I got to Warsaw and back in the time at my disposal, but not all the freshness and variety of my experiences could banish the thought of Bethulah. There were days when I could absorb myself in the passing panorama, but I felt always, so to speak, in the ante-chamber of the great moment of our third and decisive meeting.
And with every shortening day of December that moment approached. Yet I all but missed it when it came. A snowfall I might easily have foreseen retarded my journey at the eleventh hour, but my faithful mare ploughed her way through the white morasses. As she munched her mid-day corn in that quaint Christian village that neighboured Zloczszol, and in which I had agreed to stable her, it was borne in on me for the first time that the eve of Chanukah was likewise Christmas eve. I wondered vaguely if there was any occult significance in the coincidence or in theChassidicchoice of dates; but it was too late now to protest, and loading my pistol against foul play, I hurried to the rendezvous.
On the dark barren base of the mountain, patches of snow gleamed like winter blossoms; the gargoyle-like faces of the jags of rock on the river-bank were white-bearded with icicles. Down below the stream raced, apparently as turbid as ever, but suddenly, as it made a sharp curve and came under athick screen of snow-laden boughs interarching over the cleft, it grew glazed in death.
The sight of Bethulah was as of a spirit of sunshine moving across the white desolation. Her tall lone shadow fell blue upon the snowy path. She was swathed now in splendid silver furs, from which her face shone out like a tropical flower beneath its wreathed crown.
Dignity and sovereignty had subtly replaced the grace of her movement, her very stature seemed aggrandized by the consciousness of her unique mission.
She turned, and her virginal eyes met mine with abashing purity, and in that instant of anguished rapture I knew that my quest was vain. The delicate flush of joy and surprise touched her cheeks, indeed, as before, but this time I felt it would not be succeeded by terror. Self-conscious now, self-poised, she stood regally where she had faltered and fled.
"You return to spend Chanukah with us," she said.
"I came," I said, with uneasy bravado, "in the hope of spending it elsewhere—with you."
"But you know that cannot be," she said gently.
Ah, now she knew of what she was queen. But revolt was hot in my heart.
"Then they have made you share their dream," I said bitterly.
"Yes," she replied, with unruffled sweetness. "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet ofthose that bring good tidings!" And her eyes shone in exultation.
"They were messengers of evil," I said—"whisperers of untruth. Life is for love and joy."
"Ah, no!" she urged tremulously. "Surely you know the world—how full it is of suffering and sin." And as with an unconscious movement, she threw back her splendid furs, revealing the weird shroud. "Ah, what ecstasy to think that the divine day will come, ere I am old, when, as it is written in the twenty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, 'He will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death in victory: and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of His people shall He take away from off all the earth: for the Lord hath spoken.'"
Her own eyes were full of tears, which I yearned to kiss away.
"But your own life meantime?" I said softly.
"My life—does it not already take on the glory of God as this mountain the coming day?"
She seemed indeed akin to the cold white peak as I had seen it flushed with sunrise. My passion seemed suddenly prosaic and selfish. I was lifted up into the higher love that worships and abnegates.
"God bless you!" I said, and turning away with misty vision, saw, creeping off, the three dark fanatical figures.
Half a century later I was startled to find the name of Zloczszol in a headline of the Sunday edition of my American paper.
I had married, and was even a grandfather; for after my return to America the world of Bethulah had grown fantastic, stupidly superstitious, and, finally, shadowy and almost unreal. Years and years of happiness had dissipated and obliterated the delicate fragrant dream of spiritual love.
But that strange long-forgotten name stirred instantly the sleeping past to life. I adjusted my spectacles and read the column eagerly. It was sensational enough, though not more so than a hundred columns of calamities in unknown places that one skips or reads with the mildest of thrills.
The long-threatened avalanche had fallen, and Nature had once more rudely reminded man of his puny place in creation. Rare conditions had at last come together. First a slight fall of snow, covering the mountain—how vividly I pictured it!—then a sharp frost which had frozen this deposit; after that a measureless, blinding snow-storm and a cyclonic wind. When all seemed calm again, the second mass of snow had begun to slide down the frozen surface of the first, quickening to a terrific pace, tearing down the leafless trunks and shooting them at the village like giant arrows of the angry gods.One of these arrows penetrated the trunk of a great cedar on the plain and stuck out on both sides, making a sort of cross, which the curious came from far and near to see. But, alas! the avalanche had not contented itself with such freakish manifestations; it had annihilated the new portion of the village which had dared crawl nearer the mountain when the railroad—a railroad in Zloczszol!—had found it cheaper to pass near the base than to make a circuit round the congested portion!
