A Fair Jewess

"I must find her. I suppose you cannot tell me of any place she may have gone to for assistance."

"I can't, sir. There's a bare chance that, as she had no coals and no money to buy 'em with, someone in the house has taken her in for the night. I'll inquire if you like."

"I shall be obliged to you if you will," said Dr. Spenlove, catching eagerly at the suggestion, "and I pray that you may be right."

"You won't mind waiting in the passage, sir, till I've dressed myself. I shan't be a minute."

She was very soon ready, and she went about the house making inquiries; and, returning, said that none of the lodgers could give her any information concerning Mrs. Turner.

"I am sorry to have disturbed you," said Dr. Spenlove, and wishing her good-night he once more faced the storm. The fear by which he was oppressed was that the offer of succor had come too late, and that Mrs. Turner had been driven by despair to the execution of some desperate design to put an end to her misery. Instinctively, and with a sinking heart, he took the direction of the sea, hurrying eagerly after every person he saw ahead of him in the hope that it might be the woman of whom he was in search. The snow was many inches thick on the roads, and was falling fast; the wind tore through the now almost deserted streets, moaning, sobbing, shrieking, with an appalling human suggestion in its tones created by Dr. Spenlove's fears. Now and then he met a policeman, and stopped to exchange a few words with him, the intention of which was to ascertain if the man had seen any person answering to the description of Mrs. Turner. He did not mention her by name, for he had an idea-supposing his search to be happily successful-that Mr. Gordon would withdraw his offer if any publicity were attracted to the woman he was ready to marry. The policemen could not assist him; they had seen no woman with a baby in her arms tramping the streets on this wild night.

"Anything special, sir?" they asked.

"No," he replied, "nothing special," and so went on his way.

CHAPTER V.

"COME! WE WILL END IT."

When Dr. Spenlove left Mrs. Turner she sat for some time in a state of dull lethargy. No tear came into her eyes, no sigh escaped from her bosom. During the past few months she had exhausted the entire range of remorseful and despairing emotion. The only comfort she had received through all those dreary months sprang from the helpful sympathy of Dr. Spenlove; apart from that she had never been buoyed up by a ray of light, had never been cheered by the hope of a brighter day. Her one prevailing thought, which she did not express in words, was that she would be better dead than alive. She did not court death; she waited for it, and silently prayed that it would come soon. It was not from the strength of inward moral support that she had the courage to live on, it was simply that she had schooled herself into the belief that before or when her child was born death would release her from the horrors of life. "If I live till my baby is born," she thought, "I pray that it may die with me."

Here was the case of a woman without the moral support which springs from faith in any kind of religion. In some few mortals such faith is intuitive, but in most instances it requires guidance and wise direction in childhood. Often it degenerates into bigotry and intolerance, and assumes the hateful, narrow form of condemning to perdition all who do not subscribe to their own particular belief. Pagans are as worthy of esteem as the bigots who arrogate to themselves the monopoly of heavenly rewards.

Mrs. Turner was neither pagan not bigot; she was a nullity. Her religious convictions had not yet taken shape, and though, if she had been asked, "Are you a Christian?" she would have replied, "Oh, yes, I am a Christian," she would have been unable to demonstrate in what way she was a Christian, or what she understood by the term. In this respect many thousands of human beings resemble her.

Faith is strength, mightier than the sword, mightier than the pen, mightier than all the world's store of gold and precious stones, and when this strength is displayed in the sweetness of resignation, or in submission to the divine will which chastens human life with sorrow, its influence upon the passions is sustaining and purifying and sublime. If Mrs. Turner had been blessed with faith which displayed itself in this direction she would have been the happier for it, and hard as were her trials she would to the last have looked forward with hope instead of despair.

The story related by Mr. Gordon to Dr. Spenlove was true in every particular. There was no distortion or exaggeration; he had done for Mrs. Turner and her father all that he said he had done. He had not mentioned the word "love" in connection with the woman he had asked to be his wife. She, on her part, had no such love for him as that which should bind a man and a woman in a lifelong tie; she held him in respect and esteem-that was all. But she had accepted him, and had contemplated the future with satisfaction until, until-

