And after a perfunctory catechism upon the health of his mother and Kropovetz matters in general, he inquired about his old master.
"Peretz?" the old man echoed Rouvke's interrogation. "May the Uppermost have mercy on him! You have heard that he is now in reduced circumstances, have you not? The distillery is closed."
"Yes, he is in a very bad way," Reb Feive resumed, curling one of his long yellowish-gray sidelocks. "You know what hard times the Jews are now having in Russia. Things are getting from bad to worse--may He whom I dare not mention without washing my hands deliver us and preserve!--a Jew can nowadays hardly engage in any business, much less in the liquor line. Poor Peretz, he looks so careworn!"
"Can it be true that the distillery has been closed? I am _very_ sorry."
Rouvke was moved with profound pity for his old employer, who had been kind to him, and to whom he had been devoted. But this feeling of commiseration was instantly succeeded by a vague sense of triumph. "What have I lived to see!" Rouvke seemed to exclaim. "I am now richer than Reb Peretz, as sure as I am a Jew!" And at this he became aware of the bank-book in his breast-pocket.
"Oh, I am _very, very_ sorry for him!" he added, with renewed sincerity, after a slight pause. "Why, such an honest Jew! And how is Hanele?"
"As usual," the shadchen rejoined--"still unmarried. But it serves Peretz right (may God not punish me for my hard words!). When I offered her the best matches in the world, he was hard to please. Nothing short of a king would have suited his ambition."
As the old shadchen spoke his right arm, hand, and fingers were busily engaged punctuating his words with a system of the most intricate and most diversified evolutions in the air.
"And how does she look?" Rouvke again broke in. "Is she still as pretty as she used to be?"
"That she is," the matchmaker returned grimly. "But all the worse for her. Would she were plainer looking, for then her father would not have been so fastidious about a young man for her, and she might be a mother of three children by this time."
"Oh, she will have no trouble in making a match; such a beauty!" Rouvke observed.
In the afternoon of the same day, Rouvke lay across his bed with his legs stretched on a chair, after his wont, and his head lost in recollections of Hanele. She had recently all but faded away from his memory, and when he did have occasion to recall her, her portrait before his mind's eye would be a mere faint-drawn outline. But now, singularly enough, he could somehow again vividly see her good-natured, deep, dark eyes, and her rosy lips perpetually exposing the dazzling whiteness of her teeth and illuminating her pallid face with inextinguishable good humor; he could hear the rustle of her fresh calico dress as she friskily ran up to answer her father's solemnly affectionate "Good Sabbath," on Reb Peretz's return from synagogue, the last Saturday before Rouvke's departure.