she had been recently exposed.

“I hope, my dear,” said Joshua Quixano, “that you are quite happy in this engagement?”

“Oh, yes, papa,” answered Judith; but suddenly, as she spoke, the tears welled to her eyes and poured down her face.

Such a display of feeling on her part was without precedent. Both father and daughter were exceedingly shy, though in neither case with that shyness which manifests itself in outward physical flutter.

Mr. Quixano, deeply moved, stretched out his arms, and putting them about her, drew her close against him.

“My dear girl, my dear girl, you are not to do this unless you are sure it is for your happiness. Remember, there is always a home for you here. You can always come back to us.”

She let her face lie on his breast, while the tears flowed unchecked. His words, the kind, timid, caressing movements with which he accompanied them were sweet to her, though in the depths of her heart she knew that there was no turning back.

Material advantage; things that you could touch and see and talk about; that these were the only things which really mattered, had been the unspoken gospel of her life.

Now and then you allowed yourself the luxury of a fine sentiment in speech, but when it came to the point, to take the best that you could get for yourself was the only course open to a person of sense.

The push, the struggle, the hunger and greed of her world rose vividly before her. Wealth, power, success—a flaunting success for all men to see; had she not believed in these things as the most desirable on earth? Had she not always wished them to fall to the lot of the person dearest to her? Did she not believe in them still? Was she not doing her best to secure them for herself?

But she was Joshua Quixano’s daughter—was it possible that she cared for none of these things?

CHAPTER XVIII.

The essence of love is kindness; and indeed it may
be best defined as passionate kindness.
R. L Stevenson.

There is nothing more dear to the Jewish heart than an engagement; and when, four days after the events of the last chapter, that between Judith and Bertie was made public, congratulations flowed in, people called at all hours of the day, and the house in Kensington Palace Gardens presented a scene of cheerful activity and excitement.

The Community, after much discussion, much shaking of heads over the degeneracy of the times, had decided on accepting Bertie’s veneer of Judaism as the real thing, and the engagement was treated like any other. If Mr. Lee-Harrison had continued in the faith of his fathers this would not have been the case. Though both engagement and marriage would in a great number of instances have been countenanced, their recognition would have been less formal and public, and of course a fair proportion of Jews would never have recognized them at all.

As it was, the brilliancy of the match was considered a little dimmed by the fact of Bertie’s not being of the Semitic race. It showed indifferent sportsmanship, if nothing else, to have failed in bringing down one of the wily sons of Shem.

The Samuel Sachses came over at the first opportunity to wish joy, as they themselves expressed it, and inspect the new fiancé.

It is possible that they were not well received, for Netta gave out subsequently, whenever the Lee-Harrisons were in question: “We don’t visit. Mamma doesn’t approve of mixed marriages.”

The day on which the engagement was announced happened also to be that of the election, and in the course of the afternoon Adelaide burst in, much excited by the double event.

“An overwhelming majority!” she cried; “Reuben is in by an overwhelming majority.”

Then going up to Judith, she gave her a sounding kiss.

“I am so glad, dear,” she said gushingly.

Judith submitted to this display of affection with a good grace.

For the last four days she had been living in a dream; a dream peopled by phantoms, who went and came, spoke and smiled, but had about as much reality as the figures of a magic lantern.

As before Bertie’s proposal she had been too much preoccupied to be much aware of him, so now she continued to accept his attentions in the same spirit of amiable indifference and unconsciousness. Bertie, as Gwendolen Harleth said of Grandcourt, was not disgusting. He took his love, as he took his religion, very theoretically. There was something not unpleasant in the atmosphere of respectful devotion with which he contrived to surround her.

“Where is your young man?” went on Adelaide, taking a seat close to Judith, and noting with admiration the rich colour in her face, the wonderful brilliance of her eyes.

She felt very friendly towards the girl, who was safely out of her brother’s way, and was doing so remarkably well for herself.

Afterwards she observed to her husband: “Judith looked quite good-looking. I always say there is nothing like being engaged for improving a girl’s complexion.”

“Am I my young man’s keeper?” answered Judith lightly. “But I believe he is at Christie’s.”

“When can you come and dine with us?” went on Adelaide, who had never asked Judith to dinner before. “I will get some pleasant people to meet you. You shall choose your own night. Reuben must come as well—if he is not too jealous.”

Adelaide did not mean to be cruel. She honestly believed that before the solid reality of an engagement, such vapour as unspoken, unacknowledged feeling must at once have melted.

