And so Brum passed at last over the shining, wonderful sea, feeling only the wind on his forehead and the salt in his nostrils. It was a beautiful day at the dawn of spring; the far-stretching sea sparkled with molten diamonds, and Zillah felt that the highest God's blessing rested like a blue sky over this strange pilgrimage. She was dressed with great taste, andfew would have divined the ignorance under her silks.
"Mother, can you see France yet?" Brum asked very soon.
"No, my lamb."
"Mother, can you see France yet?" he persisted later.
"I see white cliffs," she said at last.
"Ah! that's only the white cliffs of Old England. Look the other way."
"Iamlooking the other way. I see white cliffs coming to meet us."
"Has France got white cliffs, too?" cried Brum, disappointed.
On the journey to Paris he wearied her to describe France. In vain she tried: her untrained vision and poor vocabulary could give him no new elements to weave into a mental picture. There were trees and sometimes houses and churches. And again trees. What kind of trees? Green! Brum was in despair. France was, then, only like England; white cliffs without, trees and houses within. He demanded the Seine at least.
"Yes, I see a great water," his mother admitted at last.
"That's it! It rises in the Côte d'Or, flows N.N.W. then W., and N.W. into the English Channel. It is more than twice as long as the Thames. Perhaps you'll see the tributaries flowinginto it—the little rivers, the Oise, the Marne, the Yonne."
"No wonder the angels envy me him!" thought Zillah proudly.
They halted at Paris, putting up for the night, by the advice of a friendly fellow-traveller, at a hotel by the Gare de Lyon, where, to Zillah's joy and amazement, everybody spoke English to her and accepted her English gold—a pleasant experience which was destined to be renewed at each stage, and which increased her hope of a happy issue.
"How loud Paris sounds!" said Brum, as they drove across it. He had to construct it from its noises, for in answer to his feverish interrogations his mother could only explain that some streets were lined with trees and some foolish unrespectable people sat out in the cold air, drinking at little tables.
"Oh, how jolly!" said Brum. "But can't you see Notre Dame?"
"What's that?"
"A splendid cathedral, mother—very old. Do look for two towers. We must go there the first thing to-morrow."
"The first thing to-morrow we take the train. The quicker we get to the doctor, the better."
"Oh, but we can't leave Paris without seeing Notre Dame, and the gargoyles, and perhaps Quasimodo, and all that Victor Hugo describes. I wonderif we shall see a devil-fish in Italy," he added irrelevantly.
"You'll see the devil if you go to such places," said Zillah, who, besides shirking the labor of description, was anxious not to provoke unnecessarily the God of Israel.
"But I've often been to St. Paul's with the boys," said Brum.
"Have you?" She was vaguely alarmed.
"Yes, it's lovely—the stained windows and the organ. Yes, and the Abbey's glorious, too; it almost makes me cry. I always liked to hear the music with my eyes shut," he added, with forced cheeriness, "and now that'll be all right."
"But your father wouldn't like it," said Zillah feebly.
"Father wouldn't like me to read thePilgrim's Progress," retorted Brum. "He doesn't understand these things. There's no harm in our going to Notre Dame."
"No, no; it'll be much better to save all these places for the way back, when you'll be able to see for yourself."
Too late it struck her she had missed an opportunity of breaking to Brum the real object of the expedition.
"But the Seine, anyhow!" he persisted. "We can go there to-night."
"But what can you see at night?" cried Zillah, unthinkingly.
"Oh, mother! how beautiful it used to be to look over London Bridge at night when we came back from the Crystal Palace!"
In the end Zillah accepted the compromise, and after their dinner of fish and vegetables—for which Brum had scant appetite—they were confided by the hotel porter to a bulbous-nosed cabman, who had instructions to restore them to the hotel. Zillah thought wistfully of her warm parlour in Dalston, with the firelight reflected in the glass cases of the wax flowers.
The cab stopped on a quay.
"Well?" said Brum breathlessly.
"Little fool!" said Zillah good-humouredly. "There is nothing but water—the same water as in London."
"But there are lights, aren't there?"
"Yes, there are lights," she admitted cheerfully.
"Where is the moon?"
