Bot-S: Daniel Deronda

Later, in the drawing-room, Deronda, at somebody's request, sat down to
the piano and sang. Afterward, Mrs. Raymond took his place; and on
rising he observed that Gwendolen had left her seat, and had come to
this end of the room, as if to listen more fully, but was now standing
with her back to every one, apparently contemplating a fine cowled head
carved in ivory which hung over a small table. He longed to go to her
and speak. Why should he not obey such an impulse, as he would have
done toward any other lady in the room? Yet he hesitated some moments,
observing the graceful lines of her back, but not moving.

If you have any reason for not indulging a wish to speak to a fair
woman, it is a bad plan to look long at her back: the wish to see what
it screens becomes the stronger. There may be a very sweet smile on the
other side. Deronda ended by going to the end of the small table, at
right angles to Gwendolen's position, but before he could speak she had
turned on him no smile, but such an appealing look of sadness, so
utterly different from the chill effort of her recognition at table,
that his speech was checked. For what was an appreciative space of time
to both, though the observation of others could not have measured it,
they looked at each other--she seeming to take the deep rest of
confession, he with an answering depth of sympathy that neutralized all
other feelings.

"Will you not join in the music?" he said, by way of meeting the
necessity for speech.

That her look of confession had been involuntary was shown by that just
perceptible shake and change of countenance with which she roused
herself to reply calmly, "I join in it by listening. I am fond of
music."

"Are you not a musician?"

"I have given a great deal of time to music. But I have not talent
enough to make it worth while. I shall never sing again."

"But if you are fond of music, it will always be worth while in
private, for your own delight. I make it a virtue to be content with my
middlingness," said Deronda, smiling; "it is always pardonable, so that
one does not ask others to take it for superiority."

"I cannot imitate you," said Gwendolen, recovering her tone of
artificial vivacity. "To be middling with me is another phrase for
being dull. And the worst fault I have to find with the world is that
it is dull. Do you know, I am going to justify gambling in spite of
you. It is a refuge from dullness."

"I don't admit the justification," said Deronda. "I think what we call
the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how can any one
find an intense interest in life? And many do."

"Ah, I see! The fault I find in the world is my own fault," said
Gwendolen, smiling at him. Then after a moment, looking up at the ivory
again, she said, "Do _you_ never find fault with the world or with
others?"

"Oh, yes. When I am in a grumbling mood."

"And hate people? Confess you hate them when they stand in your
way--when their gain is your loss? That is your own phrase, you know."

"We are often standing in each other's way when we can't help it. I
think it is stupid to hate people on that ground."

"But if they injure you and could have helped it?" said Gwendolen with
a hard intensity unaccountable in incidental talk like this.

Deronda wondered at her choice of subjects. A painful impression
arrested his answer a moment, but at last he said, with a graver,
deeper intonation, "Why, then, after all, I prefer my place to theirs."

"There I believe you are right," said Gwendolen, with a sudden little
laugh, and turned to join the group at the piano.

Deronda looked around for Grandcourt, wondering whether he followed his
bride's movements with any attention; but it was rather undiscerning to
him to suppose that he could find out the fact. Grandcourt had a
delusive mood of observing whatever had an interest for him, which
could be surpassed by no sleepy-eyed animal on the watch for prey. At
that moment he was plunged in the depth of an easy chair, being talked
to by Mr. Vandernoodt, who apparently thought the acquaintance of such
a bridegroom worth cultivating; and an incautious person might have
supposed it safe to telegraph secrets in front of him, the common
prejudice being that your quick observer is one whose eyes have quick
movements. Not at all. If you want a respectable witness who will see
nothing inconvenient, choose a vivacious gentleman, very much on the
alert, with two eyes wide open, a glass in one of them, and an entire
impartiality as to the purpose of looking. If Grandcourt cared to keep
any one under his power he saw them out of the corners of his long
narrow eyes, and if they went behind him he had a constructive process
by which he knew what they were doing there. He knew perfectly well
where his wife was, and how she was behaving. Was he going to be a
jealous husband? Deronda imagined that to be likely; but his
imagination was as much astray about Grandcourt as it would have been
about an unexplored continent where all the species were peculiar. He
did not conceive that he himself was a likely subject of jealousy, or
that he should give any pretext for it; but the suspicion that a wife
is not happy naturally leads one to speculate on the husband's private
deportment; and Deronda found himself after one o'clock in the morning
in the rather ludicrous position of sitting up severely holding a
Hebrew grammar in his hands (for somehow, in deference to Mordecai, he
had begun to study Hebrew), with the consciousness that he had been in
that attitude nearly an hour, and had thought of nothing but Gwendolen
and her husband. To be an unusual young man means for the most part to
get a difficult mastery over the usual, which is often like the sprite
of ill-luck you pack up your goods to escape from, and see grinning at
you from the top of your luggage van. The peculiarities of Deronda's
nature had been acutely touched by the brief incident and words which
made the history of his intercourse with Gwendolen; and this evening's
slight addition had given them an importunate recurrence. It was not
vanity--it was ready sympathy that had made him alive to a certain
appealingness in her behavior toward him; and the difficulty with which
she had seemed to raise her eyes to bow to him, in the first instance,
was to be interpreted now by that unmistakable look of involuntary
confidence which she had afterward turned on him under the
consciousness of his approach.

"What is the use of it all?" thought Deronda, as he threw down his
grammar, and began to undress. "I can't do anything to help her--nobody
can, if she has found out her mistake already. And it seems to me that
she has a dreary lack of the ideas that might help her. Strange and
piteous to human flesh like that might be, wrapped round with fine
raiment, her ears pierced for gems, her head held loftily, her mouth
all smiling pretense, the poor soul within her sitting in sick distaste
of all things! But what do I know of her? There may be a demon in her
to match the worst husband, for what I can tell. She was clearly an
ill-educated, worldly girl: perhaps she is a coquette."

This last reflection, not much believed in, was a self-administered
dose of caution, prompted partly by Sir Hugo's much-contemned joking on
the subject of flirtation. Deronda resolved not to volunteer any
_tete-à-tete_ with Gwendolen during the days of her stay at the Abbey;
and he was capable of keeping a resolve in spite of much inclination to
the contrary.

But a man cannot resolve about a woman's actions, least of all about
those of a woman like Gwendolen, in whose nature there was a
combination of proud reserve with rashness, of perilously poised terror
with defiance, which might alternately flatter and disappoint control.
Few words could less represent her than "coquette." She had native love
of homage, and belief in her own power; but no cold artifice for the
sake of enslaving. And the poor thing's belief in her power, with her
other dreams before marriage, had often to be thrust aside now like the
toys of a sick child, which it looks at with dull eyes, and has no
heart to play with, however it may try.

The next day at lunch Sir Hugo said to her, "The thaw has gone on like
magic, and it's so pleasant out of doors just now--shall we go and see
the stables and the other odd bits about the place?"

"Yes, pray," said Gwendolen. "You will like to see the stables,
Henleigh?" she added, looking at her husband.

"Uncommonly," said Grandcourt, with an indifference which seemed to
give irony to the word, as he returned her look. It was the first time
Deronda had seen them speak to each other since their arrival, and he
thought their exchange of looks as cold or official as if it had been a
ceremony to keep up a charter. Still, the English fondness for reserve
will account for much negation; and Grandcourt's manners with an extra
veil of reserve over them might be expected to present the extreme type
of the national taste.

"Who else is inclined to make the tour of the house and premises?" said
Sir Hugo. "The ladies must muffle themselves; there is only just about
time to do it well before sunset. You will go, Dan, won't you?"

"Oh, yes," said Deronda, carelessly, knowing that Sir Hugo would think
any excuse disobliging.

"All meet in the library, then, when they are ready--say in half an
hour," said the baronet. Gwendolen made herself ready with wonderful
quickness, and in ten minutes came down into the library in her sables,
plume, and little thick boots. As soon as she entered the room she was
aware that some one else was there: it was precisely what she had hoped
for. Deronda was standing with his back toward her at the far end of
the room, and was looking over a newspaper. How could little thick
boots make any noise on an Axminster carpet? And to cough would have
seemed an intended signaling which her pride could not condescend to;
also, she felt bashful about walking up to him and letting him know
that she was there, though it was her hunger to speak to him which had
set her imagination on constructing this chance of finding him, and had
made her hurry down, as birds hover near the water which they dare not
drink. Always uneasily dubious about his opinion of her, she felt a
peculiar anxiety to-day, lest he might think of her with contempt, as
one triumphantly conscious of being Grandcourt's wife, the future lady
of this domain. It was her habitual effort now to magnify the
satisfactions of her pride, on which she nourished her strength; but
somehow Deronda's being there disturbed them all. There was not the
faintest touch of coquetry in the attitude of her mind toward him: he
was unique to her among men, because he had impressed her as being not
her admirer but her superior: in some mysterious way he was becoming a
part of her conscience, as one woman whose nature is an object of
reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man.

And now he would not look round and find out that she was there! The
paper crackled in his hand, his head rose and sank, exploring those
stupid columns, and he was evidently stroking his beard; as if this
world were a very easy affair to her. Of course all the rest of the
company would soon be down, and the opportunity of her saying something
to efface her flippancy of the evening before, would be quite gone. She
felt sick with irritation--so fast do young creatures like her absorb
misery through invisible suckers of their own fancies--and her face had
gathered that peculiar expression which comes with a mortification to
which tears are forbidden.

At last he threw down the paper and turned round.

"Oh, you are there already," he said, coming forward a step or two: "I
must go and put on my coat."

He turned aside and walked out of the room. This was behaving quite
badly. Mere politeness would have made him stay to exchange some words
before leaving her alone. It was true that Grandcourt came in with Sir
Hugo immediately after, so that the words must have been too few to be
worth anything. As it was, they saw him walking from the library door.

"A--you look rather ill," said Grandcourt, going straight up to her,
standing in front of her, and looking into her eyes. "Do you feel equal
to the walk?"

"Yes, I shall like it," said Gwendolen, without the slightest movement
except this of the lips.

"We could put off going over the house, you know, and only go out of
doors," said Sir Hugo, kindly, while Grandcourt turned aside.

"Oh, dear no!" said Gwendolen, speaking with determination; "let us put
off nothing. I want a long walk."

The rest of the walking party--two ladies and two gentlemen besides
Deronda--had now assembled; and Gwendolen rallying, went with due
cheerfulness by the side of Sir Hugo, paying apparently an equal
attention to the commentaries Deronda was called upon to give on the
various architectural fragments, to Sir Hugo's reasons for not
attempting to remedy the mixture of the undisguised modern with the
antique--which in his opinion only made the place the more truly
historical. On their way to the buttery and kitchen they took the
outside of the house and paused before a beautiful pointed doorway,
which was the only old remnant in the east front.

"Well, now, to my mind," said Sir Hugo, "that is more interesting
standing as it is in the middle of what is frankly four centuries
later, than if the whole front had been dressed up in a pretense of the
thirteenth century. Additions ought to smack of the time when they are
made and carry the stamp of their period. I wouldn't destroy any old
bits, but that notion of reproducing the old is a mistake, I think. At
least, if a man likes to do it he must pay for his whistle. Besides,
where are you to stop along that road--making loopholes where you don't
want to peep, and so on? You may as well ask me to wear out the stones
with kneeling; eh, Grandcourt?"

"A confounded nuisance," drawled Grandcourt. "I hate fellows wanting to
howl litanies--acting the greatest bores that have ever existed."

"Well, yes, that's what their romanticism must come to," said Sir Hugo,
in a tone of confidential assent--"that is if they carry it out
logically."

"I think that way of arguing against a course because it may be ridden
down to an absurdity would soon bring life to a standstill," said
Deronda. "It is not the logic of human action, but of a roasting-jack,
that must go on to the last turn when it has been once wound up. We can
do nothing safely without some judgment as to where we are to stop."

"I find the rule of the pocket the best guide," said Sir Hugo,
laughingly. "And as for most of your new-old building, you had need to
hire men to scratch and chip it all over artistically to give it an
elderly-looking surface; which at the present rate of labor would not
answer."

"Do you want to keep up the old fashions, then, Mr. Deronda?" said
Gwendolen, taking advantage of the freedom of grouping to fall back a
little, while Sir Hugo and Grandcourt went on.

"Some of them. I don't see why we should not use our choice there as we
do elsewhere--or why either age or novelty by itself is an argument for
or against. To delight in doing things because our fathers did them is
good if it shuts out nothing better; it enlarges the range of
affection--and affection is the broadest basis of good in life."

"Do you think so?" said Gwendolen with a little surprise. "I should
have thought you cared most about ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and all
that."

"But to care about _them_ is a sort of affection," said Deronda,
smiling at her sudden _naïveté_. "Call it attachment; interest, willing
to bear a great deal for the sake of being with them and saving them
from injury. Of course, it makes a difference if the objects of
interest are human beings; but generally in all deep affections the
objects are a mixture--half persons and half ideas--sentiments and
affections flow in together."

"I wonder whether I understand that," said Gwendolen, putting up her
chin in her old saucy manner. "I believe I am not very affectionate;
perhaps you mean to tell me, that is the reason why I don't see much
good in life."

"No, I did _not_ mean to tell you that; but I admit that I should think
it true if I believed what you say of yourself," said Deronda, gravely.

Here Sir Hugo and Grandcourt turned round and paused.

"I never can get Mr. Deronda to pay me a compliment," said Gwendolen.
"I have quite a curiosity to see whether a little flattery can be
extracted from him."

"Ah!" said Sir Hugo, glancing at Deronda, "the fact is, it is useless
to flatter a bride. We give it up in despair. She has been so fed on
sweet speeches that every thing we say seems tasteless."

"Quite true," said Gwendolen, bending her head and smiling. "Mr.
Grandcourt won me by neatly-turned compliments. If there had been one
word out of place it would have been fatal."

"Do you hear that?" said Sir Hugo, looking at the husband.

"Yes," said Grandcourt, without change of countenance. "It's a deucedly
hard thing to keep up, though."

All this seemed to Sir Hugo a natural playfulness between such a
husband and wife; but Deronda wondered at the misleading alternations
in Gwendolen's manner, which at one moment seemed to excite sympathy by
childlike indiscretion, at another to repel it by proud concealment. He
tried to keep out of her way by devoting himself to Miss Juliet Fenn, a
young lady whose profile had been so unfavorably decided by
circumstances over which she had no control, that Gwendolen some months
ago had felt it impossible to be jealous of her. Nevertheless, when
they were seeing the kitchen--a part of the original building in
perfect preservation--the depth of shadow in the niches of the
stone-walls and groined vault, the play of light from the huge glowing
fire on polished tin, brass, and copper, the fine resonance that came
with every sound of voice or metal, were all spoiled for Gwendolen, and
Sir Hugo's speech about them was made rather importunate, because
Deronda was discoursing to the other ladies and kept at a distance from
her. It did not signify that the other gentlemen took the opportunity
of being near her: of what use in the world was their admiration while
she had an uneasy sense that there was some standard in Deronda's mind
which measured her into littleness? Mr. Vandernoodt, who had the mania
of always describing one thing while you were looking at another, was
quite intolerable with his insistence on Lord Blough's kitchen, which
he had seen in the north.

"Pray don't ask us to see two kitchens at once. It makes the heat
double. I must really go out of it," she cried at last, marching
resolutely into the open air, and leaving the others in the rear.
Grandcourt was already out, and as she joined him, he said,

"I wondered how long you meant to stay in that damned place"--one of
the freedoms he had assumed as a husband being the use of his strongest
epithets. Gwendolen, turning to see the rest of the party approach,
said,

"It was certainly rather too warm in one's wraps."

They walked on the gravel across a green court, where the snow still
lay in islets on the grass, and in masses on the boughs of the great
cedar and the crenelated coping of the stone walls, and then into a
larger court, where there was another cedar, to find the beautiful
choir long ago turned into stables, in the first instance perhaps after
an impromptu fashion by troopers, who had a pious satisfaction in
insulting the priests of Baal and the images of Ashtoreth, the queen of
heaven. The exterior--its west end, save for the stable door, walled in
with brick and covered with ivy--was much defaced, maimed of finial and
gargoyle, the friable limestone broken and fretted, and lending its
soft gray to a powdery dark lichen; the long windows, too, were filled
in with brick as far as the springing of the arches, the broad
clerestory windows with wire or ventilating blinds. With the low wintry
afternoon sun upon it, sending shadows from the cedar boughs, and
lighting up the touches of snow remaining on every ledge, it had still
a scarcely disturbed aspect of antique solemnity, which gave the scene
in the interior rather a startling effect; though, ecclesiastical or
reverential indignation apart, the eyes could hardly help dwelling with
pleasure on its piquant picturesqueness. Each finely-arched chapel was
turned into a stall, where in the dusty glazing of the windows there
still gleamed patches of crimson, orange, blue, and palest violet; for
the rest, the choir had been gutted, the floor leveled, paved, and
drained according to the most approved fashion, and a line of loose
boxes erected in the middle: a soft light fell from the upper windows
on sleek brown or gray flanks and haunches; on mild equine faces
looking out with active nostrils over the varnished brown boarding; on
the hay hanging from racks where the saints once looked down from the
altar-pieces, and on the pale golden straw scattered or in heaps; on a
little white-and-liver-colored spaniel making his bed on the back of an
elderly hackney, and on four ancient angels, still showing signs of
devotion like mutilated martyrs--while over all, the grand pointed
roof, untouched by reforming wash, showed its lines and colors
mysteriously through veiling shadow and cobweb, and a hoof now and then
striking against the boards seemed to fill the vault with thunder,
while outside there was the answering bay of the blood-hounds.

"Oh, this is glorious!" Gwendolen burst forth, in forgetfulness of
everything but the immediate impression: there had been a little
intoxication for her in the grand spaces of courts and building, and
the fact of her being an important person among them. "This _is_
glorious! Only I wish there were a horse in every one of the boxes. I
would ten times rather have these stables than those at Diplow."

But she had no sooner said this than some consciousness arrested her,
and involuntarily she turned her eyes toward Deronda, who oddly enough
had taken off his felt hat and stood holding it before him as if they
had entered a room or an actual church. He, like others, happened to be
looking at her, and their eyes met--to her intense vexation, for it
seemed to her that by looking at him she had betrayed the reference of
her thoughts, and she felt herself blushing: she exaggerated the
impression that even Sir Hugo as well as Deronda would have of her bad
taste in referring to the possession of anything at the Abbey: as for
Deronda, she had probably made him despise her. Her annoyance at what
she imagined to be the obviousness of her confusion robbed her of her
usual facility in carrying it off by playful speech, and turning up her
face to look at the roof, she wheeled away in that attitude. If any had
noticed her blush as significant, they had certainly not interpreted it
by the secret windings and recesses of her feeling. A blush is no
language: only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two
contradictories. Deronda alone had a faint guess at some part of her
feeling; but while he was observing her he was himself under
observation.

"Do you take off your hat to horses?" said Grandcourt, with a slight
sneer.

"Why not?" said Deronda, covering himself. He had really taken off the
hat automatically, and if he had been an ugly man might doubtless have
done so with impunity; ugliness having naturally the air of involuntary
exposure, and beauty, of display.

Gwendolen's confusion was soon merged in the survey of the horses,
which Grandcourt politely abstained from appraising, languidly
assenting to Sir Hugo's alternate depreciation and eulogy of the same
animal, as one that he should not have bought when he was younger, and
piqued himself on his horses, but yet one that had better qualities
than many more expensive brutes.

"The fact is, stables dive deeper and deeper into the pocket nowadays,
and I am very glad to have got rid of that _démangeaison_," said Sir
Hugo, as they were coming out.

"What is a man to do, though?" said Grandcourt. "He must ride. I don't
see what else there is to do. And I don't call it riding to sit astride
a set of brutes with every deformity under the sun."

This delicate diplomatic way of characterizing Sir Hugo's stud did not
require direct notice; and the baronet, feeling that the conversation
had worn rather thin, said to the party generally, "Now we are going to
see the cloister--the finest bit of all--in perfect preservation; the
monks might have been walking there yesterday."

But Gwendolen had lingered behind to look at the kenneled blood-hounds,
perhaps because she felt a little dispirited; and Grandcourt waited for
her.

"You had better take my arm," he said, in his low tone of command; and
she took it.

"It's a great bore being dragged about in this way, and no cigar," said
Grandcourt.

"I thought you would like it."

"Like it!--one eternal chatter. And encouraging those ugly
girls--inviting one to meet such monsters. How that _fat_ Deronda can
bear looking at her----"

"Why do you call him a _fat_? Do you object to him so much?"

"Object? no. What do I care about his being a _fat_? It's of no
consequence to me. I'll invite him to Diplow again if you like."

"I don't think he would come. He is too clever and learned to care
about _us_," said Gwendolen, thinking it useful for her husband to be
told (privately) that it was possible for him to be looked down upon.

"I never saw that make much difference in a man. Either he is a
gentleman, or he is not," said Grandcourt.

That a new husband and wife should snatch a moment's _tete-à-tete_ was
what could be understood and indulged; and the rest of the party left
them in the rear till, re-entering the garden, they all paused in that
cloistered court where, among the falling rose-petals thirteen years
before, we saw a boy becoming acquainted with his first sorrow. This
cloister was built of a harder stone than the church, and had been in
greater safety from the wearing weather. It was a rare example of a
northern cloister with arched and pillared openings not intended for
glazing, and the delicately-wrought foliage of the capitals seemed
still to carry the very touches of the chisel. Gwendolen had dropped
her husband's arm and joined the other ladies, to whom Deronda was
noticing the delicate sense which had combined freedom with accuracy in
the imitation of natural forms.

"I wonder whether one oftener learns to love real objects through their
representations, or the representations through the real objects," he
said, after pointing out a lovely capital made by the curled leaves of
greens, showing their reticulated under-side with the firm gradual
swell of its central rib. "When I was a little fellow these capitals
taught me to observe and delight in the structure of leaves."

"I suppose you can see every line of them with your eyes shut," said
Juliet Fenn.

"Yes. I was always repeating them, because for a good many years this
court stood for me as my only image of a convent, and whenever I read
of monks and monasteries, this was my scenery for them."

"You must love this place very much," said Miss Fenn, innocently, not
thinking of inheritance. "So many homes are like twenty others. But
this is unique, and you seem to know every cranny of it. I dare say you
could never love another home so well."

"Oh, I carry it with me," said Deronda, quietly, being used to all
possible thoughts of this kind. "To most men their early home is no
more than a memory of their early years, and I'm not sure but they have
the best of it. The image is never marred. There's no disappointment in
memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side."

Gwendolen felt sure that he spoke in that way out of delicacy to her
and Grandcourt--because he knew they must hear him; and that he
probably thought of her as a selfish creature who only cared about
possessing things in her own person. But whatever he might say, it must
have been a secret hardship to him that any circumstances of his birth
had shut him out from the inheritance of his father's position; and if
he supposed that she exulted in her husband's taking it, what could he
feel for her but scornful pity? Indeed it seemed clear to her that he
was avoiding her, and preferred talking to others--which nevertheless
was not kind in him.

With these thoughts in her mind she was prevented by a mixture of pride
and timidity from addressing him again, and when they were looking at
the rows of quaint portraits in the gallery above the cloisters, she
kept up her air of interest and made her vivacious remarks without any
direct appeal to Deronda. But at the end she was very weary of her
assumed spirits, and as Grandcourt turned into the billiard-room, she went
to the pretty boudoir which had been assigned to her, and shut herself
up to look melancholy at her ease. No chemical process shows a more
wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we
imagine to be going on in another. Changes in theory, religion,
admirations, may begin with a suspicion of dissent or disapproval, even
when the grounds of disapproval are but matter of searching conjecture.

Poor Gwendolen was conscious of an uneasy, transforming process--all
the old nature shaken to its depths, its hopes spoiled, its pleasures
perturbed, but still showing wholeness and strength in the will to
reassert itself. After every new shock of humiliation she tried to
adjust herself and seize her old supports--proud concealment, trust in
new excitements that would make life go by without much thinking; trust
in some deed of reparation to nullify her self-blame and shield her
from a vague, ever-visiting dread of some horrible calamity; trust in
the hardening effect of use and wont that would make her indifferent to
her miseries.

Yes--miseries. This beautiful, healthy young creature, with her
two-and-twenty years and her gratified ambition, no longer felt
inclined to kiss her fortunate image in the glass. She looked at it
with wonder that she could be so miserable. One belief which had
accompanied her through her unmarried life as a self-cajoling
superstition, encouraged by the subordination of every one about
her--the belief in her own power of dominating--was utterly gone.
Already, in seven short weeks, which seemed half her life, her husband
had gained a mastery which she could no more resist than she could have
resisted the benumbing effect from the touch of a torpedo. Gwendolen's
will had seemed imperious in its small girlish sway; but it was the
will of a creature with a large discourse of imaginative fears: a
shadow would have been enough to relax its hold. And she had found a
will like that of a crab or a boa-constrictor, which goes on pinching
or crushing without alarm at thunder. Not that Grandcourt was without
calculation of the intangible effects which were the chief means of
mastery; indeed, he had a surprising acuteness in detecting that
situation of feeling in Gwendolen which made her proud and rebellious
spirit dumb and helpless before him.

She had burned Lydia Glasher's letter with an instantaneous terror lest
other eyes should see it, and had tenaciously concealed from Grandcourt
that there was any other cause of her violent hysterics than the
excitement and fatigue of the day: she had been urged into an implied
falsehood. "Don't ask me--it was my feeling about everything--it was
the sudden change from home." The words of that letter kept repeating
themselves, and hung on her consciousness with the weight of a
prophetic doom. "I am the grave in which your chance of happiness is
buried as well as mine. You had your warning. You have chosen to injure
me and my children. He had meant to marry me. He would have married me
at last, if you had not broken your word. You will have your
punishment. I desire it with all my soul. Will you give him this letter
to set him against me and ruin us more--me and my children? Shall you
like to stand before your husband with these diamonds on you, and these
words of mine in his thoughts and yours? Will he think you have any
right to complain when he has made you miserable? You took him with
your eyes open. The willing wrong you have done me will be your curse."

The words had nestled their venomous life within her, and stirred
continually the vision of the scene at the Whispering Stones. That
scene was now like an accusing apparition: she dreaded that Grandcourt
should know of it--so far out of her sight now was that possibility she
had once satisfied herself with, of speaking to him about Mrs. Glasher
and her children, and making them rich amends. Any endurance seemed
easier than the mortal humiliation of confessing that she knew all
before she married him, and in marrying him had broken her word. For
the reasons by which she had justified herself when the marriage
tempted her, and all her easy arrangement of her future power over her
husband to make him do better than he might be inclined to do, were now
as futile as the burned-out lights which set off a child's pageant. Her
sense of being blameworthy was exaggerated by a dread both definite and
vague. The definite dread was lest the veil of secrecy should fall
between her and Grandcourt, and give him the right to taunt her. With
the reading of that letter had begun her husband's empire of fear.

And her husband all the while knew it. He had not, indeed, any distinct
knowledge of her broken promise, and would not have rated highly the
effect of that breach on her conscience; but he was aware not only of
what Lush had told him about the meeting at the Whispering Stones, but
also of Gwendolen's concealment as to the cause of her sudden illness.
He felt sure that Lydia had enclosed something with the diamonds, and
that this something, whatever it was, had at once created in Gwendolen
a new repulsion for him and a reason for not daring to manifest it. He
did not greatly mind, or feel as many men might have felt, that his
hopes in marriage were blighted: he had wanted to marry Gwendolen, and
he was not a man to repent. Why should a gentleman whose other
relations in life are carried on without the luxury of sympathetic
feeling, be supposed to require that kind of condiment in domestic
life? What he chiefly felt was that a change had come over the
conditions of his mastery, which, far from shaking it, might establish
it the more thoroughly. And it was established. He judged that he had
not married a simpleton unable to perceive the impossibility of escape,
or to see alternative evils: he had married a girl who had spirit and
pride enough not to make a fool of herself by forfeiting all the
advantages of a position which had attracted her; and if she wanted
pregnant hints to help her in making up her mind properly he would take
care not to withhold them.

Gwendolen, indeed, with all that gnawing trouble in her consciousness,
had hardly for a moment dropped the sense that it was her part to bear
herself with dignity, and appear what is called happy. In disclosure of
disappointment or sorrow she saw nothing but a humiliation which would
have been vinegar to her wounds. Whatever her husband might have come
at last to be to her, she meant to wear the yoke so as not to be
pitied. For she did think of the coming years with presentiment: she
was frightened at Grandcourt. The poor thing had passed from her
girlish sauciness of superiority over this inert specimen of personal
distinction into an amazed perception of her former ignorance about the
possible mental attitude of a man toward the woman he sought in
marriage--of her present ignorance as to what their life with each
other might turn into. For novelty gives immeasurableness to fear, and
fills the early time of all sad changes with phantoms of the future.
Her little coquetries, voluntary or involuntary, had told on Grandcourt
during courtship, and formed a medium of communication between them,
showing him in the light of a creature such as she could understand and
manage: but marriage had nullified all such interchange, and Grandcourt
had become a blank uncertainty to her in everything but this, that he
would do just what he willed, and that she had neither devices at her
command to determine his will, nor any rational means of escaping it.

What had occurred between them and her wearing the diamonds was
typical. One evening, shortly before they came to the Abbey, they were
going to dine at Brackenshaw Castle. Gwendolen had said to herself that
she would never wear those diamonds: they had horrible words clinging
and crawling about them, as from some bad dream, whose images lingered
on the perturbed sense. She came down dressed in her white, with only a
streak of gold and a pendant of emeralds, which Grandcourt had given
her, round her neck, and the little emerald stars in her ears.

Grandcourt stood with his back to the fire and looked at her as she
entered.

"Am I altogether as you like?" she said, speaking rather gaily. She was
not without enjoyment in this occasion of going to Brackenshaw Castle
with her new dignities upon her, as men whose affairs are sadly
involved will enjoy dining out among persons likely to be under a
pleasant mistake about them.

"No," said Grandcourt.

Gwendolen felt suddenly uncomfortable, wondering what was to come. She
was not unprepared for some struggle about the diamonds; but suppose he
were going to say, in low, contemptuous tones, "You are not in any way
what I like." It was very bad for her to be secretly hating him; but it
would be much worse when he gave the first sign of hating her.

"Oh, mercy!" she exclaimed, the pause lasting till she could bear it no
longer. "How am I to alter myself?"

"Put on the diamonds," said Grandcourt, looking straight at her with
his narrow glance.

Gwendolen paused in her turn, afraid of showing any emotion, and
feeling that nevertheless there was some change in her eyes as they met
his. But she was obliged to answer, and said as indifferently as she
could, "Oh, please not. I don't think diamonds suit me."

"What you think has nothing to do with it," said Grandcourt, his _sotto
voce_ imperiousness seeming to have an evening quietude and finish,
like his toilet. "I wish you to wear the diamonds."

"Pray excuse me; I like these emeralds," said Gwendolen, frightened in
spite of her preparation. That white hand of his which was touching his
whisker was capable, she fancied, of clinging round her neck and
threatening to throttle her; for her fear of him, mingling with the
vague foreboding of some retributive calamity which hung about her
life, had reached a superstitious point.

"Oblige me by telling me your reason for not wearing the diamonds when
I desire it," said Grandcourt. His eyes were still fixed upon her, and
she felt her own eyes narrowing under them as if to shut out an
entering pain.

Of what use was the rebellion within her? She could say nothing that
would not hurt her worse than submission. Turning slowly and covering
herself again, she went to her dressing-room. As she reached out the
diamonds, it occurred to her that her unwillingness to wear them might
have already raised a suspicion in Grandcourt that she had some
knowledge about them which he had not given her. She fancied that his
eyes showed a delight in torturing her. How could she be defiant? She
had nothing to say that would touch him--nothing but what would give
him a more painful grasp on her consciousness.

"He delights in making the dogs and horses quail: that is half his
pleasure in calling them his," she said to herself, as she opened the
jewel-case with a shivering sensation.

"It will come to be so with me; and I shall quail. What else is there
for me? I will not say to the world, 'Pity me.'"

She was about to ring for her maid when she heard the door open behind
her. It was Grandcourt who came in.

"You want some one to fasten them," he said, coming toward her.

She did not answer, but simply stood still, leaving him to take out the
ornaments and fasten them as he would. Doubtless he had been used to
fasten them on some one else. With a bitter sort of sarcasm against
herself, Gwendolen thought, "What a privilege this is, to have robbed
another woman of!"

"What makes you so cold?" said Grandcourt, when he had fastened the
last ear-ring. "Pray put plenty of furs on. I hate to see a woman come
into a room looking frozen. If you are to appear as a bride at all,
appear decently."

This marital speech was not exactly persuasive, but it touched the
quick of Gwendolen's pride and forced her to rally. The words of the
bad dream crawled about the diamonds still, but only for her: to others
they were brilliants that suited her perfectly, and Grandcourt inwardly
observed that she answered to the rein.

"Oh, yes, mamma, quite happy," Gwendolen had said on her return to
Diplow. "Not at all disappointed in Ryelands. It is a much finer place
than this--larger in every way. But don't you want some more money?"

"Did you not know that Mr. Grandcourt left me a letter on your
wedding-day? I am to have eight hundred a year. He wishes me to keep
Offendene for the present, while you are at Diplow. But if there were
some pretty cottage near the park at Ryelands we might live there
without much expense, and I should have you most of the year, perhaps."