Until a man crossed her path who wooed her in different fashion, and who lavished upon her flatteries and endearments which made her false to the promise she had given. For this man she had deserted the home which Mr. Gordon had provided for her, and had deserted it in such a fashion that she could never return to it, could never again be received in it-and this without a word of explanation to the man she had deceived. She was in her turn deceived, and she awoke from her dream to find herself a lost and abandoned woman. In horror she fled from him, and cast her lot among strangers, knowing full well that she would meet with unbearable contumely among those to whom she was known. Hot words had passed between her and her betrayer, and in her anger she had written letters to him which in the eyes of the law would have released him from any obligation it might otherwise have imposed upon him. He was well pleased with this, and he smiled as he put the letters into a place of safety, to be brought forward only in case she annoyed him. She did nothing of the kind; her scorn for him was so profound that she was content to release him unconditionally. So she passed out of his life as he passed out of hers. Neither of these beings, the betrayed or betrayer, reckoned with the future; neither of them gave a thought to the probability that the skeins of fate, which to-day separated them as surely as if they had lived at opposite poles of the earth, might at some future time bring them together again, and that the pages of the book which they believed was closed forever might be reopened again for weal or woe.

The child's moans aroused the mother from her lethargy. She had no milk to give the babe; Nature's founts were dry, and she went from door to door in the house in which she lived to beg for food. She returned as she went, empty-handed, and the child continued to moan.

Dr. Spenlove, her only friend, had bidden her farewell. She had not a penny in her pocket; there was not a crust of bread in the cupboard; not an ounce of coal, not a stick of wood to kindle a fire. She was thinly clad, and she did not possess a single article upon which she could have obtained the smallest advance. She had taken the room furnished, and if what it contained had been her property a broker would have given but a few shillings for everything in it.

The little hand instinctively wandered to the mother's wasted breast, and plucked at it imploringly, ravenously. The woman looked around in the last throes of an anguish too deep for expression except in the appalling words to which she gave despairing utterance.

"Come!" she cried, "we will end it!"

Out into the cold streets she crept, unobserved. She shivered, and a weird smile crossed her lips.

"Hush, hush!" she murmured to her babe. "It will soon be over. Better dead-better dead-for you and for me!"

She crept toward the sea, and hugged the wall when she heard approaching footsteps. She need not have feared; the night was too inclement for any but selfish considerations. The soft snow fell, and enwrapt her and her child in its pitiless shroud. She paused by a lamp post, and cast an upward look at the heavens, in which she could see the glimmering of the stars. Then she went on, and pressed her babe close to her breast to stifle its feeble sobs.

"Be still, be still," she murmured. "There is no hope in life for either of us. Better dead-better dead!"

CHAPTER VI.

THE FRIEND IN NEED

Desperately resolved as she was to carry her fatal design into execution, she had not reckoned with nature. Weakened by the life of privation she had led for so many months, and also by the birth of her child, her physical forces had reached the limit of human endurance. She faltered and staggered, the ground slipped from beneath her weary feet. Vain was the struggle; her vital power was spent. From her overcharged heart a voiceless and terrible prayer went up to heaven. "Give me strength, O God, give me but a little strength! I have not far to go!"

She fought the air with her disengaged hand, and tossed her head this way and that, but her ruthless prayer was not answered, and though she struggled fiercely she managed to crawl only a few more steps. She had yet hundreds of yards to go to reach the sea when some chord within her seemed to snap; her farther progress was instantly arrested, and she found herself incapable of moving backward or forward. Swaying to and fro, the earth, the sky, the whirling snow, and the dim light of the stars swam in her sight and faded from before her.

In that supreme moment she saw a spiritual vision of her dishonored life.

Deprived early of a mother's counsel and companionship, she had passed her days with a spendthrift father, whose love for her was so tainted with selfishness that it was not only valueless but mischievous. When she grew to woman's estate she was worse than alone; she had no guide, no teacher, to point out the rocks and shoals of maidenhood, to inculcate in her the principles of virtue which would have been a safeguard against the specious wiles of men whose eyes were charmed by her beauty, and whose only aim was to lure her to ruin. Then her father died, and a friend came forward who offered her a home and an honorable position in the world. Friendless and penniless, she accepted him, and gave him her promise and accepted his money. Love had not touched her heart; she thought it had when another man wooed her in a more alluring fashion, and by this man she had, been beguiled and betrayed. Then she knew what she had lost, but it was too late; her good name was gone, and she fled to a strange part of the country and lived among strangers, a heartbroken, despairing woman. All the salient features in her career flashed before her. She saw the man who had trusted her, she saw the man in whom she put her trust, she saw herself, an abandoned creature, with a child of shame in her arms. These ghostly figures stood clearly limned in that one last moment of swiftly fading light, as in the moment of sunrise on a frosty morning every distant object stands sharply outlined against the sky; then darkness fell upon her, and with an inarticulate, despairing cry she sank to the ground in a deathlike swoon. The wind sobbed and shrieked and wailed around her and her child, the falling snow with treacherous tenderness fell softly upon them; herself insensible, she had no power to shake it off; her babe was conscious, but its feeble movements were of small avail against the white pall which was descending upon her and her outcast mother. Thicker and thicker it grew, and in the wild outcry of this bitter night Fate seemed to have pronounced its inexorable sentence of death against these unfortunate beings.