"Where she always is—in the sky."
"Doesn't she make a silver path on the water?" he said, with a sob in his voice.
"What are you crying at? The mother didn't mean to make you cry."
She strained him contritely to her bosom, and kissed away his tears.
The train for Switzerland started so early that Brum had no time to say his morning prayers; so, the carriage being to themselves, he donned his phylacteries and his praying-shawl with the blue stripes.
Zillah sat listening to the hour-long recitative with admiration of his memory.
Early in the hour she interrupted him to say: "How lucky I haven't to say all that! I should get tired."
"That's curious!" replied Brum. "I was just saying, 'Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hath not made me a woman.' But a womanhasto pray, too, mother. Else why is there given a special form for the women to substitute?—'Who hath made me according to His will.'"
"Ah, that's only for learned women. Only learned women pray."
"Well, you'd like to pray the Benediction that comes next, mother, I know. Say it with me—do."
She repeated the Hebrew obediently, then asked: "What does it mean?"
"'Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who openest the eyes of the blind.'"
"Oh, my poor Brum! Teach it me! Say the Hebrew again."
She repeated it till she could say it unprompted. And then throughout the journey her lips movedwith it at odd times. It became a talisman—a compromise with the God who had failed her.
"Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who openest the eyes of the blind."
Mountains were the great sensation of the passage through Switzerland. Brum had never seen a mountain, and the thought of being among the highest mountains in Europe was thrilling. Even Zillah's eyes could scarcely miss the mountains. She painted them in broad strokes. But they did not at all correspond to Brum's expectations of the Alps.
"Don't you see glaciers?" he asked anxiously.
"No," replied Zillah, but kept a sharp eye on the windows of passing chalets till the boy discovered that she was looking for glaziers at work.
"Great masses of ice," he explained, "sliding down very slowly, and glittering like the bergs in the Polar regions."
"No, I see none," she said, blushing.
"Ah! wait till we come to Mont Blanc."
Mont Blanc was an obsession; his geography was not minute enough to know that the route did not pass within sight of it. He had expected it to dominate Switzerland as a cathedral spire dominates a little town.
"Mont Blanc is 15,784 feet above the sea," he said voluptuously. "Eternal snow is on its top, but you will not see that, because it is above the clouds."
"It is, then, in Heaven," said Zillah.
"God is there," replied Brum gravely, and burst out with Coleridge's lines from his school-book:—
"'God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!And they, too, have a voice, yon piles of snow,And in their perilous fall shall thunder God!'"
"'God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!And they, too, have a voice, yon piles of snow,And in their perilous fall shall thunder God!'"
"Who openest the eyes of the blind," murmured Zillah.
"There are five torrents rushing down, also," added Brum. "'And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad.' You'll recognize Mont Blanc by that. Don't you see them yet, mother?"
"Wait, I think I see them coming."
Presently she announced Mont Blanc definitely; described it with glaciers and torrents and its top reaching to God.
Brum's face shone.
"Poor lamb! I may as well give him Mont Blanc," she thought tenderly.
Endless other quaint dialogues passed between mother and son on that tedious and harassing journey southwards.
"There'll be no more snow when we get to Italy," Brum explained. "Italy's the land of beauty—always sunshine and blue sky. It's the country of the old Gods—Venus, the goddess of beauty; Juno, with her peacocks; Jupiter, with his thunderbolts, and lots of others."
"But I thought the Pope was a Christian," said Zillah.
"So he is. It was long ago, before people believed in Christianity."
"But then they were all Jews."
"Oh no, mother. There were Pagan gods that people used to believe in at Rome and in Greece. In Greece, though, these gods changed their names."
"So!" said Zillah scornfully; "I suppose they wanted to have a fresh chance. And what's become of them now?"
"They weren't ever there, not really."
"And yet people believed in them? Is it possible?" Zillah clucked her tongue with contemptuous surprise. Then she murmured mechanically, "'Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who openest the eyes of the blind.'"
"Well, and what do people believe in now? The Pope!" Brum reminded her. "And yethe'snot true."
Zillah's heart sank. "But he's really there," she protested feebly.
"Oh yes, he's there, because pilgrims come from all parts of the world to get his blessing."