"We must leave that to Mr. Grandcourt, mamma."

"Oh, certainly. It is exceedingly handsome of him to say that he will
pay the rent for Offendene till June. And we can go on very
well--without any man-servant except Crane, just for out-of-doors. Our
good Merry will stay with us and help me to manage everything. It is
natural that Mr. Grandcourt should wish me to live in a good style of
house in your neighborhood, and I cannot decline. So he said nothing
about it to you?"

"No; he wished me to hear it from you, I suppose."

Gwendolen in fact had been very anxious to have some definite knowledge
of what would be done for her mother, but at no moment since her
marriage had she been able to overcome the difficulty of mentioning the
subject to Grandcourt. Now, however, she had a sense of obligation
which would not let her rest without saying to him, "It is very good of
you to provide for mamma. You took a great deal on yourself in marrying
a girl who had nothing but relations belonging to her."

Grandcourt was smoking, and only said carelessly, "Of course I was not
going to let her live like a gamekeeper's mother."

"At least he is not mean about money," thought Gwendolen, "and mamma is
the better off for my marriage."

She often pursued the comparison between what might have been, if she
had not married Grandcourt, and what actually was, trying to persuade
herself that life generally was barren of satisfaction, and that if she
had chosen differently she might now have been looking back with a
regret as bitter as the feeling she was trying to argue away. Her
mother's dullness, which used to irritate her, she was at present
inclined to explain as the ordinary result of woman's experience. True,
she still saw that she would "manage differently from mamma;" but her
management now only meant that she would carry her troubles with
spirit, and let none suspect them. By and by she promised herself that
she should get used to her heart-sores, and find excitements that would
carry her through life, as a hard gallop carried her through some of
the morning hours. There was gambling: she had heard stories at
Leubronn of fashionable women who gambled in all sorts of ways. It
seemed very flat to her at this distance, but perhaps if she began to
gamble again, the passion might awake. Then there was the pleasure of
producing an effect by her appearance in society: what did celebrated
beauties do in town when their husbands could afford display? All men
were fascinated by them: they had a perfect equipage and toilet, walked
into public places, and bowed, and made the usual answers, and walked
out again, perhaps they bought china, and practiced accomplishments. If
she could only feel a keen appetite for those pleasures--could only
believe in pleasure as she used to do! Accomplishments had ceased to
have the exciting quality of promising any pre-eminence to her; and as
for fascinated gentlemen--adorers who might hover round her with
languishment, and diversify married life with the romantic stir of
mystery, passion, and danger, which her French reading had given her
some girlish notion of--they presented themselves to her imagination
with the fatal circumstance that, instead of fascinating her in return,
they were clad in her own weariness and disgust. The admiring male,
rashly adjusting the expression of his features and the turn of his
conversation to her supposed tastes, had always been an absurd object
to her, and at present seemed rather detestable. Many courses are
actually pursued--follies and sins both convenient and
inconvenient--without pleasure or hope of pleasure; but to solace
ourselves with imagining any course beforehand, there must be some
foretaste of pleasure in the shape of appetite; and Gwendolen's
appetite had sickened. Let her wander over the possibilities of her
life as she would, an uncertain shadow dogged her. Her confidence in
herself and her destiny had turned into remorse and dread; she trusted
neither herself nor her future.

This hidden helplessness gave fresh force to the hold Deronda had from
the first taken on her mind, as one who had an unknown standard by
which he judged her. Had he some way of looking at things which might
be a new footing for her--an inward safeguard against possible events
which she dreaded as stored-up retribution? It is one of the secrets in
that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that
to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some
personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them
into receptiveness. It had been Gwendolen's habit to think of the
persons around her as stale books, too familiar to be interesting.
Deronda had lit up her attention with a sense of novelty: not by words
only, but by imagined facts, his influence had entered into the current
of that self-suspicion and self-blame which awakens a new consciousness.

"I wish he could know everything about me without my telling him," was
one of her thoughts, as she sat leaning over the end of a couch,
supporting her head with her hand, and looking at herself in a
mirror--not in admiration, but in a sad kind of companionship. "I wish
he knew that I am not so contemptible as he thinks me; that I am in
deep trouble, and want to be something better if I could." Without the
aid of sacred ceremony or costume, her feelings had turned this man,
only a few years older than herself, into a priest; a sort of trust
less rare than the fidelity that guards it. Young reverence for one who
is also young is the most coercive of all: there is the same level of
temptation, and the higher motive is believed in as a fuller force--not
suspected to be a mere residue from weary experience.

But the coercion is often stronger on the one who takes the reverence.
Those who trust us educate us. And perhaps in that ideal consecration
of Gwendolen's, some education was being prepared for Deronda.




CHAPTER XXXVI.

  "Rien ne pese tant qu'un secret
  Le porter loin est difficile aux dames:
  Et je sçais mesme sur ce fait
  Bon nombre d'hommes qui sont femmes."
                               --LA FONTAINE.


Meanwhile Deronda had been fastened and led off by Mr. Vandernoodt, who
wished for a brisker walk, a cigar, and a little gossip. Since we
cannot tell a man his own secrets, the restraint of being in his
company often breeds a desire to pair off in conversation with some
more ignorant person, and Mr. Vandernoodt presently said,

"What a washed-out piece of cambric Grandcourt is! But if he is a
favorite of yours, I withdraw the remark."

"Not the least in the world," said Deronda.

"I thought not. One wonders how he came to have a great passion again;
and he must have had--to marry in this way. Though Lush, his old chum,
hints that he married this girl out of obstinacy. By George! it was a
very accountable obstinacy. A man might make up his mind to marry her
without the stimulus of contradiction. But he must have made himself a
pretty large drain of money, eh?"

"I know nothing of his affairs."

"What! not of the other establishment he keeps up?"

"Diplow? Of course. He took that of Sir Hugo. But merely for the year."

"No, no; not Diplow: Gadsmere. Sir Hugo knows, I'll answer for it."

Deronda said nothing. He really began to feel some curiosity, but he
foresaw that he should hear what Mr. Vandernoodt had to tell, without
the condescension of asking.

"Lush would not altogether own to it, of course. He's a confident and
go-between of Grandcourt's. But I have it on the best authority. The
fact is, there's another lady with four children at Gadsmere. She has
had the upper hand of him these ten years and more, and by what I can
understand has it still--left her husband for him, and used to travel
with him everywhere. Her husband's dead now; I found a fellow who was
in the same regiment with him, and knew this Mrs. Glasher before she
took wing. A fiery dark-eyed woman--a noted beauty at that time--he
thought she was dead. They say she has Grandcourt under her thumb
still, and it's a wonder he didn't marry her, for there's a very fine
boy, and I understand Grandcourt can do absolutely as he pleases with
the estates. Lush told me as much as that."

"What right had he to marry this girl?" said Deronda, with disgust.

Mr. Vandernoodt, adjusting the end of his cigar, shrugged his shoulders
and put out his lips.

"_She_ can know nothing of it," said Deronda, emphatically. But that
positive statement was immediately followed by an inward query--"Could
she have known anything of it?"

"It's rather a piquant picture," said Mr. Vandernoodt--"Grandcourt
between two fiery women. For depend upon it this light-haired one has
plenty of devil in her. I formed that opinion of her at Leubronn. It's
a sort of Medea and Creüsa business. Fancy the two meeting! Grandcourt
is a new kind of Jason: I wonder what sort of a part he'll make of it.
It's a dog's part at best. I think I hear Ristori now, saying, 'Jasone!
Jasone!' These fine women generally get hold of a stick."

"Grandcourt can bite, I fancy," said Deronda. "He is no stick."

"No, no; I meant Jason. I can't quite make out Grandcourt. But he's a
keen fellow enough--uncommonly well built too. And if he comes into all
this property, the estates will bear dividing. This girl, whose friends
had come to beggary, I understand, may think herself lucky to get him.
I don't want to be hard on a man because he gets involved in an affair
of that sort. But he might make himself more agreeable. I was telling
him a capital story last night, and he got up and walked away in the
middle. I felt inclined to kick him. Do you suppose that is inattention
or insolence, now?"

"Oh, a mixture. He generally observes the forms: but he doesn't listen
much," said Deronda. Then, after a moment's pause, he went on, "I
should think there must be some exaggeration or inaccuracy in what you
have heard about this lady at Gadsmere."

"Not a bit, depend upon it; it has all lain snug of late years. People
have forgotten all about it. But there the nest is, and the birds are
in it. And I know Grandcourt goes there. I have good evidence that he
goes there. However, that's nobody's business but his own. The affair
has sunk below the surface."

"I wonder you could have learned so much about it," said Deronda,
rather drily.

"Oh, there are plenty of people who knew all about it; but such stories
get packed away like old letters. They interest me. I like to know the
manners of my time--contemporary gossip, not antediluvian. These
Dryasdust fellows get a reputation by raking up some small scandal
about Semiramis or Nitocris, and then we have a thousand and one poems
written upon it by all the warblers big and little. But I don't care a
straw about the _faux pas_ of the mummies. You do, though. You are one
of the historical men--more interested in a lady when she's got a rag
face and skeleton toes peeping out. Does that flatter your imagination?"

"Well, if she had any woes in her love, one has the satisfaction of
knowing that she's well out of them."

"Ah, you are thinking of the Medea, I see."

Deronda then chose to point to some giant oaks worth looking at in
their bareness. He also felt an interest in this piece of contemporary
gossip, but he was satisfied that Mr. Vandernoodt had no more to tell
about it.

Since the early days when he tried to construct the hidden story of his
own birth, his mind had perhaps never been so active in weaving
probabilities about any private affair as it had now begun to be about
Gwendolen's marriage. This unavowed relation of Grandcourt's--could she
have gained some knowledge of it, which caused her to shrink from the
match--a shrinking finally overcome by the urgence of poverty? He could
recall almost every word she had said to him, and in certain of these
words he seemed to discern that she was conscious of having done some
wrong--inflicted some injury. His own acute experience made him alive
to the form of injury which might affect the unavowed children and
their mother. Was Mrs. Grandcourt, under all her determined show of
satisfaction, gnawed by a double, a treble-headed grief--self-reproach,
disappointment, jealousy? He dwelt especially on all the slight signs
of self-reproach: he was inclined to judge her tenderly, to excuse, to
pity. He thought he had found a key now by which to interpret her more
clearly: what magnifying of her misery might not a young creature get
into who had wedded her fresh hopes to old secrets! He thought he saw
clearly enough now why Sir Hugo had never dropped any hint of this
affair to him; and immediately the image of this Mrs. Glasher became
painfully associated with his own hidden birth. Gwendolen knowing of
that woman and her children, marrying Grandcourt, and showing herself
contented, would have been among the most repulsive of beings to him;
but Gwendolen tasting the bitterness of remorse for having contributed
to their injury was brought very near to his fellow-feeling. If it were
so, she had got to a common plane of understanding with him on some
difficulties of life which a woman is rarely able to judge of with any
justice or generosity; for, according to precedent, Gwendolen's view of
her position might easily have been no other than that her husband's
marriage with her was his entrance on the path of virtue, while Mrs.
Glasher represented his forsaken sin. And Deronda had naturally some
resentment on behalf of the Hagars and Ishmaels.

Undeniably Deronda's growing solicitude about Gwendolen depended
chiefly on her peculiar manner toward him; and I suppose neither man
nor woman would be the better for an utter insensibility to such
appeals. One sign that his interest in her had changed its footing was
that he dismissed any caution against her being a coquette setting
snares to involve him in a vulgar flirtation, and determined that he
would not again evade any opportunity of talking to her. He had shaken
off Mr. Vandernoodt, and got into a solitary corner in the twilight;
but half an hour was long enough to think of those possibilities in
Gwendolen's position and state of mind; and on forming the
determination not to avoid her, he remembered that she was likely to be
at tea with the other ladies in the drawing-room. The conjecture was
true; for Gwendolen, after resolving not to go down again for the next
four hours, began to feel, at the end of one, that in shutting herself
up she missed all chances of seeing and hearing, and that her visit
would only last two days more. She adjusted herself, put on her little
air of self-possession, and going down, made herself resolutely
agreeable. Only ladies were assembled, and Lady Pentreath was amusing
them with a description of a drawing-room under the Regency, and the
figure that was cut by ladies and gentlemen in 1819, the year she was
presented--when Deronda entered.

"Shall I be acceptable?" he said. "Perhaps I had better go back and
look for the others. I suppose they are in the billiard-room."

"No, no; stay where you are," said Lady Pentreath. "They were all
getting tired of me; let us hear what _you_ have to say."

"That is rather an embarrassing appeal," said Deronda, drawing up a
chair near Lady Mallinger's elbow at the tea-table. "I think I had
better take the opportunity of mentioning our songstress," he added,
looking at Lady Mallinger--"unless you have done so."

"Oh, the little Jewess!" said Lady Mallinger. "No, I have not mentioned
her. It never entered my head that any one here wanted singing lessons."

"All ladies know some one else who wants singing lessons," said
Deronda. "I have happened to find an exquisite singer,"--here he turned
to Lady Pentreath. "She is living with some ladies who are friends of
mine--the mother and sisters of a man who was my chum at Cambridge. She
was on the stage at Vienna; but she wants to leave that life, and
maintain herself by teaching."

"There are swarms of those people, aren't there?" said the old lady.
"Are her lessons to be very cheap or very expensive? Those are the two
baits I know of."

"There is another bait for those who hear her," said Deronda. "Her
singing is something quite exceptional, I think. She has had such
first-rate teaching--or rather first-rate instinct with her
teaching--that you might imagine her singing all came by nature."

"Why did she leave the stage, then?" said Lady Pentreath. "I'm too old
to believe in first-rate people giving up first-rate chances."

"Her voice was too weak. It is a delicious voice for a room. You who
put up with my singing of Schubert would be enchanted with hers," said
Deronda, looking at Mrs. Raymond. "And I imagine she would not object
to sing at private parties or concerts. Her voice is quite equal to
that."

"I am to have her in my drawing-room when we go up to town," said Lady
Mallinger. "You shall hear her then. I have not heard her myself yet;
but I trust Daniel's recommendation. I mean my girls to have lessons of
her."

"Is it a charitable affair?" said Lady Pentreath. "I can't bear
charitable music."

Lady Mallinger, who was rather helpless in conversation, and felt
herself under an engagement not to tell anything of Mirah's story, had
an embarrassed smile on her face, and glanced at Deronda.

"It is a charity to those who want to have a good model of feminine
singing," said Deronda. "I think everybody who has ears would benefit
by a little improvement on the ordinary style. If you heard Miss
Lapidoth"--here he looked at Gwendolen--"perhaps you would revoke your
resolution to give up singing."

"I should rather think my resolution would be confirmed," said
Gwendolen. "I don't feel able to follow your advice of enjoying my own
middlingness."

"For my part," said Deronda, "people who do anything finely always
inspirit me to try. I don't mean that they make me believe I can do it
as well. But they make the thing, whatever it may be, seem worthy to be
done. I can bear to think my own music not good for much, but the world
would be more dismal if I thought music itself not good for much.
Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual
wealth of the world."

"But then, if we can't imitate it, it only makes our own life seem the
tamer," said Gwendolen, in a mood to resent encouragement founded on
her own insignificance.

"That depends on the point of view, I think," said Deronda. "We should
have a poor life of it if we were reduced for all our pleasure to our
own performances. A little private imitation of what is good is a sort
of private devotion to it, and most of us ought to practice art only in
the light of private study--preparation to understand and enjoy what
the few can do for us. I think Miss Lapidoth is one of the few."

"She must be a very happy person, don't you think?" said Gwendolen,
with a touch of sarcasm, and a turn of her neck toward Mrs. Raymond.

"I don't know," answered the independent lady; "I must hear more of her
before I say that."

"It may have been a bitter disappointment to her that her voice failed
her for the stage," said Juliet Fenn, sympathetically.

"I suppose she's past her best, though," said the deep voice of Lady
Pentreath.

"On the contrary, she has not reached it," said Deronda. "She is barely
twenty."

"And very pretty," interposed Lady Mallinger, with an amiable wish to
help Deronda. "And she has very good manners. I'm sorry she's a bigoted
Jewess; I should not like it for anything else, but it doesn't matter
in singing."

"Well, since her voice is too weak for her to scream much, I'll tell
Lady Clementina to set her on my nine granddaughters," said Lady
Pentreath; "and I hope she'll convince eight of them that they have not
voice enough to sing anywhere but at church. My notion is, that many of
our girls nowadays want lessons not to sing."

"I have had my lessons in that," said Gwendolen, looking at Deronda.
"You see Lady Pentreath is on my side."

While she was speaking, Sir Hugo entered with some of the other
gentlemen, including Grandcourt, and standing against the group at the
low tea-table said,

"What imposition is Deronda putting on you, ladies--slipping in among
you by himself?"

"Wanting to pass off an obscurity on us as better than any celebrity,"
said Lady Pentreath--"a pretty singing Jewess who is to astonish these
young people. You and I, who heard Catalani in her prime, are not so
easily astonished."

Sir Hugo listened with his good-humored smile as he took a cup of tea
from his wife, and then said, "Well, you know, a Liberal is bound to
think that there have been singers since Catalani's time."

"Ah, you are younger than I am. I dare say you are one of the men who
ran after Alcharisi. But she married off and left you all in the lurch."

"Yes, yes; it's rather too bad when these great singers marry
themselves into silence before they have a crack in their voices. And
the husband is a public robber. I remember Leroux saying, 'A man might
as well take down a fine peal of church bells and carry them off to the
steppes," said Sir Hugo, setting down his cup and turning away, while
Deronda, who had moved from his place to make room for others, and felt
that he was not in request, sat down a little apart. Presently he
became aware that, in the general dispersion of the group, Gwendolen
had extricated herself from the attentions of Mr. Vandernoodt and had
walked to the piano, where she stood apparently examining the music
which lay on the desk. Will any one be surprised at Deronda's
concluding that she wished him to join her? Perhaps she wanted to make
amends for the unpleasant tone of resistance with which she had met his
recommendation of Mirah, for he had noticed that her first impulse
often was to say what she afterward wished to retract. He went to her
side and said,

"Are you relenting about the music and looking for something to play or
sing?"

"I am not looking for anything, but I _am_ relenting," said Gwendolen,
speaking in a submissive tone.

"May I know the reason?"

"I should like to hear Miss Lapidoth and have lessons from her, since
you admire her so much--that is, of course, when we go to town. I mean
lessons in rejoicing at her excellence and my own deficiency," said
Gwendolen, turning on him a sweet, open smile.

"I shall be really glad for you to see and hear her," said Deronda,
returning the smile in kind.

"Is she as perfect in every thing else as in her music?"

"I can't vouch for that exactly. I have not seen enough of her. But I
have seen nothing in her that I could wish to be different. She has had
an unhappy life. Her troubles began in early childhood, and she has
grown up among very painful surroundings. But I think you will say that
no advantages could have given her more grace and truer refinement."

"I wonder what sort of trouble hers were?"

"I have not any very precise knowledge. But I know that she was on the
brink of drowning herself in despair."

"And what hindered her?" said Gwendolen, quickly, looking at Deronda.

"Some ray or other came--which made her feel that she ought to
live--that it was good to live," he answered, quietly. "She is full of
piety, and seems capable of submitting to anything when it takes the
form of duty."

"Those people are not to be pitied," said Gwendolen, impatiently. "I
have no sympathy with women who are always doing right. I don't believe
in their great sufferings." Her fingers moved quickly among the edges
of the music.

"It is true," said Deronda, "that the consciousness of having done
wrong is something deeper, more bitter. I suppose we faulty creatures
can never feel so much for the irreproachable as for those who are
bruised in the struggle with their own faults. It is a very ancient
story, that of the lost sheep--but it comes up afresh every day."

"That is a way of speaking--it is not acted upon, it is not real," said
Gwendolen, bitterly. "You admire Miss Lapidoth because you think her
blameless, perfect. And you know you would despise a woman who had done
something you thought very wrong."

"That would depend entirely upon her own view of what she had done,"
said Deronda.

"You would be satisfied if she were very wretched, I suppose," said
Gwendolen, impetuously.

"No, not satisfied--full of sorrow for her. It was not a mere way of
speaking. I did not mean to say that the finer nature is not more
adorable; I meant that those who would be comparatively uninteresting
beforehand may become worthier of sympathy when they do something that
awakens in them a keen remorse. Lives are enlarged in different ways. I
dare say some would never get their eyes opened if it were not for a
violent shock from the consequences of their own actions. And when they
are suffering in that way one must care for them more than for the
comfortably self-satisfied." Deronda forgot everything but his vision
of what Gwendolen's experience had probably been, and urged by
compassion let his eyes and voice express as much interest as they
would.

Gwendolen had slipped on to the music-stool, and looked up at him with
pain in her long eyes, like a wounded animal asking for help.

"Are you persuading Mrs. Grandcourt to play to us, Dan?" said Sir Hugo,
coming up and putting his hand on Deronda's shoulder with a gentle,
admonitory pinch.

"I cannot persuade myself," said Gwendolen, rising.

Others had followed Sir Hugo's lead, and there was an end of any
liability to confidences for that day. But the next was New Year's Eve;
and a grand dance, to which the chief tenants were invited, was to be
held in the picture-gallery above the cloister--the sort of
entertainment in which numbers and general movement may create privacy.
When Gwendolen was dressing, she longed, in remembrance of Leubronn, to
put on the old turquoise necklace for her sole ornament; but she dared
not offend her husband by appearing in that shabby way on an occasion
when he would demand her utmost splendor. Determined to wear the
memorial necklace somehow, she wound it thrice round her wrist and made
a bracelet of it--having gone to her room to put it on just before the
time of entering the ball-room.

It was always a beautiful scene, this dance on New Year's Eve, which
had been kept up by the family tradition as nearly in the old fashion
as inexorable change would allow. Red carpet was laid down for the
occasion: hot-house plants and evergreens were arranged in bowers at
the extremities and in every recess of the gallery; and the old
portraits stretching back through generations, even to the
pre-portraying period, made a piquant line of spectators. Some
neighboring gentry, major and minor, were invited; and it was certainly
an occasion when a prospective master and mistress of Abbott's and
King's Topping might see their future glory in an agreeable light, as a
picturesque provincial supremacy with a rent-roll personified by the
most prosperous-looking tenants. Sir Hugo expected Grandcourt to feel
flattered by being asked to the Abbey at a time which included this
festival in honor of the family estate; but he also hoped that his own
hale appearance might impress his successor with the probable length of
time that would elapse before the succession came, and with the wisdom
of preferring a good actual sum to a minor property that must be waited
for. All present, down to the least important farmer's daughter, knew
that they were to see "young Grandcourt," Sir Hugo's nephew, the
presumptive heir and future baronet, now visiting the Abbey with his
bride after an absence of many years; any coolness between uncle and
nephew having, it is understood, given way to a friendly warmth. The
bride opening the ball with Sir Hugo was necessarily the cynosure of
all eyes; and less than a year before, if some magic mirror could have
shown Gwendolen her actual position, she would have imagined herself
moving in it with a glow of triumphant pleasure, conscious that she
held in her hands a life full of favorable chances which her cleverness
and spirit would enable her to make the best of. And now she was
wondering that she could get so little joy out of the exultation to
which she had been suddenly lifted, away from the distasteful petty
empire of her girlhood with its irksome lack of distinction and
superfluity of sisters. She would have been glad to be even
unreasonably elated, and to forget everything but the flattery of the
moment; but she was like one courting sleep, in whom thoughts insist
like willful tormentors.

Wondering in this way at her own dullness, and all the while longing
for an excitement that would deaden importunate aches, she was passing
through files of admiring beholders in the country-dance with which it
was traditional to open the ball, and was being generally regarded by
her own sex as an enviable woman. It was remarked that she carried
herself with a wonderful air, considering that she had been nobody in
particular, and without a farthing to her fortune. If she had been a
duke's daughter, or one of the royal princesses, she could not have
taken the honors of the evening more as a matter of course. Poor
Gwendolen! It would by-and-by become a sort of skill in which she was
automatically practiced to bear this last great gambling loss with an
air of perfect self-possession.

The next couple that passed were also worth looking at. Lady Pentreath
had said, "I shall stand up for one dance, but I shall choose my
partner. Mr. Deronda, you are the youngest man, I mean to dance with
you. Nobody is old enough to make a good pair with me. I must have a
contrast." And the contrast certainly set off the old lady to the
utmost. She was one of those women who are never handsome till they are
old, and she had had the wisdom to embrace the beauty of age as early
as possible. What might have seemed harshness in her features when she
was young, had turned now into a satisfactory strength of form and
expression which defied wrinkles, and was set off by a crown of white
hair; her well-built figure was well covered with black drapery, her
ears and neck comfortably caressed with lace, showing none of those
withered spaces which one would think it a pitiable condition of
poverty to expose. She glided along gracefully enough, her dark eyes
still with a mischievous smile in them as she observed the company. Her
partner's young richness of tint against the flattened hues and rougher
forms of her aged head had an effect something like that of a fine
flower against a lichenous branch. Perhaps the tenants hardly
appreciated this pair. Lady Pentreath was nothing more than a straight,
active old lady: Mr. Deronda was a familiar figure regarded with
friendliness; but if he had been the heir, it would have been regretted
that his face was not as unmistakably English as Sir Hugo's.

Grandcourt's appearance when he came up with Lady Mallinger was not
impeached with foreignness: still the satisfaction in it was not
complete. It would have been matter of congratulation if one who had
the luck to inherit two old family estates had had more hair, a fresher
color, and a look of greater animation; but that fine families dwindled
off into females, and estates ran together into the single heirship of
a mealy-complexioned male, was a tendency in things which seemed to be
accounted for by a citation of other instances. It was agreed that Mr.
Grandcourt could never be taken for anything but what he was--a born
gentleman; and that, in fact, he looked like an heir. Perhaps the
person least complacently disposed toward him at that moment was Lady
Mallinger, to whom going in procession up this country-dance with
Grandcourt was a blazonment of herself as the infelicitous wife who had
produced nothing but daughters, little better than no children, poor
dear things, except for her own fondness and for Sir Hugo's wonderful
goodness to them. But such inward discomfort could not prevent the
gentle lady from looking fair and stout to admiration, or her full blue
eyes from glancing mildly at her neighbors. All the mothers and fathers
held it a thousand pities that she had not had a fine boy, or even
several--which might have been expected, to look at her when she was
first married.

The gallery included only three sides of the quadrangle, the fourth
being shut off as a lobby or corridor: one side was used for dancing,
and the opposite side for the supper-table, while the intermediate part
was less brilliantly lit, and fitted with comfortable seats. Later in
the evening Gwendolen was in one of these seats, and Grandcourt was
standing near her. They were not talking to each other: she was leaning
backward in her chair, and he against the wall; and Deronda, happening
to observe this, went up to ask her if she had resolved not to dance
any more. Having himself been doing hard duty in this way among the
guests, he thought he had earned the right to sink for a little while
into the background, and he had spoken little to Gwendolen since their
conversation at the piano the day before. Grandcourt's presence would
only make it the easier to show that pleasure in talking to her even
about trivialities which would be a sign of friendliness; and he
fancied that her face looked blank. A smile beamed over it as she saw
him coming, and she raised herself from her leaning posture. Grandcourt
had been grumbling at the _ennui_ of staying so long in this stupid
dance, and proposing that they should vanish: she had resisted on the
ground of politeness--not without being a little frightened at the
probability that he was silently angry with her. She had her reason
for staying, though she had begun to despair of the opportunity for the
sake of which she had put the old necklace on her wrist. But now at
last Deronda had come.

"Yes; I shall not dance any more. Are you not glad?" she said, with
some gayety, "you might have felt obliged humbly to offer yourself as a
partner, and I feel sure you have danced more than you like already."

"I will not deny that," said Deronda, "since you have danced as much as
you like."

"But will you take trouble for me in another way, and fetch me a glass
of that fresh water?"

It was but a few steps that Deronda had to go for the water. Gwendolen
was wrapped in the lightest, softest of white woolen burnouses, under
which her hands were hidden. While he was gone she had drawn off her
glove, which was finished with a lace ruffle, and when she put up her
hand to take the glass and lifted it to her mouth, the
necklace-bracelet, which in its triple winding adapted itself clumsily
to her wrist, was necessarily conspicuous. Grandcourt saw it, and saw
that it was attracting Deronda's notice.

"What is that hideous thing you have got on your wrist?" said the
husband.

"That?" said Gwendolen, composedly, pointing to the turquoises, while
she still held the glass; "it is an old necklace I like to wear. I lost
it once, and someone found it for me."

With that she gave the glass again to Deronda, who immediately carried
it away, and on returning said, in order to banish any consciousness
about the necklace,

"It is worth while for you to go and look out at one of the windows on
that side. You can see the finest possible moonlight on the stone
pillars and carving, and shadows waving across it in the wind."

"I should like to see it. Will you go?" said Gwendolen, looking up at
her husband.

He cast his eyes down at her, and saying, "No, Deronda will take you,"
slowly moved from his leaning attitude, and walked away.

Gwendolen's face for a moment showed a fleeting vexation: she resented
this show of indifference toward her. Deronda felt annoyed, chiefly for
her sake; and with a quick sense, that it would relieve her most to
behave as if nothing peculiar had occurred, he said, "Will you take my
arm and go, while only servants are there?" He thought that he
understood well her action in drawing his attention to the necklace:
she wished him to infer that she had submitted her mind to rebuke--her
speech and manner had from the first fluctuated toward that
submission--and that she felt no lingering resentment. Her evident
confidence in his interpretation of her appealed to him as a peculiar
claim.

When they were walking together, Gwendolen felt as if the annoyance
which had just happened had removed another film of reserve from
between them, and she had more right than before to be as open as she
wished. She did not speak, being filled with the sense of silent
confidence, until they were in front of the window looking out on the
moonlit court. A sort of bower had been made round the window, turning
it into a recess. Quitting his arm, she folded her hands in her
burnous, and pressed her brow against the glass. He moved slightly
away, and held the lapels of his coat with his thumbs under the collar
as his manner was: he had a wonderful power of standing perfectly
still, and in that position reminded one sometimes of Dante's _spiriti
magni con occhi tardi e gravi_. (Doubtless some of these danced in
their youth, doubted of their own vocation, and found their own times
too modern.) He abstained from remarking on the scene before them,
fearing that any indifferent words might jar on her: already the calm
light and shadow, the ancient steadfast forms, and aloofness enough
from those inward troubles which he felt sure were agitating her. And
he judged aright: she would have been impatient of polite conversation.
The incidents of the last minute or two had receded behind former
thoughts which she had imagined herself uttering to Deronda, which now
urged themselves to her lips. In a subdued voice, she said,

"Suppose I had gambled again, and lost the necklace again, what should
you have thought of me?"

"Worse than I do now."

"Then you are mistaken about me. You wanted me not to do that--not to
make my gain out of another's loss in that way--and I have done a great
deal worse."

"I can't imagine temptations," said Deronda. "Perhaps I am able to
understand what you mean. At least I understand self-reproach." In
spite of preparation he was almost alarmed at Gwendolen's precipitancy
of confidence toward him, in contrast with her habitual resolute
concealment.

"What should you do if you were like me--feeling that you were wrong
and miserable, and dreading everything to come?" It seemed that she was
hurrying to make the utmost use of this opportunity to speak as she
would.

"That is not to be amended by doing one thing only--but many," said
Deronda, decisively.

"What?" said Gwendolen, hastily, moving her brow from the glass and
looking at him.

He looked full at her in return, with what she thought was severity. He
felt that it was not a moment in which he must let himself be tender,
and flinch from implying a hard opinion.

"I mean there are many thoughts and habits that may help us to bear
inevitable sorrow. Multitudes have to bear it."

She turned her brow to the window again, and said impatiently, "You
must tell me then what to think and what to do; else why did you not
let me go on doing as I liked and not minding? If I had gone on
gambling I might have won again, and I might have got not to care for
anything else. You would not let me do that. Why shouldn't I do as I
like, and not mind? Other people do." Poor Gwendolen's speech expressed
nothing very clearly except her irritation.

"I don't believe you would ever get not to mind," said Deronda, with
deep-toned decision. "If it were true that baseness and cruelty made an
escape from pain, what difference would that make to people who can't
be quite base or cruel? Idiots escape some pain; but you can't be an
idiot. Some may do wrong to another without remorse; but suppose one
does feel remorse? I believe you could never lead an injurious
life--all reckless lives are injurious, pestilential--without feeling
remorse." Deronda's unconscious fervor had gathered as he went on: he
was uttering thoughts which he had used for himself in moments of
painful meditation.

"Then tell me what better I can do," said Gwendolen, insistently.

"Many things. Look on other lives besides your own. See what their
troubles are, and how they are borne. Try to care about something in
this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try
to care for what is best in thought and action--something that is good
apart from the accidents of your own lot."

For an instant or two Gwendolen was mute. Then, again moving her brow
from the glass, she said,

"You mean that I am selfish and ignorant."

He met her fixed look in silence before he answered firmly--"You will
not go on being selfish and ignorant!"

She did not turn away her glance or let her eyelids fall, but a change
came over her face--that subtle change in nerve and muscle which will
sometimes give a childlike expression even to the elderly: it is the
subsidence of self-assertion.

