The full sum of me
Is an untutored girl, unschooled, unpractised.
_Merchant of Venice._
Judith Quixano had lived with the Leunigers ever since she was fifteen
years old.
Her mother, Israel Leuniger’s sister, had been thought to do very well
for herself when she married Joshua Quixano, who came of a family of
Portuguese merchants, the _vieille noblesse_ of the Jewish community.
That was before the days of Leuniger’s prosperity; now here, as
elsewhere, the prestige of birth had dwindled, that of money had
increased. The Quixanos were a large family, and they had grown poorer
with the years; very gratefully did they welcome the offer of the rich
uncle to adopt their eldest daughter.
So Judith had been borne away from the little crowded house in a dreary
region lying somewhere between Westbourne Park and Maida Vale to the
splendours of Kensington Palace Gardens.
Here she had shared everything with her cousin Rose: the French and
German governesses, the expensive music lessons, the useless,
pretentious “finishing” lessons from innumerable masters.
Later on, the girls, who were about of an age, had gone together into
such society as their set afforded; and here, again, no difference had
been made between them. The gowns and bonnets of Rose were neither more
splendid nor more abundant than those of her poor relation, nor her
invitations to parties more numerous.
Rose, it is true, had a fortune of £50,000; but it was a matter of
common knowledge that her uncle would settle £5000 on Judith when she
married.
The cousins were good friends after a fashion. Rose was a materialist to
her fingers’ ends; she was lacking in the finer feelings, perhaps even
in the finer honesties. But on the other hand she was easy to live with,
good-tempered, good-natured, high-spirited; qualities which cover a
multitude of sins.
It will be seen that in their own fashion, and according to their own
lights, the Leunigers had been very kind to Judith. She had no ground
for complaint; nor indeed was there anything but gratitude in her
thoughts of them. If, at times, she was discontented, she was only
vaguely aware of her own discontent. To rail at fate, to cry out against
the gods, were amusements she left to such people as Esther and Leo, for
whom, in her quiet way, she had considerable contempt.
But the life, the position, the atmosphere, though she knew it not, were
repressive ones. This woman, with her beauty, her intelligence, her
power of feeling, saw herself merely as one of a vast crowd of girls
awaiting their promotion by marriage.
She had, it is true, the advantage of good looks; on the other hand she
was, comparatively speaking, portionless; and the marriageable Jew, as
Esther was fond of saying, is even rarer and shyer than the marriageable
Gentile.
To marry a Gentile would have been quite out of the question for her.
Mr. Leuniger, thorough-going pagan as he was, would have set his foot
mercilessly on such an arrangement; it would not have seemed to him
respectable. He was no stickler for forms and ceremonies; though while
old Solomon lived a certain amount of observance of them was necessary;
you need only marry a Jew and be buried at Willesden or Ball’s Pond; the
rest would take care of itself.
But, her uncle’s views apart, Judith’s opportunities for uniting herself
to an alien were small.
The Leunigers had of course their Gentile acquaintance, chiefly people
of the sham “smart,” pseudo-fashionable variety, whose parties at
Bayswater or South Kensington they attended. But the business of their
lives, its main interests, lay almost entirely within the tribal limits.
It was as Hebrews of the Hebrews that Solomon Sachs and his son-in-law
took their stand.
In the Community, with its innumerable trivial class differences, its
sets within sets, its fine-drawn distinctions of caste, utterly
incomprehensible to an outsider, they held a good, though not the best
position. They were, as yet, socially on their promotion. The Sachses
and the Leunigers, in their elder branches, troubled themselves, as we
have seen, little enough about their relations to the outer world; but
the younger members of the family, Reuben, Leo, even Adelaide and Esther
in their own crude fashion, showed symptoms of a desire to strike out
from the tribal duck-pond into the wider and deeper waters of society.
Such symptoms, their position and training considered, were of course,
inevitable; and the elders looked on with pride and approval, not
understanding indeed the full meaning of the change.
But as for Judith Quixano, and for many women placed as she, it is
difficult to conceive a training, an existence, more curiously limited,
more completely provincial than hers. Her outlook on life was of the
narrowest; of the world, of London, of society beyond her own set, it
may be said that she had seen nothing at first hand; had looked at it
all, not with her own eyes, but with the eyes of Reuben Sachs.
