Chapter IX

Never by passion quite possessed,
And never quite benumbed by the world’s sway.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.

The party was never prolonged to a late hour on these occasions, and by ten o’clock there was no one left in the drawing-room in Portland Place except Mrs. Sachs, Mr. Leuniger, Mrs. Kohnthal and the young people in their respective trains.

The elders had got up a game of whist for the amusement of old Solomon, the termination of which their juniors awaited in conclave at the other end of the room.

Lionel and Sidney meanwhile, sleepy and overfed, quarrelled in a corner over the possession of a bound volume of the _Graphic_.

“Judith,” said Reuben, who had taken a seat opposite her, “do you know that you have made a conquest?”

“Is that such an unheard-of occurrence?”

Reuben laughed gently, and Rose cried:

“It is Mr. Lee-Harrison! I know it from the way he looked at supper.”

“Yes, it is Bertie.” Reuben looked straight in Judith’s eyes. “He says you exactly fulfil his idea of Queen Esther.”

“Ah,” cried Esther Kohnthal, “I have always had a theory about _her_. When she was kneeling at the feet of that detestable Ahasuerus, she was thinking all the time of some young Jew whom she mashed, and who mashed her, and whom she renounced for the sake of her people!”

A momentary silence fell among them, then Reuben, looking down, said slowly: “Or perhaps she preferred the splendours of the royal position even to the attractions of that youth whom you suppose her to--er--have mashed.”

He was not fond of Esther at the best of times; now he glanced at her under his eyelids with an expression of unmistakable dislike.

“I wonder,” cried Rose, throwing herself into the breach, “what Mr. Lee-Harrison thought of it all.”

“I think,” said Leo, “that he was shocked at finding us so little like the people in _Daniel Deronda_.”

“Did he expect,” cried Esther, “to see our boxes in the hall, ready packed and labelled _Palestine_?”

“I have always been touched,” said Leo, “at the immense good faith with which George Eliot carried out that elaborate misconception of hers.”

“Now Leo is going to begin,” cried Rose; “he never has a good word for his people. He is always running them down.”

“Horrid bad form,” said Reuben; “besides being altogether a mistake.”

“Oh, I have nothing to say against us at all,” answered Leo ironically, “except that we are materialists to our fingers’ ends. That we have outlived, from the nature of things, such ideals as we ever had.”

“Idealists don’t grow on every bush,” answered Reuben, “and I think we have our fair share of them. This is a materialistic age, a materialistic country.”

“And ours the religion of materialism. The corn and the wine and the oil; the multiplication of the seed; the conquest of the hostile tribes--these have always had more attraction for us than the harp and crown of a spiritualized existence.”

“It is no good to pretend,” answered Reuben in his reasonable, pacific way, “that our religion remains a vital force among the cultivated and thoughtful Jews of to-day. Of course it has been modified, as we ourselves have been modified, by the influence of western thought and western morality. And belief, among thinking people of all races, has become, as you know perfectly, a matter of personal idiosyncrasy.”

“That does not alter my position,” said Leo, “as to the character of the national religion and the significance of the fact. Ah, look at us,” he cried with sudden passion, “where else do you see such eagerness to take advantage; such sickening, hideous greed; such cruel, remorseless striving for power and importance; such ever-active, ever-hungry vanity, that must be fed at any cost? Steeped to the lips in sordidness, as we have all been from the cradle, how is it possible that any one among us, by any effort of his own, can wipe off from his soul the hereditary stain?”

“My dear boy,” said Reuben, touched by the personal note which sounded at the close of poor Leo’s heroics, and speaking with sudden earnestness, “you put things in too lurid a light. We have our faults; you seem to forget what our virtues are. Have you forgotten for how long, and at what a cruel disadvantage, the Jewish people has gone its way, until at last it has shamed the nations into respect? Our self-restraint, our self-respect, our industry, our power of endurance, our love of race, home and kindred, and our regard for their ties--are none of these things to be set down to our account?”

“Oh, our instincts of self-preservation are remarkably strong; I grant you that.”

Leo tossed back his head with its longish hair as he spoke, and Reuben went on:

“And where would you find a truer hospitality, a more generous charity than among us?”

“A charity whose right hand is so remarkably well posted up in the doings of its left!”

“Oh, come, that’s a libel--and not even true.”

“There is one good thing,” cried Leo, taking a fresh start, “and that is the inevitability--at least as regards us English Jews--of our disintegration; of our absorption by the people of the country. That is the price we are bound to pay for restored freedom and consideration. The Community will grow more and more to consist of mediocrities, and worse, as the general world claims our choicer specimens for its own. We may continue to exist as a separate clan, reinforced from below by German and Polish Jews for some time to come: but absorption complete, inevitable--that is only a matter of time. You and I sitting here, self-conscious, discussing our own race-attributes, race-position--are we not as sure a token of what is to come as anything well could be?”

