Emanuel Torr, at the age of forty, was felt by those who knew and loved him almost to have justified the very highest of the high hopes which his youth had encouraged. This intimate circle of appreciation was rendered a small one by the circumstances of his temperament and choice of career; but beyond this his name was familiar to many who had never seen him, or who remembered him at best as a stripling, yet who habitually thought and spoke of him as an example and model to his generation.
At Oxford, twenty years before, he had attracted attention of a sort rather peculiar to himself. Those who took note of him saw foreshadowed the promise, not so much of great achievements as of the development and consolidation of a great influence. He was not specially distinguished in his work at the University, and he made no mark at the union, where there happened at the time to be glittering a quite exceptional galaxy of future front bench men, judges and bishops. In Emanuel’s case, the interest he aroused was perhaps more sentimental than intellectual. His mind was seen to be of a fine order, but his character was even more attractive to the observant eye. The facts that he was half Jewish in blood, and that in time he would be the possessor of enormous wealth, no doubt lent an added suggestion of romance to the picture of delicate, somewhat coldly modeled features, of ivory skin and serious, musing dark eyes, and of a rare smile of wonderful sweetness, which Oxford men of the mid-seventies still associate with his name. It was in the days when Disraeli’s remarkable individuality was a part of England’s current history, and when the English imagination, in part from the stimulus of this fact, dwelt upon the possibilities of a new Semitic wave of inspiration and ethical impetus. The dreams, the aspirations, the mysterious “perhaps” of Daniel Deronda were in men’s minds, and Johannesburg had not been so much as heard of.
What the University recognized in the youth standing upon the threshold of manhood, had been an article of faith within his home since his childhood. It is as well to recount at this place the brief story of that home.
At the age of twenty-five Lord Julius Torr, engaged in the listless pursuit of that least elusive of careers, called diplomacy, found himself at The Hague, and yawned his way about its brightly scrubbed solitudes for some months, until, upon the eve of his resolve to have done with the whole business, and buy a commission in a line regiment, he encountered a young woman who profoundly altered all his plans in life. It was by the merest and unlikeliest of accidents that he came to know the Ascarels, father and daughter, and at the outset his condescension had seemed to him to be involved as well. They were of an old family in the Netherlands, Jewish in race but now for some generations estranged from, the synagogue, and reputed to be extraordinarily wealthy. It was said of them too that they were sternly exclusive, but to the brother of an English duke this had not appeared to possess much meaning. He had previously been of some official service to the father, in a matter wherein Dutch and English interests touched each other at Sumatra; from this he came to meet the daughter. He had been told by the proud father that she was of the blood of the immortal Spinoza, and had been so little impressed that he had not gone to the trouble of finding out who Spinoza was.
The marriage of young Torr, of the Foreign Office, to some Dutch-Jewish heiress a half-year later, received only a trifle more notice in England than did the news of his retirement from his country’s diplomatic service. The duke had already four sons, and the brother, when it seemed that he intended to live abroad, was not at all missed. Nearly fifteen years elapsed before a mature Lord Julius reappeared in England—a Lord Julius whom scarcely any one found recognizable. He bore small visible relation to the aimless and indolent young attaché whom people, by an effort of memory, were able to recall; still less did he resemble anything else that the Torr family, within recollection, had produced. He took a big old house in Russell Square, and in time it became understood that very learned and intellectual people paid pilgrimages thither to sit at the feet of Lady Julius, and learn of her. Smart London rarely saw this Lady Julius save at a distance—in her carriage or at the opera. The impression it preserved of her was of a short, swarthy woman, increasingly stout as years went on, who peered with near-sighted earnestness through a large pince-nez of unusual form. On her side, it seemed doubtful if she had formed even so succinct an impression as this of smart London. She was content with Bloomsbury to the end of her days; and made no effort whatever to establish relations with the West End. Indeed, tales came to be told of the effectual resistance she offered, in later years, to amiable interested advances from that quarter. It grew to be believed that she had made an eccentric will, and would leave untold millions to Atheist charities. The rumor that she was among the most highly cultivated women of her time, and that the most illustrious scientists and thinkers would quit the society of kings to travel post-haste across Europe at her bidding, did not, it must regretfully be added, seem incompatible with this theory about a crazy will. Finally, when she died in 1885, something was printed by the papers about her philanthropy, and much was said in private speculation about her disposition of her vast fortune, but it did not come out that any will whatever was proved, and London ceased to think of the matter.
The outer world had in truth been wrong from the beginning. Lady Julius was not a deeply learned woman, and the limited circle of friends she gathered about her contained hardly one distinguished figure, in the popular use of the phrase; her opinions were not notably advanced or unconventional; she did not shun society upon philosophic principles, but merely because it failed to attract a nature at once shy and practical; so far from being rich in her own right, she had insisted many years before her death upon transferring every penny of her fortune to her husband.
Inside her own household, this dark, stout little woman with the eye-glasses was revered as a kind of angel. She was plainfaced almost to ugliness in the eyes of strangers. Her husband and her son never doubted that she was beautiful. Now, when she had been a memory for ten years and more, these two talked of her lovingly and with no constraint of gloom, as if she were still the pivot round which their daily life turned.
The elder man particularly delighted in dwelling upon the details of that earlier change in him, under her influence, to which allusion has been made. Emanuel had in his mind, from boyhood, no vision more distinct or familiar than this selfpainted picture of his father—the idle, indifferent, unschooled, paltry-ideaed young gentleman of fashion—meeting all unawares this overpowering new force, and kneeling in awed yet rapturous submission before it. To the boy’s imagination it became a historical scene, as fixed and well known in its lines of composition as that of Nelson’s death in the cockpit. He saw his beardless father in dandified clothes of the Corn-Laws-caricature period, proceeding along the primrose path of dalliance, like some flippant new Laodicean type of Saul of Tarsus—when “suddenly there shined around him a light from heaven.” Lord Julius, indeed, thought and spoke of it in much that same spirit. The recollection that he had not known who Spinoza was tenderly amused him: it was the symbol of his vast oceanic ignorance of all things worth knowing.
“Ah, yes,” the son used to say, “but if you had not had within yourself all the right feelings—only lacking the flash to bring them out—you would not have seen how wonderful she was. You would not have understood at all, but just passed on, and nothing would have happened.”
And the father, smiling in reverie, and stroking his great beard, would answer: “I don’t see that that follows. I remember what I was like quite vividly, and really there was nothing in me to explain the thing at all. I was a young blood about town, positively nothing more. No, Emanuel, we may say what we like, but there are things supernatural—that is, beyond what we can see, and are prepared for, in nature. It was as unaccountable as magic, the effect your mother produced upon me from the beginning. At the end of a few hours, when it w............