And Judith was beyond being hurt by her words.

“I don’t know exactly when we can come. Blanche Kemys wants us to go down there for a day or two next week. And we are half promised to Geraldine Sydenham for the week after.”

She pronounced these distinguished names thus familiarly with a secret amusement, a sense that there was really a great deal of fun to be got out of Adelaide.

Mrs. Cohen stared open-mouthed, frankly impressed.

She had no idea that Bertie’s people would come round without any difficulty in that way, and visions of herself and Monty honoured guests at Norwood Towers began to dance before her mental vision.

Esther, noting the little comedy, smiled to herself. She had perhaps a clearer view of Judith’s state of mind than any one else.

Judith indeed had almost succeeded in banishing thought during the last few days.

The persistent questions: “What will Reuben think?” “When will he know?” were the nearest approach to thought she had allowed herself.

Rose, who was thoroughly enjoying the engagement, and had confided to Judith that, once married, “she would be all right” came in at this point, and in her turn was made acquainted with the results of the election.

“Reuben comes back to-night by the last train, the 12.15,” added Mrs. Cohen.

Judith thought: “He knows now.”

Lady Kemys would certainly have told him what that morning had been a public fact.

People streamed in and out all the afternoon, greatly disappointed at not finding Bertie.

At six Judith, at the instigation of Rose, went to dress for dinner. Bertie had announced his intention of coming early.

As she shut the drawing-room door behind her, the muscles of her face relaxed, she stood a moment at the foot of the stairs like a figure of stone.

Mrs. Sachs, emerging from Mr. Leuniger’s private room, where she had been imparting the news of her son’s triumph, came upon her thus.

“My dear!” she cried, going up to her.

Judith roused herself at once, and held out her hand with the comedy-smile which she had learned to wear these last few days.

Mrs. Sachs looked up at her, curiously moved. “My dear, I have to congratulate you.”

“And I to congratulate you, Mrs. Sachs.”

Their eyes met.

Hitherto Judith had been too proud to make the least advance to Reuben’s mother, to respond even to any advance the latter might choose to make. But things were changed between them now.

She looked down at the sallow face, the shrewd eyes lifted to hers, almost, it seemed, in deprecation, in sympathy almost.

Her beautiful face quivered; stooping forward, she pressed her lips with sudden passion to the other’s wrinkled cheek.

CHAPTER XIX.

... This life’s end, and this love-bliss have been lost here. Doubt you whether
This she felt, as looking at me, mine and her souls rushed together?
Browning: Christina.

Esther sat a little apart, watching the lovers.

“Does she think he is a cardboard man to play with, or an umbrella to take shelter under?” she reflected. “A lover may be a shadowy creature, but husbands are made of flesh and blood. Doesn’t she see already that he is as obstinate as a mule, and as whimsical as a goat?”

And she repeated the phrase to herself well pleased with it.

It was Sunday, the day following that of the election. A great family party had dined in Kensington Palace Gardens, and now were awaiting Reuben in the primrose-coloured drawing-room.

Judith, side by side with Bertie, was listening amiably to a fluent account of his adventures in Asia Minor, in which he dwelt a great deal on his state of mind and state of health at the time; while Rose played scraps of music for the benefit of Jack Quixano, who had a taste for comic opera.

Judith was in such a state of tension as scarcely to be conscious of pain. Her duties as fiancée were clearly marked out; anything was better than those days of chaos, of upheaval, which had preceded her engagement.

Esther’s favourite phrase, that marriage was an opiate, had occurred to her more than once during the past week.

“I sat up all night long, and read every word of it. I was determined to make up my mind once for all,” Bertie was saying.

Rose, at the piano, put her hand on her hip and hummed a scrap from a music-hall song, while Jack whistled an accompaniment:

“Stop the cab,
Stop the cab,
Woh, woh, woh!”

The hall-door banged to with some violence.

The voices of Lionel and Sidney were heard upraised without:

“Vote for Sachs! Vote for Sachs, the people’s friend!”

Then came the sound of another voice—

“My head was like a live coal, and my feet were as cold as stones ...” went on Bertie.

Judith looked sympathetic, and her heart leaped suddenly within her: it had not yet unlearnt the trick of leaping at the sound of Reuben’s voice. Lionel flung open the door and capered into the room.

Behind him came Reuben Sachs.

Judith knew nothing more till she and Reuben were standing face to face, holding one another’s hands.