Alas! the cheapness was illusory. The dépôt with its crowd had been wiped out as by the offended Fury of the mountain; though by another freakish incident, illustrating the Titanic forces at work, yet the one redeeming detail of the appalling catastrophe, a small train of three carriages that had just moved off was lifted up bodily by the terrible wind that raced ahead of the monstrous sliding snowball, and was clapped down in a field out of its reach, as if by a protecting hand. Not a creature on it was injured.
I had passed the years allotted to man by the Psalmist, and my memory of the things of yesterday had begun to be faint and elusive, but the images of my Zloczszol adventure returned with a vividness that grew daily more possessive. What had become of Bethulah? Was she alive? Was she dead? And which were the sadder alternative—to have felt the darkness of early death closing round the great hope, or to have survived its possibility, and old, bent,bitter, and deserted by her followers, to await the lesser disenchantment of the grave?
An irresistible instinct impelled me—aged as I was myself—to revisit alone these scenes of my youth, to see how fate had rounded or broken off its grim ironic story.
I pass over the stages of the journey, at the conclusion of which I found myself again in the mountain village. Alas! The changes on the route had prepared me for the change in Zloczszol. Railroads threw their bridges over the gorges I had climbed, telegraph poles tamed the erst savage forest ways. And Zloczszol itself had now, by the line passing through it, expanded into a trading centre, with vitality enough to recuperate quickly from the avalanche. The hotel was clean and commodious, but I could better have endured that ancient sitting-room in which the squalling baby was rocked. Strange, I could see its red wrinkled face, catch the very timbre of its piping cries! Only the mountain was unchanged, and the pines and firs that had whispered dreams to my youth whispered sleep to my age. Ah, how frail and futile is the life of man! He passes like a shadow, and the green sunlit earth he trod on closes over him and takes the tread of the new generations. What had I to say to these new, smart people in Zloczszol? No, the dead were my gossips and neighbours. For me more than the avalanche had desolated Zloczszol. I repaired to the cemetery.There I should find Yarchi. It was no use looking for him under the porch of the pine cottage. And there, too, I should in all likelihood find Bethulah!
But Ben David's tomb was the first I found, carved with the intersecting triangles. The date showed he had died very soon after my departure; perhaps, I thought remorsefully, my importunities had agitated him too much. Ah! there at last was Yarchi. Under a high white stone he slept as soundly as any straight corpse. His sneering mouth had crumbled to dust, but I would have given much to hear it once more abuse theChassidim. Propped on my stick and poring over the faded gilt letters, I recalled "the handsome stranger" whom the years had marred. But of Bethulah I saw no sign. I wandered back and found the turreted house, but it had been converted into a large store, and from Bethulah's turret window hung a great advertising sky-sign.
I returned cheerlessly to the hotel, but as the sun began to pierce auspiciously through the bleakness of early March, I was about to sally forth again in the direction of Yarchi's ancient cottage, when the porter directed me—as if I were a mere tourist—to go to see the giant cedar of Lebanon with its Titanic arrow. However, I followed his instructions, and pretty soon I espied the broad-girthed tree towering over its field, with the foreign transpiercing trunk about fifteen feet from the ground, making indeed a vast cross. Leaning against the sunlit cedar was a white-robedfigure, and as I hobbled nearer I saw by the shroud and the crown of flowers that I had found Bethulah.
At my approach she drew herself up in statuesque dignity, upright as Ben David of yore, and looked at me with keen unclouded eyes. There was a wondrous beauty of old age in her face and bearing. The silver hair banded on the temples glistened picturesquely against the reds and greens and golds of her crown.
"Ah, stranger!" she said, with a gracious smile. "You return to us."
"You recognize me?" I mumbled, in amaze.
"It is the face I loved in youth," she said simply.
Strange, happy, wistful tears sprang to my old eyes—some blurred sense of youth and love and God.
"Your youth seems with you still," I said. "Your face is as sweet, your voice as full of music."
The old ecstatic look lit up her eyes. "It is God who keeps me ever young, till the great day dawns."
I was taken aback. What! She believed still! That alternative had not figured in my prevision of pathetic closes. I was silent, but the old tumult of thought raged within me.
"But is not the day passed forever?" I murmured at last.
The light in her eyes became queenly fire.
"While there is life," she cried, "in the veins of the house of Ben David!" And as she spoke my eyecaught the gleam of the Persian emerald on her forefinger.
"And your worshippers—what of them?" I asked.