"Shall I lead you back?" said Deronda, gently, turning and offering her
his arm again. She took it silently, and in that way they came in sight
of Grandcourt, who was walking slowly near their former place.
Gwendolen went up to him and said, "I am ready to go now. Mr. Deronda
will excuse us to Lady Mallinger."

"Certainly," said Deronda. "Lord and Lady Pentreath disappeared some
time ago."

Grandcourt gave his arm in silent compliance, nodding over his shoulder
to Deronda, and Gwendolen too only half turned to bow and say,
"Thanks." The husband and wife left the gallery and paced the corridors
in silence. When the door had closed on them in the boudoir, Grandcourt
threw himself into a chair and said, with undertoned peremptoriness,
"Sit down." She, already in the expectation of something unpleasant,
had thrown off her burnous with nervous unconsciousness, and
immediately obeyed. Turning his eyes toward her, he began,

"Oblige me in future by not showing whims like a mad woman in a play."

"What do you mean?" said Gwendolen.

"I suppose there is some understanding between you and Deronda about
that thing you have on your wrist. If you have anything to say to him,
say it. But don't carry on a telegraphing which other people are
supposed not to see. It's damnably vulgar."

"You can know all about the necklace," said Gwendolen, her angry pride
resisting the nightmare of fear.

"I don't want to know. Keep to yourself whatever you like." Grandcourt
paused between each sentence, and in each his speech seemed to become
more preternaturally distinct in its inward tones. "What I care to know
I shall know without your telling me. Only you will please to behave as
becomes my wife. And not make a spectacle of yourself."

"Do you object to my talking to Mr. Deronda?"

"I don't care two straws about Deronda, or any other conceited
hanger-on. You may talk to him as much as you like. He is not going to
take my place. You are my wife. And you will either fill your place
properly--to the world and to me--or you will go to the devil."

"I never intended anything but to fill my place properly," said
Gwendolen, with bitterest mortification in her soul.

"You put that thing on your wrist, and hid it from me till you wanted
him to see it. Only fools go into that deaf and dumb talk, and think
they're secret. You will understand that you are not to compromise
yourself. Behave with dignity. That's all I have to say."

With that last word Grandcourt rose, turned his back to the fire and
looked down on her. She was mute. There was no reproach that she dared
to fling back at him in return for these insulting admonitions, and the
very reason she felt them to be insulting was that their purport went
with the most absolute dictate of her pride. What she would least like
to incur was the making a fool of herself and being compromised. It was
futile and irrelevant to try and explain that Deronda too had only been
a monitor--the strongest of all monitors. Grandcourt was contemptuous,
not jealous; contemptuously certain of all the subjection he cared for.
Why could she not rebel and defy him? She longed to do it. But she
might as well have tried to defy the texture of her nerves and the
palpitation of her heart. Her husband had a ghostly army at his back,
that could close round her wherever she might turn. She sat in her
splendid attire, like a white image of helplessness, and he seemed to
gratify himself with looking at her. She could not even make a
passionate exclamation, or throw up her arms, as she would have done in
her maiden days. The sense of his scorn kept her still.

"Shall I ring?" he said, after what seemed to her a long while. She
moved her head in assent, and after ringing he went to his
dressing-room.

Certain words were gnawing within her. "The wrong you have done me will
be your own curse." As he closed the door, the bitter tears rose, and
the gnawing words provoked an answer: "Why did you put your fangs into
me and not into him?" It was uttered in a whisper, as the tears came up
silently. But she immediately pressed her handkerchief against her
eyes, and checked her tendency to sob.

The next day, recovered from the shuddering fit of this evening scene,
she determined to use the charter which Grandcourt had scornfully given
her, and to talk as much as she liked with Deronda; but no
opportunities occurred, and any little devices she could imagine for
creating them were rejected by her pride, which was now doubly active.
Not toward Deronda himself--she was singularly free from alarm lest he
should think her openness wanting in dignity: it was part of his power
over her that she believed him free from all misunderstanding as to the
way in which she appealed to him; or rather, that he should
misunderstand her had never entered into her mind. But the last morning
came, and still she had never been able to take up the dropped thread
of their talk, and she was without devices. She and Grandcourt were to
leave at three o'clock. It was too irritating that after a walk in the
grounds had been planned in Deronda's hearing, he did not present
himself to join in it. Grandcourt was gone with Sir Hugo to King's
Topping, to see the old manor-house; others of the gentlemen were
shooting; she was condemned to go and see the decoy and the waterfowl,
and everything else that she least wanted to see, with the ladies, with
old Lord Pentreath and his anecdotes, with Mr. Vandernoodt and his
admiring manners. The irritation became too strong for her; without
premeditation, she took advantage of the winding road to linger a
little out of sight, and then set off back to the house, almost running
when she was safe from observation. She entered by a side door, and the
library was on her left hand; Deronda, she knew, was often there; why
might she not turn in there as well as into any other room in the
house? She had been taken there expressly to see the illuminated family
tree, and other remarkable things--what more natural than that she
should like to look in again? The thing most to be feared was that the
room would be empty of Deronda, for the door was ajar. She pushed it
gently, and looked round it. He was there, writing busily at a distant
table, with his back toward the door (in fact, Sir Hugo had asked him
to answer some constituents' letters which had become pressing). An
enormous log fire, with the scent of Russia from the books, made the
great room as warmly odorous as a private chapel in which the censors
have been swinging. It seemed too daring to go in--too rude to speak
and interrupt him; yet she went in on the noiseless carpet, and stood
still for two or three minutes, till Deronda, having finished a letter,
pushed it aside for signature, and threw himself back to consider
whether there were anything else for him to do, or whether he could
walk out for the chance of meeting the party which included Gwendolen,
when he heard her voice saying, "Mr. Deronda."

It was certainly startling. He rose hastily, turned round, and pushed
away his chair with a strong expression of surprise.

"Am I wrong to come in?" said Gwendolen.

"I thought you were far on your walk," said Deronda.

"I turned back," said Gwendolen.

"Do you intend to go out again? I could join you now, if you would
allow me."

"No; I want to say something, and I can't stay long," said Gwendolen,
speaking quickly in a subdued tone, while she walked forward and rested
her arms and muff on the back of the chair he had pushed away from him.
"I want to tell you that it is really so--I can't help feeling remorse
for having injured others. That was what I meant when I said that I had
done worse than gamble again and pawn the necklace again--something
more injurious, as you called it. And I can't alter it. I am punished,
but I can't alter it. You said I could do many things. Tell me again.
What should you do--what should you feel if you were in my place?"

The hurried directness with which she spoke--the absence of all her
little airs, as if she were only concerned to use the time in getting
an answer that would guide her, made her appeal unspeakably touching.

Deronda said, "I should feel something of what you feel--deep sorrow."

"But what would you try to do?" said Gwendolen, with urgent quickness.

"Order my life so as to make any possible amends, and keep away from
doing any sort of injury again," said Deronda, catching her sense that
the time for speech was brief.

"But I can't--I can't; I must go on," said Gwendolen, in a passionate
loud whisper. "I have thrust out others--I have made my gain out of
their loss--tried to make it--tried. And I must go on. I can't alter
it."

It was impossible to answer this instantaneously. Her words had
confirmed his conjecture, and the situation of all concerned rose in
swift images before him. His feeling for those who had been thrust out
sanctioned her remorse; he could not try to nullify it, yet his heart
was full of pity for her. But as soon as he could he answered--taking
up her last words,

"That is the bitterest of all--to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing.
But if you submitted to that as men submit to maiming or life-long
incurable disease?--and made the unalterable wrong a reason for more
effort toward a good, that may do something to counterbalance the evil?
One who has committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that
consciousness into a higher course than is common. There are many
examples. Feeling what it is to have spoiled one life may well make us
long to save other lives from being spoiled."

"But you have not wronged any one, or spoiled their lives," said
Gwendolen, hastily. "It is only others who have wronged _you_."

Deronda colored slightly, but said immediately--"I suppose our keen
feeling for ourselves might end in giving us a keen feeling for others,
if, when we are suffering acutely, we were to consider that others go
through the same sharp experience. That is a sort of remorse before
commission. Can't you understand that?"

"I think I do--now," said Gwendolen. "But you were right--I _am_
selfish. I have never thought much of any one's feelings, except my
mother's. I have not been fond of people. But what can I do?" she went
on, more quickly. "I must get up in the morning and do what every one
else does. It is all like a dance set beforehand. I seem to see all
that can be--and I am tired and sick of it. And the world is all
confusion to me"--she made a gesture of disgust. "You say I am
ignorant. But what is the good of trying to know more, unless life were
worth more?"

"This good," said Deronda promptly, with a touch of indignant severity,
which he was inclined to encourage as his own safeguard; "life _would_
be worth more to you: some real knowledge would give you an interest in
the world beyond the small drama of personal desires. It is the curse
of your life--forgive me--of so many lives, that all passion is spent
in that narrow round, for want of ideas and sympathies to make a larger
home for it. Is there any single occupation of mind that you care about
with passionate delight or even independent interest?"

Deronda paused, but Gwendolen, looking startled and thrilled as by an
electric shock, said nothing, and he went on more insistently,

"I take what you said of music for a small example--it answers for all
larger things--you will not cultivate it for the sake of a private joy
in it. What sort of earth or heaven would hold any spiritual wealth in
it for souls pauperized by inaction? If one firmament has no stimulus
for our attention and awe, I don't see how four would have it. We
should stamp every possible world with the flatness of our own
inanity--which is necessarily impious, without faith or fellowship. The
refuge you are needing from personal trouble is the higher, the
religious life, which holds an enthusiasm for something more than our
own appetites and vanities. The few may find themselves in it simply by
an elevation of feeling; but for us who have to struggle for our
wisdom, the higher life must be a region in which the affections are
clad with knowledge."

The half-indignant remonstrance that vibrated in Deronda's voice came,
as often happens, from the habit of inward argument with himself rather
than from severity toward Gwendolen: but it had a more beneficial
effect on her than any soothings. Nothing is feebler than the indolent
rebellion of complaint; and to be roused into self-judgment is
comparative activity. For the moment she felt like a shaken
child--shaken out of its wailing into awe, and she said humbly,

"I will try. I will think."

They both stood silent for a minute, as if some third presence had
arrested them,--for Deronda, too, was under that sense of pressure
which is apt to come when our own winged words seem to be hovering
around us,--till Gwendolen began again,

"You said affection was the best thing, and I have hardly any--none
about me. If I could, I would have mamma; but that is impossible.
Things have changed to me so--in such a short time. What I used not to
like I long for now. I think I am almost getting fond of the old things
now they are gone." Her lip trembled.

"Take the present suffering as a painful letting in of light," said
Deronda, more gently. "You are conscious of more beyond the round of
your own inclinations--you know more of the way in which your life
presses on others, and their life on yours. I don't think you could
have escaped the painful process in some form or other."

"But it is a very cruel form," said Gwendolen, beating her foot on the
ground with returning agitation. "I am frightened at everything. I am
frightened at myself. When my blood is fired I can do daring
things--take any leap; but that makes me frightened at myself." She was
looking at nothing outside her; but her eyes were directed toward the
window, away from Deronda, who, with quick comprehension said,

"Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of
increasing that remorse which is so bitter to you. Fixed meditation may
do a great deal toward defining our longing or dread. We are not always
in a state of strong emotion, and when we are calm we can use our
memories and gradually change the bias of our fear, as we do our
tastes. Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing.
It may make consequences passionately present to you. Try to take hold
of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision."
Deronda uttered each sentence more urgently; he felt as if he were
seizing a faint chance of rescuing her from some indefinite danger.

"Yes, I know; I understand what you mean," said Gwendolen in her loud
whisper, not turning her eyes, but lifting up her small gloved hand and
waving it in deprecation of the notion that it was easy to obey that
advice. "But if feelings rose--there are some feelings--hatred and
anger--how can I be good when they keep rising? And if there came a
moment when I felt stifled and could bear it no longer----" She broke
off, and with agitated lips looked at Deronda, but the expression on
his face pierced her with an entirely new feeling. He was under the
baffling difficulty of discerning that what he had been urging on her
was thrown into the pallid distance of mere thought before the outburst
of her habitual emotion. It was as if he saw her drowning while his
limbs were bound. The pained compassion which was spread over his
features as he watched her, affected her with a compunction unlike any
she had felt before, and in a changed and imploring tone she said,

"I am grieving you. I am ungrateful. You _can_ help me. I will think of
everything. I will try. Tell me--it will not be a pain to you that I
have dared to speak of my trouble to you? You began it, you know, when
you rebuked me." There was a melancholy smile on her lips as she said
that, but she added more entreatingly, "It will not be a pain to you?"

"Not if it does anything to save you from an evil to come," said
Deronda, with strong emphasis; "otherwise, it will be a lasting pain."

"No--no--it shall not be. It may be--it shall be better with me because
I have known you." She turned immediately, and quitted the room.

When she was on the first landing of the staircase, Sir Hugo passed
across the hall on his way to the library, and saw her. Grandcourt was
not with him.

Deronda, when the baronet entered, was standing in his ordinary
attitude, grasping his coat-collar, with his back to the table, and
with that indefinable expression by which we judge that a man is still
in the shadow of a scene which he has just gone through. He moved,
however, and began to arrange the letters.

"Has Mrs. Grandcourt been in here?" said Sir Hugo.

"Yes, she has."

"Where are the others?"

"I believe she left them somewhere in the grounds."

After a moment's silence, in which Sir Hugo looked at a letter without
reading it, he said "I hope you are not playing with fire, Dan--you
understand me?"

"I believe I do, sir," said Deronda, after a slight hesitation, which
had some repressed anger in it. "But there is nothing answering to your
metaphor--no fire, and therefore no chance of scorching."

Sir Hugo looked searchingly at him, and then said, "So much the better.
For, between ourselves, I fancy there may be some hidden gunpowder in
that establishment."




CHAPTER XXXVII.

  _Aspern._    Pardon, my lord--I speak for Sigismund.
  _Fronsberg._ For him? Oh, ay--for him I always hold
               A pardon safe in bank, sure he will draw
               Sooner or later on me. What his need?
               Mad project broken? fine mechanic wings
               That would not fly? durance, assault on watch,
               Bill for Epernay, not a crust to eat?
  _Aspern._    Oh, none of these, my lord; he has escaped
               From Circe's herd, and seeks to win the love
               Of your fair ward Cecilia: but would win
               First your consent. You frown.
  _Fronsberg._                         Distinguish words.
               I said I held a pardon, not consent.


In spite of Deronda's reasons for wishing to be in town again--reasons
in which his anxiety for Mirah was blent with curiosity to know more of
the enigmatic Mordecai--he did not manage to go up before Sir Hugo, who
preceded his family that he might be ready for the opening of
Parliament on the sixth of February. Deronda took up his quarters in
Park Lane, aware that his chambers were sufficiently tenanted by Hans
Meyrick. This was what he expected; but he found other things not
altogether according to his expectations.

Most of us remember Retzsch's drawing of destiny in the shape of
Mephistopheles playing at chess with man for his soul, a game in which
we may imagine the clever adversary making a feint of unintended moves
so as to set the beguiled mortal on carrying his defensive pieces away
from the true point of attack. The fiend makes preparation his favorite
object of mockery, that he may fatally persuade us against our taking
out waterproofs when he is well aware the sky is going to clear,
foreseeing that the imbecile will turn this delusion into a prejudice
against waterproofs instead of giving a closer study to the
weather-signs. It is a peculiar test of a man's mettle when, after he
has painfully adjusted himself to what seems a wise provision, he finds
all his mental precaution a little beside the mark, and his excellent
intentions no better than miscalculated dovetails, accurately cut from
a wrong starting-point. His magnanimity has got itself ready to meet
misbehavior, and finds quite a different call upon it. Something of
this kind happened to Deronda.

His first impression was one of pure pleasure and amusement at finding
his sitting-room transformed into an _atelier_ strewed with
miscellaneous drawings and with the contents of two chests from Rome,
the lower half of the windows darkened with baize, and the blonde Hans
in his weird youth as the presiding genius of the littered place--his
hair longer than of old, his face more whimsically creased, and his
high voice as usual getting higher under the excitement of rapid talk.
The friendship of the two had been kept up warmly since the memorable
Cambridge time, not only by correspondence but by little episodes of
companionship abroad and in England, and the original relation of
confidence on one side and indulgence on the other had been developed
in practice, as is wont to be the case where such spiritual borrowing
and lending has been well begun.

"I knew you would like to see my casts and antiquities," said Hans,
after the first hearty greetings and inquiries, "so I didn't scruple to
unlade my chests here. But I've found two rooms at Chelsea not many
hundred yards from my mother and sisters, and I shall soon be ready to
hang out there--when they've scraped the walls and put in some new
lights. That's all I'm waiting for. But you see I don't wait to begin
work: you can't conceive what a great fellow I'm going to be. The seed
of immortality has sprouted within me."

"Only a fungoid growth, I dare say--a growing disease in the lungs,"
said Deronda, accustomed to treat Hans in brotherly fashion. He was
walking toward some drawings propped on the ledge of his bookcases;
five rapidly-sketched heads--different aspects of the same face. He
stood at a convenient distance from them, without making any remark.
Hans, too, was silent for a minute, took up his palette and began
touching the picture on his easel.

"What do you think of them?" he said at last.

"The full face looks too massive; otherwise the likenesses are good,"
said Deronda, more coldly than was usual with him.

"No, it is not too massive," said Hans, decisively. "I have noted that.
There is always a little surprise when one passes from the profile to
the full face. But I shall enlarge her scale for Berenice. I am making
a Berenice series--look at the sketches along there--and now I think of
it, you are just the model I want for the Agrippa." Hans, still with
pencil and palette in hand, had moved to Deronda's side while he said
this, but he added hastily, as if conscious of a mistake, "No, no, I
forgot; you don't like sitting for your portrait, confound you!
However, I've picked up a capital Titus. There are to be five in the
series. The first is Berenice clasping the knees of Gessius Florus and
beseeching him to spare her people; I've got that on the easel. Then,
this, where she is standing on the Xystus with Agrippa, entreating the
people not to injure themselves by resistance."

"Agrippa's legs will never do," said Deronda.

"The legs are good realistically," said Hans, his face creasing drolly;
"public men are often shaky about the legs--' Their legs, the emblem of
their various thought,' as somebody says in the _Rehearsal._"

"But these are as impossible as the legs of Raphael's Alcibiades," said
Deronda.

"Then they are good ideally," said Hans. "Agrippa's legs were possibly
bad; I idealize that and make them impossibly bad. Art, my Eugenius,
must intensify. But never mind the legs now: the third sketch in the
series is Berenice exulting in the prospects of being Empress of Rome,
when the news has come that Vespasian is declared Emperor and her lover
Titus his successor."

"You must put a scroll in her mouth, else people will not understand
that. You can't tell that in a picture."

"It will make them feel their ignorance then--an excellent æsthetic
effect. The fourth is, Titus sending Berenice away from Rome after she
has shared his palace for ten years--both reluctant, both sad--_invitus
invitam_, as Suetonius hath it. I've found a model for the Roman brute."

"Shall you make Berenice look fifty? She must have been that."

"No, no; a few mature touches to show the lapse of time. Dark-eyed
beauty wears well, hers particularly. But now, here is the fifth:
Berenice seated lonely on the ruins of Jerusalem. That is pure
imagination. That is what ought to have been--perhaps was. Now, see how
I tell a pathetic negative. Nobody knows what became of her--that is
finely indicated by the series coming to a close. There is no sixth
picture." Here Hans pretended to speak with a gasping sense of
sublimity, and drew back his head with a frown, as if looking for a
like impression on Deronda. "I break off in the Homeric style. The
story is chipped off, so to speak, and passes with a ragged edge into
nothing--_le néant_; can anything be more sublime, especially in
French? The vulgar would desire to see her corpse and burial--perhaps
her will read and her linen distributed. But now come and look at this
on the easel. I have made some way there."

"That beseeching attitude is really good," said Deronda, after a
moment's contemplation. "You have been very industrious in the
Christmas holidays; for I suppose you have taken up the subject since
you came to London." Neither of them had yet mentioned Mirah.

"No," said Hans, putting touches to his picture, "I made up my mind to
the subject before. I take that lucky chance for an augury that I am
going to burst on the world as a great painter. I saw a splendid woman
in the Trastevere--the grandest women there are half Jewesses--and she
set me hunting for a fine situation of a Jewess at Rome. Like other men
of vast learning, I ended by taking what lay on the surface. I'll show
you a sketch of the Trasteverina's head when I can lay my hands on it."

"I should think she would be a more suitable model for Berenice," said
Deronda, not knowing exactly how to express his discontent.

"Not a bit of it. The model ought to be the most beautiful Jewess in
the world, and I have found her."

"Have you made yourself sure that she would like to figure in that
character? I should think no woman would be more abhorrent to her. Does
she quite know what you are doing?"

"Certainly. I got her to throw herself precisely into this attitude.
Little mother sat for Gessius Florus, and Mirah clasped her knees."
Here Hans went a little way off and looked at the effect of his touches.

"I dare say she knows nothing about Berenice's history," said Deronda,
feeling more indignation than he would have been able to justify.

"Oh, yes, she does--ladies' edition. Berenice was a fervid patriot, but
was beguiled by love and ambition into attaching herself to the
arch-enemy of her people. Whence the Nemesis. Mirah takes it as a
tragic parable, and cries to think what the penitent Berenice suffered
as she wandered back to Jerusalem and sat desolate amidst desolation.
That was her own phrase. I couldn't find it in my heart to tell her I
invented that part of the story."

"Show me your Trasteverina," said Deronda, chiefly in order to hinder
himself from saying something else.

"Shall you mind turning over that folio?" said Hans. "My studies of
heads are all there. But they are in confusion. You will perhaps find
her next to a crop-eared undergraduate."

After Deronda had been turning over the drawings a minute or two, he
said,

"These seem to be all Cambridge heads and bits of country. Perhaps I
had better begin at the other end."

"No; you'll find her about the middle. I emptied one folio into
another."

"Is this one of your undergraduates?" said Deronda, holding up a
drawing. "It's an unusually agreeable face."

"That! Oh, that's a man named Gascoigne--Rex Gascoigne. An uncommonly
good fellow; his upper lip, too, is good. I coached him before he got
his scholarship. He ought to have taken honors last Easter. But he was
ill, and has had to stay up another year. I must look him up. I want to
know how he's going on."

"Here she is, I suppose," said Deronda, holding up a sketch of the
Trasteverina.

"Ah," said Hans, looking at it rather contemptuously, "too coarse. I
was unregenerate then."

Deronda was silent while he closed the folio, leaving the Trasteverina
outside. Then clasping his coat-collar, and turning toward Hans, he
said, "I dare say my scruples are excessive, Meyrick, but I must ask
you to oblige me by giving up this notion."

Hans threw himself into a tragic attitude, and screamed, "What! my
series--my immortal Berenice series? Think of what you are saying,
man--destroying, as Milton says, not a life but an immortality. Wait
before you answer, that I may deposit the implements of my art and be
ready to uproot my hair."

Here Hans laid down his pencil and palette, threw himself backward into
a great chair, and hanging limply over the side, shook his long hair
over his face, lifted his hooked fingers on each side his head, and
looked up with comic terror at Deronda, who was obliged to smile, as he
said,

"Paint as many Berenices as you like, but I wish you could feel with
me--perhaps you will, on reflection--that you should choose another
model."

"Why?" said Hans, standing up, and looking serious again.

"Because she may get into such a position that her face is likely to be
recognized. Mrs. Meyrick and I are anxious for her that she should be
known as an admirable singer. It is right, and she wishes it, that she
should make herself independent. And she has excellent chances. One
good introduction is secured already, and I am going to speak to
Klesmer. Her face may come to be very well known, and--well, it is
useless to attempt to explain, unless you feel as I do. I believe that
if Mirah saw the circumstances clearly, she would strongly object to
being exhibited in this way--to allowing herself to be used as a model
for a heroine of this sort."

As Hans stood with his thumbs in the belt of his blouse, listening to
this speech, his face showed a growing surprise melting into amusement,
that at last would have its way in an explosive laugh: but seeing that
Deronda looked gravely offended, he checked himself to say, "Excuse my
laughing, Deronda. You never gave me an advantage over you before. If
it had been about anything but my own pictures, I should have swallowed
every word because you said it. And so you actually believe that I
should get my five pictures hung on the line in a conspicuous position,
and carefully studied by the public? Zounds, man! cider-cup and conceit
never gave me half such a beautiful dream. My pictures are likely to
remain as private as the utmost hypersensitiveness could desire."

Hans turned to paint again as a way of filling up awkward pauses.
Deronda stood perfectly still, recognizing his mistake as to publicity,
but also conscious that his repugnance was not much diminished. He was
the reverse of satisfied either with himself or with Hans; but the
power of being quiet carries a man well through moments of
embarrassment. Hans had a reverence for his friend which made him feel
a sort of shyness at Deronda's being in the wrong; but it was not in
his nature to give up anything readily, though it were only a whim--or
rather, especially if it were a whim, and he presently went on,
painting the while,

"But even supposing I had a public rushing after my pictures as if they
were a railway series including nurses, babies and bonnet-boxes, I
can't see any justice in your objection. Every painter worth
remembering has painted the face he admired most, as often as he could.
It is a part of his soul that goes out into his pictures. He diffuses
its influence in that way. He puts what he hates into a caricature. He
puts what he adores into some sacred, heroic form. If a man could paint
the woman he loves a thousand times as the _Stella Marts_ to put courage
into the sailors on board a thousand ships, so much the more honor to
her. Isn't that better than painting a piece of staring immodesty and
calling it by a worshipful name?"

"Every objection can be answered if you take broad ground enough, Hans:
no special question of conduct can be properly settled in that way,"
said Deronda, with a touch of peremptoriness. "I might admit all your
generalities, and yet be right in saying you ought not to publish
Mirah's face as a model for Berenice. But I give up the question of
publicity. I was unreasonable there." Deronda hesitated a moment.
"Still, even as a private affair, there might be good reasons for your
not indulging yourself too much in painting her from the point of view
you mention. You must feel that her situation at present is a very
delicate one; and until she is in more independence, she should be kept
as carefully as a bit of Venetian glass, for fear of shaking her out of
the safe place she is lodged in. Are you quite sure of your own
discretion? Excuse me, Hans. My having found her binds me to watch over
her. Do you understand me?"

"Perfectly," said Hans, turning his face into a good-humored smile.
"You have the very justifiable opinion of me that I am likely to
shatter all the glass in my way, and break my own skull into the
bargain. Quite fair. Since I got into the scrape of being born,
everything I have liked best has been a scrape either for myself or
somebody else. Everything I have taken to heartily has somehow turned
into a scrape. My painting is the last scrape; and I shall be all my
life getting out of it. You think now I shall get into a scrape at
home. No; I am regenerate. You think I must be over head and ears in
love with Mirah. Quite right; so I am. But you think I shall scream and
plunge and spoil everything. There you are mistaken--excusably, but
transcendently mistaken. I have undergone baptism by immersion. Awe
takes care of me. Ask the little mother."

"You don't reckon a hopeless love among your scrapes, then," said
Deronda, whose voice seemed to get deeper as Hans's went higher.

"I don't mean to call mine hopeless," said Hans, with provoking
coolness, laying down his tools, thrusting his thumbs into his belt,
and moving away a little, as if to contemplate his picture more
deliberately.

"My dear fellow, you are only preparing misery for yourself," said
Deronda, decisively. "She would not marry a Christian, even if she
loved him. Have you heard her--of course you have--heard her speak of
her people and her religion?"

"That can't last," said Hans. "She will see no Jew who is tolerable.
Every male of that race is insupportable--'insupportably
advancing'--his nose."

"She may rejoin her family. That is what she longs for. Her mother and
brother are probably strict Jews."

"I'll turn proselyte, if she wishes it," said Hans, with a shrug and a
laugh.

"Don't talk nonsense, Hans. I thought you professed a serious love for
her," said Deronda, getting heated.

"So I do. You think it desperate, but I don't."

"I know nothing; I can't tell what has happened. We must be prepared
for surprises. But I can hardly imagine a greater surprise to me than
that there should have seemed to be anything in Mirah's sentiments for
you to found a romantic hope on." Deronda felt that he was too
contemptuous.

"I don't found my romantic hopes on a woman's sentiments," said Hans,
perversely inclined to be the merrier when he was addressed with
gravity. "I go to science and philosophy for my romance. Nature
designed Mirah to fall in love with me. The amalgamation of races
demands it--the mitigation of human ugliness demands it--the affinity
of contrasts assures it. I am the utmost contrast to Mirah--a bleached
Christian, who can't sing two notes in tune. Who has a chance against
me?"

"I see now; it was all _persiflage_. You don't mean a word you say,
Meyrick," said Deronda, laying his hand on Meyrick's shoulder, and
speaking in a tone of cordial relief. "I was a wiseacre to answer you
seriously."

"Upon my honor I do mean it, though," said Hans, facing round and
laying his left hand on Deronda's shoulder, so that their eyes fronted
each other closely. "I am at the confessional. I meant to tell you as
soon as you came. My mother says you are Mirah's guardian, and she
thinks herself responsible to you for every breath that falls on Mirah
in her house. Well, I love her--I worship her--I won't despair--I mean
to deserve her."

"My dear fellow, you can't do it," said Deronda, quickly.

"I should have said, I mean to try."

"You can't keep your resolve, Hans. You used to resolve what you would
do for your mother and sisters."

"You have a right to reproach me, old fellow," said Hans, gently.

"Perhaps I am ungenerous," said Deronda, not apologetically, however.
"Yet it can't be ungenerous to warn you that you are indulging mad,
Quixotic expectations."

"Who will be hurt but myself, then?" said Hans, putting out his lip. "I
am not going to say anything to her unless I felt sure of the answer. I
dare not ask the oracles: I prefer a cheerful caliginosity, as Sir
Thomas Browne might say. I would rather run my chance there and lose,
than be sure of winning anywhere else. And I don't mean to swallow the
poison of despair, though you are disposed to thrust it on me. I am
giving up wine, so let me get a little drunk on hope and vanity."

"With all my heart, if it will do you any good," said Deronda, loosing
Hans's shoulder, with a little push. He made his tone kindly, but his
words were from the lip only. As to his real feeling he was silenced.

He was conscious of that peculiar irritation which will sometimes
befall the man whom others are inclined to trust as a mentor--the
irritation of perceiving that he is supposed to be entirely off the
same plane of desire and temptation as those who confess to him. Our
guides, we pretend, must be sinless: as if those were not often the
best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes.
Throughout their friendship Deronda had been used to Hans's egotism,
but he had never before felt intolerant of it: when Hans, habitually
pouring out his own feelings and affairs, had never cared for any
detail in return, and, if he chanced to know any, had soon forgotten
it. Deronda had been inwardly as well as outwardly indulgent--nay,
satisfied. But now he had noted with some indignation, all the stronger
because it must not be betrayed, Hans's evident assumption that for any
danger of rivalry or jealousy in relation to Mirah, Deronda was not as
much out of the question as the angel Gabriel. It is one thing to be
resolute in placing one's self out of the question, and another to
endure that others should perform that exclusion for us. He had
expected that Hans would give him trouble: what he had not expected was
that the trouble would have a strong element of personal feeling. And
he was rather ashamed that Hans's hopes caused him uneasiness in spite
of his well-warranted conviction that they would never be fulfilled.
They had raised an image of Mirah changing; and however he might
protest that the change would not happen, the protest kept up the
unpleasant image. Altogether poor Hans seemed to be entering into
Deronda's experience in a disproportionate manner--going beyond his
part of rescued prodigal, and rousing a feeling quite distinct from
compassionate affection.

When Deronda went to Chelsea he was not made as comfortable as he ought
to have been by Mrs. Meyrick's evident release from anxiety about the
beloved but incalculable son. Mirah seemed livelier than before, and
for the first time he saw her laugh. It was when they were talking of
Hans, he being naturally the mother's first topic. Mirah wished to know
if Deronda had seen Mr. Hans going through a sort of character piece
without changing his dress.

"He passes from one figure to another as if he were a bit of flame
where you fancied the figures without seeing them," said Mirah, full of
her subject; "he is so wonderfully quick. I used never to like comic
things on the stage--they were dwelt on too long; but all in one minute
Mr. Hans makes himself a blind bard, and then Rienzi addressing the
Romans, and then an opera-dancer, and then a desponding young
gentleman--I am sorry for them all, and yet I laugh, all in one"--here
Mirah gave a little laugh that might have entered into a song.

"We hardly thought that Mirah could laugh till Hans came," said Mrs.
Meyrick, seeing that Deronda, like herself, was observing the pretty
picture.

"Hans seems in great force just now," said Deronda in a tone of
congratulation. "I don't wonder at his enlivening you."

"He's been just perfect ever since he came back," said Mrs. Meyrick,
keeping to herself the next clause--"if it will but last."

"It is a great happiness," said Mirah, "to see the son and brother come
into this dear home. And I hear them all talk about what they did
together when they were little. That seems like heaven, and to have a
mother and brother who talk in that way. I have never had it."

"Nor I," said Deronda, involuntarily.

