Chapter VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judith glanced up quickly with a bright, gentle look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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