University of Virginia Library

13. Chapter XIII.
The Hebrew's Daughter.

BEFORE a comfortable-looking dwelling-house, in a
secluded street, of the eastern quarter of the city, an
old man walked slowly back and forth upon the sidewalk,
his hands clasped behind his back. He was stout in build,
with a short, thick neck, suggestive of apoplectic tendencies.
He wore a thick, brown surtout, closely buttoned,
and a narrow-brimmed hat; and his feet were encased in
stout leather boots. Short-curled hair, the sable hue of
which was slightly varied by silver threads, and a large
curved nose, stamped him as of the Hebrew race. Indeed,
he was well known, not only in the purlieus of exchange,
but throughout the financial world, as Mordecai Kolephat,
the rich Jew. He now tramped up and down the snowy
walk, impatiently waiting the postman, who, about this
hour in the morning, was accustomed to bring his daily
correspondence.

Mordecai Kolephat was considered to be a frigid and
selfish old gentleman, little given to mingling with the
world, and penurious to the last degree. Yet, there were
some who said he had been known to perform generous
actions, perhaps from whim, perhaps through ulterior

motives of interest. He was a widower, and childless;
though Rebecca, his niece, who dwelt with him in the old
mansion, was considered by everybody as his adopted
daughter, to whom would, undoubtedly, descend his property,
real and personal. To what that property might
amount in value, was a subject of much speculation among
the gossips of the neighborhood; but all agreed that it
was large, not falling short of half a million, in houses,
bonds and mortgages, and substantial stocks. It may be
supposed, then, this Mordecai Kolephat was a person of
considerable consequence, and that, as he walked in front
of his house, many good citizens bowed deferentially as
they passed, and, perhaps, envied him his wealth and
position.

But, perchance, had such good citizens been permitted
to look into the old Hebrew's thoughts, and partake of his
reflections, they might not altogether have wished to
exchange positions with him, humble soever as their own
lot in life might be. Impassible as were Mordecai Kolephat's
bronzed features—hard as seemed his cold and
glittering eyes—there were times when lines of anguish
and tears of remorse disturbed their immobility. The
Jew had his hours and days of suffering, of which the
world knew nothing.

Mordecai Kolephat was very rich. His houses might
be counted by squares; his title-deeds fenced in miles of
rich lands; his bonds secured great ships and rich cargoes;
and his coffers held heaps of bright gold. People
said the broker and usurer Kolephat was “worth half a
million,” for they judged by his taxes on assessors' books;

but the old man laughed at his neighbors' surmises, knowing
well that their estimate might be multiplied sevenfold,
nor reach the sum of his accumulations.

Nevertheless, the Jew was an unhappy man. His retrospect
of life was not a soothing one. He could look
back to partnerships in ocean adventures — to vessels
manned and victualled by his money, bearing unholy
freights of kidnapped Africans, to glut the markets of the
Indies, and coin, from human agony, more gold to swell
his hoards. He could recall investments in the far-off
western wilds, when his drugged liquor had maddened
Indian tribes, and his gunpowder, trafficked for costly
peltries, had armed the savages against his countrymen,
the frontier whites. He could recollect the prayers of
debtors, left to rot in mouldy prisons, when law stood by
to aid the crimes of Mammon. But, of these reminiscences,
Mordecai Kolephat took less heed than of the
bitter personal experiences which had made him comfortless
amid luxury—poor, in spite of his affluence; for the
Jew had beheld his family wither, one by one. Seven
children had been born to him, by their mother; five had
withered in their beds, and died in the spring of life; one
had wedded with a stranger, an alien from his faith, and
fled away with his bride, from the bitterness of a father's
malediction, to be heard of no more. The seventh, child
of his old age, had been stolen from her nurse's arms,
while yet a little babe, and the mother had then sunk
down and died, with broken heart, leaving the rich Jew to
curse the fate that had left him, the last of his house, a
blasted trunk, its branches prematurely lopped away, its

vigor “dead at the top.” Such was Mordecai Kolephat,
the owner of Kolephat College.

The Hebrew, at length, received his letters from the
obsequious postman, and then slowly entered his habitation.
In the hall, as he closed the door, a young girl
came to meet him. It was his niece, Rebecca: a girl,
with feminine features, marked with Israelitish lineaments,
but delicately, as not to mar a very attractive contour of
face and really fine complexion. Heavy curls were pendant
upon a well-developed bust, and the form and air of
the lady were what the French would style petite. She
caught her uncle's hand, as he advanced, and asked:

“Nothing for me—no note, dear uncle?”

“Here is one, my child. I fear you are carrying on
some clandestine correspondence, Rebecca!” said the old
man, with a grim smile, as he handed her a letter. “I
must see to it.”