She could scarcely remember the time when she and Reuben had not been
friends. Ever since she was a little girl in the schoolroom, and he a
charming lad in his first terms at the University, he had thought it
worth while to talk to her, to confide to her his hopes, plans and
ambitions; to direct her reading and lend her books.
Books were a luxury in the Leuniger household. We all have our
economies, even the richest of us; and the Leunigers, who begrudged no
money for food, clothes or furniture, who went constantly into the
stalls of the theatre, without considering the expense, regarded every
shilling spent on books as pure extravagance.
Reuben indeed was the only person who had any conception of Judith’s
possibilities, or, of those surrounding her, who even estimated at its
full her rich and stately beauty. Their friendship, unusual enough in a
society which retains, in relation to women at least, so many traces of
orientalism, had sprung up at first unnoticed in the intimacy of family
life.
It was not till the last year or two that it had attracted any serious
attention. Adelaide Cohen openly did everything in her power to check
it; and even Mrs. Sachs, with her rooted belief in her son’s discretion,
her conviction that he would never fail to act up to his creed of doing
the very best for himself, grew anxious at times, and was almost glad
of the chance which had sent him off to the antipodes.
Aloud to her daughter, she scouted the notion of any serious cause for
alarm.
“It is for the girl’s sake I am sorry. That sort of thing does a girl a
great deal of harm. It is time she was married.”
“She has no money. Very likely she won’t marry at all,” cried Adelaide,
who was dyspeptic and subject to fits of bad temper.
Meanwhile Judith, acquiescent, receptive, appreciative, took the good
things this friendship offered her, and shut her eyes to the future.
Not, as she believed, that she ever for a moment deceived herself. That
would scarcely have been possible in the atmosphere in which she
breathed.
She had known from the beginning, how could she fail to know? that
Reuben must do great things for himself in every relation of life; must
ultimately climb to inaccessible heights where she could not hope to
follow.
Her pride and her humility went hand in hand, and she prided herself on
her own good sense which made any mistake in the matter impossible. And
that he was so sensible, was what she particularly admired in Reuben.
Leo was clever, she knew; and Esther after a fashion; but these two
people had an uncomfortable, eccentric, undignified method of setting
about things, from the way they did their hair, upwards.
But Reuben had sacrificed none of his dignity as a human being to his
cleverness; he was eminently normal, though cleverer than any one she
knew.
For the long-haired type of man, the professional person of genius, this
thorough-going Philistine, this conservative ingrain, had no tolerance
whatever. She never could understand the mania among some of the girls
of her set, Rose Leuniger included, for the second-rate actors,
musicians, and professional reciters with whom they came into occasional
contact at parties.
She had, it is seen, distinct if unformulated notions as to the sanity
of true genius.
And she herself? She was so sensible, oh, she was thoroughly sensible
and matter-of-fact!
Esther fell in love half-a-dozen times a season, loudly bewailing
herself throughout. Even Rose was not without her _affairs de cœur_; but
she, Judith, was utterly free from such sentimental aberrations.
That was why perhaps a man like Reuben, who had not much opinion of
women in general, considering them creatures easily snared, should find
it possible to make a friend of her.
She understood perfectly Adelaide’s snubs, Mrs. Sachs’s repressive
attitude, Esther’s clumsily veiled warnings.
She understood and was indignant. Did they think her such a fool; a
person incapable of friendship with a man without misinterpretation of
his motives?
But Reuben knew that it was not so; and therein of course lay her
strength and her consolation.
It was this openly matter-of-fact attitude of hers which had not only
added piquancy to his intercourse with her, but had made Reuben less
careful with her than he would otherwise have been.
He had no wish to hurt the girl, either as regarded her feelings or her
prospects; nor was the danger, he told himself, a serious one.
She liked him immensely, of course, but she was unsentimental, like most
women of her race, and would settle down happily enough when the time
came.
He told himself these things with a secret, pleasant consciousness of a
subtler element in their relationship; of unsounded depths in the nature
of this girl who trusted him so completely, and whom he had so
completely in hand. Nor did he hide from himself that she charmed him
and pleased his taste as no other woman had ever done.
A man does not so easily deceive himself in these matters, and during
the last year or two he had been fully aware of a quickening in his
sentiments towards her.
Yes, Reuben knew by now that he was in love with Judith Quixano. The
situation was full of delights, of dangers, of pains and pleasantnesses.
A disturbing element in the serene course of his existence, it added a
charm to existence of which he was in no haste to be rid.