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

REUBEN SACHS
A SKETCH

REUBEN SACHS

A SKETCH
BY
AMY LEVY
AUTHOR OF “A MINOR POET” AND “THE ROMANCE OF A SHOP”
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1888
The Right of Translation and Reproduction is reserved
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
LONDON AND BUNGAY.

REUBEN SACHS:
A SKETCH.

CHAPTER I.
This is my beloved Son.

Reuben Sachs was the pride of his family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why do women invariably sit in the dark?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Leunigers!” cried Adelaide in open disapproval.

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

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

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

Her mother looked across at her through the dusk.

“Reuben will do nothing rash,” she said.

CHAPTER II.

Whatever my mood is, I love Piccadilly.

London Lyrics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Aunt Ada!” cried Reuben, going forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III.

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

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

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

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

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

“See the conquering hero comes!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not till October 14th.”

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

“What have you been doing this Long?”

“Oh ... staying about.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is almost impossible not to.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V.

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

M. Desbordes Valmore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked up eagerly.

“Then you will be asked to stand?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know he is very fond of you.”

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

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

“You know best.”

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

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

“He will have to get over that!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI.

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

Shelley: Prince Athanase.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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