“You can not realize, Mr. Hetzel, a tithe of the horror I experienced when my father spoke those words to me, until I have gone back further still, and told something of my life up to that time. At this moment, as I recall the occasion of my father’s saying that to me, my heart turns to ice, my cheeks burn, my limbs quake, my nature recoils with disgust and loathing. It is painful to have to go over it all again, to have to live through it all again; yet that is what I have started out to do.
“You must know, to begin with, that my father was a watchmaker, and that he kept a shop on Second Avenue, between Sixth and Seventh Streets. He was a man of great intelligence, of uncommon cultivation, and of a most gentle and affectionate disposition; but he was a Jew of the sternest orthodoxy, and he held old-fashioned, orthodox notions of the obedience children owe to their parents. My father in his youth had intended to become a physician; but while he was a student in Berlin, in 1848, the revolution broke out; he took part in it; and as a consequence he had to leave Germany and come to America before he had won his diploma. Here, friendless, penniless, he fell in with a jeweler, named Oppenhym, who offered to teach him his trade. Thus he became an apprentice, then a journeyman, finally a proprietor. I was born in the house on Second Avenue, in the basement of which my father kept his shop. We lived up stairs. Our family consisted only of my father and mother, myself, and my father’s intimate friend, Marcus Nathan. Mr. Nathan was a very learned gentleman, who had been a widower and childless for many years, and who acted as chazzan in our synagogue. It was to him that my father confided my education. It was he who first taught me to read and write and to care for books and music. How good and loyal a friend he was to me you will learn later on. He died early in 1880.... I did not go to school till I was thirteen years old. Then I was sent to the public school in Twelfth Street, and thence to the Normal College, where I graduated in 1876. I studied the piano at home under the direction of a woman named Emily Millard—an accomplished musician, but unkind and cruel. She used to pull my hair and pinch me, when I made mistakes; and afterward, when they tried me in the court of General Sessions for Bernard Peixada’s murder, Miss Millard came and swore that I was bad.
“Bernard Peixada—whom the newspapers described as ’a retired Jewish merchant’—was a pawnbroker. His shop was straight across the street from ours. I never in my life saw another structure of brick and mortar that seemed to frown with such sinister significance, with such ominous suggestiveness, upon the street in front of it as did that house of Bernard Peixada’s. It was a brick house; but the bricks were concealed by a coat of dark gray stucco, with blotches here and there that were almost black. The shop, of course, was on the ground floor. Its broad windows were protected, like those of a jail, by heavy iron bars. Within them was exhibited an assortment of such goods and chattels as the pawnbroker had contrived to purchase from distress—musical instruments, household ornaments, kitchen utensils, firearms, tarnished suits of uniform, faded bits of women’s finery—ex voto offerings at the shrine of Mammon. Behind these, all was darkness, and mystery, and gloom. Over the door, three golden balls—golden they had been once, but were no longer, thanks to the thief, Time, abetted by wind and weather—the pawnbroker’s escutcheon, swayed in the breeze. Higher up still—big, white, ghastly letters on a sable background—hung a sign, bearing a legend like this:
B. PEIXADA.
MONEY LENT ON WATCHES, JEWELRY, PRECIOUS STONES, AND ALL VARIETIES OF PERSONAL PROPERTY.
“And on the side door, the door that let into the private hallway of the house, was screwed a solemn brass plate, with ’B. Peixada’ engraved in Old English characters upon it. (When Bernard Peixada retired from business, he was succeeded by one B. Peinard. On taking possession, Mr. Peinard, for economy’s sake, caused the last four letters of Bernard Peixada’s name on the sign to be painted out, and the corresponding letters of his own name to be painted in: so that, to this day, the time-stained PEI stands as it used to stand years ago, and contrasts oddly with the more recent word that follows.) As I have said, the shop windows were defended by an iron grating. The other windows—those of the three upper stories—were hermetically sealed. I, at least, never saw them open. The blinds, once green, doubtless, but blackened by age, were permanently closed; and the stucco beneath them was fantastically frescoed with the dirt that had been washed from them by the rain.
“I think it was partly due to these black blinds, and’ to the queer shapes that the dirt had taken on the wall, that the house had that peculiarly sinister aspect that I have spoken of. At all events, you could not glance at its façade without shuddering. As early a recollection as any that I have, is of how I used to sit at our front windows, and gaze over at Bernard Peixada’s, and work myself into a very ecstasy of fear by trying to imagine the dark and terrible things that were stored behind them. My worst nightmares used to be that I was a prisoner in Bernard Peixada’s house. I never dreamed that some time my most hideous nightmare would be surpassed by the fact.