“Pshaw, uncle! it's from Miriam Woolff!—who do I
write to but her! There—her name, uncle!” And the
girl offered the note, written in a delicate hand, to her
uncle's inspection; but he moved his head, impatiently,
saying: “Nonsense, child—I did but jest!” and passed on
to his private parlor.

Rebecca's dark eyes flashed, as she looked after him,
and, kissing the note she had received, she hastily thrust
it into her bosom, and ran up stairs, singing as she went,
to her apartment. Arrived there, closing and locking
the door, she sat down to read the missive, her face and
neck growing crimson, as the first words met her eye; for,
indeed, it was no school-girl epistle, from her friend Miriam

Woolff, but a letter filled with words such as stir, in a
maiden's soul, the thrills of passionate love.

A proud smile played on Rebecca's chiselled lips, as she
persued the love-letter, and kissed it repeatedly, with all
the ardor of first-love as usually developed in a girl of
seventeen. “Darling fellow!” she murmured, evidently
referring to another than her friend “Miriam Woolff;”
and then, starting up suddenly, added—“the usual hour!
—I must hurry to see the darling!” With these words
the Jew's daughter proceeded hastily to the mysteries of
the toilet, intent on arranging herself in all the elegancies
of dress and ornament deemed essential to the state of
“perfect love” in which she felt herself.

Meantime, Mordecai Kolephat, returning to his study,
began to read his correspondence. He passed quickly
over letters respecting the rise and fall of stocks, the
exchange of money, and the sales of real estate; laid
aside two or three longer epistles, to be perused at leisure;
and, finally, opened a small, clumsily-folded note, written
on a dirty scrap of paper, in a cramped hand, and addressed
to “M. Kolephat, Esq.” Its contents riveted
his attention:—

“If Mister Kolephat wants to see an old acquaintance,
and hear a secret, he will come to the tenant-house,
No. —, in — street, rear building, back room—to-day,
or never.”

The Hebrew scanned the note closely, seeking for a
signature, but discovered none. The handwriting, scarcely
to be deciphered, he could not recognize; yet, as he
spelled out the scroll, the old man's lips quivered, and a
presentiment of something to befall him flitted strangely
across his mind. But Mordecai Kolephat was not one to
speculate long upon what was doubtful, when the means
of explanation were so plainly indicated. He rose, refolding
the note, and, placing it in his pocket, said, with a nod
of the head, “to-day, or never!”—I will obey this summous—to
pass away the time.”

“To pass away the time!”—to find refuge from his own
unhappy reveries—Mordecai Kolephat would have voyaged
around the world. Why not, then, stroll to the
back-room of a tenant-house? So the Jew buttoned himself
again in his brown great-coat, and went quietly out
of the house, to visit “an old acquaintance;” and scarcely
had he departed, when his niece Rebecca, arrayed in captivating
symmetry, with furred mantilla, furred boots, and
dainty fur-tipped gloves, descended the staircase from her
dressing-room, and tripped away to meet “a new acquaintance”—whither,
as in deference to her sex, the reader is
called upon to follow.

The trysting-place was not remote, and the steps of
love are fleet, so Rebecca soon traversed the streets that

intervened, and crossing a fashionable avenue, entered into
one of those quiet and genteel retreats, usually kept by
starched, prudish-looking ladies, of uncertain years, and
devoted at once to the dispensation of ice-creams and thin
sugar cakes, and to the happiness of tête-à-tête lovers,
seated at little round marble tables. The young Jewess
appeared to be well acquainted in the saloon, for she
nodded familiarly to the waitress, and passed to an interior
apartment, separated from the main room by a heavy
curtain drapery, looped up, at either side, with gilded
rings. As she reached the curtain, her quick eye caught
sight of an elegantly-attired and handsome gentleman,
who rose immediately to greet her, and led her to the
table at which he had been sipping chocolate.

“Dear Charles! I hurried so!” said the Jewess,
naïvely. “I was frightened, lest you would think I was
not coming.”

“Then I would have waited in grief and lonesomeness,
darling Rebecca!” replied the gentleman, pressing her
hand. “But, here is the girl.”

A waitress approached at this moment, and Rebecca,
loosening her bonnet-strings, gave an order for some slight
refreshment, and then fixed her eyes upon her companion's
face, with a look of such doating fondness that the lover
smiled to observe it.

“Is your uncle well, to-day, Rebecca?”

“Oh! Charles, don't talk of the stupid old man. It's
so horrid dull in that house. Let us talk of ourselves!
Tell me you love me, Charles!—that I am as dear to you
as you are to me.”