"No?" said Mirah, regretfully. "I wish you had. I wish you had had
every good." The last words were uttered with a serious ardor as if
they had been part of a litany, while her eyes were fixed on Deronda,
who with his elbow on the back of his chair was contemplating her by
the new light of the impression she had made on Hans, and the
possibility of her being attracted by that extraordinary contrast. It
was no more than what had happened on each former visit of his, that
Mirah appeared to enjoy speaking of what she felt very much as a little
girl fresh from school pours forth spontaneously all the long-repressed
chat for which she has found willing ears. For the first time in her
life Mirah was among those whom she entirely trusted, and her original
visionary impression that Deronda was a divinely-sent messenger hung
about his image still, stirring always anew the disposition to reliance
and openness. It was in this way she took what might have been the
injurious flattery of admiring attention into which her helpless
dependence had been suddenly transformed. Every one around her watched
for her looks and words, and the effect on her was simply that of
having passed from a trifling imprisonment into an exhilarating air
which made speech and action a delight. To her mind it was all a gift
from others' goodness. But that word of Deronda's implying that there
had been some lack in his life which might be compared with anything
she had known in hers, was an entirely new inlet of thought about him.
After her first expression of sorrowful surprise she went on,

"But Mr. Hans said yesterday that you thought so much of others you
hardly wanted anything for yourself. He told us a wonderful story of
Buddha giving himself to the famished tigress to save her and her
little ones from starving. And he said you were like Buddha. That is
what we all imagine of you."

"Pray don't imagine that," said Deronda, who had lately been finding
such suppositions rather exasperating. "Even if it were true that I
thought so much of others, it would not follow that I had no wants for
myself. When Buddha let the tigress eat him he might have been very
hungry himself."

"Perhaps if he was starved he would not mind so much about being
eaten," said Mab, shyly.

"Please don't think that, Mab; it takes away the beauty of the action,"
said Mirah.

"But if it were true, Mirah?" said the rational Amy, having a
half-holiday from her teaching; "you always take what is beautiful as
if it were true."

"So it is," said Mirah, gently. "If people have thought what is the
most beautiful and the best thing, it must be true. It is always there."

"Now, Mirah, what do you mean?" said Amy.

"I understand her," said Deronda, coming to the rescue.

"It is a truth in thought though it may never have been carried out in
action. It lives as an idea. Is that it?" He turned to Mirah, who was
listening with a blind look in her lovely eyes.

"It must be that, because you understand me, but I cannot quite
explain," said Mirah, rather abstractedly--still searching for some
expression.

"But _was_ it beautiful for Buddha to let the tiger eat him?" said Amy,
changing her ground. "It would be a bad pattern."

"The world would get full of fat tigers," said Mab.

Deronda laughed, but defended the myth. "It is like a passionate word,"
he said; "the exaggeration is a flash of fervor. It is an extreme image
of what is happening every day-the transmutation of self."

"I think I can say what I mean, now," said Mirah, who had not heard the
intermediate talk. "When the best thing comes into our thoughts, it is
like what my mother has been to me. She has been just as really with me
as all the other people about me--often more really with me."

Deronda, inwardly wincing under this illustration, which brought other
possible realities about that mother vividly before him, presently
turned the conversation by saying, "But we must not get too far away
from practical matters. I came, for one thing, to tell of an interview
I had yesterday, which I hope Mirah will find to have been useful to
her. It was with Klesmer, the great pianist."

"Ah?" said Mrs. Meyrick, with satisfaction. "You think he will help
her?"

"I hope so. He is very much occupied, but has promised to fix a time
for receiving and hearing Miss Lapidoth, as we must learn to call
her"--here Deronda smiled at Mirah--"If she consents to go to him."

"I shall be very grateful," said Mirah. "He wants to hear me sing,
before he can judge whether I ought to be helped."

Deronda was struck with her plain sense about these matters of
practical concern.

"It will not be at all trying to you, I hope, if Mrs. Meyrick will
kindly go with you to Klesmer's house."

"Oh, no, not at all trying. I have been doing that all my life--I mean,
told to do things that others may judge of me. And I have gone through
a bad trial of that sort. I am prepared to bear it, and do some very
small thing. Is Klesmer a severe man?"

"He is peculiar, but I have not had experience enough of him to know
whether he would be what you would call severe."

"I know he is kind-hearted--kind in action, if not in speech."

"I have been used to be frowned at and not praised," said Mirah.

"By the by, Klesmer frowns a good deal," said Deronda, "but there is
often a sort of smile in his eyes all the while. Unhappily he wears
spectacles, so you must catch him in the right light to see the smile."

"I shall not be frightened," said Mirah. "If he were like a roaring
lion, he only wants me to sing. I shall do what I can."

"Then I feel sure you will not mind being invited to sing in Lady
Mallinger's drawing-room," said Deronda. "She intends to ask you next
month, and will invite many ladies to hear you, who are likely to want
lessons from you for their daughters."

"How fast we are mounting!" said Mrs. Meyrick, with delight. "You never
thought of getting grand so quickly, Mirah."

"I am a little frightened at being called Miss Lapidoth," said Mirah,
coloring with a new uneasiness. "Might I be called Cohen?"

"I understand you," said Deronda, promptly. "But I assure you, you must
not be called Cohen. The name is inadmissible for a singer. This is one
of the trifles in which we must conform to vulgar prejudice. We could
choose some other name, however--such as singers ordinarily choose--an
Italian or Spanish name, which would suit your _physique_." To Deronda
just now the name Cohen was equivalent to the ugliest of yellow badges.

Mirah reflected a little, anxiously, then said, "No. If Cohen will not
do, I will keep the name I have been called by. I will not hide myself.
I have friends to protect me. And now--if my father were very miserable
and wanted help--no," she said, looking at Mrs. Meyrick, "I should
think, then, that he was perhaps crying as I used to see him, and had
nobody to pity him, and I had hidden myself from him. He had none
belonging to him but me. Others that made friends with him always left
him."

"Keep to what you feel right, my dear child," said Mrs. Meyrick. "_I_
would not persuade you to the contrary." For her own part she had no
patience or pity for that father, and would have left him to his crying.

Deronda was saying to himself, "I am rather base to be angry with Hans.
How can he help being in love with her? But it is too absurdly
presumptuous for him even to frame the idea of appropriating her, and a
sort of blasphemy to suppose that she could possibly give herself to
him."

What would it be for Daniel Deronda to entertain such thoughts? He was
not one who could quite naively introduce himself where he had just
excluded his friend, yet it was undeniable that what had just happened
made a new stage in his feeling toward Mirah. But apart from other
grounds for self-repression, reasons both definite and vague made him
shut away that question as he might have shut up a half-opened writing
that would have carried his imagination too far, and given too much
shape to presentiments. Might there not come a disclosure which would
hold the missing determination of his course? What did he really know
about his origin? Strangely in these latter months when it seemed right
that he should exert his will in the choice of a destination, the
passion of his nature had got more and more locked by this uncertainty.
The disclosure might bring its pain, indeed the likelihood seemed to
him to be all on that side; but if it helped him to make his life a
sequence which would take the form of duty--if it saved him from having
to make an arbitrary selection where he felt no preponderance of
desire? Still more, he wanted to escape standing as a critic outside
the activities of men, stiffened into the ridiculous attitude of
self-assigned superiority. His chief tether was his early inwrought
affection for Sir Hugo, making him gratefully deferential to wishes
with which he had little agreement: but gratitude had been sometimes
disturbed by doubts which were near reducing it to a fear of being
ungrateful. Many of us complain that half our birthright is sharp duty:
Deronda was more inclined to complain that he was robbed of this half;
yet he accused himself, as he would have accused another, of being
weakly self-conscious and wanting in resolve. He was the reverse of
that type painted for us in Faulconbridge and Edmund of Gloster, whose
coarse ambition for personal success is inflamed by a defiance of
accidental disadvantages. To Daniel the words Father and Mother had the
altar-fire in them; and the thought of all closest relations of our
nature held still something of the mystic power which had made his neck
and ears burn in boyhood. The average man may regard this sensibility
on the question of birth as preposterous and hardly credible; but with
the utmost respect for his knowledge as the rock from which all other
knowledge is hewn, it must be admitted that many well-proved facts are
dark to the average man, even concerning the action of his own heart
and the structure of his own retina. A century ago he and all his
forefathers had not had the slightest notion of that electric discharge
by means of which they had all wagged their tongues mistakenly; any
more than they were awake to the secluded anguish of exceptional
sensitiveness into which many a carelessly-begotten child of man is
born.

Perhaps the ferment was all the stronger in Deronda's mind because he
had never had a confidant to whom he could open himself on these
delicate subjects. He had always been leaned on instead of being
invited to lean. Sometimes he had longed for the sort of friend to whom
he might possibly unfold his experience: a young man like himself who
sustained a private grief and was not too confident about his own
career; speculative enough to understand every moral difficulty, yet
socially susceptible, as he himself was, and having every outward sign
of equality either in bodily or spiritual wrestling--for he had found
it impossible to reciprocate confidences with one who looked up to him.
But he had no expectation of meeting the friend he imagined. Deronda's
was not one of those quiveringly-poised natures that lend themselves to
second-sight.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.

    There be who hold that the deeper tragedy were a Prometheus Bound not
    _after_ but _before_ he had well got the celestial fire into
    the _narthex_ whereby it might be conveyed to mortals: thrust by
    the Kratos and Bia of instituted methods into a solitude of despised
    ideas, fastened in throbbing helplessness by the fatal pressure of
    poverty and disease--a solitude where many pass by, but none regard.


"Second-sight" is a flag over disputed ground. But it is matter of
knowledge that there are persons whose yearnings, conceptions--nay,
traveled conclusions--continually take the form of images which have a
foreshadowing power; the deed they would do starts up before them in
complete shape, making a coercive type; the event they hunger for or
dread rises into vision with a seed-like growth, feeding itself fast on
unnumbered impressions. They are not always the less capable of the
argumentative process, nor less sane than the commonplace calculators
of the market: sometimes it may be that their natures have manifold
openings, like the hundred-gated Thebes, where there may naturally be a
greater and more miscellaneous inrush than through a narrow
beadle-watched portal. No doubt there are abject specimens of the
visionary, as there is a minim mammal which you might imprison in the
finger of your glove. That small relative of the elephant has no harm
in him; but what great mental or social type is free from specimens
whose insignificance is both ugly and noxious? One is afraid to think
of all that the genus "patriot" embraces; or of the elbowing there
might be at the day of judgment for those who ranked as authors, and
brought volumes either in their hands or on trucks.

This apology for inevitable kinship is meant to usher in some facts
about Mordecai, whose figure had bitten itself into Deronda's mind as a
new question which he felt an interest in getting answered. But the
interest was no more than a vaguely-expectant suspense: the
consumptive-looking Jew, apparently a fervid student of some kind,
getting his crust by a quiet handicraft, like Spinoza, fitted into none
of Deronda's anticipations.

It was otherwise with the effect of their meeting on Mordecai. For many
winters, while he had been conscious of an ebbing physical life, and as
widening spiritual loneliness, all his passionate desire had
concentrated itself in the yearning for some young ear into which he
could pour his mind as a testament, some soul kindred enough to accept
the spiritual product of his own brief, painful life, as a mission to
be executed. It was remarkable that the hopefulness which is often the
beneficent illusion of consumptive patients, was in Mordecai wholly
diverted from the prospect of bodily recovery and carried into the
current of this yearning for transmission. The yearning, which had
panted upward from out of over-whelming discouragements, had grown into
a hope--the hope into a confident belief, which, instead of being
checked by the clear conception he had of his hastening decline, took
rather the intensity of expectant faith in a prophecy which has only
brief space to get fulfilled in.

Some years had now gone since he had first begun to measure men with a
keen glance, searching for a possibility which became more and more a
distinct conception. Such distinctness as it had at first was reached
chiefly by a method of contrast: he wanted to find a man who differed
from himself. Tracing reasons in that self for the rebuffs he had met
with and the hindrances that beset him, he imagined a man who would
have all the elements necessary for sympathy with him, but in an
embodiment unlike his own: he must be a Jew, intellectually cultured,
morally fervid--in all this a nature ready to be plenished from
Mordecai's; but his face and frame must be beautiful and strong, he
must have been used to all the refinements of social life, his voice
must flow with a full and easy current, his circumstances be free from
sordid need: he must glorify the possibilities of the Jew, not sit and
wonder as Mordecai did, bearing the stamp of his people amid the sign
of poverty and waning breath. Sensitive to physical characteristics, he
had, both abroad and in England, looked at pictures as well as men, and
in a vacant hour he had sometimes lingered in the National Gallery in
search of paintings which might feed his hopefulness with grave and
noble types of the human form, such as might well belong to men of his
own race. But he returned in disappointment. The instances are
scattered but thinly over the galleries of Europe, in which the fortune
or selection even of the chief masters has given to art a face at once
young, grand, and beautiful, where, if there is any melancholy, it is
no feeble passivity, but enters into the foreshadowed capability of
heroism.

Some observant persons may perhaps remember his emaciated figure, and
dark eyes deep in their sockets, as he stood in front of a picture that
had touched him either to new or habitual meditation: he commonly wore
a cloth cap with black fur round it, which no painter would have asked
him to take off. But spectators would be likely to think of him as an
odd-looking Jew who probably got money out of pictures; and Mordecai,
when he looked at them, was perfectly aware of the impression he made.
Experience had rendered him morbidly alive to the effect of a man's
poverty and other physical disadvantages in cheapening his ideas,
unless they are those of a Peter the Hermit who has a tocsin for the
rabble. But he was too sane and generous to attribute his spiritual
banishment solely to the excusable prejudices of others; certain
incapacities of his own had made the sentence of exclusion; and hence
it was that his imagination had constructed another man who would be
something more ample than the second soul bestowed, according to the
notion of the Cabalists, to help out the insufficient first--who would
be a blooming human life, ready to incorporate all that was worthiest
in an existence whose visible, palpable part was burning itself fast
away. His inward need for the conception of this expanded, prolonged
self was reflected as an outward necessity. The thoughts of his heart
(that ancient phrase best shadows the truth) seemed to him too
precious, too closely interwoven with the growth of things not to have
a further destiny. And as the more beautiful, the stronger, the more
executive self took shape in his mind, he loved it beforehand with an
affection half identifying, half contemplative and grateful.

Mordecai's mind wrought so constantly in images, that his coherent
trains of thought often resembled the significant dreams attributed to
sleepers by waking persons in their most inventive moments: nay, they
often resembled genuine dreams in their way of breaking off the passage
from the known to the unknown. Thus, for a long while, he habitually
thought of the Being answering to his need as one distantly approaching
or turning his back toward him, darkly painted against a golden sky.
The reason of the golden sky lay in one of Mordecai's habits. He was
keenly alive to some poetic aspects of London; and a favorite resort of
his, when strength and leisure allowed, was to some of the bridges,
especially about sunrise or sunset. Even when he was bending over
watch-wheels and trinkets, or seated in a small upper room looking out
on dingy bricks and dingy cracked windows, his imagination
spontaneously planted him on some spot where he had a far-stretching
scene; his thoughts went on in wide spaces; and whenever he could, he
tried to have in reality the influences of a large sky. Leaning on the
parapet of Blackfriar's Bridge, and gazing meditatively, the breadth
and calm of the river, with its long vista half hazy, half luminous,
the grand dim masses of tall forms of buildings which were the signs of
world-commerce, the oncoming of boats and barges from the still
distance into sound and color, entered into his mood and blent
themselves indistinguishably with his thinking, as a fine symphony to
which we can hardly be said to listen, makes a medium that bears up our
spiritual wings. Thus it happened that the figure representative of
Mordecai's longing was mentally seen darkened by the excess of light in
the aerial background. But in the inevitable progress of his
imagination toward fuller detail, he ceased to see the figure with its
back toward him. It began to advance, and a face became discernible;
the words youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth, noble gravity,
turned into hardly individual but typical form and color: gathered from
his memory of faces seen among the Jews of Holland and Bohemia, and
from the paintings which revived that memory. Reverently let it be said
of this mature spiritual need that it was akin to the boy's and girl's
picturing of the future beloved; but the stirrings of such young desire
are feeble compared with the passionate current of an ideal life
straining to embody itself, made intense by resistance to imminent
dissolution. The visionary form became a companion and auditor; keeping
a place not only in the waking imagination, but in those dreams of
lighter slumber of which it is truest to say, "I sleep, but my heart
waketh"--when the disturbing trivial story of yesterday is charged with
the impassioned purpose of years.

Of late the urgency of irremediable time, measured by the gradual
choking of life, had turned Mordecai's trust into an agitated watch for
the fulfillment that must be at hand. Was the bell on the verge of
tolling, the sentence about to be executed? The deliverer's footstep
must be near--the deliverer who was to rescue Mordecai's spiritual
travail from oblivion, and give it an abiding-place in the best
heritage of his people. An insane exaggeration of his own value, even
if his ideas had been as true and precious as those of Columbus or
Newton, many would have counted this yearning, taking it as the
sublimer part for a man to say, "If not I, then another," and to hold
cheap the meaning of his own life. But the fuller nature desires to be
an agent, to create, and not merely to look on: strong love hungers to
bless, and not merely to behold blessing. And while there is warmth
enough in the sun to feed an energetic life, there will still be men to
feel, "I am lord of this moment's change, and will charge it with my
soul."

But with that mingling of inconsequence which belongs to us all, and
not unhappily, since it saves us from many effects of mistake,
Mordecai's confidence in the friend to come did not suffice to make him
passive, and he tried expedients, pathetically humble, such as happened
to be within his reach, for communicating something of himself. It was
now two years since he had taken up his abode under Ezra Cohen's roof,
where he was regarded with much good-will as a compound of workman,
dominie, vessel of charity, inspired idiot, man of piety, and (if he
were inquired into) dangerous heretic. During that time little Jacob
had advanced into knickerbockers, and into that quickness of
apprehension which has been already made manifest in relation to
hardware and exchange. He had also advanced in attachment to Mordecai,
regarding him as an inferior, but liking him none the worse, and taking
his helpful cleverness as he might have taken the services of an
enslaved Djinn. As for Mordecai, he had given Jacob his first lessons,
and his habitual tenderness easily turned into the teacher's
fatherhood. Though he was fully conscious of the spiritual distance
between the parents and himself, and would never have attempted any
communication to them from his peculiar world, the boy moved him with
that idealizing affection which merges the qualities of the individual
child in the glory of childhood and the possibilities of a long future.
And this feeling had drawn him on, at first without premeditation, and
afterward with conscious purpose, to a sort of outpouring in the ear of
the boy which might have seemed wild enough to any excellent man of
business who overheard it. But none overheard when Jacob went up to
Mordecai's room one day, for example, in which there was little work to
be done, or at an hour when the work was ended, and after a brief
lesson in English reading or in numeration, was induced to remain
standing at his teacher's knees, or chose to jump astride them, often
to the patient fatigue of the wasted limbs. The inducement was perhaps
the mending of a toy, or some little mechanical device in which
Mordecai's well-practiced finger-tips had an exceptional skill; and
with the boy thus tethered, he would begin to repeat a Hebrew poem of
his own, into which years before he had poured his first youthful
ardors for that conception of a blended past and future which was the
mistress of his soul, telling Jacob to say the words after him.

"The boy will get them engraved within him," thought Mordecai; "it is a
way of printing."

None readier than Jacob at this fascinating game of imitating
unintelligible words; and if no opposing diversion occurred he would
sometimes carry on his share in it as long as the teacher's breath
would last out. For Mordecai threw into each repetition the fervor
befitting a sacred occasion. In such instances, Jacob would show no
other distraction than reaching out and surveying the contents of his
pockets; or drawing down the skin of his cheeks to make his eyes look
awful, and rolling his head to complete the effect; or alternately
handling his own nose and Mordecai's as if to test the relation of
their masses. Under all this the fervid reciter would not pause,
satisfied if the young organs of speech would submit themselves. But
most commonly a sudden impulse sent Jacob leaping away into some antic
or active amusement, when, instead of following the recitation he would
return upon the foregoing words most ready to his tongue, and mouth or
gabble, with a see-saw suited to the action of his limbs, a verse on
which Mordecai had spent some of his too scanty heart's blood. Yet he
waited with such patience as a prophet needs, and began his strange
printing again undiscouraged on the morrow, saying inwardly,

"My words may rule him some day. Their meaning may flash out on him. It
is so with a nation--after many days."

Meanwhile Jacob's sense of power was increased and his time enlivened
by a store of magical articulation with which he made the baby crow, or
drove the large cat into a dark corner, or promised himself to frighten
any incidental Christian of his own years. One week he had
unfortunately seen a street mountebank, and this carried off his
muscular imitativeness in sad divergence from New Hebrew poetry, after
the model of Jehuda ha-Levi. Mordecai had arrived at a fresh passage in
his poem; for as soon as Jacob had got well used to one portion, he was
led on to another, and a fresh combination of sounds generally answered
better in keeping him fast for a few minutes. The consumptive voice,
generally a strong high baritone, with its variously mingling
hoarseness, like a haze amidst illuminations, and its occasional
incipient gasp had more than the usual excitement, while it gave forth
Hebrew verses with a meaning something like this:

  "Away from me the garment of forgetfulness.
  Withering the heart;
  The oil and wine from presses of the Goyim,
  Poisoned with scorn.
  Solitude is on the sides of Mount Nebo,
  In its heart a tomb:
  There the buried ark and golden cherubim
  Make hidden light:
  There the solemn gaze unchanged,
  The wings are spread unbroken:
  Shut beneath in silent awful speech
  The Law lies graven.
  Solitude and darkness are my covering,
  And my heart a tomb;
  Smite and shatter it, O Gabriel!
  Shatter it as the clay of the founder
  Around the golden image."

In the absorbing enthusiasm with which Mordecai had intoned rather than
spoken this last invocation, he was unconscious that Jacob had ceased
to follow him and had started away from his knees; but pausing he saw,
as by a sudden flash, that the lad had thrown himself on his hands with
his feet in the air, mountebank fashion, and was picking up with his
lips a bright farthing which was a favorite among his pocket treasures.
This might have been reckoned among the tricks Mordecai was used to,
but at this moment it jarred him horribly, as if it had been a Satanic
grin upon his prayer.

"Child! child!" he called out with a strange cry that startled Jacob to
his feet, and then he sank backward with a shudder, closing his eyes.

"What?" said Jacob, quickly. Then, not getting an immediate answer, he
pressed Mordecai's knees with a shaking movement, in order to rouse
him. Mordecai opened his eyes with a fierce expression in them, leaned
forward, grasped the little shoulders, and said in a quick, hoarse
whisper,

"A curse is on your generation, child. They will open the mountain and
drag forth the golden wings and coin them into money, and the solemn
faces they will break up into ear-rings for wanton women! And they
shall get themselves a new name, but the angel of ignominy, with the
fiery brand, shall know them, and their heart shall be the tomb of dead
desires that turn their life to rottenness."

The aspect and action of Mordecai were so new and mysterious to
Jacob--they carried such a burden of obscure threat--it was as if the
patient, indulgent companion had turned into something unknown and
terrific: the sunken dark eyes and hoarse accents close to him, the
thin grappling fingers, shook Jacob's little frame into awe, and while
Mordecai was speaking he stood trembling with a sense that the house
was tumbling in and they were not going to have dinner any more. But
when the terrible speech had ended and the pinch was relaxed, the shock
resolved itself into tears; Jacob lifted up his small patriarchal
countenance and wept aloud. This sign of childish grief at once
recalled Mordecai to his usual gentle self: he was not able to speak
again at present, but with a maternal action he drew the curly head
toward him and pressed it tenderly against his breast. On this Jacob,
feeling the danger well-nigh over, howled at ease, beginning to imitate
his own performance and improve upon it--a sort of transition from
impulse into art often observable. Indeed, the next day he undertook to
terrify Adelaide Rebekah in like manner, and succeeded very well.

But Mordecai suffered a check which lasted long, from the consciousness
of a misapplied agitation; sane as well as excitable, he judged
severely his moments of aberration into futile eagerness, and felt
discredited with himself. All the more his mind was strained toward the
discernment of that friend to come, with whom he would have a calm
certainty of fellowship and understanding.

It was just then that, in his usual midday guardianship of the old
book-shop, he was struck by the appearance of Deronda, and it is
perhaps comprehensible now why Mordecai's glance took on a sudden eager
interest as he looked at the new-comer: he saw a face and frame which
seemed to him to realize the long-conceived type. But the disclaimer of
Jewish birth was for the moment a backward thrust of double severity,
the particular disappointment tending to shake his confidence in the
more indefinite expectation. Nevertheless, when he found Deronda seated
at the Cohens' table, the disclaimer was for the moment nullified: the
first impression returned with added force, seeming to be guaranteed by
this second meeting under circumstance more peculiar than the former;
and in asking Deronda if he knew Hebrew, Mordecai was so possessed by
the new inrush of belief, that he had forgotten the absence of any
other condition to the fulfillment of his hopes. But the answering "No"
struck them all down again, and the frustration was more painful than
before. After turning his back on the visitor that Sabbath evening,
Mordecai went through days of a deep discouragement, like that of men
on a doomed ship, who having strained their eyes after a sail, and
beheld it with rejoicing, behold it never advance, and say, "Our sick
eyes make it." But the long-contemplated figure had come as an
emotional sequence of Mordecai's firmest theoretic convictions; it had
been wrought from the imagery of his most passionate life; and it
inevitably reappeared--reappeared in a more specific self-asserting
form than ever. Deronda had that sort of resemblance to the
preconceived type which a finely individual bust or portrait has to the
more generalized copy left in our minds after a long interval: we renew
our memory with delight, but we hardly know with how much correction.
And now, his face met Mordecai's inward gaze as it had always belonged
to the awaited friend, raying out, moreover, some of that influence
which belongs to breathing flesh; till by-and-by it seemed that
discouragement had turned into a new obstinacy of resistance, and the
ever-recurrent vision had the force of an outward call to disregard
counter-evidence, and keep expectation awake. It was Deronda now who
was seen in the often painful night-watches, when we are all liable to
be held with the clutch of a single thought--whose figure, never with
its back turned, was seen in moments of soothed reverie or soothed
dozing, painted on that golden sky which was the doubly blessed symbol
of advancing day and of approaching rest.

Mordecai knew that the nameless stranger was to come and redeem his
ring; and, in spite of contrary chances, the wish to see him again was
growing into a belief that he should see him. In the January weeks, he
felt an increasing agitation of that subdued hidden quality which
hinders nervous people from any steady occupation on the eve of an
anticipated change. He could not go on with his printing of Hebrew on
little Jacob's mind; or with his attendance at a weekly club, which was
another effort of the same forlorn hope: something else was coming. The
one thing he longed for was to get as far as the river, which he could
do but seldom and with difficulty. He yearned with a poet's yearning
for the wide sky, the far-reaching vista of bridges, the tender and
fluctuating lights on the water which seems to breathe with a life that
can shiver and mourn, be comforted and rejoice.




CHAPTER XXXIX.


  "Vor den Wissenden sich stellen,
  Sicher ist's in allen Fällen!
  Wenn du lange dich gequälet,
  Weiß er gleich, wo dir es fehlet.
  Auch auf Beifall darfst du hoffen;
  Denn er weiß, wo du's getroffen."

           --GOETHE: _West-östlicher Divan_.


Momentous things happened to Deronda the very evening of that visit to
the small house at Chelsea, when there was the discussion about Mirah's
public name. But for the family group there, what appeared to be the
chief sequence connected with it occurred two days afterward. About
four o'clock wheels paused before the door, and there came one of those
knocks with an accompanying ring which serve to magnify the sense of
social existence in a region where the most enlivening signals are
usually those of the muffin-man. All the girls were at home, and the
two rooms were thrown together to make space for Kate's drawing, as
well as a great length of embroidery which had taken the place of the
satin cushions--a sort of _pièce de résistance_ in the courses of
needlework, taken up by any clever fingers that happened to be at
liberty. It stretched across the front room picturesquely enough, Mrs.
Meyrick bending over it on one corner, Mab in the middle, and Amy at
the other end. Mirah, whose performances in point of sewing were on the
make-shift level of the tailor-bird's, her education in that branch
having been much neglected, was acting as reader to the party, seated
on a camp-stool; in which position she also served Kate as model for a
title-page vignette, symbolizing a fair public absorbed in the
successive volumes of the family tea-table. She was giving forth with
charming distinctness the delightful Essay of Elia, "The Praise of
Chimney-Sweeps," and all were smiling over the "innocent blackness,"
when the imposing knock and ring called their thoughts to loftier
spheres, and they looked up in wonderment.

"Dear me!" said Mrs. Meyrick; "can it be Lady Mallinger? Is there a
grand carriage, Amy?"

"No--only a hansom cab. It must be a gentleman."

"The Prime Minister, I should think," said Kate dryly. "Hans says the
greatest man in London may get into a hansom cab."

"Oh, oh, oh!" cried Mab. "Suppose it should be Lord Russell!"

The five bright faces were all looking amused when the old maid-servant
bringing in a card distractedly left the parlor-door open, and there
was seen bowing toward Mrs. Meyrick a figure quite unlike that of the
respected Premier--tall and physically impressive even in his kid and
kerseymere, with massive face, flamboyant hair, and gold spectacles: in
fact, as Mrs. Meyrick saw from the card, _Julius Klesmer_.

Even embarrassment could hardly have made the "little mother" awkward,
but quick in her perceptions she was at once aware of the situation,
and felt well satisfied that the great personage had come to Mirah
instead of requiring her to come to him; taking it as a sign of active
interest. But when he entered, the rooms shrank into closets, the
cottage piano, Mab thought, seemed a ridiculous toy, and the entire
family existence as petty and private as an establishment of mice in
the Tuileries. Klesmer's personality, especially his way of glancing
round him, immediately suggested vast areas and a multitudinous
audience, and probably they made the usual scenery of his
consciousness, for we all of us carry on our thinking in some habitual
locus where there is a presence of other souls, and those who take in a
larger sweep than their neighbors are apt to seem mightily vain and
affected. Klesmer was vain, but not more so than many contemporaries of
heavy aspect, whose vanity leaps out and startles one like a spear out
of a walking-stick; as to his carriage and gestures, these were as
natural to him as the length of his fingers; and the rankest
affectation he could have shown would have been to look diffident and
demure. While his grandiose air was making Mab feel herself a
ridiculous toy to match the cottage piano, he was taking in the details
around him with a keen and thoroughly kind sensibility. He remembered a
home no longer than this on the outskirts of Bohemia; and in the
figurative Bohemia too he had had large acquaintance with the variety
and romance which belong to small incomes. He addressed Mrs. Meyrick
with the utmost deference.

"I hope I have not taken too great a freedom. Being in the
neighborhood, I ventured to save time by calling. Our friend, Mr.
Deronda, mentioned to me an understanding that I was to have the honor
of becoming acquainted with a young lady here--Miss Lapidoth."

Klesmer had really discerned Mirah in the first moment of entering,
but, with subtle politeness, he looked round bowingly at the three
sisters as if he were uncertain which was the young lady in question.

"Those are my daughters: this is Miss Lapidoth," said Mrs. Meyrick,
waving her hand toward Mirah.

"Ah," said Klesmer, in a tone of gratified expectation, turning a
radiant smile and deep bow to Mirah, who, instead of being in the least
taken by surprise, had a calm pleasure in her face. She liked the look
of Klesmer, feeling sure that he would scold her, like a great musician
and a kind man.

"You will not object to beginning our acquaintance by singing to me,"
he added, aware that they would all be relieved by getting rid of
preliminaries.

"I shall be very glad. It is good of you to be willing to listen to
me," said Mirah, moving to the piano. "Shall I accompany myself?"

"By all means," said Klesmer, seating himself, at Mrs. Meyrick's
invitation, where he could have a good view of the singer. The acute
little mother would not have acknowledged the weakness, but she really
said to herself, "He will like her singing better if he sees her."

All the feminine hearts except Mirah's were beating fast with anxiety,
thinking Klesmer terrific as he sat with his listening frown on, and
only daring to look at him furtively. If he did say anything severe it
would be so hard for them all. They could only comfort themselves with
thinking that Prince Camaralzaman, who had heard the finest things,
preferred Mirah's singing to any other: also she appeared to be doing
her very best, as if she were more instead of less at ease than usual.

The song she had chosen was a fine setting of some words selected from
Leopardi's grand Ode to Italy:,

  "_O patria mia, vedo le mura c gli archi
  E le colonne e i simula-cri e l'erme
  Torridegli avi nostri_",

This was recitative: then followed,

  "_Ma la gloria--non vedo_",

a mournful melody, a rhythmic plaint. After this came a climax of
devout triumph--passing from the subdued adoration of a happy Andante
in the words,

  "_Beatissimi voi.
  Che offriste il petto alle nemiche lance
  Per amor di costei che al sol vi diede_",

to the joyous outburst of an exultant Allegro in,

        "_Oh viva, oh viva:
  Beatissimi voi
  Mentre nel monde si favelli o scriva._"

When she had ended, Klesmer said after a moment,

"That is old Leo's music."

"Yes, he was my last master--at Vienna: so fierce and so good," said
Mirah, with a melancholy smile. "He prophesied that my voice would not
do for the stage. And he was right."

"_Con_tinue, if you please," said Klesmer, putting out his lips and
shaking his long fingers, while he went on with a smothered
articulation quite unintelligible to the audience.