Her hopes revived.
"But they wouldn't come unless he really did them good."
"Well, if you argue like that, mother, you might as well say we ought to believe in Christ."
"Hush! hush!" The forbidden word jarred on Zillah. She felt chilled and silenced. She had to call up the image of the Irish Fire-Woman to restore herself to confidence. It was clear Brum must not be told; his unfaith might spoil all. No, the deception must be kept up till his eyes were opened—in more than one sense.
After Mont Blanc, Brum's great interest was the leaning tower of Pisa. "It is one of the wonders of the world," he said; "there are seven altogether."
"Yes, it is a wonderful world," said Zillah; "I never thought about it before."
And in truth Italy was beginning to touch sleeping chords. The cypresses, the sunset on the mountains, the white towns dozing on the hills under the magical blue sky,—all these broad manifestations of an obvious beauty, under the spur of Brum's incessant interrogatory, began to penetrate. Nature in unusual combinations spoke to her as its habitual phenomena had never done. Her replies to Brum did rough justice to Italy.
Florence recalled "Romola" to the boy. He told his mother about Savonarola. "He was burnt!"
"What!" cried Zillah. "Burn a Christian! No wonder, then, they burnt Jews. But why?"
"He wanted the people to be good. All good people suffer."
"Oh, nonsense, Brum! It is the bad who suffer."
Then she looked at his wasted, white face, grown thinner with the weariness of the long journey through perpetual night, and wonder at her own words struck her silent.
They arrived at last in the Eternal City, having taken a final run of many hours without a break. But the Pope was still to seek.
Leaving the exhausted Brum in bed, Zillah drove the first morning to the Vatican, where Brum said he lived, and asked to see him.
A glittering Swiss Guard stared blankly at her, and directed her by dumb show to follow the stream of people—the pilgrims, Zillah told herself. She was made to scrawl her name, and, thanking God that she had acquired that accomplishment, she went softly up a gorgeous flight of steps, and past awe-inspiring creatures in tufted helmets, into the Sistine Chapel, where she wondered at people staring ceilingwards through opera-glasses, or lookingdownwards into little mirrors. Zillah also stared up through the gloom till she had a crick in the neck, but saw no sign of the Pope. She inquired of the janitor whether he was the Pope, and realized that English was, after all, not the universal language. She returned gloomily to see after Brum, and to consider her plan of campaign.
"The great doctor was not at home," she said. "We must wait a little."
"And yet you made us hurry so through everything," grumbled Brum.
Brum remained in bed while Zillah went to get some lunch in the dining-room. A richly dressed old lady who sat near her noticed that she was eating Lenten fare, like herself, and, assuming her a fellow-Catholic, spoke to her, in foreign-sounding English, about the blind boy whose arrival she had observed.
Zillah asked her how one could get to see the Pope, and the old lady told her it was very difficult.
"Ah, those blessed old times before 1870!—ah, the splendid ceremonies in St. Peter's! Do you remember them?"
Zillah shook her head. The old lady's assumption of spiritual fellowship made her uneasy.
But St. Peter's stuck in her mind. Brum had already told her it was the Pope's house of prayer. Clearly, therefore, it was only necessary to loiter about there with Brum to chance upon him and extort his compassionate withdrawal of the spell ofthe Evil Eye. With a culminating inspiration she bought a photograph of the Pope, and overcoming the first shock of hereditary repulsion at the sight of the large pendent crucifix at his breast, she studied carefully the Pontiff's face and the Papal robes.
Then, when Brum declared himself strong enough to get up, they drove to St. Peter's, the instruction being given quietly to the driver so that Brum should not overhear it.
It was the first time Zillah had ever been in a cathedral; and the vastness and glory of it swept over her almost as a reassuring sense of a greater God than she had worshipped in dingy synagogues. She walked about solemnly, leading Brum by the hand, her breast swelling with suppressed sobs of hope. Her eyes roved everywhere, searching for the Pope; but at moments she well-nigh forgot her disappointment at his absence in the wonder and ghostly comfort of the great dim spaces, and the mysterious twinkle of the countless lights before the bronze canopy with its golden-flashing columns.