“But if I used to terrify myself by the sight of Bernard Peixada’s dwelling, much keener was the terror with which Bernard Peixada’s person inspired me. Picture to yourself a—creature—six feet tall, gaunt as a skeleton, always dressed in black—in black broadcloth, that glistened like a snake’s skin—with a head—my pen revolts from an attempt to describe it. Yet I must describe it, so that you may appreciate a little what I endured when my father said that he had chosen Bernard Peixada for my husband. Well, Bernard Peixada’s head was thus: a hawk’s beak for a nose, a hawk’s beak inverted for a chin; lips, two thin, blue, crooked lines across his face, with yellow fangs behind them, that shone horribly when he laughed; eyes, two black, shiny beads, deep-set beneath prominent, black, shaggy brows, with the malevolence of a demon aflame deep down in them; skull, destitute of honest hair, but kept warm by a curling, reddish wig; skin, dry and sallow as old parchment, on which dark wrinkles were traced—a cryptogram, with a meaning, but one which I could not perfectly decipher; these were the elements of Bernard Peixada’s physiognomy—fit features for a bird of prey, were they not? Have you ever seen his brother, Benjamin? the friend of Arthur Ripley? Benjamin is corpulent, florid, and on the whole not ill-looking—morally and physically vastly superior to his elder brother. But fancy Benjamin pumped dry of blood, shrunken to the dimensions of a mummy, then bewigged, then caricatured by an enemy, and you will form a tolerably vivid conception of how Bernard Peixada looked. But his looks were not all. His voice, I think, was worse. It was a thin, piercing voice that, when I heard it, used to set my heart palpitating with a hundred horrible emotions. It was a dry, metallic voice that grated like a file. It was a sharp, jerky voice that seemed to chop the air, each word sounding like a blow from an ax. It was a voice which could not be forced to say a kind and human thing. Cruelty and harshness were natural to it. I can hear it ringing in my ears, as I am writing now; and it makes my heart sink and my hand tremble, as it used to do when I indeed heard it, issuing from his foul, cruel mouth. Will you be surprised—will you think I am exaggerating—when I say that Bernard Peixada’s hideousness did not end with his voice? I should do his portrait an injustice if I were to omit mention of his hands—his claws, rather, for claws they were shaped like; and, instead of fingers, they were furnished with long, brown, bony talons, terminated by black, untrimmed nails. I do not believe I ever saw Bernard Peixada’s hands in repose. They were in perpetual, nervous motion—the talons clutching at the air, if at nothing more substantial—even when he slept. The most painful dreams that I have had, since God delivered me of him, have been those in which I have seen his hands, working, working, the fingers writhing like serpents, as they were wont to do in life. Oh, such a monstrosity! Oh, such a wicked travesty of man! This, Mr. Hetzel, was the person to f-whom my father proposed to marry me. There was no one to plead for me, no one to interfere in my behalf. And I was a young girl, nineteen years old.
“How could my father do it? How could he bring himself to do this thing? It is a long story.
“In the first place, Bernard Peixada was accounted a most estimable member of society. He was rich; he was pious; he was eminently respectable. His ill-looks were ignored. Was he to blame for them? people asked. Did he not close his shop regularly on every holiday? Who was more precise than he in observing the feasts and fasts of the Hebrew calendar? or in attending services at the Synagogue? Was smoke ever to be seen issuing from his chimneys on the Sabbath? Old as he was, did he not abstain from food on the fast of Gedalia, and on that of Tebeth, and on that of Tamuz, as well as on the Ninth of Ab and on Yom Kippur? Had he not, year after year, been elected and re-elected Parnass of the congregation? All honor to him, then, for a wise man and an upright man in the way of the law! It was thus that public opinion in our small world treated Bernard Peixada. On the theory that handsome is that handsome does, he got the credit of being quite a paragon of beauty. To be sure, he lacked social qualities—he was scarcely a hail-fellow-well-met. He cared little for wine and tobacco—he abhorred dominoes—he could not be induced to sit down to a game of penacle; but all the better! The absence of these frivolous interests proved him to be a man of responsible weight and gravity. It was a pity he had never married. Perhaps it was not yet too late. Lucky the girl upon whom his eye should turn with favor. If he had not youth and bodily grace to offer her, he had, at least, wealth, wisdom, and respectability.