The three girls detested him unanimously for not saying one word of
praise. Mrs. Meyrick was a little alarmed.

Mirah, simply bent on doing what Klesmer desired, and imagining that he
would now like to hear her sing some German, went through Prince
Radzivill's music to Gretchen's songs in the _Faust,_ one after the
other without any interrogatory pause. When she had finished he rose
and walked to the extremity of the small space at command, then walked
back to the piano, where Mirah had risen from her seat and stood
looking toward him with her little hands crossed before her, meekly
awaiting judgment; then with a sudden unknitting of his brow and with
beaming eyes, he stretched out his hand and said abruptly, "Let us
shake hands: you are a musician."

Mab felt herself beginning to cry, and all the three girls held Klesmer
adorable. Mrs. Meyrick took a long breath.

But straightway the frown came again, the long hand, back uppermost,
was stretched out in quite a different sense to touch with finger-tip
the back of Mirah's, and with protruded lip he said,

"Not for great tasks. No high roofs. We are no skylarks. We must be
modest." Klesmer paused here. And Mab ceased to think him adorable: "as
if Mirah had shown the least sign of conceit!"

Mirah was silent, knowing that there was a specific opinion to be
waited for, and Klesmer presently went on--"I would not advise--I would
not further your singing in any larger space than a private
drawing-room. But you will do there. And here in London that is one of
the best careers open. Lessons will follow. Will you come and sing at a
private concert at my house on Wednesday?"

"Oh, I shall be grateful," said Mirah, putting her hands together
devoutly. "I would rather get my bread in that way than by anything
more public. I will try to improve. What should I work at most?"

Klesmer made a preliminary answer in noises which sounded like words
bitten in two and swallowed before they were half out, shaking his
fingers the while, before he said, quite distinctly, "I shall introduce
you to Astorga: he is the foster-father of good singing and will give
you advice." Then addressing Mrs. Meyrick, he added, "Mrs. Klesmer will
call before Wednesday, with your permission."

"We shall feel that to be a great kindness," said Mrs. Meyrick.

"You will sing to her," said Klesmer, turning again to Mirah. "She is a
thorough musician, and has a soul with more ears to it than you will
often get in a musician. Your singing will satisfy her:

  'Vor den Wissenden sich stellen;'

you know the rest?"

  "'Sicher ist's in alien Fällen.'"

said Mirah, promptly. And Klesmer saying "Schön!" put out his hand
again as a good-by.

He had certainly chosen the most delicate way of praising Mirah, and
the Meyrick girls had now given him all their esteem. But imagine Mab's
feeling when suddenly fixing his eyes on her, he said decisively, "That
young lady is musical, I see!" She was a mere blush and sense of
scorching.

"Yes," said Mirah, on her behalf. "And she has a touch."

"Oh, please, Mirah--a scramble, not a touch," said Mab, in anguish,
with a horrible fear of what the next thing might be: this dreadful
divining personage--evidently Satan in gray trousers--might order her
to sit down to the piano, and her heart was like molten wax in the
midst of her. But this was cheap payment for her amazed joy when
Klesmer said benignantly, turning to Mrs. Meyrick, "Will she like to
accompany Miss Lapidoth and hear the music on Wednesday?"

"There could hardly be a greater pleasure for her," said Mrs. Meyrick.
"She will be most glad and grateful."

Thereupon Klesmer bowed round to the three sisters more grandly than
they had ever been bowed to before. Altogether it was an amusing
picture--the little room with so much of its diagonal taken up in
Klesmer's magnificent bend to the small feminine figures like images a
little less than life-size, the grave Holbein faces on the walls, as
many as were not otherwise occupied, looking hard at this stranger who
by his face seemed a dignified contemporary of their own, but whose
garments seemed a deplorable mockery of the human form.

Mrs. Meyrick could not help going out of the room with Klesmer and
closing the door behind her. He understood her, and said with a
frowning nod,

"She will do: if she doesn't attempt too much and her voice holds out,
she can make an income. I know that is the great point: Deronda told
me. You are taking care of her. She looks like a good girl."

"She is an angel," said the warm-hearted woman.

"No," said Klesmer, with a playful nod; "she is a pretty Jewess: the
angels must not get the credit of her. But I think she has found a
guardian angel," he ended, bowing himself out in this amiable way.

The four young creatures had looked at each other mutely till the door
banged and Mrs. Meyrick re-entered. Then there was an explosion. Mab
clapped her hands and danced everywhere inconveniently; Mrs. Meyrick
kissed Mirah and blessed her; Amy said emphatically, "We can never get
her a new dress before Wednesday!" and Kate exclaimed, "Thank heaven my
table is not knocked over!"

Mirah had reseated herself on the music-stool without speaking, and the
tears were rolling down her cheeks as she looked at her friends.

"Now, now, Mab!" said Mrs. Meyrick; "come and sit down reasonably and
let us talk?"

"Yes, let us talk," said Mab, cordially, coming back to her low seat
and caressing her knees. "I am beginning to feel large again. Hans said
he was coming this afternoon. I wish he had been here--only there would
have been no room for him. Mirah, what are you looking sad for?"

"I am too happy," said Mirah. "I feel so full of gratitude to you all;
and he was so very kind."

"Yes, at last," said Mab, sharply. "But he might have said something
encouraging sooner. I thought him dreadfully ugly when he sat frowning,
and only said, '_Con_tinue.' I hated him all the long way from the top
of his hair to the toe of his polished boot."

"Nonsense, Mab; he has a splendid profile," said Kate.

"_Now_, but not _then_. I cannot bear people to keep their minds
bottled up for the sake of letting them off with a pop. They seem to
grudge making you happy unless they can make you miserable beforehand.
However, I forgive him everything," said Mab, with a magnanimous air,
"but he has invited me. I wonder why he fixed on me as the musical one?
Was it because I have a bulging forehead, ma, and peep from under it
like a newt from under a stone?"

"It was your way of listening to the singing, child," said Mrs.
Meyrick. "He has magic spectacles and sees everything through them,
depend upon it. But what was that German quotation you were so ready
with, Mirah--you learned puss?"

"Oh, that was not learning," said Mirah, her tearful face breaking into
an amused smile. "I said it so many times for a lesson. It means that
it is safer to do anything--singing or anything else--before those who
know and understand all about it."

"That was why you were not one bit frightened, I suppose," said Amy.
"But now, what we have to talk about is a dress for you on Wednesday."

"I don't want anything better than this black merino," said Mirah,
rising to show the effect. "Some white gloves and some new _bottines_."
She put out her little foot, clad in the famous felt slipper.

"There comes Hans," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Stand still, and let us hear
what he says about the dress. Artists are the best people to consult
about such things."

"You don't consult me, ma," said Kate, lifting up her eyebrow with a
playful complainingness. "I notice mothers are like the people I deal
with--the girls' doings are always priced low."

"My dear child, the boys are such a trouble--we could never put up with
them, if we didn't make believe they were worth more," said Mrs.
Meyrick, just as her boy entered. "Hans, we want your opinion about
Mirah's dress. A great event has happened. Klesmer has been here, and
she is going to sing at his house on Wednesday among grand people. She
thinks this dress will do."

"Let me see," said Hans. Mirah in her childlike way turned toward him
to be looked at; and he, going to a little further distance, knelt with
one knee on a hassock to survey her.

"This would be thought a very good stage-dress for me," she said,
pleadingly, "in a part where I was to come on as a poor Jewess and sing
to fashionable Christians."

"It would be effective," said Hans, with a considering air; "it would
stand out well among the fashionable _chiffons_."

"But you ought not to claim all the poverty on your side, Mirah," said
Amy. "There are plenty of poor Christians and dreadfully rich Jews and
fashionable Jewesses."

"I didn't mean any harm," said Mirah. "Only I have been used to
thinking about my dress for parts in plays. And I almost always had a
part with a plain dress."

"That makes me think it questionable," said Hans, who had suddenly
become as fastidious and conventional on this occasion as he had
thought Deronda was, apropos of the Berenice-pictures. "It looks a
little too theatrical. We must not make you a _rôle_ of the poor
Jewess--or of being a Jewess at all." Hans had a secret desire to
neutralize the Jewess in private life, which he was in danger of not
keeping secret.

"But it is what I am really. I am not pretending anything. I shall
never be anything else," said Mirah. "I always feel myself a Jewess."

"But we can't feel that about you," said Hans, with a devout look.
"What does it signify whether a perfect woman is a Jewess or not?"

"That is your kind way of praising me; I never was praised so before,"
said Mirah, with a smile, which was rather maddening to Hans and made
him feel still more of a cosmopolitan.

"People don't think of me as a British Christian," he said, his face
creasing merrily. "They think of me as an imperfectly handsome young
man and an unpromising painter."

"But you are wandering from the dress," said Amy. "If that will not do,
how are we to get another before Wednesday? and to-morrow Sunday?"

"Indeed this will do," said Mirah, entreatingly. "It is all real, you
know," here she looked at Hans--"even if it seemed theatrical. Poor
Berenice sitting on the ruins--any one might say that was theatrical,
but I know that this is just what she would do."

"I am a scoundrel," said Hans, overcome by this misplaced trust. "That
is my invention. Nobody knows that she did that. Shall you forgive me
for not saying so before?"

"Oh, yes," said Mirah, after a momentary pause of surprise. "You knew
it was what she would be sure to do--a Jewess who had not been
faithful--who had done what she did and was penitent. She could have no
joy but to afflict herself; and where else would she go? I think it is
very beautiful that you should enter so into what a Jewess would feel."

"The Jewesses of that time sat on ruins," said Hans, starting up with a
sense of being checkmated. "That makes them convenient for pictures."

"But the dress--the dress," said Amy; "is it settled?"

"Yes; is it not?" said Mirah, looking doubtfully at Mrs. Meyrick, who
in her turn looked up at her son, and said, "What do you think, Hans?"

"That dress will not do," said Hans, decisively. "She is not going to
sit on ruins. You must jump into a cab with her, little mother, and go
to Regent Street. It's plenty of time to get anything you like--a black
silk dress such as ladies wear. She must not be taken for an object of
charity. She has talents to make people indebted to her."

"I think it is what Mr. Deronda would like--for her to have a handsome
dress," said Mrs. Meyrick, deliberating.

"Of course it is," said Hans, with some sharpness. "You may take my
word for what a gentleman would feel."

"I wish to do what Mr. Deronda would like me to do," said Mirah,
gravely, seeing that Mrs. Meyrick looked toward her; and Hans, turning
on his heel, went to Kate's table and took up one of her drawings as if
his interest needed a new direction.

"Shouldn't you like to make a study of Klesmer's head, Hans?" said
Kate. "I suppose you have often seen him?"

"Seen him!" exclaimed Hans, immediately throwing back his head and
mane, seating himself at the piano and looking round him as if he were
surveying an amphitheatre, while he held his fingers down
perpendicularly toward the keys. But then in another instant he wheeled
round on the stool, looked at Mirah and said, half timidly--"Perhaps
you don't like this mimicry; you must always stop my nonsense when you
don't like it."

Mirah had been smiling at the swiftly-made image, and she smiled still,
but with a touch of something else than amusement, as she said--"Thank
you. But you have never done anything I did not like. I hardly think he
could, belonging to you," she added, looking at Mrs. Meyrick.

In this way Hans got food for his hope. How could the rose help it when
several bees in succession took its sweet odor as a sign of personal
attachment?




CHAPTER XL.

  "Within the soul a faculty abides,
  That with interpositions, which would hide
  And darken, so can deal, that they become
  Contingencies of pomp; and serve to exalt
  Her native brightness, as the ample moon.
  In the deep stillness of a summer even.
  Rising behind a thick and lofty grove,
  Burns, like an unconsuming fire of light,
  In the green trees; and, kindling on all sides
  Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil
  Into a substance glorious as her own,
  Yea, with her own incorporated, by power
  Capacious and serene."
               --WORDSWORTH: _Excursion_, B. IV.


Deronda came out of the narrow house at Chelsea in a frame of mind that
made him long for some good bodily exercise to carry off what he was
himself inclined to call the fumes of his temper. He was going toward
the city, and the sight of the Chelsea Stairs with the waiting boats at
once determined him to avoid the irritating inaction of being driven in
a cab, by calling a wherry and taking an oar.

His errand was to go to Ram's book-shop, where he had yesterday arrived
too late for Mordecai's midday watch, and had been told that he
invariably came there again between five and six. Some further
acquaintance with this remarkable inmate of the Cohens was particularly
desired by Deronda as a preliminary to redeeming his ring: he wished
that their conversation should not again end speedily with that drop of
Mordecai's interest which was like the removal of a drawbridge, and
threatened to shut out any easy communication in future. As he got
warmed with the use of the oar, fixing his mind on the errand before
him and the ends he wanted to achieve on Mirah's account, he
experienced, as was wont with him, a quick change of mental light,
shifting his point of view to that of the person whom he had been
thinking of hitherto chiefly as serviceable to his own purposes, and
was inclined to taunt himself with being not much better than an
enlisting sergeant, who never troubles himself with the drama that
brings him the needful recruits.

"I suppose if I got from this man the information I am most anxious
about," thought Deronda, "I should be contented enough if he felt no
disposition to tell me more of himself, or why he seemed to have some
expectation from me which was disappointed. The sort of curiosity he
stirs would die out; and yet it might be that he had neared and parted
as one can imagine two ships doing, each freighted with an exile who
would have recognized the other if the two could have looked out face
to face. Not that there is any likelihood of a peculiar tie between me
and this poor fellow, whose voyage, I fancy, must soon be over. But I
wonder whether there is much of that momentous mutual missing between
people who interchange blank looks, or even long for one another's
absence in a crowded place. However, one makes one's self chances of
missing by going on the recruiting sergeant's plan."

When the wherry was approaching Blackfriars Bridge, where Deronda meant
to land, it was half-past four, and the gray day was dying gloriously,
its western clouds all broken into narrowing purple strata before a
wide-spreading saffron clearness, which in the sky had a monumental
calm, but on the river, with its changing objects, was reflected as a
luminous movement, the alternate flash of ripples or currents, the
sudden glow of the brown sail, the passage of laden barges from
blackness into color, making an active response to that brooding glory.

Feeling well heated by this time, Deronda gave up the oar and drew over
him again his Inverness cape. As he lifted up his head while fastening
the topmost button his eyes caught a well-remembered face looking
toward him over the parapet of the bridge--brought out by the western
light into startling distinctness and brilliancy--an illuminated type
of bodily emaciation and spiritual eagerness. It was the face of
Mordecai, who also, in his watch toward the west, had caught sight of
the advancing boat, and had kept it fast within his gaze, at first
simply because it was advancing, then with a recovery of impressions
that made him quiver as with a presentiment, till at last the nearing
figure lifted up its face toward him--the face of his visions--and then
immediately, with white uplifted hand, beckoned again and again.

For Deronda, anxious that Mordecai should recognize and await him, had
lost no time before signaling, and the answer came straightway.
Mordecai lifted his cap and waved it--feeling in that moment that his
inward prophecy was fulfilled. Obstacles, incongruities, all melted
into the sense of completion with which his soul was flooded by this
outward satisfaction of his longing. His exultation was not widely
different from that of the experimenter, bending over the first
stirrings of change that correspond to what in the fervor of
concentrated prevision his thought has foreshadowed. The prefigured
friend had come from the golden background, and had signaled to him:
this actually was: the rest was to be.

In three minutes Deronda had landed, had paid his boatman, and was
joining Mordecai, whose instinct it was to stand perfectly still and
wait for him.

"I was very glad to see you standing here," said Deronda, "for I was
intending to go on to the book-shop and look for you again. I was there
yesterday--perhaps they mentioned it to you?"

"Yes," said Mordecai; "that was the reason I came to the bridge."

This answer, made with simple gravity, was startlingly mysterious to
Deronda. Were the peculiarities of this man really associated with any
sort of mental alienation, according to Cohen's hint?

"You knew nothing of my being at Chelsea?" he said, after a moment.

"No; but I expected you to come down the river. I have been waiting for
you these five years." Mordecai's deep-sunk eyes were fixed on those of
the friend who had at last arrived with a look of affectionate
dependence, at once pathetic and solemn. Deronda's sensitiveness was
not the less responsive because he could not but believe that this
strangely-disclosed relation was founded on an illusion.

"It will be a satisfaction to me if I can be of any real use to you,"
he answered, very earnestly. "Shall we get into a cab and drive
to--wherever you wish to go? You have probably had walking enough with
your short breath."

"Let us go to the book-shop. It will soon be time for me to be there.
But now look up the river," said Mordecai, turning again toward it and
speaking in undertones of what may be called an excited calm--so
absorbed by a sense of fulfillment that he was conscious of no barrier
to a complete understanding between him and Deronda. "See the sky, how
it is slowly fading. I have always loved this bridge: I stood on it
when I was a little boy. It is a meeting-place for the spiritual
messengers. It is true--what the Masters said--that each order of
things has its angel: that means the full message of each from what is
afar. Here I have listened to the messages of earth and sky; when I was
stronger I used to stay and watch for the stars in the deep heavens.
But this time just about sunset was always what I loved best. It has
sunk into me and dwelt with me--fading, slowly fading: it was my own
decline: it paused--it waited, till at last it brought me my new
life--my new self--who will live when this breath is all breathed out."

Deronda did not speak. He felt himself strangely wrought upon. The
first-prompted suspicion that Mordecai might be liable to
hallucinations of thought--might have become a monomaniac on some
subject which had given too severe a strain to his diseased
organism--gave way to a more submissive expectancy. His nature was too
large, too ready to conceive regions beyond his own experience, to rest
at once in the easy explanation, "madness," whenever a consciousness
showed some fullness and conviction where his own was blank. It
accorded with his habitual disposition that he should meet rather than
resist any claim on him in the shape of another's need; and this claim
brought with it a sense of solemnity which seemed a radiation from
Mordecai, as utterly nullifying his outward poverty and lifting him
into authority as if he had been that preternatural guide seen in the
universal legend, who suddenly drops his mean disguise and stands a
manifest Power. That impression was the more sanctioned by a sort of
resolved quietude which the persuasion of fulfillment had produced in
Mordecai's manner. After they had stood a moment in silence he said,
"Let us go now," and when they were riding he added, "We will get down
at the end of the street and walk to the shop. You can look at the
books, and Mr. Ram will be going away directly and leave us alone."

It seemed that this enthusiast was just as cautious, just as much alive
to judgments in other minds as if he had been that antipode of all
enthusiasm called "a man of the world."

While they were rattling along in the cab, Mirah was still present with
Deronda in the midst of this strange experience, but he foresaw that
the course of conversation would be determined by Mordecai, not by
himself: he was no longer confident what questions he should be able to
ask; and with a reaction on his own mood, he inwardly said, "I suppose
I am in a state of complete superstition, just as if I were awaiting
the destiny that could interpret the oracle. But some strong relation
there must be between me and this man, since he feels it strongly.
Great heaven! what relation has proved itself more potent in the world
than faith even when mistaken--than expectation even when perpetually
disappointed? Is my side of the relation to be disappointing or
fulfilling?--well, if it is ever possible for me to fulfill I will not
disappoint."

In ten minutes the two men, with as intense a consciousness as if they
had been two undeclared lovers, felt themselves alone in the small
gas-lit book-shop and turned face to face, each baring his head from an
instinctive feeling that they wished to see each other fully. Mordecai
came forward to lean his back against the little counter, while Deronda
stood against the opposite wall hardly more than four feet off. I wish
I could perpetuate those two faces, as Titian's "Tribute Money" has
perpetuated two types presenting another sort of contrast. Imagine--we
all of us can--the pathetic stamp of consumption with its brilliancy of
glance to which the sharply-defined structure of features reminding one
of a forsaken temple, give already a far-off look as of one getting
unwillingly out of reach; and imagine it on a Jewish face naturally
accentuated for the expression of an eager mind--the face of a man
little above thirty, but with that age upon it which belongs to time
lengthened by suffering, the hair and beard, still black, throwing out
the yellow pallor of the skin, the difficult breathing giving more
decided marking to the mobile nostril, the wasted yellow hands
conspicuous on the folded arms: then give to the yearning consumptive
glance something of the slowly dying mother's look, when her one loved
son visits her bedside, and the flickering power of gladness leaps out
as she says, "My boy!"--for the sense of spiritual perpetuation in
another resembles that maternal transference of self.

Seeing such a portrait you would see Mordecai. And opposite to him was
a face not more distinctively oriental than many a type seen among what
we call the Latin races; rich in youthful health, and with a forcible
masculine gravity in its repose, that gave the value of judgment to the
reverence with which he met the gaze of this mysterious son of poverty
who claimed him as a long-expected friend. The more exquisite quality
of Deronda's nature--that keenly perceptive sympathetic emotiveness
which ran along with his speculative tendency--was never more
thoroughly tested. He felt nothing that could be called belief in the
validity of Mordecai's impressions concerning him or in the probability
of any greatly effective issue: what he felt was a profound sensibility
to a cry from the depths of another and accompanying that, the summons
to be receptive instead of superciliously prejudging. Receptiveness is
a rare and massive power, like fortitude; and this state of mind now
gave Deronda's face its utmost expression of calm benignant force--an
expression which nourished Mordecai's confidence and made an open way
before him. He began to speak.

"You cannot know what has guided me to you and brought us together at
this moment. You are wondering."

"I am not impatient," said Deronda. "I am ready to listen to whatever
you may wish to disclose."

"You see some of the reasons why I needed you," said Mordecai, speaking
quietly, as if he wished to reserve his strength. "You see that I am
dying. You see that I am as one shut up behind bars by the wayside, who
if he spoke to any would be met only by head-shaking and pity. The day
is closing--the light is fading--soon we should not have been able to
discern each other. But you have come in time."

"I rejoice that I am come in time," said Deronda, feelingly. He would
not say, "I hope you are not mistaken in me,"--the very word
"mistaken," he thought, would be a cruelty at that moment.

"But the hidden reasons why I need you began afar off," said Mordecai;
"began in my early years when I was studying in another land. Then
ideas, beloved ideas, came to me, because I was a Jew. They were a
trust to fulfill, because I was a Jew. They were an inspiration,
because I was a Jew, and felt the heart of my race beating within me.
They were my life; I was not fully born till then. I counted this
heart, and this breath, and this right hand"--Mordecai had pathetically
pressed his hand upon his breast, and then stretched its wasted fingers
out before him--"I counted my sleep and my waking, and the work I fed
my body with, and the sights that fed my eyes--I counted them but as
fuel to the divine flame. But I had done as one who wanders and
engraves his thought in rocky solitudes, and before I could change my
course came care and labor and disease, and blocked the way before me,
and bound me with the iron that eats itself into the soul. Then I said,
'How shall I save the life within me from being stifled with this
stifled breath?'"

Mordecai paused to rest that poor breath which had been taxed by the
rising excitement of his speech. And also he wished to check that
excitement. Deronda dared not speak: the very silence in the narrow
space seemed alive with mingled awe and compassion before this
struggling fervor. And presently Mordecai went on:

"But you may misunderstand me. I speak not as an ignorant dreamer--as
one bred up in the inland valleys, thinking ancient thoughts anew, and
not knowing them ancient, never having stood by the great waters where
the world's knowledge passes to and fro. English is my mother-tongue,
England is the native land of this body, which is but as a breaking pot
of earth around the fruit-bearing tree, whose seed might make the
desert rejoice. But my true life was nourished in Holland at the feet
of my mother's brother, a Rabbi skilled in special learning: and when
he died I went to Hamburg to study, and afterwards to Göttingen, that I
might take a larger outlook on my people, and on the Gentile world, and
drank knowledge at all sources. I was a youth; I felt free; I saw our
chief seats in Germany; I was not then in utter poverty. And I had
possessed myself of a handicraft. For I said, I care not if my lot be
as that of Joshua ben Chananja: after the last destruction he earned
his bread by making needles, but in his youth he had been a singer on
the steps of the Temple, and had a memory of what was before the glory
departed. I said, let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the
hands of the toiler: but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance
where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.
I knew what I chose. They said, 'He feeds himself on visions,' and I
denied not; for visions are the creators and feeders of the world. I
see, I measure the world as it is, which the vision will create anew.
You are not listening to one who raves aloof from the lives of his
fellows."

Mordecai paused, and Deronda, feeling that the pause was expectant,
said, "Do me the justice to believe that I was not inclined to call
your words raving. I listen that I may know, without prejudgment. I
have had experience which gives me a keen interest in the story of a
spiritual destiny embraced willingly, and embraced in youth."

"A spiritual destiny embraced willingly--in youth?" Mordecai repeated
in a corrective tone. "It was the soul fully born within me, and it
came in my boyhood. It brought its own world--a mediaeval world, where
there are men who made the ancient language live again in new psalms of
exile. They had absorbed the philosophy of the Gentile into the faith
of the Jew, and they still yearned toward a center for our race. One of
their souls was born again within me, and awakened amid the memories of
their world. It traveled into Spain and Provence; it debated with
Aben-Ezra; it took ship with Jehuda ha-Levi; it heard the roar of the
Crusaders and the shrieks of tortured Israel. And when its dumb tongue
was loosed, it spoke the speech they had made alive with the new blood
of their ardor, their sorrow, and their martyred trust: it sang with
the cadence of their strain."

Mordecai paused again, and then said in a loud, hoarse whisper,

"While it is imprisoned in me, it will never learn another."

"Have you written entirely in Hebrew, then?" said Deronda, remembering
with some anxiety the former question as to his own knowledge of that
tongue.

"Yes--yes," said Mordecai, in a tone of deep sadness: "in my youth I
wandered toward that solitude, not feeling that it was a solitude. I
had the ranks of the great dead around me; the martyrs gathered and
listened. But soon I found that the living were deaf to me. At first I
saw my life spread as a long future: I said part of my Jewish heritage
is an unbreaking patience; part is skill to seek divers methods and
find a rooting-place where the planters despair. But there came new
messengers from the Eternal. I had to bow under the yoke that presses
on the great multitude born of woman: family troubles called me--I had
to work, to care, not for myself alone. I was left solitary again; but
already the angel of death had turned to me and beckoned, and I felt
his skirts continually on my path. I loosed not my effort. I besought
hearing and help. I spoke; I went to men of our people--to the rich in
influence or knowledge, to the rich in other wealth. But I found none
to listen with understanding. I was rebuked for error; I was offered a
small sum in charity. No wonder. I looked poor; I carried a bundle of
Hebrew manuscript with me; I said, our chief teachers are misleading
the hope of our race. Scholar and merchant were both too busy to
listen. Scorn stood as interpreter between me and them. One said, 'The
book of Mormon would never have answered in Hebrew; and if you mean to
address our learned men, it is not likely you can teach them anything.'
He touched a truth there."

The last words had a perceptible irony in their hoarsened tone.

"But though you had accustomed yourself to write in Hebrew, few,
surely, can use English better," said Deronda, wanting to hint
consolation in a new effort for which he could smooth the way.

Mordecai shook his head slowly, and answered,

"Too late--too late. I can write no more. My writing would be like this
gasping breath. But the breath may wake the fount of pity--the writing
not. If I could write now and used English, I should be as one who
beats a board to summon those who have been used to no signal but a
bell. My soul has an ear to hear the faults of its own speech. New
writing of mine would be like this body"--Mordecai spread his
arms--"within it there might be the Ruach-ha-kodesh--the breath of
divine thought--but, men would smile at it and say, 'A poor Jew!' and
the chief smilers would be of my own people."

Mordecai let his hands fall, and his head sink in melancholy: for the
moment he had lost hold of his hope. Despondency, conjured up by his
own words, had floated in and hovered above him with eclipsing wings.
He had sunk into momentary darkness,

"I feel with you--I feel strongly with you," said Deronda, in a clear
deep voice which was itself a cordial, apart from the words of
sympathy. "But forgive me if I speak hastily--for what you have
actually written there need be no utter burial. The means of
publication are within reach. If you will rely on me, I can assure you
of all that is necessary to that end."

"That is not enough," said Mordecai, quickly, looking up again with the
flash of recovered memory and confidence. "That is not all my trust in
you. You must be not only a hand to me, but a soul--believing my
belief--being moved by my reasons--hoping my hope--seeing the vision I
point to--beholding a glory where I behold it!"--Mordecai had taken a
step nearer as he spoke, and now laid his hand on Deronda's arm with a
tight grasp; his face little more than a foot off had something like a
pale flame in it--an intensity of reliance that acted as a peremptory
claim, while he went on--"You will be my life: it will be planted
afresh; it will grow. You shall take the inheritance; it has been
gathering for ages. The generations are crowding on my narrow life as a
bridge: what has been and what is to be are meeting there; and the
bridge is breaking. But I have found you. You have come in time. You
will take the inheritance which the base son refuses because of the
tombs which the plow and harrow may not pass over or the gold-seeker
disturb: you will take the sacred inheritance of the Jew."

Deronda had become as pallid as Mordecai. Quick as an alarm of flood or
fire, there spread within him not only a compassionate dread of
discouraging this fellowman who urged a prayer as one in the last
agony, but also the opposing dread of fatally feeding an illusion, and
being hurried on to a self-committal which might turn into a falsity.
The peculiar appeal to his tenderness overcame the repulsion that most
of us experience under a grasp and speech which assumed to dominate.
The difficulty to him was to inflict the accents of hesitation and
doubt on this ardent suffering creature, who was crowding too much of
his brief being into a moment of perhaps extravagant trust. With
exquisite instinct, Deronda, before he opened his lips, placed his palm
gently on Mordecai's straining hand--an act just then equal to many
speeches. And after that he said, without haste, as if conscious that
he might be wrong,

"Do you forget what I told you when we first saw each other? Do you
remember that I said I was not of your race?"

"It can't be true," Mordecai whispered immediately, with no sign of
shock. The sympathetic hand still upon him had fortified the feeling
which was stronger than those words of denial. There was a perceptible
pause, Deronda feeling it impossible to answer, conscious indeed that
the assertion "It can't be true"--had the pressure of argument for him.
Mordecai, too entirely possessed by the supreme importance of the
relation between himself and Deronda to have any other care in his
speech, followed up that assertion by a second, which came to his lips
as a mere sequence of his long-cherished conviction--"You are not sure
of your own origin."

"How do you know that?" said Daniel, with an habitual shrinking which
made him remove his hands from Mordecai's, who also relaxed his hold,
and fell back into his former leaning position.

"I know it--I know it; what is my life else?" said Mordecai, with a low
cry of impatience. "Tell me everything: tell me why you deny."

He could have no conception what that demand was to the hearer--how
probingly it touched the hidden sensibility, the vividly conscious
reticence of years; how the uncertainty he was insisting on as part of
his own hope had always for Daniel been a threatening possibility of
painful revelation about his mother. But the moment had influences
which were not only new but solemn to Deronda; any evasion here might
turn out to be a hateful refusal of some task that belonged to him,
some act of due fellowship; in any case it would be a cruel rebuff to a
being who was appealing to him as a forlorn hope under the shadow of a
coming doom. After a few moments, he said, with a great effort over
himself--determined to tell all the truth briefly,

"I have never known my mother. I have no knowledge about her. I have
never called any man father. But I am convinced that my father is an
Englishman."

Deronda's deep tones had a tremor in them as he uttered this
confession; and all the while there was an undercurrent of amazement in
him at the strange circumstances under which he uttered it. It seemed
as if Mordecai were hardly overrating his own power to determine the
action of the friend whom he had mysteriously chosen.

"It will be seen--it will be declared," said Mordecai, triumphantly.
"The world grows, and its frame is knit together by the growing soul;
dim, dim at first, then clearer and more clear, the consciousness
discerns remote stirrings. As thoughts move within us darkly, and shake
us before they are fully discerned--so events--so beings: they are knit
with us in the growth of the world. You have risen within me like a
thought not fully spelled; my soul is shaken before the words are all
there. The rest will come--it will come.".

"We must not lose sight of the fact that the outward event has not
always been a fulfillment of the firmest faith," said Deronda, in a
tone that was made hesitating by the painfully conflicting desires, not
to give any severe blow to Mordecai, and not to give his confidence a
sanction which might have the severest of blows in reserve.

Mordecai's face, which had been illuminated to the utmost in that last
declaration of his confidence, changed under Deronda's words, not only
into any show of collapsed trust: the force did not disappear from the
expression, but passed from the triumphant into the firmly resistant.

"You would remind me that I may be under an illusion--that the history
of our people's trust has been full of illusion. I face it all." Here
Mordecai paused a moment. Then bending his head a little forward, he
said, in his hoarse whisper, "_So it might be with my trust, if you
would make it an illusion. But you will not._"

The very sharpness with which these words penetrated Deronda made him
feel the more that here was a crisis in which he must be firm.

"What my birth was does not lie in my will," he answered. "My sense of
claims on me cannot be independent of my knowledge there. And I cannot
promise you that I will try to hasten a disclosure. Feelings which have
struck root through half my life may still hinder me from doing what I
have never been able to do. Everything must be waited for. I must know
more of the truth about my own life, and I must know more of what it
would become if it were made a part of yours."