"Where are we, mother?" said Brum at last.
"We are waiting for the doctor."
"But where?"
"In the waiting-room."
"It seems very large, mother."
"No, I am walking round and round."
"There is a strange smell, mother,—I don't know what—something religious."
"Oh, nonsense!" She laughed uneasily.
"I know what it smells like: cold marble pillars and warm coloured windows."
Her blood froze at such uncanny sensibility.
"It is the smell of the medicines," she murmured. Somehow his divination made it more difficult to confess to him.
"It feels like being in St. Paul's or the Abbey," he persisted, "when I used to shut my eyes to hear the organ better." He had scarcely ceased speaking, when a soft, slow music began to thrill with life the great stone spaces.
Brum's grasp tightened convulsively: a light leapt into the blind face. Both came to a standstill, silent. In Zillah's breast rapture made confusion more confounded; and as this pealing grandeur, swelling more passionately, uplifted her high as the mighty Dome, she forgot everything—even the need of explanation to Brum—in this wonderful sense of a Power that could heal, and her Hebrew benediction flowed out into sobbing speech:—
"'Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who openest the eyes of the blind.'"
But Brum had fainted, and hung heavy on her arm.
When Brum awoke, in bed again, after his long fainting-fit, he related with surprise his vivid dreamof St. Paul's, and Zillah weakly acquiesced in the new deception, especially as the doctor warned her against exciting the boy. But her hopes were brighter than ever; for the old lady had beneficently appeared from behind a pillar in St. Peter's to offer eau de Cologne for the unconscious Brum, and had then, interesting herself in the couple, promised to procure for her fellow-Catholics admission to the next Papal reception. Being a very rich and fashionable old lady, she kept her word; but unfortunately, when the day came round, Brum was terribly low and forbidden to leave his bed.
Zillah was distracted. If she should miss the great chance after all! It might never recur again.
"Brum," she said at last, "this is the only day for a long time that the great eye-doctor receives patients. Do you think you could go, my lamb?"
"Why won't he come here—like the other doctors?"
"He is too great."
"Well, I daresay I can manage. It's miserable lying in bed. Fancy coming to Rome and seeing nothing!"
With infinite care Brum was dressed and wrapped up, and placed in a specially comfortable brougham; and thus at last mother and son stood waiting in one of the ante-chambers of the Vatican, amid twenty other pilgrims whispering in strange languages. Zillah was radiantly assured: the mighty Power, whatever it was, that spoke in music and in mountains,would never permit such weary journeyings and waitings to end in the old darkness; the malice of witches could not prevail against this great spirit of sunshine. For Brum, too, the long pilgrimage had enveloped the doctor with a miraculous glamour as of an eighth wonder of the world.
Drooping wearily on his mother's arm, but wrought up to joyous anticipation, Brum had an undoubting sense of the patient crowd around him waiting, as in his old hospital days, for admission to the doctor's sanctum. His ear was strung for the ting-ting of the bell summoning the sufferers one by one.
At last a wave of awe swept over the little fashionable gathering, and set Zillah's heart thumping and the room fading in mist, through which the tall, venerable, robed figure, the eagle features softened in benediction, gleamed like a god's. Then she found herself on her knees, with Brum at her side, and the wonderful figure passing between two rows of reverent pilgrims.
"Why must I kneel, mother?" murmured Brum feebly.
"Hush! hush!" she whispered. "The great doc—" she hesitated in awe of the venerable figure—"the great healer is here."
"The great healer!" breathed Brum. His face was transfigured with ecstatic forevision. "'Who openeth the eyes of the blind,'" he murmured, as he fell forward in death.
The day came when old Daniel Peyser could no longer withstand his wife's desire for a wider social sphere and a horizon blacker with advancing bachelors. For there were seven daughters, and not a man to the pack. Indeed, there had been only one marriage in the whole Portsmouth congregation during the last five years, and the Christian papers had had reports of the novel ceremony, with the ritual bathing of the bride and the breaking of the glass under the bridegroom's heel. To Mrs. Peyser, brought up amid the facile pairing of the Russian pale, this congestion of celibacy approached immorality.
