Children of the Ghetto Part 97

Why should he disturb her anew?

"Ah, well, I'm glad you allow me a little goodness," she said sarcastically. "It is quite evident how you have drifted from orthodoxy.

Strange result of _The Flag of Judah_! Started to convert me, it has ended by alienating you--its editor--from the true faith. Oh, the irony of circ.u.mstance! But don't look so glum. It has fulfilled its mission all the same; it _has_ converted me--I will confess it to you." Her face grew grave, her tones earnest "So I haven't an atom of sympathy with your broader att.i.tude. I am full of longing for the old impossible Judaism."

His face took on a look of anxious solicitude. He was uncertain whether she spoke ironically or seriously. Only one thing was certain--that she was slipping from him again. She seemed so complex, paradoxical, elusive--and yet growing every moment more dear and desirable.

"Where are you living?" he asked abruptly. "It doesn't matter where,"

she answered. "I sail for America in three weeks."

The world seemed suddenly empty. It was hopeless, then--she was almost in his grasp, yet he could not hold her. Some greater force was sweeping her into strange alien solitudes. A storm of protest raged in his heart--all he had meant to say to her rose to his lips, but he only said, "Must you go?"

"I must. My little sister marries. I have timed my visit so as to arrive just for the wedding--like a fairy G.o.dmother." She smiled wistfully.

"Then you will live with your people, I suppose?"

"I suppose so. I dare say I shall become quite good again. Ah, your new Judaisms will never appeal like the old, with all its imperfections.

They will never keep the race together through shine and shade as that did. They do but stave off the inevitable dissolution. It is beautiful--that old childlike faith in the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, that patient waiting through the centuries for the Messiah who even to you, I dare say, is a mere symbol." Again the wistful look lit up her eyes. "That's what you rich people will never understand--it doesn't seem to go with dinners in seven courses, somehow."

"Oh, but I do understand," he protested. "It's what I told Strelitski, who is all for intellect in religion. He is going to America, too," he said, with a sudden pang of jealous apprehension.

"On a holiday?"

"No; he is going to resign his ministry here."

"What! Has he got a better offer from America?"

"Still so cruel to him," he said reprovingly. "He is resigning for conscience' sake."

"After all these years?" she queried sarcastically.

"Miss Ansell, you wrong him! He was not happy in his position. You were right so far. But he cannot endure his shackles any longer. And it is you who have inspired him to break them."

"I?" she exclaimed, startled.

"Yes, I told him why you had left Mrs. Henry Goldsmith's--it seemed to act like an electrical stimulus. Then and there he made me write a paragraph announcing his resignation. It will appear to-morrow."

Esther's eyes filled with soft light. She walked on in silence; then, noticing she had automatically walked too much in the direction of her place of concealment, she came to an abrupt stop.

"We must part here," she said. "If I ever come across my old shepherd in America, I will be nicer to him. It is really quite heroic of him--you must have exaggerated my own petty sacrifice alarmingly if it really supplied him with inspiration. What is he going to do in America?"

"To preach a universal Judaism. He is a born idealist; his ideas have always such a magnificent sweep. Years ago he wanted all the Jews to return to Palestine."

Esther smiled faintly, not at Strelitski, but at Raphael's calling another man an idealist. She had never yet done justice to the strain of common-sense that saved him from being a great man; he and the new Strelitski were of one breed to her.

"He will make Jews no happier and Christians no wiser," she said sceptically. "The great populations will sweep on, as little affected by the Jews as this crowd by you and me. The world will not go back on itself--rather will Christianity transform itself and take the credit.

We are such a handful of outsiders. Judaism--old or new--is a forlorn hope."

"The forlorn hope will yet save the world," he answered quietly, "but it has first to be saved to the world."

"Be happy in your hope," she said gently. "Good-bye." She held out her little hand. He had no option but to take it.

"But we are not going to part like this," he said desperately. "I shall see you again before you go to America?"

