father, had drifted out of a partnership with Karil Zamenoy, a wealthy
Christian merchant of Prague, and had drifted into a partnership with
Trendellsohn. How this had come to pass needs not to be told here, as
it had all occurred in years when Nina was an infant. But in these
shiftings Balatka became a ruined man, and at the time of which I write
he and his daughter were almost penniless. The reader must know that
Karil Zamenoy and Josef Balatka had married sisters. Josef's wife,
Nina's mother, had long been dead, having died--so said Sophie Zamenoy,
her sister--of a broken heart; of a heart that had broken itself in
grief, because her husband had joined his fortunes with those of a Jew.
Whether the disgrace of the alliance or its disastrous result may have
broken the lady's heart, or whether she may have died of a pleurisy, as
the doctors said, we need not inquire here. Her soul had been long at
rest, and her spirit, we may hope, had ceased to fret itself in horror
at contact with a Jew. But Sophie Zamenoy was alive and strong, and
could still hate a Jew as intensely as Jews ever were hated in those
earlier days in which hatred could satisfy itself with persecution. In
her time but little power was left to Madame Zamenoy to persecute the
Trendellsohns other than that which nature had given to her in the
bitterness of her tongue. She could revile them behind their back, or,
if opportunity offered, to their faces; and both she had done often,
telling the world of Prague that the Trendellsohns had killed her
sister, and robbed her foolish brother-in-law. But hitherto the full
vial of her wrath had not been emptied, as it came to be emptied
afterwards; for she had not yet learned the mad iniquity of her niece.
But at the moment of which I now speak, Nina herself knew her own
iniquity, hardly knowing, however, whether her love did or did not
disgrace her. But she did know that any thought as to that was too
late. She loved the man, and had told him so; and were he gipsy as well
as Jew, it would be required of her that she should go out with him