Portsmouth with its careless soldiers and sailors might be an excellent town for pawnbroking, especially when one was not too punctiliously acceptant of the ethics of the heathen, but as a market for maidens—even with dowries and pretty faces—it was hopeless. But it was not wholly as an emporium for bachelors that London appealed. It was the natural goal of the provincial Jew, the reward of hisindustry. The best people had all drifted to the mighty magic city, whose fascination survived even cheap excursions to it.
Would father deny that they had now made enough to warrant the migration? No, father would not deny it. Ever since he had left Germany as a boy he had been saving money, and his surplus he had shrewdly invested in the neighbouring soil of Southsea, fast growing into a watering-place. Even allowing three thousand pounds for each daughter's dowry, he would still have a goodly estate.
Was there any social reason why they should not cut as great a dash as the Benjamins or the Rosenweilers? No, father would not deny that his girls were prettier and more polished than the daughters of these pioneers, especially when six of them crowded around the stern granite figure, arguing, imploring, cajoling, kissing.
"But I don't see why we should waste the money," he urged, with the cautious instincts of early poverty.
"Waste!" and the pretty lips made reproachful "Oh's!"
"Yes, waste!" he retorted. "In India one treads on diamonds and gold, but in London the land one treads on costs diamonds and gold."
"But are we never to have a grandson?" cried Mrs. Peyser.
The Indian item was left unquestioned, so that little Schnapsie, whose childish imagination wasgreatly impressed by these eventful family debates, had for years a vivid picture of picking her way with bare feet over sharp-pointed diamonds and pebbly gold. Indeed, long after she had learned to wonder at her father's naïve geography the word "India" always shone for her with barbaric splendour.
Environed by so much persistent femininity, the rugged elderly toiler was at last nagged into accepting a leisured life in London.
And so the family spread its wings joyfully and migrated to the wonder-town. Only its head and tail—old Daniel and little Schnapsie—felt the least sentiment for the things left behind. Old Daniel left the dingy synagogue to whose presidency he had mounted with the fattening of his purse, and in which he bought for himself, or those he delighted to honour, the choicest privileges of ark-opening or scroll-bearing; left the cronies who dropped in to play "Klabberjagd" on Sunday afternoons; left the bustling lucrative Saturday nights in the shop when the heathen housewives came to redeem their Sabbath finery.
And little Schnapsie—who was only eleven, and not keen about husbands—left the twinkling tarry harbour, with its heroic hulks and modern men-of-war amid which the half-penny steamer plied; left thegreat waves that smashed on the pebbly beach, and the friendly moon that threw shimmering paths across their tranquillity; left the narrow lively streets in which she had played, and the school in which she had always headed her class, and the salt wind that blew over all.
Little Schnapsie was only Schnapsie to her father. Her real name was Florence. The four younger girls all bore pagan names—Sylvia, Lily, Daisy, Florence—symbolic of the influence upon the family councils of the three elder girls, grown to years of discretion and disgust with their own Leah, Rachael, and Rebecca. Between these two strata of girls—Jewish and pagan—two boys had intervened, but their stay was brief and pitiful, so that all this plethora of progeny had not provided the father with a male mourner to say theKaddish. But it seemed likely a grandson would not long be a-wanting, for the eldest girl was twenty-five, and all were good-looking. As if in irony, the Jewish group was blond, almost Christian, in colouring (for they took after the Teuton father), while the pagan group had characteristically Oriental traits. In little Schnapsie these Eastern charms—a whit heavy in her sisters—were repeated in a key of exquisite refinement. The thick black eyebrows and hair were soft as silk, dark dreamy eyes suffused her oval face with poetry, and her skin was like dead ivory flushing into life.
The first year at Highbury, that genteel suburb in the north of London, was an enchanted ecstasy for the mother and the Jewish group of girls, taken at once to the bosom of a great German clan, and admitted to a new world of dances and dinners, of "at homes" and theatres and card parties. The eldest of the pagan group, Sylvia—tyrannically kept young in the interests of her sisters—was the only one who grumbled at the change, for Lily and Daisy found sufficient gain in the prospect of replacing the elder group when it should have passed away in an odour of orange blossom. The scent of that was always in the air, and Mrs. Peyser and her three hopefuls sniffed it night and day.
