CHAPTER IV
Minna Hart was an only child. She had lost her mother early in life, and had been left to the casual care of a series of governesses, with none of whom, save one, had she contracted a warmer bond than that of mutual indifference. For this exceptional one she had conceived a girlish passion; but as the young lady had disappeared one night, carrying with her some of her pupil’s most valuable jewellery, Minna’s love had been turned to hatred, which vented itself afterwards upon all succeeding governesses. As soon as it was practicable she declared her education to be finished, and herself to have done with instructors forever. Whereupon her father, who had as vague a notion of rearing a daughter as of fighting a line-of-battle ship, brought into the house, as duenna, his only sister, an elderly, stout, rubicund, black-haired Jewess of the most orthodox faith. As Minna had never been accustomed to pay regard to Judaic observances, and only went to synagogue now and then, in order to show off her new dresses, her Aunt Leah’s interfering piety maddened her past endurance. Moreover, the good lady, in the streets, with blowsy face, red roses, gold chain, and a brooch the size of a dessert-plate, was a sight for gods and men, with which Minna shrank from being associated. So when Aunt Leah died suddenly, Minna was inexpressibly relieved. She issued forthwith another domestic manifesto, in which she announced her intention of leading thenceforward a perfectly untrammelled and independent life.
Accordingly, she reigned supreme in her father’s house, obeying all her caprices, bending her servants to her will, or summarily dismissing the recalcitrant, surrounding herself with all the bodily luxuries that money can buy—and eating out her young heart in loneliness. Beyond the strong Hebrew sense of parentage, Israel Hart had little sympathy with his daughter. She despised his race and loathed his profession.
He felt it instinctively. Her company was an embarrassment. He could not talk of gowns and laces, of music, picture-galleries and light literature. The engrossing pursuit of money-making interested her not in the least. Outside relatives, whose foibles and disagreeablenesses form so harmonious a household bond, there were not. By the wives and daughters of his city co-religionist friends his daughter passed with a sniff of her delicate nose. She would have none of them. Israel shrugged his shoulders, and beyond insisting on her co-operating with him in the interchange of a few formal courtesies—ordeals worse than Sabbath observances under Aunt Leah’s dispensation—left her entirely to her own devices. In the house, they rarely met, except at dinner. Afterwards, if the humour seized her, she would play to him for half an hour in the drawing-room, and then he would go down to his study. Her comings and goings were of little concern to him. He would have given her a staff of lady companions, had she desired it; but as she refused to be interfered with, Israel, with many wonderings as to the strange and hidden ways of womankind, sagaciously refrained from interference. On one point, however, he stood firm: when the question of her marriage came up for discussion, his voice should have considerable weight. But Minna scoffed at the idea of marriage with such hooked noses and shiny crowns and puffed cheeks as ventured to come a-wooing, and sat instead at her window and sighed, poor child, for the prince that never could come. She lived an aimless, lonely life, wasting her young and splendid womanhood in a vicious circle of unsatisfied longings. The society of her own folk she would not. The alien society that she craved would not her. She was a social leper—the Jew money-lender’s daughter. Yet, on looking inward, she knew that the leprosy of her wealth was in her heart’s blood. She could not cleanse herself from it, bathe in the Jordan of renunciation, go forth into the world and work out her freedom. She had the Syrian repugnances of Naaman.
Sometimes the palatial loneliness of her home weighed too awfully upon her spirit. The torture of unsatisfied cravings set all her nerves jangling. Then she would fly from town, without her maid, and visit at Brighton her old Syrian nurse, Anna Cassaba, who gave up to her the best rooms in her house, petted and soothed her, and uttered comfortable prophecies concerning the prince. Perhaps Anna was the only creature in the world she cared for. The old woman worshipped her with an Oriental passion of devotion.
At Brighton, in the intoxication of her liberty and the vainglory of her beauty, the girl sought adventures, played recklessly with fire. She learned the languorous witchery of her voice, and it became a wild pastime to exercise it upon the chance met man. Once a young guardsman fell in with her upon the Parade, carried her off to dinner. At the end, she insisted upon paying half the bill. He demurred. She rose and declared she would walk straight out of the place if he did not accept with good grace. He yielded the point. They went to the theatre together, and then for a long moonlight drive along the roast. It was audacious bliss. She arrived home at two o’clock in the morning. Anna was sleepless with terror, in spite of a warning telegram. Minna explained lightly. The old woman lifted up her young cheeks with tremulous fingers.
“Oh, God, my child—you have come to no harm?”
Minna broke into merry laughter. Only when the prince came would there be that danger. She would know him in a moment. And she cut the young guardsman dead in the street the next day, having wiped off his kisses forever.
But at last came Hugh.
Oddly enough, she met him first in the Merriams’ drawing-room, whither she had gone with her father in anything but an adventurous spirit.
Some shrewd remark of Hugh’s had caught Israel’s fancy. With the parting handshake he ventured to express the pleasure it would give him to see Mr. Colman at The Lindens. The young man sought for a non-committal phrase of courtesy; but a glance from swimming eyes, half-proud, half-appealing, brought a quick acceptance to his lips. And that was the beginning of things.
That Minna Hart and herself came to be on visiting terms was, of course, Irene’s doing. Her revolt at social cruelties had been fired by the scant courtesy paid to the Jew financier’s daughter at a large political garden-party, and her impulsive scorn of convention led her to walk the next day to The Lindens and call upon the innocent pariah. It was like many other of Irene’s impetuous deeds of knight-errantry. Gerard had expostulated, veiling profound distaste under tones of pleasantry. Men who lent money at the God of Jacob alone knew how much per cent, were not welcome in a society belonging virtually, if not actually, to the race of borrowers. It was putting the leopard to lie down with the kid; setting the calf and the lion and the fatling together, without any reasonable hope of millennial advantages. But the dawning dismay in Irene’s eyes and the quiver of protest about her lips had checked further expression of cynicism. He had given way, even assumed a magnanimous air of enthusiasm; and with his approbation for lance and his visiting card for buckler, Irene, a modern Britomart, had set forth on her quest. It was on Minna and Israel’s return visit that Hugh had first met them.