Mordecai had folded his arms again while Deronda was speaking, and now
answered with equal firmness, though with difficult breathing,

"You _shall_ know. What are we met for, but that you should know. Your
doubts lie as light as dust on my belief. I know the philosophies of
this time and of other times; if I chose I could answer a summons
before their tribunals. I could silence the beliefs which are the
mother-tongue of my soul and speak with the rote-learned language of a
system, that gives you the spelling of all things, sure of its alphabet
covering them all. I could silence them: may not a man silence his awe
or his love, and take to finding reasons, which others demand? But if
his love lies deeper than any reasons to be found? Man finds his
pathways: at first they were foot tracks, as those of the beast in the
wilderness: now they are swift and invisible: his thought dives through
the ocean, and his wishes thread the air: has he found all the pathways
yet? What reaches him, stays with him, rules him: he must accept it,
not knowing its pathway. Say, my expectation of you has grown but as
false hopes grow. That doubt is in your mind? Well, my expectation was
there, and you are come. Men have died of thirst. But I was thirsty,
and the water is on my lips! What are doubts to me? In the hour when
you come to me and say, 'I reject your soul: I know that I am not a
Jew: we have no lot in common'--I shall not doubt. I shall be
certain--certain that I have been deluded. That hour will never come!"

Deronda felt a new chord sounding in his speech: it was rather
imperious than appealing--had more of conscious power than of the
yearning need which had acted as a beseeching grasp on him before. And
usually, though he was the reverse of pugnacious, such a change of
attitude toward him would have weakened his inclination to admit a
claim. But here there was something that balanced his resistance and
kept it aloof. This strong man whose gaze was sustainedly calm and his
finger-nails pink with health, who was exercised in all questioning,
and accused of excessive mental independence, still felt a subduing
influence over him in the tenacious certitude of the fragile creature
before him, whose pallid yellow nostril was tense with effort as his
breath labored under the burthen of eager speech. The influence seemed
to strengthen the bond of sympathetic obligation. In Deronda at this
moment the desire to escape what might turn into a trying embarrassment
was no more likely to determine action than the solicitations of
indolence are likely to determine it in one with whom industry is a
daily law. He answered simply,

"It is my wish to meet and satisfy your wishes wherever that is
possible to me. It is certain to me at least that I desire not to
undervalue your toil and your suffering. Let me know your thoughts. But
where can we meet?"

"I have thought of that," said Mordecai. "It is not hard for you to
come into this neighborhood later in the evening? You did so once."

"I can manage it very well occasionally," said Deronda. "You live under
the same roof with the Cohens, I think?"

Before Mordecai could answer, Mr. Ram re-entered to take his place
behind the counter. He was an elderly son of Abraham, whose childhood
had fallen on the evil times at the beginning of this century, and who
remained amid this smart and instructed generation as a preserved
specimen, soaked through and through with the effect of the poverty and
contempt which were the common heritage of most English Jews seventy
years ago. He had none of the oily cheerfulness observable in Mr.
Cohen's aspect: his very features--broad and chubby--showed that
tendency to look mongrel without due cause, which, in a miscellaneous
London neighborhood, may perhaps be compared with the marvels of
imitation in insects, and may have been nature's imperfect effort on
behalf of the pure Caucasian to shield him from the shame and spitting
to which purer features would have been exposed in the times of zeal.
Mr. Ram dealt ably in books, in the same way that he would have dealt
in tins of meat and other commodities--without knowledge or
responsibility as to the proportion of rottenness or nourishment they
might contain. But he believed in Mordecai's learning as something
marvellous, and was not sorry that his conversation should be sought by
a bookish gentleman, whose visits had twice ended in a purchase. He
greeted Deronda with a crabbed good-will, and, putting on large silver
spectacles, appeared at once to abstract himself in the daily accounts.

But Deronda and Mordecai were soon in the street together, and without
any explicit agreement as to their direction, were walking toward Ezra
Cohen's.

"We can't meet there: my room is too narrow," said Mordecai, taking up
the thread of talk where they had dropped it. "But there is a tavern
not far from here where I sometimes go to a club. It is the _Hand and
Banner_, in the street at the next turning, five doors down. We can
have the parlor there any evening."

"We can try that for once," said Deronda. "But you will perhaps let me
provide you with some lodging, which would give you more freedom and
comfort than where you are."

"No; I need nothing. My outer life is as nought. I will take nothing
less precious from you than your soul's brotherhood. I will think of
nothing else yet. But I am glad you are rich. You did not need money on
that diamond ring. You had some other motive for bringing it."

Deronda was a little startled by this clear-sightedness; but before he
could reply Mordecai added--"it is all one. Had you been in need of the
money, the great end would have been that we should meet again. But you
are rich?" he ended, in a tone of interrogation.

"Not rich, except in the sense that every one is rich who has more than
he needs for himself."

"I desired that your life should be free," said Mordecai,
dreamily--"mine has been a bondage."

It was clear that he had no interest in the fact of Deronda's
appearance at the Cohens' beyond its relation to his own ideal purpose.
Despairing of leading easily up to the question he wished to ask,
Deronda determined to put it abruptly, and said,

"Can you tell me why Mrs. Cohen, the mother, must not be spoken to
about her daughter?"

There was no immediate answer, and he thought that he should have to
repeat the question. The fact was that Mordecai had heard the words,
but had to drag his mind to a new subject away from his passionate
preoccupation. After a few moments, he replied with a careful effort
such as he would have used if he had been asked the road to Holborn:

"I know the reason. But I will not speak even of trivial family affairs
which I have heard in the privacy of the family. I dwell in their tent
as in a sanctuary. Their history, so far as they injure none other, is
their own possession."

Deronda felt the blood mounting to his cheeks as a sort of rebuke he
was little used to, and he also found himself painfully baffled where
he had reckoned with some confidence on getting decisive knowledge. He
became the more conscious of emotional strain from the excitements of
the day; and although he had the money in his pocket to redeem his
ring, he recoiled from the further task of a visit to the Cohens',
which must be made not only under the former uncertainty, but under a
new disappointment as to the possibility of its removal.

"I will part from you now," he said, just before they could reach
Cohen's door; and Mordecai paused, looking up at him with an anxious
fatigued face under the gaslight.

"When will you come back?" he said, with slow emphasis.

"May I leave that unfixed? May I ask for you at the Cohens' any evening
after your hour at the book-shop? There is no objection, I suppose, to
their knowing that you and I meet in private?"

"None," said Mordecai. "But the days I wait now are longer than the
years of my strength. Life shrinks: what was but a tithe is now the
half. My hope abides in you."

"I will be faithful," said Deronda--he could not have left those words
unuttered. "I will come the first evening I can after seven: on
Saturday or Monday, if possible. Trust me."

He put out his ungloved hand. Mordecai, clasping it eagerly, seemed to
feel a new instreaming of confidence, and he said with some recovered
energy--"This is come to pass, and the rest will come."

That was their good-by.




BOOK VI---REVELATIONS


CHAPTER XLI.

    "This, too is probable, according to that saying of Agathon: 'It is a
    part of probability that many improbable things will happen.'"
    --ARISTOTLE: _Poetics_.


Imagine the conflict in a mind like Deronda's given not only to feel
strongly but to question actively, on the evening after the interview
with Mordecai. To a young man of much duller susceptibilities the
adventure might have seemed enough out of the common way to divide his
thoughts; but it had stirred Deronda so deeply, that with the usual
reaction of his intellect he began to examine the grounds of his
emotion, and consider how far he must resist its guidance. The
consciousness that he was half dominated by Mordecai's energetic
certitude, and still more by his fervent trust, roused his alarm. It
was his characteristic bias to shrink from the moral stupidity of
valuing lightly what had come close to him, and of missing blindly in
his own life of to-day the crisis which he recognized as momentous and
sacred in the historic life of men. If he had read of this incident as
having happened centuries ago in Rome, Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine,
Cairo, to some man young as himself, dissatisfied with his neutral
life, and wanting some closer fellowship, some more special duty to
give him ardor for the possible consequences of his work, it would have
appeared to him quite natural that the incident should have created a
deep impression on that far-off man, whose clothing and action would
have been seen in his imagination as part of an age chiefly known to us
through its more serious effects. Why should he be ashamed of his own
agitated feeling merely because he dressed for dinner, wore a white
tie, and lived among people who might laugh at his owning any
conscience in the matter, as the solemn folly of taking himself too
seriously?--that bugbear of circles in which the lack of grave emotion
passes for wit. From such cowardice before modish ignorance and
obtuseness, Deronda shrank. But he also shrank from having his course
determined by mere contagion, without consent of reason; or from
allowing a reverential pity for spiritual struggle to hurry him along a
dimly-seen path.

What, after all, had really happened? He knew quite accurately the
answer Sir Hugo would have given: "A consumptive Jew, possessed by a
fanaticism which obstacles and hastening death intensified, had fixed
on Deronda as the antitype of some visionary image, the offspring of
wedded hope and despair: despair of his own life, irrepressible hope in
the propagation of his fanatical beliefs. The instance was perhaps odd,
exceptional in its form, but substantially it was not rare. Fanaticism
was not so common as bankruptcy, but taken in all its aspects it was
abundant enough. While Mordecai was waiting on the bridge for the
fulfillment of his visions, another man was convinced that he had the
mathematical key of the universe which would supersede Newton, and
regarded all known physicists as conspiring to stifle his discovery and
keep the universe locked; another, that he had the metaphysical key,
with just that hair's-breadth of difference from the old wards which
would make it fit exactly. Scattered here and there in every direction
you might find a terrible person, with more or less power of speech,
and with an eye either glittering or preternaturally dull, on the
look-out for the man who must hear him; and in most cases he had
volumes which it was difficult to get printed, or if printed to get
read. This Mordecai happened to have a more pathetic aspect, a more
passionate, penetrative speech than was usual with such monomaniacs; he
was more poetical than a social reformer with colored views of the new
moral world in parallelograms, or than an enthusiast in sewage; still
he came under the same class. It would be only right and kind to
indulge him a little, to comfort him with such help as was practicable;
but what likelihood was there that his notions had the sort of value he
ascribed to them? In such cases a man of the world knows what to think
beforehand. And as to Mordecai's conviction that he had found a new
executive self, it might be preparing for him the worst of
disappointments--that which presents itself as final."

Deronda's ear caught all these negative whisperings; nay, he repeated
them distinctly to himself. It was not the first but it was the most
pressing occasion on which he had had to face this question of the
family likeness among the heirs of enthusiasm, whether prophets or
dreamers of dreams, whether the

  "Great benefactors of mankind, deliverers,"

or the devotees of phantasmal discovery--from the first believer in his
own unmanifested inspiration, down to the last inventor of an ideal
machine that will achieve perpetual motion. The kinship of human
passion, the sameness of mortal scenery, inevitably fill fact with
burlesque and parody. Error and folly have had their hecatombs of
martyrs. Reduce the grandest type of man hitherto known to an abstract
statement of his qualities and efforts, and he appears in dangerous
company: say that, like Copernicus and Galileo, he was immovably
convinced in the face of hissing incredulity; but so is the contriver
of perpetual motion. We cannot fairly try the spirits by this sort of
test. If we want to avoid giving the dose of hemlock or the sentence of
banishment in the wrong case, nothing will do but a capacity to
understand the subject-matter on which the immovable man is convinced,
and fellowship with human travail, both near and afar, to hinder us
from scanning and deep experience lightly. Shall we say, "Let the ages
try the spirits, and see what they are worth?" Why, we are the
beginning of the ages, which can only be just by virtue of just
judgments in separate human breasts--separate yet combined. Even
steam-engines could not have got made without that condition, but must
have stayed in the mind of James Watt.

This track of thinking was familiar enough to Deronda to have saved him
from any contemptuous prejudgment of Mordecai, even if their
communication had been free from that peculiar claim on himself
strangely ushered in by some long-growing preparation in the Jew's
agitated mind. This claim, indeed, considered in what is called a
rational way, might seem justifiably dismissed as illusory and even
preposterous; but it was precisely what turned Mordecai's hold on him
from an appeal to his ready sympathy into a clutch on his struggling
conscience. Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner
deliverance of fixed laws: they are the voice of sensibilities as
various as our memories (which also have their kinship and likeness).
And Deronda's conscience included sensibilities beyond the common,
enlarged by his early habit of thinking himself imaginatively into the
experience of others.

What was the claim this eager soul made upon him?--"You must believe my
beliefs--be moved by my reasons--hope my hopes--see the vision I point
to--behold a glory where I behold it!" To take such a demand in the
light of an obligation in any direct sense would have been
preposterous--to have seemed to admit it would have been dishonesty;
and Deronda, looking on the agitation of those moments, felt thankful
that in the midst of his compassion he had preserved himself from the
bondage of false concessions. The claim hung, too, on a supposition
which might be--nay, probably was--in discordance with the full fact:
the supposition that he, Deronda, was of Jewish blood. Was there ever a
more hypothetic appeal?

But since the age of thirteen Deronda had associated the deepest
experience of his affections with what was a pure supposition, namely,
that Sir Hugo was his father: that was a hypothesis which had been the
source of passionate struggle within him; by its light he had been
accustomed to subdue feelings and to cherish them. He had been well
used to find a motive in a conception which might be disproved; and he
had been also used to think of some revelation that might influence his
view of the particular duties belonging to him. To be in a state of
suspense, which was also one of emotive activity and scruple, was a
familiar attitude of his conscience.

And now, suppose that wish-begotten belief in his Jewish birth, and
that extravagant demand of discipleship, to be the foreshadowing of an
actual discovery and a genuine spiritual result: suppose that
Mordecai's ideas made a real conquest over Deronda's conviction? Nay,
it was conceivable that as Mordecai needed and believed that, he had
found an active replenishment of himself, so Deronda might receive from
Mordecai's mind the complete ideal shape of that personal duty and
citizenship which lay in his own thought like sculptured fragments
certifying some beauty yearned after but not traceable by divination.

As that possibility presented itself in his meditations, he was aware
that it would be called dreamy, and began to defend it. If the
influence he imagined himself submitting to had been that of some
honored professor, some authority in a seat of learning, some
philosopher who had been accepted as a voice of the age, would a
thorough receptiveness toward direction have been ridiculed? Only by
those who hold it a sign of weakness to be obliged for an idea, and
prefer to hint that they have implicitly held in a more correct form
whatever others have stated with a sadly short-coming explicitness.
After all, what was there but vulgarity in taking the fact that
Mordecai was a poor Jewish workman, and that he was to be met perhaps
on a sanded floor in the parlor of the _Hand and Banner_ as a reason
for determining beforehand that there was not some spiritual force
within him that might have a determining effect on a white-handed
gentleman? There is a legend told of the Emperor Domitian, that having
heard of a Jewish family, of the house of David, whence the ruler of
the world was to spring, he sent for its members in alarm, but quickly
released them on observing that they had the hands of
work-people--being of just the opposite opinion with that Rabbi who
stood waiting at the gate of Rome in confidence that the Messiah would
be found among the destitute who entered there. Both Emperor and Rabbi
were wrong in their trust of outward signs: poverty and poor clothes
are no sign of inspiration, said Deronda to his inward objector, but
they have gone with it in some remarkable cases. And to regard
discipleship as out of the question because of them, would be mere
dullness of imagination.

A more plausible reason for putting discipleship out of the question
was the strain of visionary excitement in Mordecai, which turned his
wishes into overmastering impressions, and made him read outward facts
as fulfillment. Was such a temper of mind likely to accompany that wise
estimate of consequences which is the only safeguard from fatal error,
even to ennobling motive? But it remained to be seen whether that rare
conjunction existed or not in Mordecai: perhaps his might be one of the
natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of
that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes
in. The inspirations of the world have come in that way too: even
strictly-measuring science could hardly have got on without that
forecasting ardor which feels the agitations of discovery beforehand,
and has a faith in its preconception that surmounts many failures of
experiment. And in relation to human motives and actions, passionate
belief has a fuller efficacy. Here enthusiasm may have the validity of
proof, and happening in one soul, give the type of what will one day be
general.

At least, Deronda argued, Mordecai's visionary excitability was hardly
a reason for concluding beforehand that he was not worth listening to
except for pity sake. Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the
strictest reasoners. Do they form a body of men hitherto free from
false conclusions and illusory speculations? The driest argument has
its hallucinations, too hastily concluding that its net will now at
last be large enough to hold the universe. Men may dream in
demonstrations, and cut out an illusory world in the shape of axioms,
definitions, and propositions, with a final exclusion of fact signed
Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistake in
our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about. And since
the unemotional intellect may carry us into a mathematical dreamland
where nothing is but what is not, perhaps an emotional intellect may
have absorbed into its passionate vision of possibilities some truth of
what will be--the more comprehensive massive life feeding theory with
new material, as the sensibility of the artist seizes combinations
which science explains and justifies. At any rate, presumptions to the
contrary are not to be trusted. We must be patient with the inevitable
makeshift of our human thinking, whether in its sum total or in the
separate minds that have made the sum. Columbus had some impressions
about himself which we call superstitions, and used some arguments
which we disapprove; but he had also some sound physical conceptions,
and he had the passionate patience of genius to make them tell on
mankind. The world has made up its mind rather contemptuously about
those who were deaf to Columbus.

"My contempt for them binds me to see that I don't adopt their mistake
on a small scale," said Deronda, "and make myself deaf with the
assumption that there cannot be any momentous relation between this Jew
and me, simply because he has clad it in illusory notions. What I can
be to him, or he to me, may not at all depend on his persuasion about
the way we came together. To me the way seems made up of plainly
discernible links. If I had not found Mirah, it is probable that I
should not have begun to be specially interested in the Jews, and
certainly I should not have gone on that loitering search after an Ezra
Cohen which made me pause at Ram's book-shop and ask the price of
_Maimon_. Mordecai, on his side, had his visions of a disciple, and he
saw me by their light; I corresponded well enough with the image his
longing had created. He took me for one of his race. Suppose that his
impression--the elderly Jew at Frankfort seemed to have something like
it--suppose in spite of all presumptions to the contrary, that his
impression should somehow be proved true, and that I should come
actually to share any of the ideas he is devoted to? This is the only
question which really concerns the effect of our meeting on my life.

"But if the issue should be quite different?--well, there will be
something painful to go through. I shall almost inevitably have to be
an active cause of that poor fellow's crushing disappointment. Perhaps
this issue is the one I had need prepare myself for. I fear that no
tenderness of mine can make his suffering lighter. Would the
alternative--that I should not disappoint him--be less painful to me?"

Here Deronda wavered. Feelings had lately been at work within him which
had very much modified the reluctance he would formerly have had to
think of himself as probably a Jew. And, if you like, he was romantic.
That young energy and spirit of adventure which have helped to create
the world-wide legions of youthful heroes going to seek the hidden
tokens of their birth and its inheritance of tasks, gave him a certain
quivering interest in the bare possibility that he was entering on a
track like--all the more because the track was one of thought as well
as action.

"The bare possibility." He could not admit it to be more. The belief
that his father was an Englishman only grew firmer under the weak
assaults of unwarranted doubt. And that a moment should ever come in
which that belief was declared a delusion, was something of which
Deronda would not say, "I should be glad." His life-long affection for
Sir Hugo, stronger than all his resentment, made him shrink from
admitting that wish.

Which way soever the truth might lie, he repeated to himself what he
had said to Mordecai--that he could not without farther reasons
undertake to hasten its discovery. Nay, he was tempted now to regard
his uncertainty as a condition to be cherished for the present. If
further intercourse revealed nothing but illusions as what he was
expected to share in, the want of any valid evidence that he was a Jew
might save Mordecai the worst shock in the refusal of fraternity. It
might even be justifiable to use the uncertainty on this point in
keeping up a suspense which would induce Mordecai to accept those
offices of friendship that Deronda longed to urge on him.

These were the meditations that busied Deronda in the interval of four
days before he could fulfill his promise to call for Mordecai at Ezra
Cohen's, Sir Hugo's demands on him often lasting to an hour so late as
to put the evening expedition to Holborn out of the question.




CHAPTER XLII.

    "Wenn es eine Stutenleiter von Leiden giebt, so hat Israel die höchste
    Staffel erstiegen; wen die Dauer der Schmerzen und die Geduld, mit
    welcher sie ertragen werden, adeln, so nehmen es die Juden mit den
    Hochgeborenen aller Länder auf; wenn eine Literatur reich genannt
    wird, die wenige klassische Trauerspiele besitzt, welcher Platz
    gebührt dann einer Tragodie die anderthalb Jahrtausende wahrt,
    gedichtet und dargestellt von den Helden selber?"--ZUNZ: _Die
    Synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters._


"If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the
nations--if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they
are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land--if
a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic
tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen
hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?"

Deronda had lately been reading that passage of Zunz, and it occurred
to him by way of contrast when he was going to the Cohens, who
certainly bore no obvious stamp of distinction in sorrow or in any
other form of aristocracy. Ezra Cohen was not clad in the sublime
pathos of the martyr, and his taste for money-getting seemed to be
favored with that success which has been the most exasperating
difference in the greed of Jews during all the ages of their
dispersion. This Jeshurun of a pawnbroker was not a symbol of the great
Jewish tragedy; and yet was there not something typical in the fact
that a life like Mordecai's--a frail incorporation of the national
consciousness, breathing with difficult breath--was nested in the
self-gratulating ignorant prosperity of the Cohens?

Glistening was the gladness in their faces when Deronda reappeared
among them. Cohen himself took occasion to intimate that although the
diamond ring, let alone a little longer, would have bred more money, he
did not mind _that_--not a sixpence--when compared with the pleasure of
the women and children in seeing a young gentleman whose first visit
had been so agreeable that they had "done nothing but talk of it ever
since." Young Mrs. Cohen was very sorry that baby was asleep, and then
very glad that Adelaide was not yet gone to bed, entreating Deronda not
to stay in the shop, but to go forthwith into the parlor to see "mother
and the children." He willingly accepted the invitation, having
provided himself with portable presents; a set of paper figures for
Adelaide, and an ivory cup and ball for Jacob.

The grandmother had a pack of cards before her and was making "plates"
with the children. A plate had just been thrown down and kept itself
whole.

"Stop!" said Jacob, running to Deronda as he entered. "Don't tread on
my plate. Stop and see me throw it up again."

Deronda complied, exchanging a smile of understanding with the
grandmother, and the plate bore several tossings before it came to
pieces; then the visitor was allowed to come forward and seat himself.
He observed that the door from which Mordecai had issued on the former
visit was now closed, but he wished to show his interest in the Cohens
before disclosing a yet stronger interest in their singular inmate.

It was not until he had Adelaide on his knee, and was setting up the
paper figures in their dance on the table, while Jacob was already
practicing with the cup and ball, that Deronda said,

"Is Mordecai in just now?"

"Where is he, Addy?" said Cohen, who had seized an interval of business
to come and look on.

"In the workroom there," said his wife, nodding toward the closed door.

"The fact is, sir," said Cohen, "we don't know what's come to him this
last day or two. He's always what I may call a little touched, you
know"--here Cohen pointed to his own forehead--"not quite so rational
in all things, like you and me; but he's mostly wonderful regular and
industrious so far as a poor creature can be, and takes as much delight
in the boy as anybody could. But this last day or two he's been moving
about like a sleep-walker, or else sitting as still as a wax figure."

"It's the disease, poor dear creature," said the grandmother, tenderly.
"I doubt whether he can stand long against it."

"No; I think its only something he's got in his head." said Mrs. Cohen
the younger. "He's been turning over writing continually, and when I
speak to him it takes him ever so long to hear and answer."

"You may think us a little weak ourselves," said Cohen, apologetically.
"But my wife and mother wouldn't part with him if he was a still worse
encumbrance. It isn't that we don't know the long and short of matters,
but it's our principle. There's fools do business at a loss and don't
know it. I'm not one of 'em."

"Oh, Mordecai carries a blessing inside him," said the grandmother.

"He's got something the matter inside him," said Jacob, coming up to
correct this erratum of his grandmother's. "He said he couldn't talk to
me, and he wouldn't have a bit o' bun."

"So far from wondering at your feeling for him," said Deronda, "I
already feel something of the same sort myself. I have lately talked to
him at Ram's book-shop--in fact, I promised to call for him here, that
we might go out together."

"That's it, then!" said Cohen, slapping his knee. "He's been expecting
you, and it's taken hold of him. I suppose he talks about his learning
to you. It's uncommonly kind of _you_, sir; for I don't suppose there's
much to be got out of it, else it wouldn't have left him where he is.
But there's the shop." Cohen hurried out, and Jacob, who had been
listening inconveniently near to Deronda's elbow, said to him with
obliging familiarity, "I'll call Mordecai for you, if you like."

"No, Jacob," said his mother; "open the door for the gentleman, and let
him go in himself Hush! don't make a noise."

Skillful Jacob seemed to enter into the play, and turned the handle of
the door as noiselessly as possible, while Deronda went behind him and
stood on the threshold. The small room was lit only by a dying fire and
one candle with a shade over it. On the board fixed under the window,
various objects of jewelry were scattered: some books were heaped in
the corner beyond them. Mordecai was seated on a high chair at the
board with his back to the door, his hands resting on each other and on
the board, a watch propped on a stand before him. He was in a state of
expectation as sickening as that of a prisoner listening for the
delayed deliverance--when he heard Deronda's voice saying, "I am come
for you. Are you ready?"

Immediately he turned without speaking, seized his furred cap which lay
near, and moved to join Deronda. It was but a moment before they were
both in the sitting-room, and Jacob, noticing the change in his
friend's air and expression, seized him by the arm and said, "See my
cup and ball!" sending the ball up close to Mordecai's face, as
something likely to cheer a convalescent. It was a sign of the relieved
tension in Mordecai's mind that he could smile and say, "Fine, fine!"

"You have forgotten your greatcoat and comforter," said young Mrs.
Cohen, and he went back into the work-room and got them.

"He's come to life again, do you see?" said Cohen, who had
re-entered--speaking in an undertone. "I told you so: I'm mostly
right." Then in his usual voice, "Well, sir, we mustn't detain you now,
I suppose; but I hope this isn't the last time we shall see you."

"Shall you come again?" said Jacob, advancing. "See, I can catch the
ball; I'll bet I catch it without stopping, if you come again."

"He has clever hands," said Deronda, looking at the grandmother. "Which
side of the family does he get them from?"

But the grandmother only nodded towards her son, who said promptly, "My
side. My wife's family are not in that line. But bless your soul! ours
is a sort of cleverness as good as gutta percha; you can twist it which
way you like. There's nothing some old gentlemen won't do if you set
'em to it." Here Cohen winked down at Jacob's back, but it was doubtful
whether this judicious allusiveness answered its purpose, for its
subject gave a nasal whinnying laugh and stamped about singing, "Old
gentlemen, old gentlemen," in chiming cadence.

Deronda thought, "I shall never know anything decisive about these
people until I ask Cohen pointblank whether he lost a sister named
Mirah when she was six years old." The decisive moment did not yet seem
easy for him to face. Still his first sense of repulsion at the
commonness of these people was beginning to be tempered with kindlier
feeling. However unrefined their airs and speech might be, he was
forced to admit some moral refinement in their treatment of the
consumptive workman, whose mental distinction impressed them chiefly as
a harmless, silent raving.

"The Cohens seem to have an affection for you," said Deronda, as soon
as he and Mordecai were off the doorstep.

"And I for them," was the immediate answer. "They have the heart of the
Israelite within them, though they are as the horse and the mule,
without understanding beyond the narrow path they tread."

"I have caused you some uneasiness, I fear," said Deronda, "by my
slowness in fulfilling my promise. I wished to come yesterday, but I
found it impossible."

"Yes--yes, I trusted you. But it is true I have been uneasy, for the
spirit of my youth has been stirred within me, and this body is not
strong enough to bear the beating of its wings. I am as a man bound and
imprisoned through long years: behold him brought to speech of his
fellow and his limbs set free: he weeps, he totters, the joy within him
threatens to break and overthrow the tabernacle of flesh."

"You must not speak too much in this evening air," said Deronda,
feeling Mordecai's words of reliance like so many cords binding him
painfully. "Cover your mouth with the woolen scarf. We are going to the
_Hand and Banner_, I suppose, and shall be in private there?"

"No, that is my trouble that you did not come yesterday. For this is
the evening of the club I spoke of, and we might not have any minutes
alone until late, when all the rest are gone. Perhaps we had better
seek another place. But I am used to that only. In new places the outer
world presses on me and narrows the inward vision. And the people there
are familiar with my face."

"I don't mind the club if I am allowed to go in," said Deronda. "It is
enough that you like this place best. If we have not enough time I will
come again. What sort of club is it?"

"It is called 'The Philosophers.' They are few--like the cedars of
Lebanon--poor men given to thought. But none so poor as I am: and
sometimes visitors of higher worldly rank have been brought. We are
allowed to introduce a friend, who is interested in our topics. Each
orders beer or some other kind of drink, in payment for the room. Most
of them smoke. I have gone when I could, for there are other men of my
race who come, and sometimes I have broken silence. I have pleased
myself with a faint likeness between these poor philosophers and the
Masters who handed down the thought of our race--the great
Transmitters, who labored with their hands for scant bread, but
preserved and enlarged for us the heritage of memory, and saved the
soul of Israel alive as a seed among the tombs. The heart pleases
itself with faint resemblances."

"I shall be very glad to go and sit among them, if that will suit you.
It is a sort of meeting I should like to join in," said Deronda, not
without relief in the prospect of an interval before he went through
the strain of his next private conversation with Mordecai.

In three minutes they had opened the glazed door with the red curtain,
and were in the little parlor, hardly much more than fifteen feet
square, where the gaslight shone through a slight haze of smoke on what
to Deronda was a new and striking scene. Half-a-dozen men of various
ages, from between twenty and thirty to fifty, all shabbily dressed,
most of them with clay pipes in their mouths, were listening with a
look of concentrated intelligence to a man in a pepper-and-salt dress,
with blonde hair, short nose, broad forehead and general breadth, who,
holding his pipe slightly uplifted in the left hand, and beating his
knee with the right, was just finishing a quotation from Shelley (the
comparison of the avalanche in his "Prometheus Unbound")

  "As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
  Is loosened, and the nations echo round."

The entrance of the new-comers broke the fixity of attention, and
called for re-arrangement of seats in the too narrow semicircle round
the fire-place and the table holding the glasses, spare pipes and
tobacco. This was the soberest of clubs; but sobriety is no reason why
smoking and "taking something" should be less imperiously needed as a
means of getting a decent status in company and debate. Mordecai was
received with welcoming voices which had a slight cadence of compassion
in them, but naturally all glances passed immediately to his companion.

"I have brought a friend who is interested in our subjects," said
Mordecai. "He has traveled and studied much."

"Is the gentlemen anonymous? Is he a Great 'Unknown?'" said the
broad-chested quoter of Shelley, with a humorous air.

"My name is Daniel Deronda. I am unknown, but not in any sense great."
The smile breaking over the stranger's grave face as he said this was
so agreeable that there was a general indistinct murmur, equivalent to
a "Hear, hear," and the broad man said,

"You recommend the name, sir, and are welcome. Here, Mordecai, come to
this corner against me," he added, evidently wishing to give the
coziest place to the one who most needed it.

Deronda was well satisfied to get a seat on the opposite side, where
his general survey of the party easily included Mordecai, who remained
an eminently striking object in this group of sharply-characterized
figures, more than one of whom, even to Daniel's little exercised
discrimination, seemed probably of Jewish descent.

In fact pure English blood (if leech or lancet can furnish us with the
precise product) did not declare itself predominantly in the party at
present assembled. Miller, the broad man, an exceptional second-hand
bookseller who knew the insides of books, had at least grand-parents
who called themselves German, and possibly far-away ancestors who
denied themselves to be Jews; Buchan, the saddler, was Scotch; Pash,
the watchmaker, was a small, dark, vivacious, triple-baked Jew; Gideon,
the optical instrument maker, was a Jew of the red-haired,
generous-featured type easily passing for Englishmen of unusually
cordial manners: and Croop, the dark-eyed shoemaker, was probably more
Celtic than he knew. Only three would have been discernable everywhere
as Englishman: the wood-inlayer Goodwin, well-built, open-faced,
pleasant-voiced; the florid laboratory assistant Marrables; and Lily,
the pale, neat-faced copying-clerk, whose light-brown hair was set up
in a small parallelogram above his well-filled forehead, and whose
shirt, taken with an otherwise seedy costume, had a freshness that
might be called insular, and perhaps even something narrower.

Certainly a company select of the select among poor men, being drawn
together by a taste not prevalent even among the privileged heirs of
learning and its institutions; and not likely to amuse any gentleman in
search of crime or low comedy as the ground of interest in people whose
weekly income is only divisible into shillings. Deronda, even if he had
not been more than usually inclined to gravity under the influence of
what was pending between him and Mordecai, would not have set himself
to find food for laughter in the various shades of departure from the
tone of polished society sure to be observable in the air and talk of
these men who had probably snatched knowledge as most of us snatch
indulgences, making the utmost of scant opportunity. He looked around
him with the quiet air of respect habitual to him among equals, ordered
whisky and water, and offered the contents of his cigar-case, which,
characteristically enough, he always carried and hardly ever used for
his own behoof, having reasons for not smoking himself, but liking to
indulge others. Perhaps it was his weakness to be afraid of seeming
straight-laced, and turning himself into a sort of diagram instead of a
growth which can exercise the guiding attraction of fellowship. That he
made a decidedly winning impression on the company was proved by their
showing themselves no less at ease than before, and desirous of quickly
resuming their interrupted talk.