"No, no; Rebecca shall have him."
"Not me! I am not going to marry a man with carroty hair. Leah's the eldest; it's her turn first."
"Thank you, my dear. Don't give away what you haven't got."
Every new young man who showed the faintest signs of liking to drop in, provoked a similar semi-facetious but also semi-serious canvassing—his person, his income, and the girl to whom he should be allotted supplying the sauce of every meal at which he—or his fellow—was not present.
Thus, whether in the flesh or the spirit, the Young Man—for so many of him appeared on the scenethat he hovered in the air rather as a type than an individual—was a permanent guest at the Peyser table.
But all this new domestic excitement did not compensate little Schnapsie for her moonlit waters and the strange ships that came and went with their cargo of mystery.
And poor old Daniel found no cronies to appeal to him like the old, nothing in the roar of London to compensate for the Saturday night bustle of the pawn-shop, no dingy little synagogue desirous of his presidential pomp. He sat inconspicuously in a handsome half-empty edifice, and knew himself a superfluous atom in a vast lonely wilderness.
He was not, indeed, an imposing figure, with his ragged graying whiskers and his boyish blue eyes. In the street he had the stoop and shuffle of the Ghetto, and forgot to hide his coarse red hands with gloves; in the house he persisted in wearing a pious skull-cap. At first his more adaptable wife and his English-bred daughters tried to fit him for decent society, and to make him feel at home during their "at homes." But he was soon relegated to the background of these brilliant social tableaux; for he was either too silent or too talkative, with old-fashioned Jewish jokes which disconcerted the smart young men, and with Hebrew quotations which they could not even understand. And sometimes there thrilled through the small-talk the trumpet-note ofhis nose, as he blew it into a coloured handkerchief. Gradually he was eliminated from the drawing-room altogether.
But for some years longer he reigned supreme in the dining-room—when there was no company. Old habit kept the girls at table when he intoned with noisy unction the Hebrew grace after meals; they even joined in the melodious morceaux that diversified the plain-chant. But little by little their contributions dwindled to silence. And when they had smart company to dinner, the old man himself was hushed by rows of blond and bugle eyebrows; especially after he had once or twice put young men to shame by offering them the honour of reciting the grace they did not know.
Daniel's prayer on such occasions was at length reduced to a pious mumbling, which went unobserved amid the joyous clatter of dessert, even as his pious skull-cap passed as a preventive against cold.
Last stage of all, the mumbling of his company manners passed over into the domestic circle; and this humble whispering to God became symbolic of his suppression.
"I don't think he means Rachael at all."
"Oh, how can you say so, Leah? It was me he took down to supper."
"Nonsense! it isn't either of you he's after; that's only his politeness to my sisters. Didn't he say the bouquet was for me?"
"Don't be silly, Rebecca. You know you can't have him. The eldest must take precedence."
This changed tone indicated their humbler attitude toward the Young Man as the years went by. For the first young man did not propose, either to the sisterhooden blocor to a particular sister. And his example was followed by his successors. In fact, a procession of young men passed and repassed through the house, or danced with the girls at balls, without a single application for any of these many hands. And the first season passed into the second, and the second into the third, with tantalizing mirages of marriage. Balls, dances, dinners, a universe of nebulous matrimonial matter on the whirl, but never the shot-off star of an engagement! Mrs. Peyser's hair began to whiten faster. She even surreptitiously called in the Shadchan, or rather surrendered to his solicitations.
"Pooh! Not find any one suitable?" he declared, rubbing his hands. "I have hundreds of young men on my books, just your sort, real gentlemen."
At first the girls refused to consider applications from such a source. It was not done in their set, they said.
Mrs. Peyser snorted sceptically. "Oh, indeed! and pray how did those Rosenweiler girls find husbands?"
"Oh, yes, the Rosenweilers!" They shrugged their shoulders; they knew they had not that disadvantage of hideousness.
Nevertheless they lent an ear to the agent's suggestions as filtered through the mother, though under pretence of deriding them.