Ignorant of the fact that chance of a spiritual messenger was guiding him aright, Dr. Spenlove plodded through the streets. He had no clew, and received none from the half dozen persons or so he encountered as he walked toward the sea. He was scarcely fit for the task he had undertaken, but so intent was he upon his merciful mission that he bestowed no thought upon himself. The nipping air aggravating the cough from which he was suffering, he kept his mouth closed as a protection, and peered anxiously before him for some signs of the woman he was pursuing. A man walked briskly and cheerily toward him, puffing at a large and fragrant cigar, and stamping his feet sturdily into the snow. This man wore a demonstratively furred overcoat; his hands were gloved in fur; his boots were thick and substantial; and in the independent assertion that he was at peace with the world, and on exceedingly good terms with himself, he hummed the words, in Italian, of the jewel song in "Faust" every time he removed the cigar from his lips. Although it was but a humming reminiscence of the famous and beautiful number, his faint rendering of it was absolutely faultless, and proved him to be a man of refined musicianly taste, quite out of keeping with his demonstratively furred overcoat. Music, however, was not his profession. The instincts of his race had welded the divine art into his soul, and the instincts of his race had made him-a pawnbroker. Singular conjunction of qualities-the music of the celestial spheres and fourpence in the pound a month! A vulgar occupation, that of a pawnbroker, which high-toned gentlemen and mortals of aristocratic birth regard with scorn and contempt. But the last vulgar and debasing music-hall ditty which was caroled with delight by the majority of these gilded beings of a higher social grade never found lodgment in the soul of Mr. Moss, which, despite that he devoted his business hours to the lending of insignificant sums of money upon any small articles which were submitted to his judgment across the dark counter of his pawnbroking establishment, was attuned to a far loftier height than theirs in the divine realms of song. Puff, puff, puff at his cigar, the curling wreaths from which were whirled into threads of fantastic confusion by the gusts of wind, or hung in faint gray curls of beauty during a lull. The starry gleam was transferred from the lips to the fur-covered hand:

"E' strano poter il viso suo veder;
Ah! mi posso guardar mi pospo rimirar.
Di, sei tu? Margherita!
Di, sei tu? Dimmi su!
Dimmi su, dì su, dì su, dì su presto!"

From hand to lips the starry gleam, and the soul of Mr. Moss followed the air as he puffed his weed. The pawnbroker broke into ecstasy. From lips to hand again the starry light, and his voice grew rapturous:

"Ceil! E come una man
Che sul baccio mi posa!
Ah! Io rido in poter
Me stessa qui veder!"

The last trill brought him close to Dr. Spenlove.

"Friend, friend!" cried the doctor, "a word with you, for charity's sake."

Mr. Moss did not disregard the appeal. Slipping off his right glove, and thereby displaying two fingers decorated with diamond rings, he fished a couple of coppers from a capacious pocket, and thrust them into Dr. Spenlove's outstretched palm. Dr. Spenlove caught his hand and said:

"No, no, it is not for that. Will you kindly tell me-"

"Why," interrupted Mr. Moss, "it is Dr. Spenlove!"

"Mr. Moss," said Dr. Spenlove, with a sigh of relief, "I am glad it is you-I am glad it is you."

"Not gladder than I am," responded Mr. Moss jovially. "Even in weather like this I shouldn't care to be anybody else but myself."

This feeble attempt at humor was lost upon Dr. Spenlove.

"You have come from the direction I am taking, and you may have seen a person I am looking for-a woman with a baby in her arms-a poor woman, Mr. Moss, whom I am most anxious to find."

"I've come from the Hard, but I took no account of the people I passed. A man has enough to do to look after himself, with the snow making icicles in his hair, and the wind trying to bite his nose off his face. The first law of nature, you know, doctor, is-"

"Humanity," interrupted Dr. Spenlove.

"No, no, doctor," corrected Mr. Moss; "number one's the first law-number one, number one."