Her eyes grew sad. "After my father's death—his memory for a blessing!—the pilgrims fell off, and when the years passed without the miracle, his followers even here in Zloczszol began to weaken. And slowly a new generation arose, impatient and lax, which believed not in the faith of their forefathers and mocked my footsteps, saying, 'Behold! the dreamer cometh!' And then the black fire-monster came, whizzing daily to and fro on the steel lines and breathing out fumes of unfaith, and the young men said lo! there is our true Redeemer. Wherefore, as the years waxed and waned, until at last advancing Death threw his silver shadow on my hair, even the faithful grew to doubt, and they said, 'But a few short years more and death must claim her, her mission unfulfilled, and the lamp of Israel's hope shattered forever. Perchance it is we that have misunderstood the prophecies. Not here, not here, shall God's great miracle be wrought; this is not holy ground. "For the Lord dwelleth in Zion,"' they cried with the Prophets. Only on the sacred soil, outside of which God has never revealed himself, only in Palestine, they said, can Israel's Redeemer be born. As it is written, 'But upon Mount Zion shall be deliverance, and there shall be holiness.'
"Then these and the scoffers persuaded me, seeingthat I waxed very old, and I sold my father's house—now grown of high value—to obtain the money for the journey, and I made ready to start for Jerusalem. There had been a whirlwind and a great snow the day before and I would have tarried, but they said I must arrive in the Holy City ere the eve of Chanukah. And putting off my shroud and my crown, seeing that only in Jerusalem I might be a bride, I trusted myself to the fire-monster, and a vast company went with me to the starting-place—both of those who believed that salvation was of Zion and those who scoffed. But the monster had scarcely crawled out under God's free heaven than God's hand lifted me up and those with me—for my blessedness covered them—and put us down very far off, while a great white thunder-bolt fell upon the building and upon the scoffers and upon those who had prated of Zion, and behold! they were not. The multitude of Moab was as straw trodden down for the dunghill, and the high fort of the fire-monster was brought down and laid low and brought to the ground, even to the dust. Then arose a great cry from all the town and the mountain, and a rending of garments and a weeping in sackcloth. And many returned to the faith in me, for God's hand has shown that here, and not elsewhere, is the miracle to be wrought. As it is written, word for word, in the twenty-fifth chapter of Isaiah:—
"'And He will destroy in this mountain the faceof the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God shall wipe away tears from off all faces: and the rebuke of His people shall He take away from off all the earth: for the Lord hath spoken it. And it shall be said in that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us: this is the Lord; we have waited for Him, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation. For in this mountain shall the hand of the Lord rest, and Moab shall be trodden down under Him, even as straw is trodden down for the dunghill. And He shall spread forth His hands in the midst of them, as he that swimmeth spreadeth forth to swim: and He shall bring down their pride together with the spoils of their hands. And the fortress of the high fort of thy walls shall He bring down, lay low, and bring to the ground, even to the dust.'
"And here in this cedar of Lebanon, transplanted like Israel under the shadow of this alien mountain, the Lord has shot a bolt, for a sign to all that can read. And here I come daily to pray, and to await the divine moment."
She ceased, and her eyes turned to the now stainless heaven. And as I gazed upon her shining face it seemed to me that the fresh flowers and leaves of her crown, still wet with the dew, seen against that garment of death and the silver of decaying life, were symbolic of an undying, ever rejuvenescent hope.
A last surprise awaited me. Bethulah now lived all alone in Yarchi's pine cottage, which the years had left untouched.
Whether accident or purpose settled her there I do not know, but my heart was overcharged with mingled emotion as I went up the garden the next day to pay her a farewell visit. The poppies flaunted riotously amid the neglected maize, but the cottage itself seemed tidy.
It was the season when the cold wrinkled lips of winter meet the first kiss of spring, and death is passing into resurrection. It was the hour when the chill shadows steal upon the sunlit day. In the sky was the shot purple of a rolling moor, merging into a glow of lovely green.
I stood under the porch where Yarchi had been wont to sun and snuff himself, and knocked at the door, but receiving no answer, I lifted the latch softly and looked in.
Bethulah was at her little table, her head lying on a great old Bible which her arms embraced. One long finger of departing sunlight pointed through the window and touched the flowers on the gray hair. I stole in with a cold fear that she was dead. But she seemed only asleep, with that sleep of old age which is so near to death and is yet the renewal of life.
I was curious to see what she had been reading. It was the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, and in the shadow of her crown ran the verses:—
"And the Lord said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shalt I of a surety bear a child, which am old?