But the day came when even that pretence was dropped, and with broken spirit they waited eagerly for each new possibility. And with the passing of the years the Young Man aged. He grew balder, less gentlemanly, poorer.
Once indeed, he turned up as a handsome and wealthy Christian, but this time it was he that was rejected in a unanimous sisterly shudder. Five slow years wore by, then of a sudden the luck changed. A water-proof manufacturer on the sunny side of forty appeared, the long glacial epoch was broken up, and the first orange blossom ripened for the Peyser household.
It was Rebecca, the youngest of the Jewish group, who proved the pioneer to the canopy, but her marriage gave a new lease of youth even to the oldest. And miraculously, mysteriously, within a few months two other girls flew off Mrs. Peyser's shoulders—a Jewish and a pagan—though Sylvia was not yet formally "out."
And though Leah, the first born, still remained unchosen, yet Sylvia's marriage to a Bayswater household had raised the family status, and provideda better field for operations. The Shadchan was frozen off.
But he returned. For despite all these auguries and auspices another arctic winter set in. No orange blossoms, only desolate lichens of fruitless flirtation.
Gradually the pagan group pushed its way into unconcealable womanhood. The problem darkened all the horizon. The Young Man grew middle-aged again. He lost all his money; he wanted old Daniel to set him up in business. Even this seemed better than a barren fine ladyhood, and Leah might have even harked back to the parental pawn-shop had not another sudden epidemic of felicity married off all save little Schnapsie within eighteen months. Mrs. Peyser was knocked breathless by all these shocks. First a rich German banker, then a prosperous solicitor (for Leah), then a Cape financier—any one in himself catch enough to "gouge out the eyes" of the neighbours.
"I told you so," she said, her portly bosom swelling portlier with exultation as the sixth bride was whirled off in a rice shower from the Highbury villa, while the other five sat around in radiant matronhood. "I told you to come to London."
Daniel pressed her hand in gratitude for all the happiness she had given herself and the girls.
"If it were not for Florence," she went on wistfully.
"Ah, little Schnapsie!" sighed Daniel. Somehow he felt he would have preferred her hymeneal felicityto all these marvellous marriages. For there had grown up a strange sympathy between the poor lonely old man, now nearly seventy, and his little girl, now twenty-four. They never conversed except about commonplaces, but somehow he felt that her presence warmed the air. And she—she divined his solitude, albeit dimly; had an intuition of what life had been for him in the days before she was born: the long days behind the counter, the risings in the gray dawn to chant orisons and don phylacteries ere the pawn-shop opened, the lengthy prayer and the swift supper when the shutters were at last put up—all the bare rock on which this floriage of prosperity had been sown. And long after the others had dropped kissing him good-night, she would tender her lips, partly because of the necessary domestic fiction that she was still a baby, but also because she felt instinctively that the kiss counted in his life.
Through all these years of sordid squabbles and canvassings and weary waiting, all those endless scenes of hysteria engendered by the mutual friction of all that close-packed femininity, poor Schnapsie had lived, shuddering. Sometimes a sense of the pathos of it all, of the tragedy of women's lives, swept over her. She regretted every inch she grew, it seemed to shame her celibate sisters so. She clung willingly to short skirts until she was of age, wore her long raven hair in a plait with a red ribbon.
"Well, Florence," said Leah genially, when thelast outsider at Daisy's wedding had departed, "it's your turn next. You'd better hurry up."
"Thank you," said Florence coldly. "I shall take my own time; fortunately there is no one behind me."
"Humph!" said Leah, playing with her diamond rings. "It don't do to be too particular. Why don't you come round and see me sometimes?"
"There are so many of you now," murmured Florence. She was not attracted by the solicitors and traders in whose society and carriages her mother lolled luxuriously, and she resented the matronly airs of her sisters. With Leah, however, she was conscious of a different and more paradoxical provocation. Leah had an incredible air of juvenility. All those unthinkable, innumerable years little Schnapsie had conceived of her eldest sister as an old maid, hopeless, senescent, despite the wonderful belt that had kept her figure dashing; but now that she was married she had become the girlish bride, kittenish, irresistible, while little Schnapsie was the old maid, the sister in peril of being passed by. And indeed she felt herself appallingly ancient, prematurely aged by her long stay at seventeen.