Whatever had happened before, whatever happened afterwards, she will remember to the day of her death that in that one moment, at least, they understood one another.

No need for question, for answer, for explanation of motives and feelings.

It was all as clear as daylight, in that strange, brief, interminable moment which to the onlookers showed nothing more than a pale, tired-looking gentleman offering his congratulations on her engagement to a flushed, bright-eyed lady.

Even that sharp battery of eyes could discover nothing more than this.

It was not long before the hall-door closed again upon Reuben.

He flung out into the night.

“Good God, good God!” he said to himself. Not till he had actually seen her had he been able to realize what had happened; to understand what manner of change had come into his life; to see what might have been, and what was.

He had so many things to tell her, which might never now be told. The blind, choking rage of a baffled creature came over him; he sped on, stifled, through the darkness.

Judith, sitting dazed and smiling in the gaslight, said over and over again in her heart:

“Oh my poor Reuben, my poor, poor Reuben!”

At the piano Rose and Jack sang in chorus:

“For he’s going to marry, Yum Yum,
Yum Yum.

Your anger pray bury,
For all will be merry,
I think you had better succumb,
cumb—cumb!”

. . . .

At the beginning of January there was a wedding at the synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street which excited unusual interest.

The beautiful bride in her white silk dress was greatly admired. She was very pale, certainly, and in her wide-open eyes an acute observer might have read an expression of something like terror; but acute observers, fortunately, are few and far between. The bridegroom, to all appearance, enjoyed himself immensely, going through the whole pageant with great exactness, smashing the wine-glass vigorously with his little foot, and sipping the wine daintily from the silver cup.

Old Solomon Sachs, whose own daughters had been married in the drawing-room at Portland Place, but who had no prejudice against the new fashion of weddings in the synagogue, occupied a prominent place near the ark, surrounded by his family.

Reuben Sachs stood close to Leopold Leuniger, a little in the background. His face was absolutely expressionless, unless weariness may be allowed to count as expression. He wanted yet a year or two of thirty, and already he was beginning to lose his look of youth. Leo, it must be owned, paid little attention to the ceremony. His eyes roved constantly to where the bridegroom’s family, the Lee-Harrisons and the Norwoods, stood together in a rather chilly group; to where, in particular, Lady Geraldine Sydenham, in her unassertive, unaccentuated costume, leaned lightly against a porphyry column.

Bertie’s people had accepted the situation with philosophy, and were really fond of Judith, but they found her family, especially in its collateral branches, uncongenial, if not worse.

On the outskirts of this group hovered Montague Cohen, absolutely rigid with importance. Near him Adelaide tossed her head in its smart new bonnet from side to side, her sallow face and diamond earrings flashing this way and that throughout the ceremony.

She knew that such restlessness was not good manners, but for the life of her she could not resist the temptation of seeing all that was to be seen.

Poor Mrs. Quixano, proud, but vaguely distressed, stood near her husband; while Jack, the picture of nimble smartness, ushered every one into their places and made himself generally useful.

The wedding was followed by a reception; and afterwards, amid showers of rice from Lionel and Sidney, the newly-married pair set out en route for Italy.

EPILOGUE.

It was the beginning of May, a bright, balmy evening, and the London season was in full swing.

The trees in Kensington Gardens wore yet that delicate brilliance of early spring, which, a passing glory all the world over, is in London the glory of an hour.

Under the trees children were playing and calling; out beyond in the road a ceaseless stream of cabs, carriages, carts, and omnibuses rolled by.

The broad back of the Prince Consort, gold beneath his golden canopy, shone forth with unusual splendour; the marble groups beneath stood out clearly against the soft background of pale blue sky.

And in the air—the London air—lingered something of the freshness of evening and of spring, mixed though it was with the odour of dinners in preparation, and with that of the bad tobacco which rose every now and then from the tops of the crowded road-cars rolling by.

The windows of a flat in the Albert Hall Mansions opposite were open, and a lady who was standing by one of them could smell the characteristic London odour, and could hear the sound of the children’s voices, the rolling and turning of the wheels, and the shuffle and tramp of footsteps on the pavement below. She stood there a moment, one bare, beautiful hand and arm resting on the back of an adjacent couch, her eyes mechanically fixed on the glistening gilt cross surmounting the Albert Memorial, then she turned away suddenly, the thick, rich folds of her white silk dress trailing heavily behind her. The room across which she moved was small, but bright, and fitted up with the varied and elaborate luxury of a modern fashionable drawing-room. Among the articles of bric à brac, costly, interesting, or merely bizarre which adorned it, were an antique silver Hanucah lamp and a spice box, such as the Jews make use of in certain religious services, of the same metal.