"This is what I call one of our touch-and-go nights, sir," said Miller,
who was implicitly accepted as a sort of moderator--on addressing
Deronda by way of explanation, and nodding toward each person whose
name he mentioned. "Sometimes we stick pretty close to the point. But
tonight our friend Pash, there, brought up the law of progress; and we
got on statistics; then Lily, there, saying we knew well enough before
counting that in the same state of society the same sort of things
would happen, and it was no more wonder that quantities should remain
the same, than that qualities should remain the same, for in relation
to society numbers are qualities--the number of drunkards is a quality
in society--the numbers are an index to the qualities, and give us no
instruction, only setting us to consider the causes of difference
between different social states--Lily saying this, we went off on the
causes of social change, and when you came in I was going upon the
power of ideas, which I hold to be the main transforming cause."

"I don't hold with you there, Miller," said Goodwin, the inlayer, more
concerned to carry on the subject than to wait for a word from the new
guest. "For either you mean so many sorts of things by ideas that I get
no knowledge by what you say, any more than if you said light was a
cause; or else you mean a particular sort of ideas, and then I go
against your meaning as too narrow. For, look at it in one way, all
actions men put a bit of thought into are ideas--say, sowing seed, or
making a canoe, or baking clay; and such ideas as these work themselves
into life and go on growing with it, but they can't go apart from the
material that set them to work and makes a medium for them. It's the
nature of wood and stone yielding to the knife that raises the idea of
shaping them, and with plenty of wood and stone the shaping will go on.
I look at it, that such ideas as are mixed straight away with all the
other elements of life are powerful along with 'em. The slower the
mixing, the less power they have. And as to the causes of social
change, I look at it in this way--ideas are a sort of parliament, but
there's a commonwealth outside and a good deal of the commonwealth is
working at change without knowing what the parliament is doing."

"But if you take ready mixing as your test of power," said Pash, "some
of the least practical ideas beat everything. They spread without being
understood, and enter into the language without being thought of."

"They may act by changing the distribution of gases," said Marrables;
"instruments are getting so fine now, men may come to register the
spread of a theory by observed changes in the atmosphere and
corresponding changes in the nerves."

"Yes," said Pash, his dark face lighting up rather impishly, "there is
the idea of nationalities; I dare say the wild asses are snuffing it,
and getting more gregarious."

"You don't share that idea?" said Deronda, finding a piquant
incongruity between Pash's sarcasm and the strong stamp of race on his
features.

"Say, rather, he does not share that spirit," said Mordecai, who had
turned a melancholy glance on Pash. "Unless nationality is a feeling,
what force can it have as an idea?"

"Granted, Mordecai," said Pash, quite good-humoredly. "And as the
feeling of nationality is dying, I take the idea to be no better than a
ghost, already walking to announce the death."

"A sentiment may seem to be dying and yet revive into strong life,"
said Deronda. "Nations have revived. We may live to see a great
outburst of force in the Arabs, who are being inspired with a new zeal."

"Amen, amen," said Mordecai, looking at Deronda with a delight which
was the beginning of recovered energy: his attitude was more upright,
his face was less worn.

"That may hold with backward nations," said Pash, "but with us in
Europe the sentiment of nationality is destined to die out. It will
last a little longer in the quarters where oppression lasts, but
nowhere else. The whole current of progress is setting against it."

"Ay," said Buchan, in a rapid thin Scotch tone which was like the
letting in of a little cool air on the conversation, "ye've done well
to bring us round to the point. Ye're all agreed that societies
change--not always and everywhere--but on the whole and in the long
run. Now, with all deference, I would beg t' observe that we have got
to examine the nature of changes before we have a warrant to call them
progress, which word is supposed to include a bettering, though I
apprehend it to be ill-chosen for that purpose, since mere motion
onward may carry us to a bog or a precipice. And the questions I would
put are three: Is all change in the direction of progress? if not, how
shall we discern which change is progress and which not? and thirdly,
how far and in what way can we act upon the course of change so as to
promote it where it is beneficial, and divert it where it is injurious?"

But Buchan's attempt to impose his method on the talk was a failure.
Lily immediately said,

"Change and progress are merged in the idea of development. The laws of
development are being discovered, and changes taking place according to
them are necessarily progressive; that is to say, it we have any notion
of progress or improvement opposed to them, the notion is a mistake."

"I really can't see how you arrive at that sort of certitude about
changes by calling them development," said Deronda. "There will still
remain the degrees of inevitableness in relation to our own will and
acts, and the degrees of wisdom in hastening or retarding; there will
still remain the danger of mistaking a tendency which should be
resisted for an inevitable law that we must adjust ourselves to,--which
seems to me as bad a superstition or false god as any that has been set
up without the ceremonies of philosophising."

"That is a truth," said Mordecai. "Woe to the men who see no place for
resistance in this generation! I believe in a growth, a passage, and a
new unfolding of life whereof the seed is more perfect, more charged
with the elements that are pregnant with diviner form. The life of a
people grows, it is knit together and yet expanded, in joy and sorrow,
in thought and action; it absorbs the thought of other nations into its
own forms, and gives back the thought as new wealth to the world; it is
a power and an organ in the great body of the nations. But there may
come a check, an arrest; memories may be stifled, and love may be faint
for the lack of them; or memories may shrink into withered relics--the
soul of a people, whereby they know themselves to be one, may seem to
be dying for want of common action. But who shall say, 'The fountain of
their life is dried up, they shall forever cease to be a nation?' Who
shall say it? Not he who feels the life of his people stirring within
his own. Shall he say, 'That way events are wending, I will not
resist?' His very soul is resistance, and is as a seed of fire that may
enkindle the souls of multitudes, and make a new pathway for events."

"I don't deny patriotism," said Gideon, "but we all know you have a
particular meaning, Mordecai. You know Mordecai's way of thinking, I
suppose." Here Gideon had turned to Deronda, who sat next to him, but
without waiting for an answer he went on. "I'm a rational Jew myself. I
stand by my people as a sort of family relations, and I am for keeping
up our worship in a rational way. I don't approve of our people getting
baptised, because I don't believe in a Jew's conversion to the Gentile
part of Christianity. And now we have political equality, there's no
excuse for a pretense of that sort. But I am for getting rid of all of
our superstitions and exclusiveness. There's no reason now why we
shouldn't melt gradually into the populations we live among. That's the
order of the day in point of progress. I would as soon my children
married Christians as Jews. And I'm for the old maxim, 'A man's country
is where he's well off.'"

"That country's not so easy to find, Gideon," said the rapid Pash, with
a shrug and grimace. "You get ten shillings a-week more than I do, and
have only half the number of children. If somebody will introduce a
brisk trade in watches among the 'Jerusalem wares,' I'll go--eh,
Mordecai, what do you say?"

Deronda, all ear for these hints of Mordecai's opinion, was inwardly
wondering at his persistence in coming to this club. For an
enthusiastic spirit to meet continually the fixed indifference of men
familiar with the object of his enthusiasm is the acceptance of a slow
martyrdom, beside which the fate of a missionary tomahawked without any
considerate rejection of his doctrines seems hardly worthy of
compassion. But Mordecai gave no sign of shrinking: this was a moment
of spiritual fullness, and he cared more for the utterance of his faith
than for its immediate reception. With a fervor which had no temper in
it, but seemed rather the rush of feeling in the opportunity of speech,
he answered Pash:,

"What I say is, let every man keep far away from the brotherhood and
inheritance he despises. Thousands on thousands of our race have mixed
with the Gentiles as Celt with Saxon, and they may inherit the blessing
that belongs to the Gentile. You cannot follow them. You are one of the
multitudes over this globe who must walk among the nations and be known
as Jews, and with words on their lips which mean, 'I wish I had not
been born a Jew, I disown any bond with the long travail of my race, I
will outdo the Gentile in mocking at our separateness,' they all the
while feel breathing on them the breath of contempt because they are
Jews, and they will breathe it back poisonously. Can a fresh-made
garment of citizenship weave itself straightway into the flesh and
change the slow deposit of eighteen centuries? What is the citizenship
of him who walks among a people he has no hardy kindred and fellowship
with, and has lost the sense of brotherhood with his own race? It is a
charter of selfish ambition and rivalry in low greed. He is an alien of
spirit, whatever he may be in form; he sucks the blood of mankind, he
is not a man, sharing in no loves, sharing in no subjection of the
soul, he mocks it all. Is it not truth I speak, Pash?"

"Not exactly, Mordecai," said Pash, "if you mean that I think the worse
of myself for being a Jew. What I thank our fathers for is that there
are fewer blockheads among us than among other races. But perhaps you
are right in thinking the Christians don't like me so well for it."

"Catholics and Protestants have not liked each other much better," said
the genial Gideon. "We must wait patiently for prejudices to die out.
Many of our people are on a footing with the best, and there's been a
good filtering of our blood into high families. I am for making our
expectations rational."

"And so am I!" said Mordecai, quickly, leaning forward with the
eagerness of one who pleads in some decisive crisis, his long, thin
hands clasped together on his lap. "I, too, claim to be a rational Jew.
But what is it to be rational--what is it to feel the light of the
divine reason growing stronger within and without? It is to see more
and more of the hidden bonds that bind and consecrate change as a
dependent growth--yea, consecrate it with kinship: the past becomes my
parent and the future stretches toward me the appealing arms of
children. Is it rational to drain away the sap of special kindred that
makes the families of men rich in interchanged wealth, and various as
the forests are various with the glory of the cedar and the palm? When
it is rational to say, 'I know not my father or my mother, let my
children be aliens to me, that no prayer of mine may touch them,' then
it will be rational for the Jew to say, 'I will seek to know no
difference between me and the Gentile, I will not cherish the prophetic
consciousness of our nationality--let the Hebrew cease to be, and let
all his memorials be antiquarian trifles, dead as the wall-paintings of
a conjectured race. Yet let his child learn by rote the speech of the
Greek, where he abjures his fellow-citizens by the bravery of those who
fought foremost at Marathon--let him learn to say that was noble in the
Greek, that is the spirit of an immortal nation! But the Jew has no
memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his nation is
degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments of his law which
carried within its frame the breath of social justice, of charity, and
of household sanctities--let him hold the energy of the prophets, the
patient care of the Masters, the fortitude of martyred generations, as
mere stuff for a professorship. The business of the Jew in all things
is to be even as the rich Gentile."

Mordecai threw himself back in his chair, and there was a moment's
silence. Not one member of the club shared his point of view or his
emotion; but his whole personality and speech had on them the effect of
a dramatic representation which had some pathos in it, though no
practical consequences; and usually he was at once indulged and
contradicted. Deronda's mind went back upon what must have been the
tragic pressure of outward conditions hindering this man, whose force
he felt to be telling on himself, from making any world for his thought
in the minds of others--like a poet among people of a strange speech,
who may have a poetry of their own, but have no ear for his cadence, no
answering thrill to his discovery of the latent virtues in his mother
tongue.

The cool Buchan was the first to speak, and hint the loss of time. "I
submit," said he, "that ye're traveling away from the questions I put
concerning progress."

"Say they're levanting, Buchan," said Miller, who liked his joke, and
would not have objected to be called Voltairian. "Never mind. Let us
have a Jewish night; we've not had one for a long while. Let us take
the discussion on Jewish ground. I suppose we've no prejudice here;
we're all philosophers; and we like our friends Mordecai, Pash, and
Gideon, as well as if they were no more kin to Abraham than the rest of
us. We're all related through Adam, until further showing to the
contrary, and if you look into history we've all got some discreditable
forefathers. So I mean no offence when I say I don't think any great
things of the part the Jewish people have played in the world. What
then? I think they were iniquitously dealt by in past times. And I
suppose we don't want any men to be maltreated, white, black, brown, or
yellow--I know I've just given my half-crown to the contrary. And that
reminds me, I've a curious old German book--I can't read it myself, but
a friend of mine was reading out of it to me the other day--about the
prejudicies against the Jews, and the stories used to be told against
'em, and what do you think one was? Why, that they're punished with a
bad odor in their bodies; and _that_, says the author, date 1715 (I've
just been pricing and marking the book this very morning)--that is
true, for the ancients spoke of it. But then, he says, the other things
are fables, such as that the odor goes away all at once when they're
baptized, and that every one of the ten tribes, mind you, all the ten
being concerned in the crucifixion, has got a particular punishment
over and above the smell:--Asher, I remember, has the right arm a
handbreadth shorter than the left, and Naphthali has pig's ears and a
smell of live pork. What do you think of that? There's been a good deal
of fun made of rabbinical fables, but in point of fables my opinion is,
that all over the world it's six of one and half-a-dozen of the other.
However, as I said before, I hold with the philosophers of the last
century that the Jews have played no great part as a people, though
Pash will have it they're clever enough to beat all the rest of the
world. But if so, I ask, why haven't they done it?"

"For the same reason that the cleverest men in the country don't get
themselves or their ideas into Parliament," said the ready Pash;
"because the blockheads are too many for 'em."

"That is a vain question," said Mordecai, "whether our people would
beat the rest of the world. Each nation has its own work, and is a
member of the world, enriched by the work of each. But it is true, as
Jehuda-ha-Levi first said, that Israel is the heart of mankind, if we
mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families
in dutiful love, and the reverence for the human body which lifts the
needs of our animal life into religion, and the tenderness which is
merciful to the poor and weak and to the dumb creature that wears the
yoke for us."

"They're not behind any nation in arrogance," said Lily; "and if they
have got in the rear, it has not been because they were over-modest."

"Oh, every nation brags in its turn," said Miller.

"Yes," said Pash, "and some of them in the Hebrew text."

"Well, whatever the Jews contributed at one time, they are a
stand-still people," said Lily. "They are the type of obstinate
adherence to the superannuated. They may show good abilities when they
take up liberal ideas, but as a race they have no development in them."

"That is false!" said Mordecai, leaning forward again with his former
eagerness. "Let their history be known and examined; let the seed be
sifted, let its beginning be traced to the weed of the wilderness--the
more glorious will be the energy that transformed it. Where else is
there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and
law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made
one growth--where else a people who kept and enlarged their spiritual
store at the very time when they are hated with a hatred as fierce as
the forest fires that chase the wild beast from his covert? There is a
fable of the Roman, that swimming to save his life he held the roll of
his writings between his teeth and saved them from the waters. But how
much more than that is true of our race? They struggled to keep their
place among the nations like heroes--yea, when the hand was hacked off,
they clung with their teeth; but when the plow and the harrow had
passed over the last visible signs of their national covenant, and the
fruitfulness of their land was stifled with the blood of the sowers and
planters, they said, 'The spirit is alive, let us make it a lasting
habitation--lasting because movable--so that it may be carried from
generation to generation, and our sons unborn may be rich in the things
that have been, and possess a hope built on an unchangeable
foundation.' They said it and they wrought it, though often breathing
with scant life, as in a coffin, or as lying wounded amid a heap of
slain. Hooted and scared like the unknown dog, the Hebrew made himself
envied for his wealth and wisdom, and was bled of them to fill the bath
of Gentile luxury; he absorbed knowledge, he diffused it; his dispersed
race was a new Phoenicia working the mines of Greece and carrying their
products to the world. The native spirit of our tradition was not to
stand still, but to use records as a seed and draw out the compressed
virtues of law and prophecy; and while the Gentile, who had said, 'What
is yours is ours, and no longer yours,' was reading the letter of our
law as a dark inscription, or was turning its parchments into
shoe-soles for an army rabid with lust and cruelty, our Masters were
still enlarging and illuminating with fresh-fed interpretation. But the
dispersion was wide, the yoke of oppression was a spiked torture as
well as a load; the exile was forced afar among brutish people, where
the consciousness of his race was no clearer to him than the light of
the sun to our fathers in the Roman persecution, who had their
hiding-place in a cave, and knew not that it was day save by the dimmer
burning of their candles. What wonder that multitudes of our people are
ignorant, narrow, superstitious? What wonder?"

Here Mordecai, whose seat was next the fireplace, rose and leaned his
arm on the little shelf; his excitement had risen, though his voice,
which had begun with unusual strength, was getting hoarser.

"What wonder? The night is unto them, that they have no vision; in
their darkness they are unable to divine; the sun is gone down over the
prophets, and the day is dark above them; their observances are as
nameless relics. But which among the chief of the Gentile nations has
not an ignorant multitude? They scorn our people's ignorant observance;
but the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance--sunk
to the cunning greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a
trap or the cry of the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down
below the memory that has withered into superstition. In the multitudes
of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the
confession of the divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive
the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth
and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking toward a land
and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may
share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the
peoples of the East and the West--which will plant the wisdom and skill
of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and
understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread
to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in
the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts
which widen feeling, and make all knowledge alive as the young
offspring of beloved memories."

Mordecai's voice had sunk, but with the hectic brilliancy of his gaze
it was not the less impressive. His extraordinary excitement was
certainly due to Deronda's presence: it was to Deronda that he was
speaking, and the moment had a testamentary solemnity for him which
rallied all his powers. Yet the presence of those other familiar men
promoted expression, for they embodied the indifference which gave a
resistant energy to his speech. Not that he looked at Deronda: he
seemed to see nothing immediately around him, and if any one had
grasped him he would probably not have known it. Again the former words
came back to Deronda's mind,--"You must hope my hopes--see the vision I
point to--behold a glory where I behold it." They came now with
gathered pathos. Before him stood, as a living, suffering reality, what
hitherto he had only seen as an effort of imagination, which, in its
comparative faintness, yet carried a suspicion, of being exaggerated: a
man steeped in poverty and obscurity, weakened by disease, consciously
within the shadow of advancing death, but living an intense life in an
invisible past and future, careless of his personal lot, except for its
possible making some obstruction to a conceived good which he would
never share except as a brief inward vision--a day afar off, whose sun
would never warm him, but into which he threw his soul's desire, with a
passion often wanting to the personal motives of healthy youth. It was
something more than a grandiose transfiguration of the parental love
that toils, renounces, endures, resists the suicidal promptings of
despair--all because of the little ones, whose future becomes present
to the yearning gaze of anxiety.

All eyes were fixed on Mordecai as he sat down again, and none with
unkindness; but it happened that the one who felt the most kindly was
the most prompted to speak in opposition. This was the genial and
rational Gideon, who also was not without a sense that he was
addressing the guest of the evening. He said,

"You have your own way of looking at things, Mordecai, and as you say,
your own way seems to you rational. I know you don't hold with the
restoration of Judea by miracle, and so on; but you are as well aware
as I am that the subject has been mixed with a heap of nonsense both by
Jews and Christians. And as to the connection of our race with
Palestine, it has been perverted by superstition till it's as
demoralizing as the old poor-law. The raff and scum go there to be
maintained like able-bodied paupers, and to be taken special care of by
the angel Gabriel when they die. It's no use fighting against facts. We
must look where they point; that's what I call rationality. The most
learned and liberal men among us who are attached to our religion are
for clearing our liturgy of all such notions as a literal fulfillment
of the prophecies about restoration, and so on. Prune it of a few
useless rites and literal interpretations of that sort, and our
religion is the simplest of all religions, and makes no barrier, but a
union, between us and the rest of the world."

"As plain as a pike-staff," said Pash, with an ironical laugh. "You
pluck it up by the roots, strip off the leaves and bark, shave off the
knots, and smooth it at top and bottom; put it where you will, it will
do no harm, it will never sprout. You may make a handle of it, or you
may throw it on the bonfire of scoured rubbish. I don't see why our
rubbish is to be held sacred any more than the rubbish of Brahmanism or
Buddhism."

"No," said Mordecai, "no, Pash, because you have lost the heart of the
Jew. Community was felt before it was called good. I praise no
superstition, I praise the living fountains of enlarging belief. What
is growth, completion, development? You began with that question, I
apply it to the history of our people. I say that the effect of our
separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation
unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality. That is
the fulfillment of the religious trust that moulded them into a people,
whose life has made half the inspiration of the world. What is it to me
that the ten tribes are lost untraceably, or that multitudes of the
children of Judah have mixed themselves with the Gentile populations as
a river with rivers? Behold our people still! Their skirts spread afar;
they are torn and soiled and trodden on; but there is a jeweled
breastplate. Let the wealthy men, the monarchs of commerce, the learned
in all knowledge, the skilful in all arts, the speakers, the political
counselors, who carry in their veins the Hebrew blood which has
maintained its vigor in all climates, and the pliancy of the Hebrew
genius for which difficulty means new device--let them say, 'we will
lift up a standard, we will unite in a labor hard but glorious like
that of Moses and Ezra, a labor which shall be a worthy fruit of the
long anguish whereby our fathers maintained their separateness,
refusing the ease of falsehood.' They have wealth enough to redeem the
soil from debauched and paupered conquerors; they have the skill of the
statesman to devise, the tongue of the orator to persuade. And is there
no prophet or poet among us to make the ears of Christian Europe tingle
with shame at the hideous obloquy of Christian strife which the Turk
gazes at as at the fighting of beasts to which he has lent an arena?
There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand,
simple, just, like the old--a republic where there is equality of
protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our
ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western
freedom amid the despotisms of the East. Then our race shall have an
organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the
outraged Jew shall have a defense in the court of nations, as the
outraged Englishman of America. And the world will gain as Israel
gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which
carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its
bosom: there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a
neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I
know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement
move in the great among our people, and the work will begin."

"Ay, we may safely admit that, Mordecai," said Pash. "When there are
great men on 'Change, and high-flying professors converted to your
doctrine, difficulties will vanish like smoke."

Deronda, inclined by nature to take the side of those on whom the
arrows of scorn were falling, could not help replying to Pash's
outfling, and said,

"If we look back to the history of efforts which have made great
changes, it is astonishing how many of them seemed hopeless to those
who looked on in the beginning.

"Take what we have all heard and seen something of--the effort after
the unity of Italy, which we are sure soon to see accomplished to the
very last boundary. Look into Mazzini's account of his first yearning,
when he was a boy, after a restored greatness and a new freedom to
Italy, and of his first efforts as a young man to rouse the same
feelings in other young men, and get them to work toward a united
nationality. Almost everything seemed against him; his countrymen were
ignorant or indifferent, governments hostile, Europe incredulous. Of
course the scorners often seemed wise. Yet you see the prophecy lay
with him. As long as there is a remnant of national consciousness, I
suppose nobody will deny that there may be a new stirring of memories
and hopes which may inspire arduous action."

"Amen," said Mordecai, to whom Deronda's words were a cordial. "What is
needed is the leaven--what is needed is the seed of fire. The heritage
of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins
as a power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds;
it is the inborn half of memory, moving as in a dream among writings on
the walls, which it sees dimly but cannot divide into speech. Let the
torch of visible community be lit! Let the reason of Israel disclose
itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another great
migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members
may still stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England
and Germany, whom enterprise carries afar, but who still have a
national hearth and a tribunal of national opinion. Will any say 'It
cannot be'? Baruch Spinoza had not a faithful Jewish heart, though he
had sucked the life of his intellect at the breasts of Jewish
tradition. He laid bare his father's nakedness and said, 'They who
scorn him have the higher wisdom.' Yet Baruch Spinoza confessed, he saw
not why Israel should not again be a chosen nation. Who says that the
history and literature of our race are dead? Are they not as living as
the history and literature of Greece and Rome, which have inspired
revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe, and made the unrighteous
powers tremble? These were an inheritance dug from the tomb. Ours is an
inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human
frames."

Mordecai had stretched his arms upward, and his long thin hands
quivered in the air for a moment after he had ceased to speak. Gideon
was certainly a little moved, for though there was no long pause before
he made a remark in objection, his tone was more mild and deprecatory
than before; Pash, meanwhile, pressing his lips together, rubbing his
black head with both his hands and wrinkling his brow horizontally,
with the expression of one who differs from every speaker, but does not
think it worth while to say so. There is a sort of human paste that
when it comes near the fire of enthusiasm is only baked into harder
shape.

"It may seem well enough on one side to make so much of our memories
and inheritance as you do, Mordecai," said Gideon; "but there's another
side. It isn't all gratitude and harmless glory. Our people have
inherited a good deal of hatred. There's a pretty lot of curses still
flying about, and stiff settled rancor inherited from the times of
persecution. How will you justify keeping one sort of memory and
throwing away the other? There are ugly debts standing on both sides."

"I justify the choice as all other choice is justified," said Mordecai.
"I cherish nothing for the Jewish nation, I seek nothing for them, but
the good which promises good to all the nations. The spirit of our
religious life, which is one with our national life, is not hatred of
aught but wrong. The Master has said, an offence against man is worse
than an offence against God. But what wonder if there is hatred in the
breasts of Jews, who are children of the ignorant and oppressed--what
wonder, since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? Our
national life was a growing light. Let the central fire be kindled
again, and the light will reach afar. The degraded and scorned of our
race will learn to think of their sacred land, not as a place for
saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic
where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the
old, purified and enriched by the experience our greatest sons have
gathered from the life of the ages. How long is it?--only two centuries
since a vessel carried over the ocean the beginning of the great North
American nation. The people grew like meeting waters--they were various
in habit and sect--there came a time, a century ago, when they needed a
polity, and there were heroes of peace among them. What had they to
form a polity with but memories of Europe, corrected by the vision of a
better? Let our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes. They have the
memories of the East and West, and they have the full vision of a
better. A new Persia with a purified religion magnified itself in art
and wisdom. So will a new Judaea, poised between East and West--a
covenant of reconciliation. Will any say, the prophetic vision of your
race has been hopelessly mixed with folly and bigotry: the angel of
progress has no message for Judaism--it is a half-buried city for the
paid workers to lay open--the waters are rushing by it as a forsaken
field? I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human
choice. The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose
them. The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall will the
planting of the national ensign. The Nile overflowed and rushed onward:
the Egyptian could not choose the overflow, but he chose to work and
make channels for the fructifying waters, and Egypt became the land of
corn. Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment and
resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or
purpose of me? That is the blasphemy of this time. The divine principle
of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the
blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the better future
of the world--not renounce our higher gift and say, 'Let us be as if we
were not among the populations;' but choose our full heritage, claim
the brotherhood of our nation, and carry into it a new brotherhood with
the nations of the Gentiles. The vision is there; it will be fulfilled."

With the last sentence, which was no more than a loud whisper, Mordecai
let his chin sink on his breast and his eyelids fall. No one spoke. It
was not the first time that he had insisted on the same ideas, but he
was seen to-night in a new phase. The quiet tenacity of his ordinary
self differed as much from his present exaltation of mood as a man in
private talk, giving reasons for a revolution of which no sign is
discernable, differs from one who feels himself an agent in a
revolution begun. The dawn of fulfillment brought to his hope by
Deronda's presence had wrought Mordecai's conception into a state of
impassioned conviction, and he had found strength in his excitement to
pour forth the unlocked floods of emotive argument, with a sense of
haste as at a crisis which must be seized. But now there had come with
the quiescence of fatigue a sort of thankful wonder that he had
spoken--a contemplation of his life as a journey which had come at last
to this bourne. After a great excitement, the ebbing strength of
impulse is apt to leave us in this aloofness from our active self. And
in the moments after Mordecai had sunk his head, his mind was wandering
along the paths of his youth, and all the hopes which had ended in
bringing him hither.

Every one felt that the talk was ended, and the tone of phlegmatic
discussion made unseasonable by Mordecai's high-pitched solemnity. It
was as if they had come together to hear the blowing of the _shophar_,
and had nothing to do now but to disperse. The movement was unusually
general, and in less than ten minutes the room was empty of all except
Mordecai and Deronda. "Good-nights" had been given to Mordecai, but it
was evident he had not heard them, for he remained rapt and motionless.
Deronda would not disturb this needful rest, but waited for a
spontaneous movement.




CHAPTER XLIII.

  "My spirit is too weak; mortality
  Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
  And each imagined pinnacle and steep
  Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
  Like a sick eagle looking at the sky."
                                    --KEATS.


After a few minutes the unwonted stillness had penetrated Mordecai's
consciousness, and he looked up at Deronda, not in the least with
bewilderment and surprise, but with a gaze full of reposing
satisfaction. Deronda rose and placed his chair nearer, where there
could be no imagined need for raising the voice. Mordecai felt the
action as a patient feels the gentleness that eases his pillow. He
began to speak in a low tone, as if he were only thinking articulately,
not trying to reach an audience.

"In the doctrine of the Cabbala, souls are born again and again in new
bodies till they are perfected and purified, and a soul liberated from
a worn-out body may join the fellow-soul that needs it, that they may
be perfected together, and their earthly work accomplished. Then they
will depart from the mortal region, and leave place for new souls to be
born out of the store in the eternal bosom. It is the lingering
imperfection of the souls already born into the mortal region that
hinders the birth of new souls and the preparation of the Messianic
time:--thus the mind has given shape to what is hidden, as the shadow
of what is known, and has spoken truth, though it were only in parable.
When my long-wandering soul is liberated from this weary body, it will
join yours, and its work will be perfected."

Mordecai's pause seemed an appeal which Deronda's feeling would not let
him leave unanswered. He tried to make it truthful; but for Mordecai's
ear it was inevitably filled with unspoken meaning. He only said,

"Everything I can in conscience do to make your life effective I will
do."

"I know it," said Mordecai, in a tone of quiet certainty which
dispenses with further assurance. "I heard it. You see it all--you are
by my side on the mount of vision, and behold the paths of fulfillment
which others deny."

He was silent a moment or two, and then went on meditatively,

"You will take up my life where it was broken. I feel myself back in
that day when my life was broken. The bright morning sun was on the
quay--it was at Trieste--the garments of men from all nations shone
like jewels--the boats were pushing off--the Greek vessel that would
land us at Beyrout was to start in an hour. I was going with a merchant
as his clerk and companion. I said, I shall behold the lands and people
of the East, and I shall speak with a fuller vision. I breathed then as
you do, without labor; I had the light step and the endurance of youth,
I could fast, I could sleep on the hard ground. I had wedded poverty,
and I loved my bride--for poverty to me was freedom. My heart exulted
as if it had been the heart of Moses ben Maimon, strong with the
strength of three score years, and knowing the work that was to fill
them. It was the first time I had been south; the soul within me felt
its former sun; and standing on the quay, where the ground I stood on
seemed to send forth light, and the shadows had an azure glory as of
spirits become visible, I felt myself in the flood of a glorious life,
wherein my own small year-counted existence seemed to melt, so that I
knew it not; and a great sob arose within me as at the rush of waters
that were too strong a bliss. So I stood there awaiting my companion;
and I saw him not till he said: 'Ezra, I have been to the post and
there is your letter.'"

"Ezra!" exclaimed Deronda, unable to contain himself.

"Ezra," repeated Mordecai, affirmatively, engrossed in memory. "I was
expecting a letter; for I wrote continually to my mother. And that
sound of my name was like the touch of a wand that recalled me to the
body wherefrom I had been released as it were to mingle with the ocean
of human existence, free from the pressure of individual bondage. I
opened the letter; and the name came again as a cry that would have
disturbed me in the bosom of heaven, and made me yearn to reach where
that sorrow was--'Ezra, my son!'"

Mordecai paused again, his imagination arrested by the grasp of that
long-passed moment. Deronda's mind was almost breathlessly suspended on
what was coming. A strange possibility had suddenly presented itself.
Mordecai's eyes were cast down in abstracted contemplation, and in a
few moments he went on,

"She was a mother of whom it might have come--yea, might have come to
be said, 'Her children arise up and call her blessed.' In her I
understood the meaning of that Master who, perceiving the footsteps of
his mother, rose up and said, 'The Majesty of the Eternal cometh near!'
And that letter was her cry from the depths of anguish and
desolation--the cry of a mother robbed of her little ones. I was her
eldest. Death had taken four babes one after the other. Then came,
late, my little sister, who was, more than all the rest, the desire of
my mother's eyes; and the letter was a piercing cry to me--'Ezra, my
son, I am robbed of her. He has taken her away and left disgrace
behind. They will never come again.'"--Here Mordecai lifted his eyes
suddenly, laid his hand on Deronda's arm, and said, "Mine was the lot
of Israel. For the sin of the father my soul must go into exile. For
the sin of the father the work was broken, and the day of fulfilment
delayed. She who bore me was desolate, disgraced, destitute. I turned
back. On the instant I turned--her spirit and the spirit of her
fathers, who had worthy Jewish hearts, moved within me, and drew me.
God, in whom dwells the universe, was within me as the strength of
obedience. I turned and traveled with hardship--to save the scant money
which she would need. I left the sunshine, and traveled into freezing
cold. In the last stage I spent a night in exposure to cold and snow.
And that was the beginning of this slow death."

Mordecai let his eyes wander again and removed his hand. Deronda
resolutely repressed the questions which urged themselves within him.
While Mordecai was in this state of emotion, no other confidence must
be sought than what came spontaneously: nay, he himself felt a kindred
emotion which made him dread his own speech as too momentous.

"But I worked. We were destitute--every thing had been seized. And she
was ill: the clutch of anguish was too strong for her, and wrought with
some lurking disease. At times she could not stand for the beating of
her heart, and the images in her brain became as chambers of terror,
where she beheld my sister reared in evil. In the dead of night I heard
her crying for her child. Then I rose, and we stretched forth our arms
together and prayed. We poured forth our souls in desire that Mirah
might be delivered from evil."

