Quand il pâlit un soir, et que sa voix tremblanteS’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.
Quand il pâlit un soir, et que sa voix tremblanteS’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.
Quand il pâlit un soir, et que sa voix tremblanteS’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.
OldSolomon 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 familyround 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 agehad 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 lesswelcome 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 andhis 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 doorwas 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 whosemarks 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 withoutceremony, 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 anunpleasant 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 andthen 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 ofolives 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 ofTruth. 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 privateview, 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 ofIch grolle nichtbelow 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, thesevere, 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 onesuspected, 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 overthat!”
“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 dangeroustête-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 regardsthemjust 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 wayshocked 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.
He had a gentle, yet aspiring mind;Just, innocent, with varied learning fed.Shelley:Prince Athanase.
He had a gentle, yet aspiring mind;Just, innocent, with varied learning fed.Shelley:Prince Athanase.
He had a gentle, yet aspiring mind;Just, innocent, with varied learning fed.
Shelley:Prince Athanase.
Judithrose 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 oneof 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 aman 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 theback 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 themwas 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 Roseofficiated 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.
On this day shall He make an atonement for you, to purify you; you shall be clean from all your sins.Leviticusxvi. 30.
On this day shall He make an atonement for you, to purify you; you shall be clean from all your sins.Leviticusxvi. 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 Dayof 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 theBayswater 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 thelong 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 andlongueursof 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 histalith, 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, hishat 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 inthe 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 anhour 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 withGood-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.