Judith Lee-Harrison, for it was she, went over to the mantelpiece and consulted a little carriage-clock which stood upon it.

It was barely three months since her marriage, though to judge from the great, if undefinable change which had passed over her, it might have been the same number of years.

Her beauty indeed had ripened and deepened, so that it would have been impossible for the least observant person to pass it by, and the little over emphasis of fashion which had hitherto marred the perfect distinction of her appearance, had vanished.

“Mrs. Lee-Harrison would be a beauty if she cared about it,” is the verdict of the world to which she had been introduced little more than a month ago.

But it was sufficiently evident that Mrs. Lee-Harrison did not care.

There was something almost austere in the pose of the head and figure, the lines of the mouth, the look in the wonderful eyes.

Those eyes, to a close observer indeed told that Judith had learnt many things, had grown strangely wise these last three months.

Yes, she knew now more clearly what before she had only dimly and instinctively felt: the nature and extent of the wrong which had been perpetrated; which had been dealt her; which she in her turn had dealt herself and another person.

She stood idly by the mantelpiece, staring at the mass of invitation cards stuck into the mirror above it.

One of them told that Lady Kemys would be at home that night in Grosvenor Place at nine o’clock. It was to be a political party, and like all such gatherings would begin early, for which reason she had dressed before dinner.

She took the card from its place and read it over. Reuben would be there of course.

Well, they would shake hands perhaps; she, for one, would be very amiable; they might even talk about the weather; and would he ask her to have an ice?

She put back the card indifferently; it mattered so little.

She had been home a month from Italy, and, as it happened, she and Reuben had not yet met.

The Lee-Harrisons had dined duly in Kensington Palace Gardens, but Reuben had been unavoidably detained that night at the House.

He had called on her some weeks ago, and she had been out.

But rumours of him had reached her. He had addressed his constituents with great éclat in the recess, and was already beginning to attract attention from the leader of his party.

As for more intimate matters, there were reports current connecting his name with Caroline Cardozo, with Miss Lee-Harrison, and with a chorus girl at the Gaiety.

Some people said he was only waiting for old Solomon’s death to marry the chorus girl.

The last month, which had been full of new experiences, of social events for Judith, seemed curiously long as she stood there looking back on it.

It came over her that she was in a fair way to drift off completely from her own people; they and she were borne on dividing currents.

A sudden longing for the old faces, the old ties and associations came over her as she stood there; a strange fit of home-sickness, an inrushing sense of exile.

Her people—oh, her people!—to be back once more among them! When all was said, she had been so happy there.

A servant entered with a letter.

Judith, glancing again at the clock, saw that it was nearly eight, and said, as she opened the envelope,

“Has Mr. Lee-Harrison come in?”

He had come in half an hour ago, when she had been dressing, and had gone straight to his room.

The gong sounded for dinner as the man spoke, and a few minutes afterwards Bertie came tripping in, fully equipped for the festivities of the evening.

“Blanche expects us early,” said Judith as she swept across to the dining-room and took her place at the little round table.

Bertie looked across at her doubtfully, then put his spoon into the excellent white soup before him.

It was the first time for some weeks that they had dined alone together, and conversation did not flow freely.

Bertie looked up again, fixing his eyes, not on her face, but on the row of pearls at her throat.

“My dear, you will be very much shocked.”

“Yes?” said Judith interrogatively, eating her soup.

“Reuben Sachs is dead.”

“It is not true,” said Judith, and then she actually smiled.

. . . .

The room was whirling round and round, a strange, thick mist was over everything, and through it came the muffled sound of Bertie’s voice:

“It occurred this afternoon, quite suddenly. I heard it at the club. He had not been well for some time, and had collapsed more or less the last week. But no one had any idea of danger. It seems that his heart was weak; he had been overdoing himself terribly, and cardiac disease was the immediate cause of his death—cardiac disease,” repeated Bertie, with mournful enjoyment of the phrase, and pulling a long face as he spoke.

Judith, sitting there like an automaton, eating something that tasted like sawdust, something that was difficult to swallow, was vividly conscious of only this—that Bertie must be silenced at any cost. Anything else could be borne, but not Bertie’s fluent regrets.

Another woman would have fainted: there had never been any mercy for her: but at least she would not sit there while Bertie talked of it.

