“Thamar, I am engaged; don't come fooling here about these jewels; put them down, and go into the next room.”
The child, hurt and astonished, looked blankly at her sister. Maheleth reached out her hand for the casket, and half rose from her seat.
“I will come to you presently, little sister, if you wait in there; never mind the pretty gems just now.”
And so saying, she kissed the little eyes that were ready to overflow with childish tears, and, setting the jewels on a table out of sight of her mother, resumed her seat.
“There are the first-fruits of our circumstances,” said the mother bitterly. “The man expects to be paid for those to-day, and I shall have to tell him to take them back!”
“Come! if there were nothing worse than that! Now, mother, we will both go to my father, and pray together, and then consult among ourselves.”
Maheleth's father was very fond and very proud of his eldest daughter, and this indeed was his best trait. Shrewd and clever in worldly affairs, yet strictly honest in his dealings, he was not devoid of that hardness that too often accompanies mercantile success, and as often turns to weakness when that success disappears.
One thing seemed to sustain him, but it was only a hollow prop after all—his pride of race. For generations his family had been well known and honored: he could trace his [pg 414] ancestry back in an unbroken line of descent from one of the exiles from devastated Jerusalem. Rabbis and learned men had borne his name, and though in later times no opening save that of trade and banking had been available to those of his race, yet his blood yielded it in nothing to that of the proverbially haughty nobles of Spain. It mattered little that by some he was shunned as of an inferior extraction or lower social status; his own wealth, his wife's beauty, his lavish hospitality, his daughter's charms, were strong enough, he knew, to break the barriers of prejudice, at least as far as appearances went. As to marriages, he did not covet for his children the alliance of a poor foreigner, and poor most of the proud families were whom he daily entertained at his splendid house—poor in brains, poor in beauty, poor in energy and strong will.
And yet, though he almost despised his neighbors, this shock was very galling to him. They now would turn from him, would forget his open-handedness, and remember only his race and creed; would pity him perhaps, but with the pity that is almost contempt. And this seemed to paralyze him, for all his fiercely expressed consciousness of superiority to his friends.
Maheleth tried to persuade him to take the trial calmly; for even in a temporal aspect calmness would sooner show him how to retrieve his fortunes.