"Yes, you are right, Leah," she said pensively, with a touch of malice. "To-morrow I shall be twenty-four."
"What?" shrieked Leah.
"Yes," Florence said obstinately. "And oh, howglad I shall be!" She raised her arms exultingly and stretched herself, as if shooting up seven years as soon as the pressure of her sisters was removed.
"Do you hear, mother?" whispered Leah. "That fool of a Florence is going to celebrate her twenty-fourth birthday. Not the slightest consideration forus!"
"I didn't say I would celebrate it publicly," said Florence. "Besides," she suggested, smiling, "very soon people will forget that I amnotthe eldest."
"Then your folly will recoil on your own head," said Leah.
Little Schnapsie gave a devil-may-care shrug—a Ghetto trait that still clung to all the sisters.
"Yes," added Mrs. Peyser. "Think what it will be in ten years' time!"
"I shall be thirty-four," said Florence imperturbably. Another little smile lit up the dreamy eyes. "Then Ishallbe the eldest."
"Madness!" cried Mrs. Peyser, aloud, forgetting that her daughters' husbands were about. "God forbid I should live to see any girl of mine thirty-four!"
"Hush, mother!" said Florence quietly. "I hope you will; indeed, I am sure you will, for I shallnevermarry. So don't bother to put me on the books—I'm not on the market. Good-night."
She sought out poor Daniel, who, awed by the culture and standing of his five sons-in-law, not tospeak of the guests, was hanging about the deserted supper-room, smoking cigar after cigar, much to the disgust of the caterer's men, who were waiting to spirit away the box.
Having duly kissed her father, little Schnapsie retired to bed to read Browning's love-poems. Her mother had to take a glass of champagne to restore her ruffled nerves to the appropriate ecstasy.
Poor portly Mrs. Peyser was not destined to enjoy her harvest of happiness for more than a few years. But these years were an overbrimming cup, with only the bitter drop of Florence's heretical indifference to the Young Man. Environed by the six households which she had begotten, Mrs. Peyser breathed that atmosphere of ebullient babyhood which was the breath of her Jewish nostrils; babies appeared almost every other month. It was a seething well-spring of healthy life. Religious ceremonies connected with these chubby new-comers, or medical recipes for their bodily salvation, absorbed her. But her exuberant grandmotherliness usually received a check in the summer, when the babies were deported to scattered sea-shores; and thus it came to pass that the summer of her death found her still lingering in London with a bad cold, with only Daniel and little Schnapsie athand. And before the others could be called, Mrs. Peyser passed away in peace, in the old Portsmouth bed, overlooked by the old Hebrew picture exiled from the London dining-room.
It was a curious end. She did not know she was dying, but Daniel was anxious she should not be reft into silence before she had made the immemorial proclamation of the Unity. At the same time he hesitated to appall her with the grim knowledge.
He was blubbering piteously, yet striving to hide his sobs. The early days of his struggle came back, the first weeks of wedded happiness, then the long years of progressive prosperity and godly cheerfulness in Portsmouth ere she had grown fashionable and he unimportant; and a vast self-pity mingled with his pitiful sense of her excellencies—the children she had borne him in agony, the economy of her house management, the good bargains she had driven with the clod-pated soldiers and sailors, the later splendour of her social achievement.
And little Schnapsie wept with a sense of the vanity of these dual existences to which she owed her own empty life.
Suddenly Mrs. Peyser, over whose black eyes a glaze had been stealing, let the long dark eyelashes fall over them.
"Sarah!" whispered Daniel frantically. "Say the Shemang!"
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one," said the sensuous lips obediently.
Little Schnapsie shrugged her shoulders rebelliously. The dogma seemed so irrelevant.
Mrs. Peyser opened her eyes, and a beautiful mother-light came into them as she saw the weeping girl.
"Ah, Florrie, do not fret," she said reassuringly, in her long-lapsed Yiddish. "I will find thee a bridegroom."
Her eyes closed, and little Schnapsie shuddered with a weird image of a lover fetched from the shrouded dead.