At the outset Minna had received Irene’s offer of friendship with unfeigned gladness. It was the opening to her of that charmed circle of Gentile society at whose bounds she had stood so long disconsolate. Indeed, if she had given to Irene a breath of the warmth of her southern nature, Irene would have taken her to her heart, championed her triumphantly through the ordeal of prejudice, and the girl’s own beauty would have done the rest. But to Minna she was indefinite discomfort. A recrudescence of Jewish pride gained strength from vague, instinctive feminine jealousies. And then came Hugh. His coming disarranged her universe. Amongst other phenomena, it froze up whatever kindly feelings she entertained towards Irene.
This time it was no wilful playing with fire. She flung herself like a mad moth into the flame. She wrote wild letters to old Anna Cassaba. “The prince has come. I knew him at a glance. My heart is full of glowing happiness. I must tell you, to prevent myself crying it aloud. I cannot sleep. Oh, soon I will bring my prince to you.” The old woman’s eyes grew dim as she read, as only old eyes can, that look backward and inward upon tumultuous passion of long ago. But in her wisdom she burned these letters. It might not be the true prince, after all, she thought.
But Minna doubted not. She had gained her victory; gained it, it is true, at a price—but her ungoverned passion did not pause now to consider it. She saw Hugh nearly every day, sometimes at his chambers, sometimes in quiet meeting-places in the West End, now and then at The Lindens. She was happy. Her daily hour of sweetness gave retrospective and anticipatory joy to the other three and twenty. The elaboration of a distinctive attire for each interview was in itself an absorbing occupation. The undecided aspect of their relations afforded her, also, tremulous amusement.
“It is rather sweet, this pretending, isn’t it?” she once remarked to him.
“What pretending?” he asked, somewhat taken aback.
“This long engagement. As if you are going to make your fortune in two years! It is quite enchanting. And at the end, I suppose orange-blossoms and rice, and all things nice. Eh?”
She raised her eyes to his in lazy mockery—they were walking through the courts of the Temple—and slid her hand through his arm.
“What would you have?” said Hugh.
With a sigh she brought his ear down to her lips, and whispered:
“You—and I’m not going to wait two years for you—but we’ll go on pretending a little longer.”
“But I am in grim earnest, my Vivien.”
“So am I,” she replied, with a smile.
After this he realised the impracticability of his scheme. Minna was not one of those sweet future housewives for whom a man works and waits.
There was too much “contagion of the blood” in the matter. Yet he swore to himself that there should be no irregular union between them, and that he would not marry her until he had freed himself from her father’s clutches. But how to raise the money was beyond his power of scheming. At this stage of embarrassment came the announcement that a son and heir had been born to his uncle. As far as the value of security went, the bond in Israel Hart’s possession was so much waste-paper.
A post or two brought a comforting letter from his sisters, two maiden ladies many years his senior, who lived a gentle life in a little Hertfordshire townlet. They sympathised with him over this final theft of his inheritance (the good ladies considered it nothing less), but assured him that his Uncle Geoffrey would leave him something when he died. He had hinted as much, some months before, when “apologising to them for his senile folly.” It was the very least he could do under the circumstances. Whilst reading this letter Hugh was suddenly startled by an inspired flash. His difficulties melted. He rose from his breakfast and walked about the room, settling the details of the scheme. He would borrow the £5,000 from his sisters on the security of the reversion, such as it was worth, pay off Hart forthwith, reduce the rate of interest he was paying—a natural thing, for his sisters would not accept usurer’s interest—devote as much of his yearly income as he could spare to a reserve fund, in the event of the legacy not covering the debt, and marry Minna forthwith. In the event of his own death, he would leave Minna directions to pay his sisters, so that only in this contingency would Israel be virtually repaid out of his own pocket. In any case, his sisters would not be losers. The brilliancy of the prospect blinded him to at least one fallacy and two unsound premises.
The following afternoon he was at Selwood. His sisters Alicia and Dora, warned by telegram of his coming, met him at the station and walked with him, one on either side, through the town. The broad, quiet street, its breadth oddly exaggerated by the lowness of the straggling rows of old-fashioned houses, terminated at a common, on the further side of which stood the church. Amidst a clump of trees near the rectory glowed the red brick of the house where the two sisters lived. It was a peaceful and gentle spot, and it seemed to harmonise with their faces, which bore no marks of greater stress and strain than those occasioned by their disappointment in a housemaid, and their mild, vague regrets for the fuller, wedded life that had not come to them.
Hugh looked around, drew in great draughts of the sweet air, and then glanced affectionately at his sisters. They walked beside him proudly, holding their heads high. They had gentle but enlarged ideas of the importance of their family, and Hugh, in their eyes, was the incarnation of its distinction. The town was not honoured by such a man every day in the week. They felt the admiring and respectful eyes of Selwood upon them.
“We were just going to write to you when your telegram came,” said Dora.
“We had better wait until we get indoors,” said Alicia, reprovingly. As she was five years older than Dora (who herself was ten years older than Hugh), she considered her sister’s experience of the world somewhat immature. Hugh laughed, being familiar with Alicia’s habits. They were, doubtless, about to ask his advice concerning the finances of the village goose-club, or some such solemn matter which could not be discussed save with closed doors.
It was only after he had allowed them to refresh him with tea in their comfortable drawing-room, that he alluded to the tabooed subject. He lit a cigarette—he could have lit the Queen’s Pipe had he so chosen, for they indulged him greatly—and enquired in what way he could serve them. They looked puzzled for a moment. Then Dora’s countenance cleared.
“Oh—the letter we were going to write to you! No. It wasn’t to ask you for anything. It——”
She looked across at Alicia, who glanced back at her with an air of intelligence and readiness.
“The fact is, dear Hugh,” said the elder, “we have rather unfortunate news to give you. Your Uncle Geoffrey is not very well.”
Though he expressed his sorrow, he smiled at the anti-climax. The dear, fussy sisters!
“In fact, his heart is seriously affected,” continued Alicia, gravely, “and he can’t possibly live very long.”
“The deuce he can’t,” said Hugh, who began to lose sight of the humourous aspect of things. “How do you know?”
“We received a long letter from him this morning, in which he refers to other things besides.”
“You had better let me see it,” said Hugh.
“Would you get it, Dora?” said Alicia, and then, while the younger sister was fetching the document from a secretaire by the window: “I don’t bear malice. I am grieved to hear of Geoffrey Colman’s affliction, and I hope he is prepared to meet his end like a Christian and a gentleman, but I consider his conduct towards you has been simply shameful.”
Hugh took the letter from Dora’s hand and read it through.
“I can get on without his money, my dears,” he said, bravely.
“Of course you can,” said Alicia, proudly. “A Colman need not be beholden to any man. But that does not condone anything in your uncle’s behaviour.”
He rose with a laugh, curled his moustache to a fiercer angle, and put his arm round Dora’s shoulder, who was standing, and addressed Alicia.
“What does it matter? Don’t trouble your dear kind heads about it. I’m sorry for the poor old chap. He was kind to me when a boy—has done more for me than I ever did for him. I came to see how you two were getting on, and to comfort my heart with a bottle of grandfather’s old Madeira. So let us be happy.”
“What a dear, noble fellow you are, to take it like that,” said Dora, kissing him.
“My dear child,” he replied, with a laugh, “how often am I to tell you that I am not a graven image?”
He did not feel at all noble. On the contrary, very ignominiously disappointed. His iridescent scheme had vanished like a soap-bubble. Geoffrey Colman had intimated, in his letter, with much deprecatory circumlocution, that, on looking lately into his affairs, he found them by no means as prosperous as he had imagined; there were depreciations in lands, unlucky investments, mortgages; in fine, much as he had desired it, he would be able to do nothing at all for Hugh. And then he was practically moribund.
Hugh shrugged off the disappointment. To ask his sisters for a loan out of their comparatively small fortune, upon no security more tangible than the promise of his brotherly efforts to repay them, was absolutely impossible. One comfort remained, for which he thanked the god of chance: the opportune arrival of the letter had effectually precluded his proposal.
He returned to London, where a sudden stress of work awaited him. But the briefs of a criminal advocate, chiefly engaged in small cases, are not marked very high. Moreover, ill-luck attended him. After three of his clients were convicted, he made desperate efforts to secure a favourable verdict for a fourth, and his failure roused his exasperation. His book of poems came out just at this time, to be less glowingly received by literary journals than the two previous ones. They complained of tenuity of thought, over-elaboration; advised, finally, a robuster view, a franker acceptance of the emotional facts of life. He threw his press-cuttings angrily into the waste-paper basket. What did the fools know about it? It was the only sphere in which he could divest himself of his accursed emotionality. He turned to Irene. Yet even her tribute fell short of its customary wholeness. She noticed a tendency towards the symbolism of the modern French school in his new volume. She quoted a line, said it suggested Stéphane Mallarmé. Hugh broke out tempestuously.
“Why don’t you call me a Decadent at once—an artificer of phrase—an exhausted idealist? That’s what your criticism comes to. You feel that I’m on the down grade, and you don’t like to tell me.”
“Oh, no, Hugh!” she expostulated. “Much of it is as exquisite as ever. But I love all your work to be exquisite. It’s only here and there that the meaning is not quite clear and the language appears forced.”
She exerted herself to heal his wounded susceptibilities. But her criticism had sunk deep. It was true. He was on the down grade, in every sphere. Hampered with debt, losing his hold on the sympathies of juries, his poetical vein worked out, he saw exaggerated ruin staring him in the face. He had sowed the wind, was about to reap the inevitable harvest. The high-spirited man, half ashamed of his life, often loses sense of proportion. A Gewitter—or concentration of bad weathers—as the Germans appropriately name a storm, had temporarily gathered about him, and he mistook it for the destroying whirlwind. Meanwhile Minna came to his chambers, wove her Morganesque spells about his senses, provoking, seductive, tempting, sympathetic, instinctively bringing him to the brink of the false depths in her nature, cunningly clinking her money-bags in his ear.
One afternoon he met Gerard at the club in St. James’s Street, to which both belonged. They were to dine together, later, with some friends. The talk had turned to domestic affairs. Irene, not being able as yet to find a suitable home for her rescued waif, was keeping her in the house; in fact was growing attached to the child.
“That’s the devil of it,” said Gerard, “when once Irene attaches herself to a thing, nothing can make her let go.”
“Why should she?” asked Hugh, shortly.
Gerard lay back in his chair and watched the blue wreaths rising from his pipe. Then he said, slowly:
“There are occasions when it’s awkward. Sometimes I wish Irene were not so strenuous.”
“Confound it, man!” cried Hugh. “How can you, of all men, disparage her?”
Irene’s husband looked at him queerly out of the corner of his eye.
“Irene didn’t quite step ready-made out of heaven.
“It’s a precious good thing she didn’t. Otherwise she would not have looked upon you and me.”
“You’re a poet, my friend, and I’m a philosopher.”
“You’re a married man, I suppose you mean, and I am a damned fool. You ought to be separated from Irene for a year or two. Then you would appreciate her.”
“There is no necessity, I assure you,” retorted Gerard, coolly. “And as for you’re being a damned fool—well, I have known you too long not to have my own ideas about it. Anyhow, you are growing gunpowdery—not yourself. What’s wrong?”
“My liver’s out of order,” said Hugh.
An acquaintance came up, and they discussed other matters. But it was only afterwards that Hugh recognised how near to a quarrel he had come with his best friend. A less equable temper than Gerard’s might have flared up in resentment at his angry speeches.
As it was, Gerard seemed to forget the incident, but it aided Hugh to realise his own irritability.
Shortly before Whitsuntide Minna went to Brighton. Her excuse to Hugh was the prospect of a colossal male dinner party, given to half the Hebrew bucket-shop keepers in London. If she remained in town she would have to play Herodias’ daughter at this orgie. As the only condition on which she would consent to do this—that she should receive Goldberg’s head on a charger—was incapable of fulfilment, she was withdrawing from the scene altogether. But she did not go without Hugh’s promise to join her during the Whitsuntide recess.
As soon as the courts rose, he went down. It was lovely weather. Minna looked radiant with youth and happiness. On the evening of his arrival she sat with him on the same seat on the Parade as had witnessed the beginning of her escapade with the young guardsman. She thought thrillingly of the difference between the two experiences. The dusk of the warm evening was closing round them. From the head of the pier came the faint, languorous strains of a waltz. She edged nearer to him, laid her hand on his knee.
“Are you happy that you are here?” The touch and the voice, the perfume of her hair so close to his face, the distant music, the charm of the evening, produced their intoxication.
“Minna!” he whispered.
“Yes?”
The girl’s heart throbbed tumultuously. She had waited weeks and weeks in patience for that note of passion. She hung breathlessly on his lips for their next utterance.
“I give up the waiting. I might strive till Doomsday. I don’t care. Anything you wish. Only, soon.”
“Yes, very soon,” she murmured, with an adorable catch in her voice. “At a registrar’s—almost at once.”
“I’ll give notice to-morrow—Tuesday will be the day.”
He had yielded. There was only one Irene in the world. She was beyond his reach. The only other woman he desired lay ready to his arms. And she had money, money, money—the only talisman for happiness in this world. Yet it was a hateful thought.
Even at this moment he cursed the temptation, fiercely fooled himself into the conviction that it did not enter into his plans. He loved her. It was a love match, pure and simple.
“Would you be willing, Minna,” he asked, in a low voice, “to let the marriage be a secret, until I can put my affairs in order?”
This bramble seemed to catch his honour on its slippery path down hill. He made the proposal, however, diffidently, lest it might hurt the sensitive susceptibilities of race and social station. But she broke into deep, cooing laughter.
“You dear, wise stupid,” she said. “That’s the very plan I have been dreaming over, night and day, for weeks. And I wouldn’t tell you until I felt you would agree. I have worked out every little detail.”
“Expound them all to me.”
She brushed his ear quickly with her lips.
“On Tuesday,” she whispered.
Then she rose quickly from the seat and turned gaily, facing him.
“Let us walk about and be proud of ourselves.”
CHAPTER V
As Minna had taken care to have completed the fifteen days’ residence required of one of the parties for a marriage by license, it was she who, accompanied by Hugh, gave the necessary notice the next day. On the Tuesday in Whitsun week they were married, taking with them, as one witness, Anna Cassaba, whose Jewish conscience Minna had wheedled into complicity. The old woman, bent and thin, her swarthy face wrinkled with a myriad lines, fastened eyes upon them that still glowed with unquenched fires. Her darling’s prince had come. A handsome prince, indeed, for which she pardoned him his Gentile birth. But it took all her love for Minna to reconcile her to the non-religious ceremony. Its bareness shocked her.
The Registrar was an old man in a skull cap, with long, white beard and lack-lustre eyes. He took but indifferent interest in the pair. A wearied resignation showed itself in his manner, as he administered the customary declarations, and pointed with shrivelled finger to the spaces wherein they should sign their names. He reminded one of an old scholar serving out trumpery fiction to the subscribers of a circulating library. A sorry book he was delivering up to them. A trivial pair were they for desiring it. He wished them good luck in a mechanical, far off tone. If they had put the fees in the slot of an automatic machine and drawn out a marriage certificate, the business could not have been more impersonally concluded.
Out in the street again they parted from the old woman, who stood for some time watching them as they went in the direction of the new lodgings that Hugh had engaged on the Parade. She would dearly have loved to shelter them like love-birds in her own nest. But prudence forbade Minna to reveal her secret to Anna’s servants. She sighed as soon as they had disappeared, and turning her slow steps homewards, thought in her old woman’s way of the beautiful children that would be.
The newly wedded pair walked on for a long while in silence. Minna pressed her husband’s arm tightly, waiting for him to speak, half afraid of breaking in upon his thoughts, which she instinctively felt must be deeper than her own. Besides, the bareness of the ceremony had left her with a vague depression. It was a cold, grim episode in the heart of her romance. The walk grew hateful. She longed for the shelter of four walls and the dearer, warming shelter of his arms. Until they were about her, life was a limbo where nothing was defined. She glanced up at him timidly, to see him looking straight before him, his shoulders square, his head thrown back defiantly. Now that she had won him, she faltered over her victory. A sudden dismay depressed her further. His present attitude was an impenetrable wall closing round the inner man. What did she know of him? For a sickening moment her brain was confused by the illusion that he was a total stranger whom some nightmare freak had made master of her destiny. It vanished quickly, but an after-sensation of fear remained. It was so different from the joyous glow that she had anticipated. She felt herself upon the verge of tears. Resentment against him, as if to justify her depression, began to spread like a dull pain around her heart. It was cruel of him to walk as he was doing, in other spheres, apart from her whom he had just made his wife. She withdrew her hand from his arm. He started, caught her hand and replaced it, pressed it closely to him and looked down upon the trouble of her face.
“Poor child,” he said, “you are shaken. Thank goodness it is over.”
The tears began to gather in her eyes. “It was horrid,” she said.
“Well, it will never happen again, sweetheart. Let us forget the dismal old man and think of what lies before us. You must be bright and happy on your wedding day.”
“If you would let me,” said Minna.
“I, dearest?” he exclaimed, with some prickings of self-reproach.
“Yes. Why have you walked all this time without speaking a word to me?”
A tear fell. It roused the man’s tenderness, melted the cold weight of misgiving that had held him silent. He felt that he had behaved brutally to her. She was his wife; nothing could alter it. Cruelly vain now were searchings of heart and conscience. He had caused her unhappiness already. In the revulsion of feeling he broke into passionate speech, bending as he walked, to whisper in her ear. He spoke foolish words of comfort, chided her loverwise for vain fancies, explained his previous mood of seriousness. It was a solemn step they had taken. He was trying to realise that he held her happiness in his hands for the rest of her life. Minna began to brighten.
“It is foolish to cry,” she said, “but I was hungering for a word.”
He laughed gaily, to cheer her. She must laugh, too, like a happy bride, to please her lord. He demanded to see the wedding ring. She held up her gloveless left hand. Her heart grew warm again, as the symbol of their union gleamed before the eyes of both. A little later, she was nestling in his arms, murmuring her content in low dove notes that stole sweetly over his senses.
Thus began their married life. In moments of intoxication they touched some of the lower stars. In sober hours they trod upon indubitable earth, which each pretended to call the floor of paradise. When the Trinity law sittings commenced, Hugh was forced to return to London. On the evening before his departure, they were sitting together on the pier, somewhat silent. Minna sighed her regret. The end of the honeymoon already. Although it was not the poor tragedy:—“Déjà!—Enfin!”—yet Hugh’s responsive, “Yes, already,” was somewhat lacking in spontaneity. Minna marked it, with a little pang of mortification, but she said, indulgently:
“I believe you want to get back to your horrid briefs.”
He did not deny the fact. “I must lose no chances now, dear. Energy is doubly necessary.”
“There ought to be no work in the world,” she answered, in her slow, plaintive way. “I wish we could live just as we have been doing.”
Hugh protested. His blindest flatterer could not call him a fanatical Carlylean in his views of the nobility of toil, but purposeful joining in the great struggle for existence was a condition of moral health. He apologised for the platitude. Minna laughed, dubbed it an old wives’ fable to be ranked with the proverbial but fallacious advantages of early rising. She wanted nothing in life but love. It was its own purpose. It was the heart of life.
“But the heart cannot exist by itself,” he answered, earnestly. “It must have its clothing of flesh, its supply of blood. And the stronger and more vigorous these outer walls of life are, the truer does it beat.”
“I think you only look upon love as one of the outer graces of life and not the heart at all,” she said, pensively. “For you, the heart is something quite different.”
“If it isn’t you, dear, can you tell me what it is?” he asked, tenderly.
She yielded herself to the arm he had slipped behind her.
“I suppose it is I, after all,” she said, with a half sigh. “I hope so. If not I shall be throbbing, quite bare, without my wall of flesh. You will always go on loving me, Hugh? It would kill me now if you didn’t.”
He answered as millions of men have done since the world began: honestly, according to his lights, willing to love her loyally for her soul’s sake, not for her beauty’s. Yet the consciousness of an effort of volition in the matter was disquieting. As usual, he took refuge in impetuous speech.
“I shall love you blindly and passionately till the hour of my death.”
The first morning in London he missed her. His bachelor rooms seemed cold and informal with vague discomfort. His breakfast, served by the porter’s wife, who attended to his domestic needs, was singularly unappetising. The morning paper supported in front of him by the tea-pot proved an inadequate substitute for Minna’s pretty face and sweet, lazy talk. He convinced himself that he loved her truly. But when he reached his chambers he found a brief awaiting him that demanded all his faculties. In half an hour he had forgotten her. When he went out for lunch, it was with a glow of satisfaction at work accomplished. At the restaurant, he met brother barristers, fellow-frequenters of the place, and found unprecedented zest in the keen, masculine talk. In the afternoon at his club, he dropped into a vacant armchair by the side of the editor of a great review, who cast over all who approached him the charm of his culture and the spell of his genius. By the afternoon post came two letters, one from Minna, who had addressed him at the club according to arrangement, the other from Irene. He opened his wife’s first, read it with genuine tenderness. Everything, she wrote, was plunged into utter darkness. She was yearning for to-morrow when she would see her dear love again. A passionate letter with an untrained girl’s lack of reserve. He went to a writing-table, finished a half-written letter of his own and dropped it into the club letter-box. Then he read Irene’s communication. It was a request that he would attend a committee meeting of her Institution at half-past eight. Gerard was engaged and could not come. She reproached him for his absence, was anxious for a talk with him, had addressed him at the club on the chance of catching him.
Long custom had caused him to regard such requests as commands. To please her he would have broken many engagements. At half-past eight he found himself in the committee room, and seated at the table by the side of Irene who had reserved a place for him. The business concluded, they went back to Sunnington together by the District Railway.
“What have you been doing with yourself all this time?” she said, as soon as they were settled comfortably in the train.
“Oh, lotus-eating, generally,” he replied.
“I thought so.”
“Why?”
“It is said to impair the memory. You seem to have forgotten all about us.”
“I accept the rebuke,” he answered, meekly. “Now tell me all that I have been oblivious of.”
She gave him her little budget of news, aware that he would give no further information as to his own doings. She spoke of the waif she had rescued.
“You have no idea how strong and bonny she looks. I have been canvassing for votes for the St. Katherine schools. The election is next week. I think she’ll get in.”
“But I had an idea you were going to keep her,” said Hugh.
“So had I. I shall miss her dreadfully. It would be so nice to adopt a child. But Gerard thought this would be better for her—and he’s so wise, you know.”
The idea of her husband’s goodness and wisdom brought tenderness into her eyes, changing her expression to one of wonderful simplicity. Hugh made no reply, but leaned back and watched her across the compartment which they alone occupied. The central light, that fell full upon her, showed nothing, in her face, of the practical, capable woman of affairs, only the soft charm of girlhood, that lingered still in her eight and twenty years. Presently she bent forward.
“Why do you look at me like that?” she asked, smiling.
“I was dipping into the poem of your face, and reading my favourite bits,” he replied, half seriously.
“What are they?”
“Oh, I am not going to talk Shakespearian comedy to you,” he answered, laughing. “So you needn’t expect it.”
The jest put her into a mood of light frivolity. They discussed faces. Some were sermons, some were Hymns, Ancient and Modern, some were comic operas, some were post-office directories, whilst others were the collected works of minor poets. She wondered what her own was. Hugh suggested an ode. The comparison pleased her and she thanked him prettily. Really, she had been a most ugly child. Just as if she had been at a feast of features and stolen the scraps. The foolish chat took them to Sunnington. He walked with her as far as the gate of her house.
“When are you coming to dinner?”
“The day after to-morrow,” he said, after a moment’s reflection.
He shook hands with her and turned homeward with a buoyant step. He felt happy, exhilarated, a different man from the bereaved and depressed bridegroom who had set out in the morning. The day had opened with a wretched sense of loss; it closed with a glad consciousness of gain. He wondered at the change. The fact was that the small but varied incidents of the day, bringing him into close touch with the external world of work, action, thought and sympathy, had stimulated a somewhat flagging moral energy. He was conscious of this as he dwelt upon them. Yes, these were the things that made life worth the living. These together formed the heart of life. Without them he would perish of inanition. Love, even sweet, wedded love a fortnight old, was but the fringe, the grace, the colour, the what you will of adornment of life; but its heart—ah, no! He was honest and dishonest with himself at once. The conviction that he had spent his first day of absence from his wife, in whole-hearted enjoyment of the outer world, was too absolute for him to accept it otherwise than frankly. But deep down in his soul were warning glimmerings of a truth to which he defiantly blinded his eyes—glimmerings that duskly revealed a love that might be the heart of life, rich, throbbing, vitalising, such as his feelings for Minna were not.
He drew her letter from his pocket and read it through again. His heart smote him sorely for not feeling more miserable. Instinctively he conjured up the hours of sweet intoxication and caught at their lingering glamour.
“Poor little girl,” he said aloud, rising to his feet. “How wretched she must be at this moment.”
He sat down at his writing-table.
“Sweet little wife,” he began, “I would that you were with me now.” And, for the hour, he was quite sincere.
CHAPTER VI
“I HAVE something serious to say to you, my daughter.”
The speaker was Israel Hart. The place, his study, a commodious apartment overlooking the front drive, of which the most striking features were a great library table and a solid iron safe. The time was a mid-autumn Sunday afternoon. A cheerful fire showed up the warmth of a Turkey carpet, and cast flickering gleams upon the varnished surfaces of the three oil pictures on the walls. The money-lender was sitting at the table, with some correspondence in front of him, when he greeted Minna, who had come in obedience to a summons, with this announcement. He was a man of over sixty, stout and loose-featured, with grizzling hair and beard. His race was clearly written on his countenance, which bore, too, that stamp of his calling which can best be suggested negatively as an absence of spirituality. The absorbing pursuit of money hardens the eyes and leaves the lower part of the face undetermined. One meets a thousand such, morning and evening, in suburban trains. Yet the face of Israel Hart was not without marks of integrity and even of a certain benevolence.
Minna crossed the room slowly to the fireplace and rested one small shoe on the fender.
“Yes, papa?”
“I have here a formal letter from my good friend, Simeon Goldberg, which I wish you to read.”
“About marrying me?”
“Yes. It deals exclusively with the subject.”
“What is the use of my reading the letter?” she said, without shifting her attitude, and ignoring the letter which her father had wheeled round in his chair in order to offer her. “I can guess what’s in it. Oh, dear! Why does he worry?”
“I desire you to read it, Minna,” said her father. She moved, took it from him, read it nonchalantly, with a contemptuous smile, and threw it, with a woman’s charming awkwardness in throwing, upon the table.
“I might be shares in a new company he was asking you for. Do I look like a scrip or a bond? I won’t have him, of course, but when you write to him, tell him that that’s not the way to win a woman with blood in her veins.”
“You’re a foolish girl, Minna. If you have any kind of regard for my wishes you will give this matter further consideration. Where will you, Minna Hart, find a better match?”
“Oh, in a penny box!” she cried, flippantly.
“At least it would have some latent fire at the end of it!”
“You will regret it,” said her father.
“It will be something to do, then. Tell him I’ll try. It may soothe his vanity.”
“Come here, my daughter,” said the old man.
She moved obediently to his side and put her hand in his that was held open.
“You and I have managed to drift quite apart, but I am your father and must think for you. What are you going to do, when I am gone, if you don’t get some good man to take care of you?”
She looked at him rather pityingly. It was such a futile question. Her undeveloped sympathies saw only its ludicrous, not its pathetic side.
“Oh, I shall marry some day,” she said, lightly. “You need have no fear of that.”
“Ay. But whom?”
She shrugged her shoulders and tapped her toe on the carpet with a shade of irritation. It was ridiculous to stand there like a tableau vivant, holding her father’s hand.
“Think of Simeon Goldberg, a good friend, a man not so careless in observance of the Law as we—but still of the Reformed faith—and worth”—his voice grew unconsciously reverential—“five hundred thousand pounds, if he’s worth a penny.”
The girl’s eyes flashed for a second, then grew again contemptuous.
“It’s an absolute impossibility. You must let this drop, papa. We don’t live in the Middle Ages when you could put me on bread and water and lock me up until I consented; or in patriarchal times, when you could curse me for disobeying you—so why discuss the matter further? I shall marry in my own good time. I am not the sort that old maids are made of.”
He released her hand and turned towards the table. “Very well,” he said, taking up a pen, “I will not force you. But remember that your choice among our people is limited.”
“I might choose outside them,” she said, pausing in her lazy walk towards the door.
Israel Hart started round in the chair and bent his brows upon her. She tried saucily to meet his eyes, but hers sank abashed.
“My daughter,” he said, sternly. “Let me never hear you say such a thing again, even in jest. Remember you are a Jewess.”
She stood for a moment or two twitching her fingers, longing to retort. But she did not dare. It was only when she found herself outside his door that she gave vent to the passionate outburst:
“Would to God the accursed race had perished with the other ten tribes!”
She went upstairs to her bedroom with anger and foreboding at her heart, and put on hat and jacket, casting mere mechanical glances at the mirror, for the sake of adjustment. Six months before, her dressing to meet Hugh had been a matter of sweet and import and coquetry. She looked, however, very pretty in her dark-blue costume, with dainty ruffle at her throat when she met him three-quarters of an hour later in Kensington Gardens. He was walking moodily up and down the broad walk, near their appointed meeting place; but when he caught sight of her he quickened his step.
“I am sorry I’m late,” she said, with some petulance; “but when you will make me take these long journeys——”
“It is not my fault, dear,” he said, casually. “I told you I was lunching at Lancaster Gate and was going to put in a call near by before dinner. It was my only hour.”
“Oh, well, never mind. I’m here now. It was papa who kept me. I’ve been discussing matrimony with him.”
“In the abstract, or——”
“Both. It began with the all too concrete Goldberg. Refusing him, I’m to marry an abstract Jew or the curse of Abraham will fall upon me.”
“Be more precise, if you don’t mind,” he said seriously.
She gave him a detailed account of the conversation, picturesquely satiric. Hugh listened sombrely, holding his stick with both hands behind his back, as they strolled slowly down among the fallen leaves.
“So he’ll never consent,” she concluded. “I suppose we’ll have to wait until—well—the ordinary way of nature. He’s an old man.”
“We mustn’t think of that, my child,” said Hugh, with some gentleness.
“I don’t see why not. It will solve all our difficulties.”
“What a mixture of flint and flesh you are, Minna,” he said, regarding her curiously.
“I never pretend to love where I don’t,” she replied. “And when people thwart me I begin to dislike.”
They walked on a little in silence, turned and retraced their steps. The dusk began to gather round them and the autumn mist to hang upon the thinning branches. Minna shivered a little and took his arm.
“Why don’t you say something kind to me, Hugh dear?” she said, plaintively.
He stooped and kissed her, and they went on their way less far apart than before. Presently she asked him where he was going to dine.
“At the Merriams.”
“I wish to goodness you wouldn’t!” she exclaimed, petulantly.
“My dear girl, because I am secretly married to you, I am not going to give up my dearest and oldest friends.”
“I hate them. You know I do.”
“It’s a pity, my dear, but it can’t be helped. And haven’t we discussed this rather too often lately?”
“You do very little to please me,” she said.
“I would do anything in reason.”
“If you loved me, you would not think of reason.”
“Look here, Minna,” said Hugh, losing patience, “what do you want? Of course I love you. But as things are, I must lead my own life. If you were always with me, there would be modifications—naturally. I am getting as tired of this half and half state as you are. I was going soon to approach your father on the subject. But what you have told me this afternoon has somewhat disturbed my plans. We must wait a little longer. But in the meantime——”
“I don’t mind waiting at all,” she interrupted. “It isn’t that.”
“Well, what is it, dear, that I can do for you?”
“I see so little of you—and you don’t seem to care. If you go on like this, I feel I shall grow to dislike you—and you are my husband—and oh, darling, I want you so sometimes!”
All the seductive richness in her voice toned the last appeal. Hugh’s conscience pricked him. He had of late felt himself drifting far from her and had made no efforts to reapproach. Now, however, the pathetic and languorous appeal caused him to bend his head very tenderly.
“Tell me what to do, sweetheart.”
“Ah! you know,” she murmured.
“The window?”
She pressed his arm tightly. “I shall go to sleep so happy.”
So he promised and the girl’s face brightened. Soon afterwards they parted. Minna drove homewards in a cab, kissing her hand to him as it moved off, and Hugh walked along towards Lancaster Gate, deep in troubled thought. It was an ill-starred marriage, already he regretted his folly and his weakness. If they had shared the same home, living a common life, he felt that he could have maintained a constantly tender attitude towards her, by means of a passive acceptance of his lot. But in the present circumstances, the nature of things demanded of him active demonstration. The necessary intriguing was repugnant to him. To visit his wife like a thief in the night was an act from which he shrank as from something mean and degrading. A passionate love would have swept away pettier feelings. It is only such a love that laughs at locksmiths; a waning passion be-bestows on them irritable curses. The prospect of entering The Lindens, late at night, by a window which Minna secretly unlatched, and creeping thief-wise up the stairs to her apartments, had lost its edge of romance. He had promised, however, and it became a disagreeable duty.
It damped his spirits for the evening. Even Irene could not cheer him. Conversation degenerated into futile bar gossip between Gerard and himself, which they protracted sleepily till a late hour. When at last he found himself with Minna, who had taken infinite pains to make her beauty as attractive as possible, she reopened, with feminine inconsistency, the chapter of the Merriams and sent him away, after a little, angry and disheartened.
His unqualified refusal to allow his regard for her to affect his relations with his friends gradually magnified itself, through the girl’s jealousy, into a great wrong. Once at the turn of a road she met him with them face to face. The after-glow of laughter was in Irene’s eyes. Minna acknowledged their salute with sullen stiffness, and when Hugh fell back a pace and turned to her with outstretched hand, she dismissed him angrily. Her face wore the hardened expression he had seen on it once before. Then he had attributed it to strength. But now it seemed to reveal only sulky ill-breeding. A phrase defining her flashed through his mind. She looked common.
“What a peculiarly disagreeable young woman,” said Gerard, as he rejoined his friends.
Hugh winced. Although not ill pleased to see that Gerard had no suspicions of the relations between himself and Minna, the outspoken judgment on his wife was anything but gratifying.
He struggled, however, to atone by gentleness for his grievous fault in marrying her. But it was a futile task to try to convince a jealous, untrained girl, who reasoned from her appetites and argued from her passions. At last he gave it up with a helpless gesture of impatience.
“It seems beyond your nature to comprehend the bond between the Merriams and myself,” he said, one day.
