Thus, whether in the flesh or the spirit, the Young Man--for so many of him appeared on the scene that he hovered in the air rather as a type than an individual--was a permanent guest at the Peyser table.
But all this new domestic excitement did not compensate little Schnapsie for her moonlit waters and the strange ships that came and went with their cargo of mystery.
And poor old Daniel found no cronies to appeal to him like the old, nothing in the roar of London to compensate for the Sat.u.r.day night bustle of the p.a.w.n-shop, no dingy little synagogue desirous of his presidential pomp. He sat inconspicuously in a handsome half-empty edifice, and knew himself a superfluous atom in a vast lonely wilderness.
He was not, indeed, an imposing figure, with his ragged graying whiskers and his boyish blue eyes. In the street he had the stoop and shuffle of the Ghetto, and forgot to hide his coa.r.s.e red hands with gloves; in the house he persisted in wearing a pious skull-cap. At first his more adaptable wife and his English-bred daughters tried to fit him for decent society, and to make him feel at home during their "at homes." But he was soon relegated to the background of these brilliant social tableaux; for he was either too silent or too talkative, with old-fashioned Jewish jokes which disconcerted the smart young men, and with Hebrew quotations which they could not even understand. And sometimes there thrilled through the small-talk the trumpet-note of his nose, as he blew it into a coloured handkerchief.
Gradually he was eliminated from the drawing-room altogether.
But for some years longer he reigned supreme in the dining-room--when there was no company. Old habit kept the girls at table when he intoned with noisy unction the Hebrew grace after meals; they even joined in the melodious morceaux that diversified the plain-chant. But little by little their contributions dwindled to silence. And when they had smart company to dinner, the old man himself was hushed by rows of blond and bugle eyebrows; especially after he had once or twice put young men to shame by offering them the honour of reciting the grace they did not know.
Daniel"s prayer on such occasions was at length reduced to a pious mumbling, which went un.o.bserved amid the joyous clatter of dessert, even as his pious skull-cap pa.s.sed as a preventive against cold.
Last stage of all, the mumbling of his company manners pa.s.sed over into the domestic circle; and this humble whispering to G.o.d became symbolic of his suppression.
IV
"I don"t think he means Rachael at all."
"Oh, how can you say so, Leah? It was me he took down to supper."
"Nonsense! it isn"t either of you he"s after; that"s only his politeness to my sisters. Didn"t he say the bouquet was for me?"
"Don"t be silly, Rebecca. You know you can"t have him. The eldest must take precedence."
This changed tone indicated their humbler att.i.tude toward the Young Man as the years went by. For the first young man did not propose, either to the sisterhood _en bloc_ or to a particular sister. And his example was followed by his successors. In fact, a procession of young men pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed through the house, or danced with the girls at b.a.l.l.s, without a single application for any of these many hands. And the first season pa.s.sed into the second, and the second into the third, with tantalizing mirages of marriage. b.a.l.l.s, dances, dinners, a universe of nebulous matrimonial matter on the whirl, but never the shot-off star of an engagement! Mrs. Peyser"s hair began to whiten faster. She even surrept.i.tiously called in the Shadchan, or rather surrendered to his solicitations.
"Pooh! Not find any one suitable?" he declared, rubbing his hands. "I have hundreds of young men on my books, just your sort, real gentlemen."
At first the girls refused to consider applications from such a source. It was not done in their set, they said.
Mrs. Peyser snorted sceptically. "Oh, indeed! and pray how did those Rosenweiler girls find husbands?"
"Oh, yes, the Rosenweilers!" They shrugged their shoulders; they knew they had not that disadvantage of hideousness.
Nevertheless they lent an ear to the agent"s suggestions as filtered through the mother, though under pretence of deriding them.
But the day came when even that pretence was dropped, and with broken spirit they waited eagerly for each new possibility. And with the pa.s.sing of the years the Young Man aged. He grew balder, less gentlemanly, poorer.
Once indeed, he turned up as a handsome and wealthy Christian, but this time it was he that was rejected in a unanimous sisterly shudder.
Five slow years wore by, then of a sudden the luck changed. A water-proof manufacturer on the sunny side of forty appeared, the long glacial epoch was broken up, and the first orange blossom ripened for the Peyser household.
It was Rebecca, the youngest of the Jewish group, who proved the pioneer to the canopy, but her marriage gave a new lease of youth even to the oldest. And miraculously, mysteriously, within a few months two other girls flew off Mrs. Peyser"s shoulders--a Jewish and a pagan--though Sylvia was not yet formally "out."
And though Leah, the first born, still remained unchosen, yet Sylvia"s marriage to a Bayswater household had raised the family status, and provided a better field for operations. The Shadchan was frozen off.
But he returned. For despite all these auguries and auspices another arctic winter set in. No orange blossoms, only desolate lichens of fruitless flirtation.
Gradually the pagan group pushed its way into unconcealable womanhood.