"No, why should you?"

"Because I love you," rose to his lips. But the avowal seemed too plump.

He prevaricated by retorting, "Why should I not?"

"Because I fear you," was in her heart, but nothing rose to her lips. He looked into her eyes to read an answer there, but she dropped them. He saw his opportunity.

"Why should I not?" he repeated.

"Your time is valuable," she said faintly.

"I could not spend it better than with you," he answered boldly.

"Please don't insist," she said in distress.

"But I shall; I am your friend. So far as I know, you are lonely. If you are bent upon going away, why deny me the pleasure of the society I am about to lose for ever?"

"Oh, how can you call it a pleasure--such poor melancholy company as I am!"

"Such poor melancholy company that I came expressly to seek it, for some one told me you were at the Museum. Such poor melancholy company that if I am robbed of it life will be a blank."

He had not let go her hand; his tones were low and pa.s.sionate; the heedless traffic of the sultry London street was all about them.

Esther trembled from head to foot; she could not look at him. There was no mistaking his meaning now; her breast was a whirl of delicious pain.

But in proportion as the happiness at her beck and call dazzled her, so she recoiled from it. Bent on self-effacement, attuned to the peace of despair, she almost resented the solicitation to be happy; she had suffered so much that she had grown to think suffering her natural element, out of which she could not breathe; she was almost in love with misery. And in so sad a world was there not something ign.o.ble about happiness, a selfish aloofness from the life of humanity? And, illogically blent with this questioning, and strengthening her recoil, was an obstinate conviction that there could never be happiness for her, a being of ignominious birth, without roots in life, futile, shadowy, out of relation to the tangible solidities of ordinary existence. To offer her a warm fireside seemed to be to tempt her to be false to something--she knew not what. Perhaps it was because the warm fireside was in the circle she had quitted, and her heart was yet bitter against it, finding no palliative even in the thought of a triumphant return.

She did not belong to it; she was not of Raphael's world. But she felt grateful to the point of tears for his incomprehensible love for a plain, penniless, low-born girl. Surely, it was only his chivalry. Other men had not found her attractive. Sidney had not; Levi only fancied himself in love. And yet beneath all her humility was a sense of being loved for the best in her, for the hidden qualities Raphael alone had the insight to divine. She could never think so meanly of herself or of humanity again. He had helped and strengthened her for her lonely future; the remembrance of him would always be an inspiration, and a reminder of the n.o.bler side of human nature.

All this contradictory medley of thought and feeling occupied but a few seconds of consciousness. She answered him without any perceptible pause, lightly enough.

"Really, Mr. Leon, I don't expect _you_ to say such things. Why should we be so conventional, you and I? How can your life be a blank, with Judaism yet to be saved?"

"Who am I to save Judaism? I want to save you," he said pa.s.sionately.

"What a descent! For heaven's sake, stick to your earlier ambition!"

"No, the two are one to me. Somehow you seem to stand for Judaism, too.

I cannot disentwine my hopes; I have come to conceive your life as an allegory of Judaism, the offspring of a great and tragic past with the germs of a rich blossoming, yet wasting with an inward canker, I have grown to think of its future as somehow bound up with yours. I want to see your eyes laughing, the shadows lifted from your brow; I want to see you face life courageously, not in pa.s.sionate revolt nor in pa.s.sionless despair, but in faith and hope and the joy that springs from them. I want you to seek peace, not in a despairing surrender of the intellect to the faith of childhood, but in that faith intellectually justified.

And while I want to help you, and to fill your life with the sunshine it needs, I want you to help me, to inspire me when I falter, to complete my life, to make me happier than I had ever dreamed. Be my wife, Esther.

Let me save you from yourself."

"Let me save you from yourself, Raphael. Is it wise to wed with the gray spirit of the Ghetto that doubts itself?"

And like a spirit she glided from his grasp and disappeared in the crowd.