"Is anything too hard for the Lord?"
Salvina Brill walked to and fro in the dingy Hackney Terrace, waiting till her mother should return with the house-key. So far as change of scene was concerned the little pupil-teacher might as well have stood still. Everywhere bow-windows, Venetian blinds, little front gardens—all that had represented domestic grandeur to her after a childhood of apartments in Spitalfields, though her subsequent glimpse of the West End home in which her sister Kitty was governess, had made her dazedly aware of Alps beyond Alps.
Though only seventeen, Salvina was not superficially sweet and could win no consideration from the seated males in the homeward train, and the heat of the weather and the crush of humanity—high hats sandwiched between workmen's tool-baskets—had made her head ache. Her day at the Whitechapel school had already been trying, and Thursday was always heavy with the accumulated fatigues of the week. It was unfortunate that her mother should be late, but she remembered how at breakfast thegood creature had promised father to make a little excursion to the Borough and take a packet of tea to the house of some distant relatives of his, who were sittingshivah(seven days' mourning). The non-possession of a servant made it necessary to lock up the house and pull down the blinds, when its sole occupant went visiting.
After a few minutes of vain expectation, Salvina mechanically returned to her Greek grammar, which opened as automatically at the irregular verbs. She had just achieved the greatest distinction of her life, and one not often paralleled in Board School girl-circles, by matriculating at the London University. Hers was only a second-class pass, but gained by private night-study, supplemented by some evening lessons at the People's Palace, it was sufficiently remarkable; especially when one considered she had still other subjects to prepare for the Centres. Salvina was now audaciously aiming at the Bachelorhood of Arts, for which the Greek verbs were far more irregular. It was not only the love of knowledge that animated her: as a bachelor she might become a head-mistress, nay, might even aspire to follow the lead of her dashing elder sister and teach in a wealthy family that treated you as one of itself. Not that Kitty had ever matriculated, but an ugly duckling needs many plumes of learning ere it can ruffle itself like a beautiful swan.
Who should now come upon the promenadingstudent but Sugarman the Shadchan, his hand full of papers, and his blue bandanna trailing from his left coat-tail!
"Ah, you are the very person I was coming to see," he cried gleefully in his corrupt German accent. "What is your sister's address now?"
"Why?" said Salvina distrustfully.
"I have a fine young man for her!"
Salvina's pallid cheek coloured with modesty and resentment. "My sister doesn't need your services."
"Maybe not," said Sugarman, unruffled. "But the young man does. He saw your sister once years ago, before he went to the Cape. Now he is aTakif(rich man) and wants a wife."
"He's not rich enough to buy Kitty." Salvina's romantic soul was outraged, and she spoke with unwonted asperity.
"He is rich enough to buy Kitty all she wants. He is quite in love with her—she can ask for anything."
"Then let him go and tell her so himself. What does he come to you for? He must be a very poor lover."
"Poor! I tell you he is rolling in gold. It's the luckiest thing that could have happened to your family. You will all ride in your carriage. You ought to fall on your knees and bless me. Your sister is not so young any more, at nineteen a girl can't afford to sniff. Believe me there are thousandsof girls who would jump at the chance—yes, girls with dowries, too. And your sister hasn't a penny."
"My sister has a heart and a soul," retorted Salvina witheringly, "and she wants a heart and a soul to sympathize with hers, not a money-bag."
"Then, won't you take a ticket for the lotteree?" rejoined Sugarman pleasantly. "Then you get a money-bag of your own."
"No, thank you."
"Not even half a ticket? Only thirty-six shillings! You needn't pay me now. I trust you."
She shook her head.
"But think—I may win you the great prize—a hundred thousand marks."
The sum fascinated Salvina, and for an instant her imagination played with its marvellous potentialities. They could all move to the country, and there among the birds and the flowers she could study all day long, and even try for a degree with Honours. Her father would be saved from the cigar factory, her sister from exile amid strangers, her mother should have a servant, her brother the wife he coveted. All her Spitalfields circle had speculated through Sugarman, not without encouraging hits. She smiled as she remembered the vendor of slippers who had won sixty pounds and was so puffed up that when his wife stopped in the street to speak to a shabby acquaintance, he cried vehemently, "Betsey, Betsey, do learn to behave according to your station."
"You don't believe me?" said Sugarman, misapprehending her smile. "You can read it all for yourself. A hundred thousand marks, so sure my little Nehemiah shall see rejoicings. Look!"
But Salvina waved back the thin rustling papers with their exotic Continental flavour. "Gambling is wicked," she said.
