She wrote to him, care of the theatre. The first envelope she had to
tear up because it was inadvertently addressed to Isaac Levinsky.
Her letter was a gush of joy at finding her dear Isaac, of pride in
his wonderful position. Who would have dreamed a lithographer's
apprentice would arrive at leading the fashions among the nobility and
gentry? But she had always believed in his talents; she had always
treasured the water-colour he had made of her, and it hung in the
parlour behind the haberdasher's shop into which she had married. He,
too, was married, they had imagined, and gone to America. But perhaps
he _was_ married, although in England. Would he not tell her? Of
course, his parents had cast him out of their hearts, though she had
heard mother call out his name in her sleep. But she herself thought
of him very often, and perhaps he would let her come to see him. She
would come very quietly when the grand people were not there, nor
would she ever let out that he was a Jew, or not born in Brazil.
Father was still pretty strong, thank God, but mother was rather
ailing. Hoping to see him soon, she remained his loving Miriam.
She waited eagerly for his answer. Day followed day, but none came.
When the days passed into weeks, she began to lose hope; but it was
not till _The Whirligig_, which she followed in the advertisement
columns, was taken off after a briefer run than the first night seemed
to augur, that she felt with curious conclusiveness that her letter
would go unanswered. Perhaps even it had miscarried. But it was now
not difficult to hunt out Ethelred P. Wyndhurst's address, and she
wrote him anew.
Still the same wounding silence. After the lapse of a month, she
understood that what he had written in Hebrew was final; that he had
cut himself free once and forever from the swaddling coils of
gabardine, and would not be dragged back even within touch of its hem.
She wept over her second loss of him, but the persistent thought of
him had brought back many tender childish images, and it seemed
incredible that she would never really creep into his life again. He
had permanently enlarged her horizon, and she continued to follow his
career in the papers, worshipping it as it loomed grandiose through
her haze of ignorance. Gradually she began to boast of it in her more
English circles, and so in course of time it became known to all but
the parents that the lost Isaac was a shining light in high
heathendom, and a vast secret admiration mingled with the contempt of
the Ghetto for Ethelred P. Wyndhurst.
V
In high heathendom a vast secret contempt mingled with the admiration
for Ethelred P. Wyndhurst. He had, it is true, a certain vogue, but
behind his back he was called a Jew. He did not deserve the stigma in
so far as it might have implied financial prosperity. His numerous
talents had only availed to prevent one another from being seriously
cultivated. He had had a little success at first with flamboyant
pictures, badly drawn, and well paragraphed; he had written tender
verses for music, and made quiet love to ugly and unhappy society
ladies; he was an assiduous first-nighter, and was suspected of
writing dramatic criticisms, even of his own comedy. And in that
undefined social segment where Kensington and Bohemia intersect, he
was a familiar figure (a too familiar figure, old fogies grumbled)
with an unenviable reputation as a diner-out--for the sake of the
dinner.
Yet some of the people who called him "sponge" were not averse from
imbibing his own liquids when he himself played the gracious host. He
was appearing in that role one Sunday evening before a motley assembly
in his dramatically furnished studio, nay, he was in the very act of
biting into a sandwich scrupulously compounded with ham, when a
telegram was handed to him.
"Another of those blessed actresses crying off," he said. "I wonder
how they ever manage to take up their cues!"
Then his face changed as he hurriedly crumpled up the pinkish paper.
"Mother is dying. No hope. She cries to see you. Have told her you are
in London. Father consents. Come at once.--MIRIAM."
He put the crumpled paper to the gas and lit a new cigarette with it.
"As I thought," he said, smiling. "When a woman is an actress as well
as a woman--"