The problem darkened all the horizon. The Young Man grew middle-aged again. He lost all his money; he wanted old Daniel to set him up in business. Even this seemed better than a barren fine ladyhood, and Leah might have even harked back to the parental p.a.w.n-shop had not another sudden epidemic of felicity married off all save little Schnapsie within eighteen months. Mrs. Peyser was knocked breathless by all these shocks. First a rich German banker, then a prosperous solicitor (for Leah), then a Cape financier--any one in himself catch enough to "gouge out the eyes" of the neighbours.
"I told you so," she said, her portly bosom swelling portlier with exultation as the sixth bride was whirled off in a rice shower from the Highbury villa, while the other five sat around in radiant matronhood. "I told you to come to London."
Daniel pressed her hand in grat.i.tude for all the happiness she had given herself and the girls.
"If it were not for Florence," she went on wistfully.
"Ah, little Schnapsie!" sighed Daniel. Somehow he felt he would have preferred her hymeneal felicity to all these marvellous marriages.
For there had grown up a strange sympathy between the poor lonely old man, now nearly seventy, and his little girl, now twenty-four. They never conversed except about commonplaces, but somehow he felt that her presence warmed the air. And she--she divined his solitude, albeit dimly; had an intuition of what life had been for him in the days before she was born: the long days behind the counter, the risings in the gray dawn to chant orisons and don phylacteries ere the p.a.w.n-shop opened, the lengthy prayer and the swift supper when the shutters were at last put up--all the bare rock on which this floriage of prosperity had been sown. And long after the others had dropped kissing him good-night, she would tender her lips, partly because of the necessary domestic fiction that she was still a baby, but also because she felt instinctively that the kiss counted in his life.
Through all these years of sordid squabbles and canva.s.sings and weary waiting, all those endless scenes of hysteria engendered by the mutual friction of all that close-packed femininity, poor Schnapsie had lived, shuddering. Sometimes a sense of the pathos of it all, of the tragedy of women"s lives, swept over her. She regretted every inch she grew, it seemed to shame her celibate sisters so. She clung willingly to short skirts until she was of age, wore her long raven hair in a plait with a red ribbon.
"Well, Florence," said Leah genially, when the last outsider at Daisy"s wedding had departed, "it"s your turn next. You"d better hurry up."
"Thank you," said Florence coldly. "I shall take my own time; fortunately there is no one behind me."
"Humph!" said Leah, playing with her diamond rings. "It don"t do to be too particular. Why don"t you come round and see me sometimes?"
"There are so many of you now," murmured Florence. She was not attracted by the solicitors and traders in whose society and carriages her mother lolled luxuriously, and she resented the matronly airs of her sisters. With Leah, however, she was conscious of a different and more paradoxical provocation. Leah had an incredible air of juvenility. All those unthinkable, innumerable years little Schnapsie had conceived of her eldest sister as an old maid, hopeless, senescent, despite the wonderful belt that had kept her figure dashing; but now that she was married she had become the girlish bride, kittenish, irresistible, while little Schnapsie was the old maid, the sister in peril of being pa.s.sed by. And indeed she felt herself appallingly ancient, prematurely aged by her long stay at seventeen.
"Yes, you are right, Leah," she said pensively, with a touch of malice. "To-morrow I shall be twenty-four."
"What?" shrieked Leah.
"Yes," Florence said obstinately. "And oh, how glad I shall be!" She raised her arms exultingly and stretched herself, as if shooting up seven years as soon as the pressure of her sisters was removed.
"Do you hear, mother?" whispered Leah. "That fool of a Florence is going to celebrate her twenty-fourth birthday. Not the slightest consideration for _us_!"
"I didn"t say I would celebrate it publicly," said Florence.
"Besides," she suggested, smiling, "very soon people will forget that I am _not_ the eldest."
"Then your folly will recoil on your own head," said Leah.
Little Schnapsie gave a devil-may-care shrug--a Ghetto trait that still clung to all the sisters.
"Yes," added Mrs. Peyser. "Think what it will be in ten years" time!"
"I shall be thirty-four," said Florence imperturbably. Another little smile lit up the dreamy eyes. "Then I _shall_ be the eldest."
"Madness!" cried Mrs. Peyser, aloud, forgetting that her daughters"
husbands were about. "G.o.d forbid I should live to see any girl of mine thirty-four!"
"Hush, mother!" said Florence quietly. "I hope you will; indeed, I am sure you will, for I shall _never_ marry. So don"t bother to put me on the books--I"m not on the market. Good-night."
She sought out poor Daniel, who, awed by the culture and standing of his five sons-in-law, not to speak of the guests, was hanging about the deserted supper-room, smoking cigar after cigar, much to the disgust of the caterer"s men, who were waiting to spirit away the box.
Having duly kissed her father, little Schnapsie retired to bed to read Browning"s love-poems. Her mother had to take a gla.s.s of champagne to restore her ruffled nerves to the appropriate ecstasy.