So she lifted up her face, her stony face, and turned the current of his talk.

. . . .

Dinner came to an end at last and the automatic woman passed across to the sitting-room.

Her husband followed her; she stared at him.

“You must take my excuses to Blanche. It is due to my family that I should not appear to-night in public.”

“Certainly, certainly; a mark of respect, Blanche will understand. We will neither of us go.”

She looked at him in horror, all her force of will gathered to a point: “Go—go! Blanche will expect it. There is no reason for you to stop here.”

“My dear girl, do you think I can’t stand an evening alone with you? It will be a change, quite a pleasant change.”

. . . .

He had gone at last, and she stood there motionless by the mantelpiece, staring at the card for Lady Kemys’ “At home.”

“Infinite æons” seemed to divide the present moment from that other moment, half an hour ago, when she had told herself carelessly, indifferently, that she would meet Reuben that night.

It struck her now that all the sorrow of her life, all the suffering she had undergone would be wiped out, would be as nothing, if only she could indeed meet Reuben—could see his face, hear his voice, touch his hand. Everything else looked trivial, imaginary; everything else could have been forgotten, forgiven; only this thing could never be forgiven him, this inconceivable thing—that he was dead.

. . . .

She knew that her agony was not yet upon her, that she was dazed, stunned, without feeling. A dim foreshadowing of what that agony would be was slowly creeping over her.

She moved across to a chair by the open window, and sat down.

The children’s voices were silent; the iron gates were shut; the gold cross above the Memorial shone like fire as the rays of the setting sun fell upon it.

And below in the roadway the ceaseless stream of carriages moved east and west. On the pavement the people gathered, thicker and thicker. A pair of lovers moved along slowly, close against the park railings, beneath the shadow of the trees.

The pulses of the great city beat and throbbed; the great tide roared and flowed ever onwards.

London, his London, was full of life and sound, a living, solid reality; not—oh, wonder!—a dream city that melted and faded in the sunset.

. . . .

Across the great gulf she could never stretch a hand. Death had thrown down no barriers, had brought them no nearer to one another. Wider and deeper—though before it had been very wide and deep—flowed the stream between them.

. . . .

Nearer and nearer came the sound, nearer and nearer. Where had she heard it before?

There was music in her ears now, the dreamy monotony of a waltz; the scent of dying flowers—tuberose, gardenia—was wafted in from some unseen region. It was a November night, not springtime sunset, and the harsh sound struck upwards through the mist:

“Death of a Conservative M.P.! Death of the member for St. Baldwin’s!”

. . . .

Away in Cambridge Leo paced beneath the lime-trees, a sick, blank horror at his heart.

Nearer, across that verdant stretch of twilit park, sat a wrinkled image of despair, surely a mark for the mirth of ironical gods.

And here by the open window sat Judith, absolutely motionless—a figure of stone.

Before the great mysteries of life her soul grew frozen and appalled.

It seemed to her, as she sat there in the fading light, that this is the bitter lesson of existence: that the sacred serves only to teach the full meaning of sacrilege; the beautiful of the hideous; modesty of outrage; joy of sorrow; life of death.

. . . .

Is life indeed over for Judith, or at least all that makes life beautiful, worthy—a thing in any way tolerable?

The ways of joy like the ways of sorrow are many; and hidden away in the depths of Judith’s life—though as yet she knows it not—is the germ of another life, which shall quicken, grow, and come forth at last. Shall bring with it no doubt, pain and sorrow, and tears; but shall bring also hope and joy, and that quickening of purpose which is perhaps as much as any of us should expect or demand from Fate.

THE END.

Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,

LONDON AND BUNGAY.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

marrigeable Gentile=> marriageable Gentile {pg 35}

her nephews first=> her nephew’s first {pg 211}

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Table of Contents

- REUBEN SACHS

- REUBEN SACHS: A SKETCH.

- CHAPTER I. This is my beloved Son.

- CHAPTER II.

- CHAPTER III.

- CHAPTER IV.

- CHAPTER V.

- CHAPTER VI.

- CHAPTER VII.

- CHAPTER VIII.

- CHAPTER IX.

- CHAPTER X.

- CHAPTER XI.

- CHAPTER XII.

- CHAPTER XIII.

- CHAPTER XIV.

- CHAPTER XV.

- CHAPTER XVI.

- CHAPTER XVII.

- CHAPTER XVIII.

- CHAPTER XIX.

- EPILOGUE.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE