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.”