Sugarman was incensed. "Me in a wicked business! Why, I know more Talmud than anybody in London, and can be called up the Law asMorenu! You'll say marrying is wicked, next. But they are both State Institutions. England is the only country in the world without a lotteree."
Salvina wavered, but her instinct was repugnant to money that did not accumulate itself by slow, painful economies, and her multifarious reading had made the word "Speculation" a prism of glittering vice.
"I daresayyouthink it's not wrong," she said, "and I apologize if I hurt your feelings. But don't you see how you go about unsettling people?"
"Me! Why, I settle them! And if you'd only give me your sister's address—"
His persistency played upon Salvina's delicate conscience; made her feel she must not refuse the poor man everything. Besides, the grand address would choke him off.
"She's at Bedford Square, with the Samuelsons."
"Ah, I know. Two daughters, Lily and Mabel," and Sugarman instead of being impressed noddedhis head, as if even the Samuelsons were mortal and marriageable.
"Yes, my sister is their governess and companion. But you'll only waste your time."
"You think so?" he said triumphantly. "Look at this likeness!"
And he drew out the photograph of a coarse-faced middle-aged man, with a jaunty flower in his frock-coat and a prosperous abdomen supporting a heavily trinketed watch-chain. Underneath swaggered the signature, "Yours truly, Moss M. Rosenstein."
Salvina shuddered: "He was wise to sendyou," she said slyly.
"Is it not so? Ah, and your brother, too, would have done better to come to me instead of falling in love with a girl with a hundred pounds. But I bear your family no grudge, you see. Perhaps it is not too late yet. Tell Lazarus that if he should come to break with the Jonases, there are better fish in the sea—gold fish, too. Good-bye. We shall both dance at your sister's wedding." And he tripped off.
Salvina resumed her Greek, but the grotesque aorists could not hold her attention. She was hungry and worn out, and even when her mother came, it would be some time before her evening meal could be prepared. She felt she must sit down, if only on her doorsteps, but their whiteness was inordinately marred as by many dirty boots—she wondered whose and why—and she had to content herself withleaning against the stucco balustrade. And gradually as the summer twilight faded, the grammar dropped in her hand, and Salvina fell a-dreaming.
What did she dream of, this Board School drudge, whose pasty face was craned curiously forward on sloping shoulders? Was it of the enchanted land of love of which Sugarman had reminded her, but over whose roses he had tramped so grossly? Alas! Sugarman himself had never thought of her as a client for any but the lottery section of his business. Within, she was one glow of eager romance, of honour, of quixotic duty, but no ray of this pierced without to give a sparkle to the eye, a colour to the cheek. No faintest dash of coquetry betrayed the yearning of the soul or gave grace to walk or gesture: her dress was merely a tidy covering. Her exquisite sensibility found bodily expression only as a clumsy shyness.
Poor Salvina!
At last the welcome jar and creak of the gate awoke her.
"Why, I thought you knew I had to go to the Borough!" began a fretful voice, forestalling reproach, and a buxom woman resplendent with black satin and much jewellery came up the tiny garden-path.
"It doesn't matter, mother—I haven't been waiting long."
"Well, you know how difficult it is to get a 'bus in this weather—at least if you want to sit outside, and it always makes my head ache frightfully to go inside—I'm not strong and young like you—and such a long way, I had to change at the Bank, and I made sure you'd get something to eat at one of the girls', and go straight to the People's Palace."
Still muttering, Mrs. Brill produced a key, and after some fumbling threw open the door. Both made a step within, then both stopped, aghast.
"It's the wrong house," thought Salvina confusedly, conscious of her power of making such mistakes.
"Kisshuf(witchcraft)!" whispered her mother, terrified into her native idiom. The passage lay before them, entirely bare of all its familiar colour and furniture: the framed engravings depicting the trials of William Lord Russell, in the Old Bailey, and Earl Stafford in Westminster Hall, the flower-pots on the hall table, the proudly purchased hat-rack, the metal umbrella-stand, all gone! And beyond, facing them, lay the parlour, an equally forlorn vacancy striking like a blast of chilly wind through its wide-open door.
"Thieves!" cried Mrs. Brill, reverting from the supernatural and the Yiddish. "Murder! I'm ruined! They've stolen my house!"
"Hush! Hush!" said Salvina, strung to calm by her mother's incoherence. "Let us see first what has really happened."
"Happened! Haven't you got eyes in your head? All the fruit of my years of toil!" And Mrs. Brill wrung her jewelled hands. "Your father would have me call on those Sperlings, though I told him they'd be glad to dance on my tomb. And why didn't Lazarus stay at home?"
