“That settles it. And now, Chris, listen to me. I want to tell you a good joke. Perhaps you didn't notice, but when you were down to the shop this afternoon, Mr. Bacharach here, he came in; and he—” And to the unutterable confusion of Elias, the merciless old man proceeded to tell his daughter the whole story. He wound up thus: “And, actually, Chris, he took you to be an actress. What you scowling at me for? He did, for a fact. He can't deny it. Didn't you, Mr. Bacharach? Didn't you ask me if she wasn't an actress?”
Elias appealed to Christine.
“Your father is very cruel, isn't he, Miss Redwood?”
“He loves to tease,” she assented. Then, with a touch of concern, “You mustn't feel badly. He never means to hurt anybody's feelings,” she added, and looked earnestly into Elias Bacharach's face. That look caused him a sensation, the like of which he had never experienced before. His lip trembled. His breath quickened. His heart leaped. “Thank—thank you,” he said, with none but the most confused notion of what he said, or why he said it.
Pretty soon he took his leave.
Elias dwelt in East Fifteenth Street. The house faced Stuyvesant Park. In this house, March 22, 1856, Elias had been born. In this house, May 13, 1856, Elias's father had died. In this house, alone with his mother and her brother, the Reverend Dr. Felix Gedaza, rabbi to the Congregation Gates of Pearl, Elias had lived till he was twenty-four years old. Then his mother, too, had died. Since then, he and the rabbi had kept bachelor's hall. It was a large, old-fashioned, red-brick house, very plain and respectable of exterior, and very bare, sombre and silent within. Elias had converted the front room on the top floor into a studio. Thus he had a north light and a wide view. In his childhood this room had been his play-room. During his boyhood it had been his bed-room. Now it was his work-room—consequently his living-room, in the most vital sense of the word. Its four walls had watched him grow up. The view from its window had been his daily comrade, ever since he had been old enough to have any comrade at all. In a manner, it had been his confidant and his counselor, too. It was his habit, whenever he had any thing on his mind, to station himself at that window, and look off across the park, and think it out. Hither he had come in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, in the blackest moments of his discouragement, in the brightest moments of his hope. Here he had solved many a doubt, confronted many a disappointment, built many an air-castle, registered many a vow. He was twenty-six years old. Not a phase or episode of his development, but was associated in his memory with that view.
Here, returning from Redwood's on the last night of November, 1882, he sat down, and abandoned himself to a whole set of new emotions that had been let loose in his heart. He did not understand these emotions; he did not try to understand them. If he had understood them, he might have taken measures to subdue them in their inception; and then the whole course of his subsequent life would have been altered, and this story would never have been told. They were very vague, very strange, very different from any thing that he had ever experienced before, and very, very pleasant. As often as he went over the events of the evening, recalling Christine's appearance, and her manner, and the way she had looked at him, and the words that she had spoken, he became conscious of a sudden, delicious glow of warmth in his breast. Then, when he went forward into the time yet to come, and began to paint her portrait in imagination, he had to draw a long breath, a deep sigh of pleasure, so exhilarating and so fascinating was the outlook. By and by he was called back to the present, by the clock of St. George's church tolling out midnight. He started, rose, stretched himself, went to bed. But an hour or two elapsed before he got to sleep. Christine's golden hair and lustrous eyes lighted up his dreams.