She laughed scornfully. “It would appeal to the meanest understanding. ‘A man and his wife and the Tertium Quid.’”
It was the first time she had made such an insinuation. A second passed before he could quite realise the scope of her words. Then the anger blazed in his eyes and the girl shrank back frightened.
“If you ever say such a silly and wicked thing again,” he said, “I will not speak to you again as long as I live.”
He left her there and then, in the middle of the road, and returned homewards with angry strides. The first available post brought him a repentant letter. A semblance of harmony was re-established. Thenceforward Minna kept silence concerning Irene, but she none the less harboured a bitter resentment against her husband. The habit of brooding over grievances grew into a disastrous occupation. They rarely spent a non-recriminative hour. The issue of dispute, no longer Irene, became in turns his work, his social engagements his neglect, his aloofness, even his Gentile birth and inherited instincts.
And so the dreary months wore on. At last certain horrible fears that had been vaguely haunting the girl’s ignorance developed into certainties. The prospect of maternity was inexpressibly repugnant to her idle, sensuous nature. The thought became a nightmare. So bitterly did she resent Hugh’s attitude towards her, that she shrank from telling him. At last she made up her mind, wrote to him asking for an interview at his chambers. He replied that he would be engaged in court at the time she mentioned, and regretted that he could not see her until the next day. Quite an affectionate and courteous letter from a busy and unsuspecting man. But it sent her into an unreasoning passion of anger. She tore the letter into tiny fragments, ordered her boxes to be packed and went off forthwith to Brighton.
It was only a fortnight afterwards that Hugh received a letter from Anna Cassaba telling of an accident, illness and a premature end of troubles. In consternation he took the first train down. Minna refused to see him. Old Anna was in great distress. Hugh’s handsome face and proud bearing had won her heart. To act the stern janitress taxed all her love for her darling. She sought to alleviate his disappointment, suggested that women often had strange, unaccountable fancies and aversions. Better to leave the poor child alone for the present. When she recovered she would be her own gay self again—forget the irrational dislike she had conceived for him, love him with all her old love and there would yet be a bonny babe of theirs for old Anna to dandle on her knees before she died.
The man’s pity and tenderness were wonderfully quickened. If she had willed, he would have folded her in his arms and made her sick bed sweet. He scribbled a hasty line.
“Darling—I am grieved to the heart. Your husband loves you, dear, with a fresher love. Let me tell you so—and tell you to get well, when all things will be different and dear again.”
The old woman took the note to Minna. He crept up to the bedroom door, listened, heard the faint rustle of the paper in her hands, and then came her voice, irritable and peevish:
“Tell him to go away and let me be.”
So Hugh returned to London heavy-hearted, with a gnawing sense of having ruined the girl’s life. The weeks went past. Early in the New Year Minna returned to her father’s house, looking ill and worn. Israel noticed the change, grew solicitous as to her well-being. Why had she not told him she had been poorly at Brighton? He would have given her all the care and nursing that money could provide. His kind words caused her a faint stirring of emotion—an adumbration of a tenderness that might have been; and as the loneliness and aimlessness of her life grew more oppressive, an instinct of self-preservation drew her nearer to his side. The horror of her illness still clung to her. It was a kind of Maccabre dance over her dead passion. Yet she was conscious of wrong done to Hugh, and received him kindly when he came to see her one afternoon shortly after her return. He was anxious to make reparation.
“We are bound together for the rest of our lives, dear,” he said. “Perhaps it was a mistake to begin with—and certainly the secrecy has been a terrible blunder. Let us brave it all out now and be done with it, and start life afresh.”
“Do you think we can ever be happy again together?”
“My dear little girl, I have wronged you—but I will try to make amends. I have a certain position in society—even if you don’t love me, your life will be brighter than it is now.”
She leaned back in one of her indolent attitudes. “Perhaps. Not now. I am afraid of my father. He might curse me—and that would be annoying.” Hugh paused, somewhat baffled at this new idea. “They will be merely words of anger,” he replied. “It will not be long lived.”
But she shook her head. It was better to wait. Perhaps she might gradually influence him—and then all would be smooth sailing. Hugh saw an element of reason in her proposal, and for a time returned to his briefs. For his own sake, he was not loth to postpone the announcement. The debt to Israel weighed heavily upon his conscience. But as long as his marriage remained a secret, and as long as his uncle lived, he could spare himself the galling reproach of trickery. Meanwhile his practice was showing signs of improvement. A brilliant cast might land him at a bound into affluence, and then he could raise the money, cry quits with the urbane and gentle mannered Shylock on the score of his ducats, and brave his reproaches on the score of his daughter. Thus doth hope spring eternal in the human breast.
But unforeseen action on the part of old Anna Cassaba suddenly hastened events. She let her house in Brighton for an indefinite period, and announced her return to Smyrna. A lawsuit had arisen over some property which Minna’s Syrian mother had bequeathed to the old nurse, and which formed the chief source of her comfortable income. Anna was summoned to look after her interests. The nostalgia of her native East, which she had not visited for over twenty years, grew strong upon her. She could not tell how long she might be absent from England.
Minna contemplated her departure with sinking heart. Anna was the saving spar to which she clung. Sheltering her, temporarily, in her own dressing-room at The Lindens, Minna wept in her arms and implored a speedy return. The old nurse cried, too, and spoke of death, as old folks will, and comforted her in such wise that at last the girl grew desperate in her anticipated desolation. The result was a sudden determination that Hugh should speak.
“I have come to the end of my tether,” she said to him. “Anything would be better than this. I’ll get papa to ask you to dinner. He likes you, and has been enquiring why you come so seldom now.”
In the course of a day or two he received and accepted an invitation for the following Monday. He felt happier. The die was cast. If Hart called him a scamp for thus tricking him out of five thousand pounds, he would bear it as an atoning humiliation for Minna’s sake. He prepared to go through the ordeal with an air of disdain. But in his category of scorn he himself was included.