“Yours is a sweeping theory,” said Reuben; “and at present, I don’t feel inclined to go into the rights and wrongs of it; still less to deny its soundness. I can only say that, should I live to see it borne out, I should be very sorry. It may be a weakness on my part, but I am exceedingly fond of my people. If we are to die as a race, we shall die harder than you think. The tide will ebb in the intervals of flowing. That strange, strong instinct which has held us so long together is not a thing easily eradicated. It will come into play when it is least expected. Jew will gravitate to Jew, though each may call himself by another name. If prejudice died, if difference of opinion died, if all the world, metaphorically speaking, thought one thought and spoke one language, there would still remain those unspeakable mysteries, affinity and--love.”

Reuben’s voice sounded curiously moved, and in his eyes, as he spoke, glowed a dreamy flame, as of some deep and tender emotion.

Judith, leaning forward with parted lips, lifted her shining eyes to his face in a long, unconscious gaze. Reuben with his sword in his hand, fighting the battle for his people, seemed to her a figure noble and heroic beyond speech.

In her own breast was kindled the flame of a great emotion; she felt the love of her race grow stronger at every word.

Reuben, conscious to the finger-tips of Judith’s presence, of her gaze, which he did not return, was stirred, on his part, with a new enthusiasm.

He praised her in the race, and the race in her; and this was conveyed in some subtle manner to her consciousness.

Thus they acted and reacted on one another, deceiving and deceived, with that strange, unconscious hypocrisy of lovers.

* * * * *

The game of whist had come to an end, and every one rose, preparatory to departure.

“Good-night, uncle Solomon,” said Reuben’s mother. She, too, was a Sachs, who had married her cousin.

“Come along, mamma,” cried Esther yawning, “I am dead beat. The domestic habits of the cobra are not adapted to the human constitution, that is clear.”

Reuben was standing in the hall with his mother, as Rose and Judith came down stairs in their outdoor clothes.

“Your carriage is at the door,” said Israel Leuniger to Mrs. Sachs as he lit his cigar.

Mrs. Sachs turned to her son:

“Aren’t you coming, Reuben?”

“No, but I do not expect to be late.” He answered gently and seriously, stooping down and folding a shawl about her shoulders as he spoke.

Mrs. Sachs raised her wide, sallow, wrinkled face to her son’s, looked at him a moment, then, with a sudden impulse of tenderness, lifted her hand and stroked back the hair from his forehead.

Ah, what had come to Judith, standing in a corner of the hall watching the little scene?

Ah, what did it mean, what was it, this beating and throbbing of all her pulses, this strange, choked feeling in her throat, this mist that swam before her eyesight?

The dining-room door, near which she stood, was ajar; moved by the blind impulse of her terror, she pushed it open; and trembling, ashamed, not daring to analyse her own emotions, she sought the shelter of the darkness.

* * * * *

While Judith was being driven to Kensington Palace Gardens, lying back pale and tired in a corner of the carriage, Reuben was sauntering towards Piccadilly with a cigar in his mouth.

For the moment, his mind dwelt on the fact that he had not been able to say good-night to Judith.

“Where did she make off to?” he asked himself persistently.

He was strangely irritated and baffled by the little accident.

As he went slowly down Regent Street, which was full of light and of people returning from the theatres, the thought of Judith took more and more possession of him, till his pulses beat and his senses swam.

Ah, why not, why not?

Children on his hearth with Judith’s eyes, and Judith there herself amongst them: Judith, calm, dignified, stately, yet a creature so gentle withal, so sweet, so teachable!

He looked again and again at this picture of his fancy, fascinated, alarmed at his own fascination.

Whatever happened, he would never be a poor man. There was the money which would come to him at his grandfather’s death, and at his mother’s: no inconsiderable sums. There was his own little income, besides what his practice brought him.

But it was not altogether a question of money. He had no wish to fetter himself at this early stage of his career; his ambition was boundless; and the possibilities of the future looked almost boundless too.

He had an immense idea of his own market value; an instinctive aversion to making a bad bargain.

From his cradle he had imbibed the creed that it is noble and desirable to have everything better than your neighbour; from the first had been impressed on him the sacred duty of doing the very best for yourself.

Yes, he was in love; cruelly, inconveniently, most unfortunately in love. But ten years hence, when he would still be a young man, the fever would certainly have abated, would be a dream of the past, while his ambition he had no doubt would be as lusty as ever.

Thus he swayed from side to side, balancing this way and that; pitying himself and Judith as the victims of fate; full of tenderness, of sentiment for his own thwarted desires.

He believed himself to hesitate, to waver; but at the bottom of Reuben’s heart there was that which never wavered.

He put the question by at last, wearied with the conflict, and gave himself up to pleasant dreams.

He thought of the look in Judith’s eyes, of the vibration in her voice when she spoke to him.

“Ah, she does not know it herself!”

Triumph, joy, compunction, an overwhelming tenderness, set his pulses beating, his whole being aglow.

It was late when, tired and haggard, he reached his home and let himself in with the key.

His mother came out on the landing with a candle.

She did not present a charming spectacle _en déshabille_, her large, partially bald head deprived of the sheltering, softening cap, her withered neck exposed, the lines of her figure revealed by a dingy old dressing-gown.

She gave an exclamation as she saw him; the wide, yellow expanse of her face, with its unwholesome yet undying air, lighted up by the twinkling diamonds on either side of it, looked agitated and alarmed.

“My dear boy, thank God it is you! I have been dreaming about you--a terrible dream.”