CHAPTER XV.
Wer nie sein Brod mit Thraenen ass,
Wer nie die kummervollen Naechte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Der Kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlische Maechte!
Goethe.
There was a little set of shelves in Judith’s bedroom which contained the whole of her modest library, some twenty books in all—Lorna Doone; Carlyle’s Sterling; Macaulay’s Essays; Hypatia; The Life of Palmerston; the Life of Lord Beaconsfield: these were among her favourites, and they had all been given to her by Reuben Sachs.
Like many wholly unliterary people, she preferred the mildly instructive even in her fiction. It was a matter of surprise to her that clever creatures, like Leo and Esther for instance, should pass whole days when the fit was on in the perusal of such works as Cometh Up as a Flower, and Molly Bawn.
But it was not novels, even the less frivolous ones, that Judith cared for.
Rose, whose own literary tastes inclined towards the society papers, varied by an occasional French novel, had said of her with some truth, that the drier a book was, the better she liked it. Reuben had long ago discovered Judith’s power of following out a train of thought in her clear, careful way, and had taken pleasure in providing her with historical essays and political lives, and even in leading her through the mazes of modern politics.
Perhaps he did not realize, what it is always hard for the happy, objective male creature to realize, that if he had happened to be a doctor, Judith might have developed scientific tastes, or if a clergyman, have found nothing so interesting as theological discussion and the history of the Church.
Judith stood before her little library in the dark November dawn, with a candle in her hand, scanning the familiar titles with weary eyes. She was so young and strong, that even in her misery she could sleep the greater part of the night; but these last few days she had taken to waking at dawn, to lying for hours wide-eyed in her little white bed, while the slow day grew.
But to-day it was intolerable, she could bear it no longer, to lie and let the heavy, inarticulate sorrow prey on her.
She would try a book; not a very hopeful remedy in her own opinion, but one which Reuben, Esther, and Leo, who were all troubled by sleeplessness, regarded, she knew, as the best thing under the circumstances.