All this was said in a hurried whisper, full of strange
fervor. He to whom it was addressed replied gallantly,
in a like low tone of voice, to the effect that the maiden
was the light of his heart, and the joy of his existence,
and much more of the same style, in the generally
accepted language patent of love interviews; after which,
ice-cream was brought to Rebecca, which she toyed with,
languidly, declaring that she could not eat—that she
feasted on Charles' smiles—to which Charles replied that
her smiles were more than mortal food—they were ambrosia
of the gods, and so forth. Nevertheless, both of them
took cream.

“And, Charles! you have not spoken of—her,” at
length said the Jewess, with a flush overspreading her
face and neck.

“I wish to avoid disagreeable subjects,” returned the
lover. “Will you not permit the prisoner to forget his
chain, dearest?”

“Is it not my chain, too?” asked Rebecca.

“But not to fetter us long,” said the man, in a whisper
which was intense in its distinctness, and was accompanied
by a strange glitter of the eye that made Rebecca's glance
droop.

“How foolish—how wicked I am, to love you,” said the
Jewess. “And yet,” she added passionately, “I am never
happy, unless when thinking of you, Charles. Oh! shall
we ever be entirely free to love each other?”

“Can we control our affections?” asked Richmond,
insidiously, as he bent towards the fond girl. “I am older
than you, dearest, and yet love you quite as foolishly.

But, let us hope to be happy, sweet one! Perhaps, before
June next I shall be free to cherish the only being I ever
could love—my adored Rebecca.”

The maiden's hand was held within that of her admirer,
as he passionately uttered these words, and her soft fingers
returned the pressure which he gave. Then more words
of fondness followed, and much was talked of concerning
the future: of a marriage to be waited for only till an
event should take place; that event the death of a woman;
that woman the wife of Charles Richmond.

Charles Richmond! the cruel and neglectful husband—
the heartless tyrant of a patient, suffering lady—the crafty
schemer to possess a usurer's wealth—well could he dissemble
before the fond and foolish Rebecca. Versed in
all the wicked lore which worldly experience can furnish—
adept in hypoerisy and dissimulation—he had reckoned it
but pastime to win the heart of this untutored school-girl,
and mould her so completely to his wishes that she would
have left her home, her uncle, and all earthly prospects, to
follow him whithersoever he might command. But this
was not the object of Mr. Richmond; for his callous
nature was untouched by the self-forgetting fondness of
Rebecca. He sought the Jewess only as the adopted
child of Mordecai Kolephat—the heiress of a millionaire;
and his purpose was to hold her as a captive bird, till the
speedily looked-for death of his wife, and the decease of
the usurer, necessarily not far distant—as he had already
reached the Prophet's verge of human life—should give
him Rebecca as an ornamental wife, and her large possessions
as his own, by right of conquest.

And, truly, at this stage of the man's career, it became
a necessity for him to weave some scheme of profit in the
future. Charles Richmond was a patron of the gay
world, a welcome guest in every fashionable circle. His
house was magnificent, his horses superb, his wines incomparable.
He was reputed to be immensely rich, and his
style of living accorded with the reputation which he
enjoyed. But Richmond had indulged in speculation—
Richmond was an habitual gamester—and of these facts
the world was yet in blissful ignorance. Helen Ellwood
brought to her husband a large fortune—plantations in
several southern States; houses and lands yielding lordly
incomes. But, in the confidence of her young affection,
Helen had yielded to her husband the entire control of
her wealth; and the reckless man had used it as his own.
What more is to be told? Suffice it, that, as he sat now,
toying with the youthful Jewess, he was a bankrupt, with
mortgages covering his very dwelling and furniture, the
very couch on which his betrayed wife was now resting
her aching head. Such was Charles Richmond, whom
Helen Ellwood had married—for love.

It was a necessity, then, that the adventurer should
cast forth his nets upon new waters. He had encountered
the Jewess—read easily her plastic nature—and with little
difficulty awakened her sympathy, by portraying himself
as a man unloved and unloving, but fettered by an ill-assorted
marriage. He pictured, with a master's skill,
the unhappiness of a union between unsympathizing natures;
sighed from his unappreciated heart; described
such a woman as he could love—and there was but

one—and in the end, won the love, uncalculating and
unreserved, of a woman in heart, but a child in experience
as well as in years.

A child, indeed! for, as Richmond, after accompanying
the young Jewess through a few streets, towards her
uncle's house, parted from her, with a thrilling pressure of
the hand, he muttered, under his breath, as he walked
away: “Pshaw! a bread-and-butter school-girl!”

To such a fashionable villain is many a young creature
betrayed, in the full flush of maidenly trust; immolated at
the altar, to be miserable thereafter for life, or become a
heartless woman of the world. How many are there, at
this moment, listening, with quickened pulses, to the first
words of deception from lips that will hereafter utter
harsh rebukes or mocking banter of their easy trust?