"You know he has to be out looking for work."
"And my gilt clock that I trembled even to wind up, and the big vase with the picture on it, and my antimacassars, and my beautiful couch that nobody had ever sat upon! Oh my God, oh my God!"
Leaving her mother moaning out a complete inventory in the passage, Salvina advanced into the violated parlour. It was an aching void. On the bare mantelpiece, just where the gilt clock had announced a perpetual half-past two, gleamed an unstamped letter. She took it up wonderingly. It was in her father's schoolboyish hand, addressed to her mother. She opened it, as usual, for Mrs. Brill did not even know the alphabet, and refused steadily to make its acquaintance, to the ironic humiliation of the Board School teacher.
"You would not let me give youGet," [ran the letter abruptly], "so you have only yourself to blame. I have left the clothes in the bed-rooms, but what is mine is mine. Good-bye."Michael Brill."P.S.—Don't try to find me at the factory. I have left."
"You would not let me give youGet," [ran the letter abruptly], "so you have only yourself to blame. I have left the clothes in the bed-rooms, but what is mine is mine. Good-bye.
"Michael Brill.
"P.S.—Don't try to find me at the factory. I have left."
Salvina steadied herself against the mantelpiece till the room should have finished reeling round.Get!Her father had wanted to put away her mother! Divorce, departure, devastation—what strange things were these, come to wreck a prosperity so slowly built up!
"Quick, Salvina, there goes a policeman!" came her mother's cry.
The room stood still suddenly. "Hush, hush, mother," Salvina said imperiously. "There's no thief!" She ran back into the passage, the letter in her hand.
A fierce flame of intelligence leapt into the woman's face. "Ah, it's your father!" she cried. "I knew it, I knew he'd go after that painted widow, just because she has a little money, a black curse on her bones. Oh! oh! God in heaven! To bring such shame on me, for the sake of a saucy-nosed slut whose sister sold ironmongery in Petticoat Lane—a low lot, one and all, and not fit to wipe my shoes on, even when she was respectable, and this is what you call a father, Salvina! Oh my God, my God!"
Salvina was by this time dazed, yet she had a gleam of consciousness left with which to register this culminating destruction of all her social landmarks. What! That monstrous wickedness of marquises and epauletted officers which hovered vaguely in the shadow-land of novels and plays had tumbled with a bang into real life; had fallen not even into its natural gilded atmosphere, but through the amulet-guarded doors of a respectable Jewishfamily in the heart of a Hackney Terrace, amid the horsehair couches and deal tables of homely reality. Nay—more sordid than the romantic wickedness of shadowland—it had even removed those couches and tables! And oddly blent with this tossing chaos of new thought in Salvina's romantic brain surged up another thought, no less new and startling. Her father and mother had once loved each other! They, too, had dawned upon each other, fairy prince and fairy princess; had laid in each other's hand that warm touch of trust and readiness to live and die for each other. It was very wonderful, and she almost forgot their hostile relationship in a rapid back-glance upon the years in which they had lived in mutual love before her unsuspecting eyes. Their prosaic bickering selves were transfigured: her vivid imagination threw off the damage of the years, saw her coarse, red-cheeked father and her too plump mother as the idyllic figures on the lamented parlour vase. And when her thought struggled painfully back to the actual moment, it was with a new concrete sense of its tragic intensity.
"O mother, mother!" she cried, as she threw her arms round her. The Greek grammar and the letter fell unregarded to the floor.
The fountain of Mrs. Brill's wrongs leapt higher at the sympathy. "And I could have had half-a-dozen young men! The boils of Egypt be upon him! Time after time I said, 'No,' though theShadchan bewitched my parents into believing that Michael was an angel without wings."
"But you also thought father an angel," Salvina pleaded.
"Yes; and now hehasgot wings," said Mrs. Brill savagely.
Salvina's tears began to ooze out. Poor swain and shepherdess on the parlour vase! Was this, then, how idylls ended? "Perhaps he'll come back," she murmured.
The wife snorted viciously. "And my furniture? The beautiful furniture I toiled and scraped for, that he always grumbled at, though I saved it out of the housekeeping money, without its costinghima penny, and no man in London had better meals,—hot meat every day and fish for Sabbath, even when plaice were eightpence a pound,—and no servant—every scrap of work done with my own two hands! Now he carts everything away as if it were his."
"I suppose it is by law," Salvina said mildly.
"Law! I'll have the law on him."
