"Yes. I wish to go to America with my wife. And I want you moreover to give your hand as a countryman that you will not breathe a word of this, whatever you hear. Beenah and I have sold a few little trinkets which our children gave us, and we have reckoned that with six pounds more we shall be able to take steerage passages and just exist till I get work."
"But six pounds is a very great sum--without sureties," said Belcovitch, rubbing his time-worn workaday high hat in his agitation.
"I know it is!" answered Mendel, "but God is my witness that I mean to pay you. And if I die before I can do so I vow to send word to my son Daniel, who will pay you the balance. You know my son Daniel. His word is an oath."
"But where shall I get six pounds from?" said Bear helplessly. "I am only a poor tailor, and my daughter gets married soon. It is a great sum. By my honorable word, it is. I have never lent so much in my life, nor even been security for such an amount."
Mendel dropped his head. There was a moment of anxious silence. Bear thought deeply.
"I tell you what I'll do," said Bear at last. "I'll lend you five if you can manage to come out with that."
Mendel gave a great sigh of relief. "God shall bless you," he said. He wrung the sweater's hand passionately. "I dare say we shall find another sovereign's-worth to sell." Mendel clinched the borrowing by standing the lender a glass of rum, and Bear felt secure against the graver shocks of doom. If the worst come to the worst now, he had still had something for his money.
And so Mendel and Beenah sailed away over the Atlantic. Daniel accompanied them to Liverpool, but Miriam said she could not get a day's holiday--perhaps she remembered the rebuke Esther Ansell had drawn down on herself, and was chary of asking.
At the dock in the chill dawn, Mendel Hyams kissed his son Daniel on the forehead and said in a broken voice:
"Good-bye. God bless you." He dared not add and God bless your Bessie, my daughter-in-law to be; but the benediction was in his heart.
Daniel turned away heavy-hearted, but the old man touched him on the shoulder and said in a low tremulous voice:
"Won't you forgive me for putting you into the fancy goods?"
"Father! What do you mean?" said Daniel choking. "Surely you are not thinking of the wild words I spoke years and years ago. I have long forgotten them."