"Oh, no, mother!" and Salvina shuddered. "Besides, he has left our clothes."
Mrs. Brill's eye lit up. "I see no clothes."
"In our rooms. The letter says so."
"And you still believe what he says?" She began to mount the stairs. "I am sure he packed in my Paisley shawl while he was about it. It isfortunate I wore all my jewellery. And you always say I put on too much!"
Sustained by this unanswerable vindication of her past policy, Mrs. Brill ascended the stairs without further wailing.
Salvina, whose sense of romance never exalted her above the practical, remembered now that her brother Lazarus might come back at any moment clamorously hungry. This pinned her to the concrete moment. How to get him some supper! And her mother, too, must be faint and tired. She ran into the kitchen, and found enough odds and ends left to make a meal, and even a cracked teapot and a few coarse cups not worth carrying away; and, with a sense of Robinson Crusoe adventure, she extracted light, heat, and cheerfulness from the obedient gas branch, which took on the air of a case of precious goods not washed away in the household wreck. When her mother at last came down, cataloguing the wardrobe salvage in picturesque Yiddish, Salvina stopped her curses with hot tea. They both drank, leaning against the kitchen-dresser, which served for a table for the cups.
Salvina's Crusoe excitement increased when her mother asked her where they were to sleep, seeing that even the beds had been spirited away.
"I have five shillings in my purse; I'll go out and buy a cheap mattress. But then there's Lazarus! Oh dear!"
"Lazarus has his own bed. Yes, yes, thank God, we'll be able to borrow his wedding furniture."
"But it's all stored away in the Jonas's attic."
A smart rat-tat at the door denoted the inopportune return of Lazarus himself. Salvina darted upstairs to let him in and break the shock. He was a slimmer and more elegant edition of his father, a year older than Kitty, and taller than Salvina by a jaunty head and shoulders.
"And why isn't the hall lamp alight?" he queried, as her white face showed itself in the dusky door-slit. "It looks so beastly shabby. The only light's in the kitchen; I daresay you and the mater are pigging there again. Why can't you live up to your position?"
The unexpected reproach broke her down. "We have no position any more," she sobbed out. And all the long years of paralyzing economies swept back to her memory, all the painful progress—accelerated by her growing salary—from the Hounsditch apartments to the bow-windows and gas-chandeliers of Hackney!
"What do you mean? What is the matter? Speak, you little fool! Don't cry." He came across the threshold and shook her roughly.
"Father's run away with the furniture and some woman," she explained chokingly.
"The devil!" The smart cane slipped from hisfingers and he maintained his cigar in his mouth with difficulty. "Do you mean to say the old man has gone and—the beastly brute! The selfish hypocrite! But how could he get the furniture?"
"He made mother go on a visit to the Borough."
"The old fox! That's your religious chaps. I'll go and give 'em both brimstone. Where are they?"
"I don't know where—but you must not—it is all too horrible. There's nothing even to sleep on. We thought of borrowing your furniture!"
"What! And give the whole thing away to the Jonases—and lose Rhoda, perhaps. Good heavens, Sally. Don't be so beastly selfish. Think of the disgrace, if we can't cover it up."
"The disgrace is for father, not for you."
"Don't be an idiot. Old Jonas looked down on us enough already, and if it hadn't been for Kitty's calling on him in the Samuelsons' carriage, he might never have consented to the engagement."
"Oh, dear!" said Salvina, melted afresh by this new aspect. "My poor Lazarus!" and she gazed dolefully at the handsome youth who had divided with Kitty the good looks of the family. "But still," she added consolingly, "you couldn't have married for a long time, anyhow."
"I don't know so much. I had a very promising interview this afternoon with the manager of Granders Brothers, the big sponge-people."
"But you don't understand travelling in sponge."
"Pooh! Travelling's travelling. There's nothing to understand. Whatever the article is, you just tell lies about it."
"Oh, Lazarus!"
"Don't make eyes—you ain't pretty enough. What do you know of the world, you who live mewed up in a Board School? I daresay you believe all the rot you have to tell the little girls."
Her brother's shot made a wound he had not intended. Salvina was at last reminded of her own relation to the sordid tragedy, of what the other teachers would think, ay, even the little girls, so sharp in all that did not concern school-learning. Would her pupils have any inkling of the cloud on teacher's home? Ah, her brother was right. This disgrace besplashed them all, and she saw herself confusedly as a tainted figure holding forth on honour and duty to rows of white pinafores.
Meantime, her mother had toiled up—her jewels glittering curiously in the dusk—and now poured herself out to the fresh auditor in a breathless wail; recapitulated her long years of devotion and the abstracted contents of the house. But Lazarus soon wearied of the inventory of her virtues and furniture.
"What's the use of crying over spilt milk?" he said. "You must get a new jug."
"A new jug! And what about the basin and the coffee-pot and the saucepans and the plates! And my new blue dish with the willow-pattern. Oh, my God!"
"Don't be so stupid."
"She's a little dazed, Lazarus, dear. Have patience with her. Lazarus says it's no use crying and letting the neighbours hear you: we must make the best of a bad job, and cover it up."
"You'll soon cover me up. I won't need my clothes then—only a clean shroud. After twenty years—he wipes his mouth and he goes away! Tear the rent in your garments, children mine, your mother is dead."
"How can any one have patience with her?" cried Lazarus. "One would think it was such a treat for her to live with father. Judging by the rows you've had, mother, you ought to be thankful to be rid of him."
"Iamthankful," she retorted hysterically. "Who said I wasn't? A grumbling, grunting pig, who grudged me my horsehair couch because he couldn't sit on it. Well, let him squat on it now with his lady. I don't care. All my enemies will pity me, will they? If they only knew how glad I was!" and she broke into more sobs.
"Come, mother; come downstairs, Lazarus: don't let us stay up in the dark."
"Not me," said Lazarus. "I'm not going downto hear this all over again. Besides, where am I to sit or to sleep? I must go to an hotel." He struck a match to relight his cigar and it flared weirdly upon the tear-smudged female faces. "Got any money, Salvina," he said more gently.
"Only five shillings."
"Well, I daresay I can manage on that. Good-night, mother, don't take on so, it'll be all the same a hundred years hence." He opened the door; then paused with his hand on the knob, and said awkwardly: "I suppose you'll manage to find something to sleep on just for to-night."
"Oh, yes," said Salvina reassuringly; "we'll manage. Don't worry, dear."
"I'll be in the first thing in the morning. We'll have a council of war. Good-night. Itisa beastly mean trick," and he went out meditatively.
When he was gone, Salvina remembered that the five shillings were for the mattress. But she further bethought herself that the sum would scarcely have sufficed even for a straw mattress, and that the little gold ring Kitty had given her when she matriculated would fetch more. Her mother's jewellery must be left sacred; the poor creature was smarting enough from the sense of loss. Bidding her sit on the stairs till she returned, she hastened into Mare Street, the great Hackney highway, christened "The Devil's Mile" by the Salvation Army. Early experience had familiarized her with the process of pawning,but now she slipped furtively into the first pawn-shop and did not stay to make a good bargain. She spent on a telegram to the central post-office sixpence of the proceeds, so that she might be able to draw out without delay the few pounds she had laid by for her summer holiday. While she was purchasing the mattress at the garishly illuminated furniture store, the words "Hire System" caught her eye, and seemed a providential solution of the position. She broached negotiations for the furnishing of a bed-room and a kitchen, minus carpet and oilcloth (for these would not fit the cheaper apartments into which they would now have to revert), but she found there were tedious formalities to be gone through, and that her own signature would be invalid, as she was legally a child. However, she was able to secure the porterage of the mattress at once, and, followed by a bending Atlas, she hurried back to her mother—who sat on her stair, moaning—and diverted her from her griefs by teaching her to sign her name, in view of the legal exigencies of the morrow. It was a curious wind-up to her day's teaching. Poor Mrs. Brill's obstinate objection to education had to give way at last under such unexpected conditions, but she insisted on the shortest possible spelling, and so the uncouth "Esther Brills" pencilled at the top of the sheet were exchanged for more flowing "E. Brills" lower down. Even then, the good woman took the thing as a pictorial flourish,or a section of a map, and disdained acquaintance with the constituent letters, so that her progress in learning remained only nominal.
Then the "infant" at law put her mother to bed and lay down beside her on the mattress, both in their clothes for lack of blankets. The mother soon dozed off, but the "child" lay turning from side to side. The pressure of her little tasks had dulled the edge of emotion, but now, in the silence of the night, the whole tragic position came back with all its sordid romanticism, its pathetic meanness; and when at last she slept, its obsession lay heavy upon her dreams, and she sat at her examination desk in the London University, striving horridly to recall the irregularities of Greek verbs, and to set them down with a pen that could never dip up any ink, while the inexorable hands of the clock went round, and her father, in the coveted Bachelor's gown, waited to spirit away her desk and seat as soon as the hour should strike.