"Mirah?" Deronda repeated, wishing to assure, himself that his ears had
not been deceived by a forecasting imagination. "Did you say Mirah?"

"That was my little sister's name. After we had prayed for her, my
mother would rest awhile. It lasted hardly four years, and in the
minute before she died, we were praying the same prayer--I aloud, she
silently. Her soul went out upon its wings."

"Have you never since heard of your sister?" said Deronda, as quietly
as he could.

"Never. Never have I heard whether she was delivered according to our
prayer. I know not, I know not. Who shall say where the pathways lie?
The poisonous will of the wicked is strong. It poisoned my life--it is
slowly stifling this breath. Death delivered my mother, and I felt it a
blessedness that I was alone in the winters of suffering. But what are
the winters now?--they are far off"--here Mordecai again rested his
hand on Deronda's arm, and looked at him with that joy of the hectic
patient which pierces us to sadness--"there is nothing to wail in the
withering of my body. The work will be the better done. Once I said the
work of this beginning was mine, I am born to do it. Well, I shall do
it. I shall live in you. I shall live in you."

His grasp had become convulsive in its force, and Deronda, agitated as
he had never been before--the certainty that this was Mirah's brother
suffusing his own strange relation to Mordecai with a new solemnity and
tenderness--felt his strong young heart beating faster and his lips
paling. He shrank from speech. He feared, in Mordecai's present state
of exaltation (already an alarming strain on his feeble frame), to
utter a word of revelation about Mirah. He feared to make an answer
below that high pitch of expectation which resembled a flash from a
dying fire, making watchers fear to see it die the faster. His dominant
impulse was to do as he had once done before: he laid his firm, gentle
hand on the hand that grasped him. Mordecai's, as if it had a soul of
its own--for he was not distinctly willing to do what he did--relaxed
its grasp, and turned upward under Deronda's. As the two palms met and
pressed each other Mordecai recovered some sense of his surroundings,
and said,

"Let us go now. I cannot talk any longer."

And in fact they parted at Cohen's door without having spoken to each
other again--merely with another pressure of the hands.

Deronda felt a weight on him which was half joy, half anxiety. The joy
of finding in Mirah's brother a nature even more than worthy of that
relation to her, had the weight of solemnity and sadness; the reunion
of brother and sister was in reality the first stage of a supreme
parting--like that farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last
glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow. Then there
was the weight of anxiety about the revelation of the fact on both
sides, and the arrangements it would be desirable to make beforehand. I
suppose we should all have felt as Deronda did, without sinking into
snobbishness or the notion that the primal duties of life demand a
morning and an evening suit, that it was an admissible desire to free
Mirah's first meeting with her brother from all jarring outward
conditions. His own sense of deliverance from the dreaded relationship
of the other Cohens, notwithstanding their good nature, made him
resolve if possible to keep them in the background for Mirah, until her
acquaintance with them would be an unmarred rendering of gratitude for
any kindness they had shown to her brother. On all accounts he wished
to give Mordecai surroundings not only more suited to his frail bodily
condition, but less of a hindrance to easy intercourse, even apart from
the decisive prospect of Mirah's taking up her abode with her brother,
and tending him through the precious remnant of his life. In the heroic
drama, great recognitions are not encumbered with these details; and
certainly Deronda had as reverential an interest in Mordecai and Mirah
as he could have had in the offspring of Agamemnon; but he was caring
for destinies still moving in the dim streets of our earthly life, not
yet lifted among the constellations, and his task presented itself to
him as difficult and delicate, especially in persuading Mordecai to
change his abode and habits. Concerning Mirah's feeling and resolve he
had no doubt: there would be a complete union of sentiment toward the
departed mother, and Mirah would understand her brother's greatness.
Yes, greatness: that was the word which Deronda now deliberately chose
to signify the impression that Mordecai had made on him. He said to
himself, perhaps rather defiantly toward the more negative spirit
within him, that this man, however erratic some of his interpretations
might be--this consumptive Jewish workman in threadbare clothing,
lodged by charity, delivering himself to hearers who took his thoughts
without attaching more consequences to them than the Flemings to the
ethereal chimes ringing above their market-places--had the chief
elements of greatness; a mind consciously, energetically moving with
the larger march of human destinies, but not the less full of
conscience and tender heart for the footsteps that tread near and need
a leaning-place; capable of conceiving and choosing a life's task with
far-off issues, yet capable of the unapplauded heroism which turns off
the road of achievement at the call of the nearer duty whose effect
lies within the beatings of the hearts that are close to us, as the
hunger of the unfledged bird to the breast of its parent.

Deronda to-night was stirred with, the feeling that the brief remnant
of this fervid life had become his charge. He had been peculiarly
wrought on by what he had seen at the club of the friendly indifference
which Mordecai must have gone on encountering. His own experience of
the small room that ardor can make for itself in ordinary minds had had
the effect of increasing his reserve; and while tolerance was the
easiest attitude to him, there was another bent in him also capable of
becoming a weakness--the dislike to appear exceptional or to risk an
ineffective insistance on his own opinion. But such caution appeared
contemptible to him just now, when he, for the first time, saw in a
complete picture and felt as a reality the lives that burn themselves
out in solitary enthusiasm: martyrs of obscure circumstance, exiled in
the rarity of their own minds, whose deliverances in other ears are no
more than a long passionate soliloquy--unless perhaps at last, when
they are nearing the invisible shores, signs of recognition and
fulfilment may penetrate the cloud of loneliness; or perhaps it may be
with them as with the dying Copernicus made to touch the first printed
copy of his book when the sense of touch was gone, seeing it only as a
dim object through the deepening dusk.

Deronda had been brought near to one of those spiritual exiles, and it
was in his nature to feel the relation as a strong chain, nay, to feel
his imagination moving without repugnance in the direction of
Mordecai's desires. With all his latent objection to schemes only
definite in their generality and nebulous in detail--in the poise of
his sentiments he felt at one with this man who had made a visionary
selection of him: the lines of what may be called their emotional
theory touched. He had not the Jewish consciousness, but he had a
yearning, grown the stronger for the denial which had been his
grievance, after the obligation of avowed filial and social ties. His
feeling was ready for difficult obedience. In this way it came that he
set about his new task ungrudgingly; and again he thought of Mrs.
Meyrick as his chief helper. To her first he must make known the
discovery of Mirah's brother, and with her he must consult on all
preliminaries of bringing the mutually lost together. Happily the best
quarter for a consumptive patient did not lie too far off the small
house at Chelsea, and the first office Deronda had to perform for this
Hebrew prophet who claimed him as a spiritual inheritor, was to get him
a healthy lodging. Such is the irony of earthly mixtures, that the
heroes have not always had carpets and teacups of their own; and, seen
through the open window by the mackerel-vender, may have been invited
with some hopefulness to pay three hundred per cent, in the form of
fourpence. However, Deronda's mind was busy with a prospective
arrangement for giving a furnished lodging some faint likeness to a
refined home by dismantling his own chambers of his best old books in
vellum, his easiest chair, and the bas-reliefs of Milton and Dante.

But was not Mirah to be there? What furniture can give such finish to a
room as a tender woman's face?--and is there any harmony of tints that
has such stirrings of delight as the sweet modulation of her voice?
Here is one good, at least, thought Deronda, that comes to Mordecai
from his having fixed his imagination on me. He has recovered a perfect
sister, whose affection is waiting for him.




CHAPTER XLIV.

  Fairy folk a-listening
  Hear the seed sprout in the spring.
  And for music to their dance
  Hear the hedgerows wake from trance,
  Sap that trembles into buds
  Sending little rhythmic floods
  Of fairy sound in fairy ears.
  Thus all beauty that appears
  Has birth as sound to finer sense
  And lighter-clad intelligence.


And Gwendolen? She was thinking of Deronda much more than he was
thinking of her--often wondering what were his ideas "about things,"
and how his life was occupied. But a lap-dog would be necessarily at a
loss in framing to itself the motives and adventures of doghood at
large; and it was as far from Gwendolen's conception that Deronda's
life could be determined by the historical destiny of the Jews, as that
he could rise into the air on a brazen horse, and so vanish from her
horizon in the form of a twinkling star.

With all the sense of inferiority that had been forced upon her, it was
inevitable that she should imagine a larger place for herself in his
thoughts than she actually possessed. They must be rather old and wise
persons who are not apt to see their own anxiety or elation about
themselves reflected in other minds; and Gwendolen, with her youth and
inward solitude, may be excused for dwelling on signs of special
interest in her shown by the one person who had impressed her with the
feeling of submission, and for mistaking the color and proportion of
those signs in the mind of Deronda.

Meanwhile, what would he tell her that she ought to do? "He said, I
must get more interest in others, and more knowledge, and that I must
care about the best things--but how am I to begin?" She wondered what
books he would tell her to take up to her own room, and recalled the
famous writers that she had either not looked into or had found the
most unreadable, with a half-smiling wish that she could mischievously
ask Deronda if they were not the books called "medicine for the mind."
Then she repented of her sauciness, and when she was safe from
observation carried up a miscellaneous selection--Descartes, Bacon,
Locke, Butler, Burke, Guizot--knowing, as a clever young lady of
education, that these authors were ornaments of mankind, feeling sure
that Deronda had read them, and hoping that by dipping into them all in
succession, with her rapid understanding she might get a point of view
nearer to his level.

But it was astonishing how little time she found for these vast mental
excursions. Constantly she had to be on the scene as Mrs. Grandcourt,
and to feel herself watched in that part by the exacting eyes of a
husband who had found a motive to exercise his tenacity--that of making
his marriage answer all the ends he chose, and with the more
completeness the more he discerned any opposing will in her. And she
herself, whatever rebellion might be going on within her, could not
have made up her mind to failure in her representation. No feeling had
yet reconciled her for a moment to any act, word, or look that would be
a confession to the world: and what she most dreaded in herself was any
violent impulse that would make an involuntary confession: it was the
will to be silent in every other direction that had thrown the more
impetuosity into her confidences toward Deronda, to whom her thought
continually turned as a help against herself. Her riding, her hunting,
her visiting and receiving of visits, were all performed in a spirit of
achievement which served instead of zest and young gladness, so that
all around Diplow, in those weeks of the new year, Mrs. Grandcourt was
regarded as wearing her honors with triumph.

"She disguises it under an air of taking everything as a matter of
course," said Mrs. Arrowpoint. "A stranger might suppose that she had
condescended rather than risen. I always noticed that doubleness in
her."

To her mother most of all Gwendolen was bent on acting complete
satisfaction, and poor Mrs. Davilow was so far deceived that she took
the unexpected distance at which she was kept, in spite of what she
felt to be Grandcourt's handsome behavior in providing for her, as a
comparative indifference in her daughter, now that marriage had created
new interests. To be fetched to lunch and then to dinner along with the
Gascoignes, to be driven back soon after breakfast the next morning,
and to have brief calls from Gwendolen in which her husband waited for
her outside either on horseback or sitting in the carriage, was all the
intercourse allowed to her mother.

The truth was, that the second time Gwendolen proposed to invite her
mother with Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne, Grandcourt had at first been
silent, and then drawled, "We can't be having _those people_ always.
Gascoigne talks too much. Country clergy are always bores--with their
confounded fuss about everything."

That speech was full of foreboding for Gwendolen. To have her mother
classed under "those people" was enough to confirm the previous dread
of bringing her too near. Still, she could not give the true
reasons--she could not say to her mother, "Mr. Grandcourt wants to
recognize you as little as possible; and besides it is better you
should not see much of my married life, else you might find out that I
am miserable." So she waived as lightly as she could every allusion to
the subject; and when Mrs. Davilow again hinted the possibility of her
having a house close to Ryelands, Gwendolen said, "It would not be so
nice for you as being near the rectory here, mamma. We shall perhaps be
very little at Ryelands. You would miss my aunt and uncle."

And all the while this contemptuous veto of her husband's on any
intimacy with her family, making her proudly shrink from giving them
the aspect of troublesome pensioners, was rousing more inward
inclination toward them. She had never felt so kindly toward her uncle,
so much disposed to look back on his cheerful, complacent activity and
spirit of kind management, even when mistaken, as more of a comfort
than the neutral loftiness which was every day chilling her. And here
perhaps she was unconsciously finding some of that mental enlargement
which it was hard to get from her occasional dashes into difficult
authors, who instead of blending themselves with her daily agitations
required her to dismiss them.

It was a delightful surprise one day when Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne were
at Offendene to see Gwendolen ride up without her husband--with the
groom only. All, including the four girls and Miss Merry, seated in the
dining-room at lunch, could see the welcome approach; and even the
elder ones were not without something of Isabel's romantic sense that
the beautiful sister on the splendid chestnut, which held its head as
if proud to bear her, was a sort of Harriet Byron or Miss Wardour
reappearing out of her "happiness ever after."

Her uncle went to the door to give her his hand, and she sprang from
her horse with an air of alacrity which might well encourage that
notion of guaranteed happiness; for Gwendolen was particularly bent
to-day on setting her mother's heart at rest, and her unusual sense of
freedom in being able to make this visit alone enabled her to bear up
under the pressure of painful facts which were urging themselves anew.
The seven family kisses were not so tiresome as they used to be.

"Mr. Grandcourt is gone out, so I determined to fill up the time by
coming to you, mamma," said Gwendolen, as she laid down her hat and
seated herself next to her mother; and then looking at her with a
playfully monitory air, "That is a punishment to you for not wearing
better lace on your head. You didn't think I should come and detect
you--you dreadfully careless-about-yourself mamma!" She gave a
caressing touch to the dear head.

"Scold me, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, her delicate worn face flushing
with delight. "But I wish there was something you could eat after your
ride--instead of these scraps. Let Jocosa make you a cup of chocolate
in your old way. You used to like that."

Miss Merry immediately rose and went out, though Gwendolen said, "Oh,
no, a piece of bread, or one of those hard biscuits. I can't think
about eating. I am come to say good-bye."

"What! going to Ryelands again?" said Mr. Gascoigne.

"No, we are going to town," said Gwendolen, beginning to break up a
piece of bread, but putting no morsel into her mouth.

"It is rather early to go to town," said Mrs. Gascoigne, "and Mr.
Grandcourt not in Parliament."

"Oh, there is only one more day's hunting to be had, and Henleigh has
some business in town with lawyers, I think," said Gwendolen. "I am
very glad. I shall like to go to town."

"You will see your house in Grosvenor Square," said Mrs. Davilow. She
and the girls were devouring with their eyes every movement of their
goddess, soon to vanish.

"Yes," said Gwendolen, in a tone of assent to the interest of that
expectation. "And there is so much to be seen and done in town."

"I wish, my dear Gwendolen," said Mr. Gascoigne, in a kind of cordial
advice, "that you would use your influence with Mr. Grandcourt to
induce him to enter Parliament. A man of his position should make his
weight felt in politics. The best judges are confident that the
ministry will have to appeal to the country on this question of further
Reform, and Mr. Grandcourt should be ready for the opportunity. I am
not quite sure that his opinions and mine accord entirely; I have not
heard him express himself very fully. But I don't look at the matter
from that point of view. I am thinking of your husband's standing in
the country. And he has now come to that stage of life when a man like
him should enter into public affairs. A wife has great influence with
her husband. Use yours in that direction, my dear."

The rector felt that he was acquitting himself of a duty here, and
giving something like the aspect of a public benefit to his niece's
match. To Gwendolen the whole speech had the flavor of bitter comedy.
If she had been merry, she must have laughed at her uncle's explanation
to her that he had not heard Grandcourt express himself very fully on
politics. And the wife's great influence! General maxims about husbands
and wives seemed now of a precarious usefulness. Gwendolen herself had
once believed in her future influence as an omnipotence in
managing--she did not know exactly what. But her chief concern at
present was to give an answer that would be felt appropriate.

"I should be very glad, uncle. But I think Mr. Grandcourt would not
like the trouble of an election--at least, unless it could be without
his making speeches. I thought candidates always made speeches."

"Not necessarily--to any great extent," said Mr. Gascoigne. "A man of
position and weight can get on without much of it. A county member need
have very little trouble in that way, and both out of the House and in
it is liked the better for not being a speechifier. Tell Mr. Grandcourt
that I say so."

"Here comes Jocosa with my chocolate after all," said Gwendolen,
escaping from a promise to give information that would certainly have
been received in a way inconceivable to the good rector, who, pushing
his chair a little aside from the table and crossing his leg, looked as
well as if he felt like a worthy specimen of a clergyman and magistrate
giving experienced advice. Mr. Gascoigne had come to the conclusion
that Grandcourt was a proud man, but his own self-love, calmed through
life by the consciousness of his general value and personal advantages,
was not irritable enough to prevent him from hoping the best about his
niece's husband because her uncle was kept rather haughtily at a
distance. A certain aloofness must be allowed to the representative of
an old family; you would not expect him to be on intimate terms even
with abstractions. But Mrs. Gascoigne was less dispassionate on her
husband's account, and felt Grandcourt's haughtiness as something a
little blameable in Gwendolen.

"Your uncle and Anna will very likely be in town about Easter," she
said, with a vague sense of expressing a slight discontent. "Dear Rex
hopes to come out with honors and a fellowship, and he wants his father
and Anna to meet him in London, that they may be jolly together, as he
says. I shouldn't wonder if Lord Brackenshaw invited them, he has been
so very kind since he came back to the Castle."

"I hope my uncle will bring Ann to stay in Grosvenor Square," said
Gwendolen, risking herself so far, for the sake of the present moment,
but in reality wishing that she might never be obliged to bring any of
her family near Grandcourt again. "I am very glad of Rex's good
fortune."

"We must not be premature, and rejoice too much beforehand," said the
rector, to whom this topic was the happiest in the world, and
altogether allowable, now that the issue of that little affair about
Gwendolen had been so satisfactory. "Not but that I am in
correspondence with impartial judges, who have the highest hopes about
my son, as a singularly clear-headed young man. And of his excellent
disposition and principle I have had the best evidence."

"We shall have him a great lawyer some time," said Mrs. Gascoigne.

"How very nice!" said Gwendolen, with a concealed scepticism as to
niceness in general, which made the word quite applicable to lawyers.

"Talking of Lord Brackenshaw's kindness," said Mrs. Davilow, "you don't
know how delightful he has been, Gwendolen. He has begged me to
consider myself his guest in this house till I can get another that I
like--he did it in the most graceful way. But now a house has turned
up. Old Mr. Jodson is dead, and we can have his house. It is just what
I want; small, but with nothing hideous to make you miserable thinking
about it. And it is only a mile from the Rectory. You remember the low
white house nearly hidden by the trees, as we turn up the lane to the
church?"

"Yes, but you have no furniture, poor mamma," said Gwendolen, in a
melancholy tone.

"Oh, I am saving money for that. You know who has made me rather rich,
dear," said Mrs. Davilow, laying her hand on Gwendolen's. "And Jocosa
really makes so little do for housekeeping--it is quite wonderful."

"Oh, please let me go up-stairs with you and arrange my hat, mamma,"
said Gwendolen, suddenly putting up her hand to her hair and perhaps
creating a desired disarrangement. Her heart was swelling, and she was
ready to cry. Her mother _must_ have been worse off, if it had not been
for Grandcourt. "I suppose I shall never see all this again," said
Gwendolen, looking round her, as they entered the black and yellow
bedroom, and then throwing herself into a chair in front of the glass
with a little groan as of bodily fatigue. In the resolve not to cry she
had become very pale.

"You are not well, dear?" said Mrs. Davilow.

"No; that chocolate has made me sick," said Gwendolen, putting up her
hand to be taken.

"I should be allowed to come to you if you were ill, darling," said
Mrs. Davilow, rather timidly, as she pressed the hand to her bosom.
Something had made her sure today that her child loved her--needed her
as much as ever.

"Oh, yes," said Gwendolen, leaning her head against her mother, though
speaking as lightly as she could. "But you know I never am ill. I am as
strong as possible; and you must not take to fretting about me, but
make yourself as happy as you can with the girls. They are better
children to you than I have been, you know." She turned up her face
with a smile.

"You have always been good, my darling. I remember nothing else."

"Why, what did I ever do that was good to you, except marry Mr.
Grandcourt?" said Gwendolen, starting up with a desperate resolve to be
playful, and keep no more on the perilous edge of agitation. "And I
should not have done that unless it had pleased myself." She tossed up
her chin, and reached her hat.

"God forbid, child! I would not have had you marry for my sake. Your
happiness by itself is half mine."

"Very well," said Gwendolen, arranging her hat fastidiously, "then you
will please to consider that you are half happy, which is more than I
am used to seeing you." With the last words she again turned with her
old playful smile to her mother. "Now I am ready; but oh, mamma, Mr.
Grandcourt gives me a quantity of money, and expects me to spend it,
and I can't spend it; and you know I can't bear charity children and
all that; and here are thirty pounds. I wish the girls would spend it
for me on little things for themselves when you go to the new house.
Tell them so." Gwendolen put the notes into her mother's hands and
looked away hastily, moving toward the door.

"God bless you, dear," said Mrs. Davilow. "It will please them so that
you should have thought of them in particular."

"Oh, they are troublesome things; but they don't trouble me now," said
Gwendolen, turning and nodding playfully. She hardly understood her own
feeling in this act toward her sisters, but at any rate she did not
wish it to be taken as anything serious. She was glad to have got out
of the bedroom without showing more signs of emotion, and she went
through the rest of her visit and all the good-byes with a quiet
propriety that made her say to herself sarcastically as she rode away,
"I think I am making a very good Mrs. Grandcourt."

She believed that her husband had gone to Gadsmere that day--had
inferred this, as she had long ago inferred who were the inmates of
what he had described as "a dog-hutch of a place in a black country;"
and the strange conflict of feeling within her had had the
characteristic effect of sending her to Offendene with a tightened
resolve--a form of excitement which was native to her.

She wondered at her own contradictions. Why should she feel it bitter
to her that Grandcourt showed concern for the beings on whose account
she herself was undergoing remorse? Had she not before her marriage
inwardly determined to speak and act on their behalf?--and since he had
lately implied that he wanted to be in town because he was making
arrangements about his will, she ought to have been glad of any sign
that he kept a conscience awake toward those at Gadsmere; and yet, now
that she was a wife, the sense that Grandcourt was gone to Gadsmere was
like red heat near a burn. She had brought on herself this indignity in
her own eyes--this humiliation of being doomed to a terrified silence
lest her husband should discover with what sort of consciousness she
had married him; and as she had said to Deronda, she "must go on."
After the intense moments of secret hatred toward this husband who from
the very first had cowed her, there always came back the spiritual
pressure which made submission inevitable. There was no effort at
freedoms that would not bring fresh and worse humiliation. Gwendolen
could dare nothing except an impulsive action--least of all could she
dare premeditatedly a vague future in which the only certain condition
was indignity. In spite of remorse, it still seemed the worst result of
her marriage that she should in any way make a spectacle of herself;
and her humiliation was lightened by her thinking that only Mrs.
Glasher was aware of the fact which caused it. For Gwendolen had never
referred the interview at the Whispering Stones to Lush's agency; her
disposition to vague terror investing with shadowy omnipresence any
threat of fatal power over her, and so hindering her from imagining
plans and channels by which news had been conveyed to the woman who had
the poisoning skill of a sorceress. To Gwendolen's mind the secret lay
with Mrs. Glasher, and there were words in the horrible letter which
implied that Mrs. Glasher would dread disclosure to the husband, as
much as the usurping Mrs. Grandcourt.

Something else, too, she thought of as more of a secret from her
husband than it really was--namely that suppressed struggle of
desperate rebellion which she herself dreaded. Grandcourt could not
indeed fully imagine how things affected Gwendolen: he had no
imagination of anything in her but what affected the gratification of
his own will; but on this point he had the sensibility which seems like
divination. What we see exclusively we are apt to see with some mistake
of proportions; and Grandcourt was not likely to be infallible in his
judgments concerning this wife who was governed by many shadowy powers,
to him nonexistent. He magnified her inward resistance, but that did
not lessen his satisfaction in the mastery of it.




CHAPTER XLV.

  Behold my lady's carriage stop the way.
  With powdered lacquey and with charming bay;
  She sweeps the matting, treads the crimson stair.
  Her arduous function solely "to be there."
  Like Sirius rising o'er the silent sea.
  She hides her heart in lustre loftily.


So the Grandcourts were in Grosvenor Square in time to receive a card
for the musical party at Lady Mallinger's, there being reasons of
business which made Sir Hugo know beforehand that his ill-beloved
nephew was coming up. It was only the third evening after their
arrival, and Gwendolen made rather an absent-minded acquaintance with
her new ceilings and furniture, preoccupied with the certainty that she
was going to speak to Deronda again, and also to see the Miss Lapidoth
who had gone through so much, and was "capable of submitting to
anything in the form of duty." For Gwendolen had remembered nearly
every word that Deronda had said about Mirah, and especially that
phrase, which she repeated to herself bitterly, having an ill-defined
consciousness that her own submission was something very different. She
would have been obliged to allow, if any one had said it to her, that
what she submitted to could not take the shape of duty, but was
submission to a yoke drawn on her by an action she was ashamed of, and
worn with a strength of selfish motives that left no weight for duty to
carry.

The drawing-rooms in Park Lane, all white, gold, and pale crimson, were
agreeably furnished, and not crowded with guests, before Mr. and Mrs.
Grandcourt entered; and more than half an hour of instrumental music
was being followed by an interval of movement and chat. Klesmer was
there with his wife, and in his generous interest for Mirah he proposed
to accompany her singing of Leo's "_O patria mia_," which he had before
recommended her to choose, as more distinctive of her than better known
music. He was already at the piano, and Mirah was standing there
conspicuously, when Gwendolen, magnificent in her pale green velvet and
poisoned diamonds, was ushered to a seat of honor well in view of them.
With her long sight and self-command she had the rare power of quickly
distinguishing persons and objects on entering a full room, and while
turning her glance toward Mirah she did not neglect to exchange a bow
with Klesmer as she passed. The smile seemed to each a lightning-flash
back on that morning when it had been her ambition to stand as the
"little Jewess" was standing, and survey a grand audience from the
higher rank of her talent--instead of which she was one of the ordinary
crowd in silk and gems, whose utmost performance it must be to admire
or find fault. "He thinks I am in the right road now," said the lurking
resentment within her.

Gwendolen had not caught sight of Deronda in her passage, and while she
was seated acquitting herself in chat with Sir Hugo, she glanced round
her with careful ease, bowing a recognition here and there, and fearful
lest an anxious-looking exploration in search of Deronda might be
observed by her husband, and afterward rebuked as something "damnably
vulgar." But all traveling, even that of a slow gradual glance round a
room, brings a liability to undesired encounters, and amongst the eyes
that met Gwendolen's, forcing her into a slight bow, were those of the
"amateur too fond of Meyerbeer," Mr. Lush, whom Sir Hugo continued to
find useful as a half-caste among gentlemen. He was standing near her
husband, who, however, turned a shoulder toward him, and was being
understood to listen to Lord Pentreath. How was it that at this moment,
for the first time, there darted through Gwendolen, like a disagreeable
sensation, the idea that this man knew all about her husband's life? He
had been banished from her sight, according to her will, and she had
been satisfied; he had sunk entirely into the background of her
thoughts, screened away from her by the agitating figures that kept up
an inward drama in which Lush had no place. Here suddenly he reappeared
at her husband's elbow, and there sprang up in her, like an
instantaneously fabricated memory in a dream, the sense of his being
connected with the secrets that made her wretched. She was conscious of
effort in turning her head away from him, trying to continue her
wandering survey as if she had seen nothing of more consequence than
the picture on the wall, till she discovered Deronda. But he was not
looking toward her, and she withdrew her eyes from him, without having
got any recognition, consoling herself with the assurance that he must
have seen her come in. In fact, he was not standing far from the door
with Hans Meyrick, whom he had been careful to bring into Lady
Mallinger's list. They were both a little more anxious than was
comfortable lest Mirah should not be heard to advantage. Deronda even
felt himself on the brink of betraying emotion, Mirah's presence now
being linked with crowding images of what had gone before and was to
come after--all centering in the brother he was soon to reveal to her;
and he had escaped as soon as he could from the side of Lady Pentreath,
who had said in her violoncello voice,

"Well, your Jewess is pretty--there's no denying that. But where is her
Jewish impudence? She looks as demure as a nun. I suppose she learned
that on the stage."

He was beginning to feel on Mirah's behalf something of what he had
felt for himself in his seraphic boyish time, when Sir Hugo asked him
if he would like to be a great singer--an indignant dislike to her
being remarked on in a free and easy way, as if she were an imported
commodity disdainfully paid for by the fashionable public, and he
winced the more because Mordecai, he knew, would feel that the name
"Jewess" was taken as a sort of stamp like the lettering of Chinese
silk. In this susceptible mood he saw the Grandcourts enter, and was
immediately appealed to by Hans about "that Vandyke duchess of a
beauty." Pray excuse Deronda that in this moment he felt a transient
renewal of his first repulsion from Gwendolen, as if she and her beauty
and her failings were to blame for the undervaluing of Mirah as a
woman--a feeling something like class animosity, which affection for
what is not fully recognized by others, whether in persons or in
poetry, rarely allows us to escape. To Hans admiring Gwendolen with his
habitual hyperbole, he answered, with a sarcasm that was not quite
good-natured,

"I thought you could admire no style of woman but your Berenice."

"That is the style I worship--not admire," said Hans. "Other styles of
women I might make myself wicked for, but for Berenice I could make
myself--well, pretty good, which is something much more difficult."

"Hush," said Deronda, under the pretext that the singing was going to
begin. He was not so delighted with the answer as might have been
expected, and was relieved by Hans's movement to a more advanced spot.

Deronda had never before heard Mirah sing "_O patria mia_." He knew
well Leopardi's fine Ode to Italy (when Italy sat like a disconsolate
mother in chains, hiding her face on her knees and weeping), and the
few selected words were filled for him with the grandeur of the whole,
which seemed to breath an inspiration through the music. Mirah singing
this, made Mordecai more than ever one presence with her. Certain words
not included in the song nevertheless rang within Deronda as harmonies
from the invisible,

        "Non ti difende
  Nessun dè tuoi! L'armi, qua l'armi: io solo
  Combatteró, procomberó sol io"--
[Footnote: Do none of thy children defend thee? Arms! bring me arms!
alone I will fight, alone I will fall.]

they seemed the very voice of that heroic passion which is falsely said
to devote itself in vain when it achieves the god-like end of
manifesting unselfish love. And that passion was present to Deronda now
as the vivid image of a man dying helplessly away from the possibility
of battle.

Mirah was equal to his wishes. While the general applause was sounding,
Klesmer gave a more valued testimony, audible to her only--"Good,
good--the crescendo better than before." But her chief anxiety was to
know that she had satisfied Mr. Deronda: any failure on her part this
evening would have pained her as an especial injury to him. Of course
all her prospects were due to what he had done for her; still, this
occasion of singing in the house that was his home brought a peculiar
demand. She looked toward him in the distance, and he saw that she did;
but he remained where he was, and watched the streams of emulous
admirers closing round her, till presently they parted to make way for
Gwendolen, who was taken up to be introduced by Mrs. Klesmer. Easier
now about "the little Jewess," Daniel relented toward poor Gwendolen in
her splendor, and his memory went back, with some penitence for his
momentary hardness, over all the signs and confessions that she too
needed a rescue, and one much more difficult than that of the wanderer
by the river--a rescue for which he felt himself helpless. The silent
question--"But is it not cowardly to make that a reason for turning
away?" was the form in which he framed his resolve to go near her on
the first opportunity, and show his regard for her past confidence, in
spite of Sir Hugo's unwelcome hints.

Klesmer, having risen to Gwendolen as she approached, and being
included by her in the opening conversation with Mirah, continued near
them a little while, looking down with a smile, which was rather in his
eyes than on his lips, at the piquant contrast of the two charming
young creatures seated on the red divan. The solicitude seemed to be
all on the side of the splendid one.

"You must let me say how much I am obliged to you," said Gwendolen. "I
had heard from Mr. Deronda that I should have a great treat in your
singing, but I was too ignorant to imagine how great."

"You are very good to say so," answered Mirah, her mind chiefly
occupied in contemplating Gwendolen. It was like a new kind of
stage-experience to her to be close to genuine grand ladies with
genuine brilliants and complexions, and they impressed her vaguely as
coming out of some unknown drama, in which their parts perhaps got more
tragic as they went on.

"We shall all want to learn of you--I, at least," said Gwendolen. "I
sing very badly, as Herr Klesmer will tell you,"--here she glanced
upward to that higher power rather archly, and continued--"but I have
been rebuked for not liking to middling, since I can be nothing more. I
think that is a different doctrine from yours?" She was still looking
at Klesmer, who said quickly,

"Not if it means that it would be worth while for you to study further,
and for Miss Lapidoth to have the pleasure of helping you." With that
he moved away, and Mirah taking everything with _naïve_ seriousness,
said,

"If you think I could teach you, I shall be very glad. I am anxious to
teach, but I have only just begun. If I do it well, it must be by
remembering how my master taught me."

Gwendolen was in reality too uncertain about herself to be prepared for
this simple promptitude of Mirah's, and in her wish to change the
subject, said, with some lapse from the good taste of her first
address,

"You have not been long in London, I think?--but you were perhaps
introduced to Mr. Deronda abroad?"

"No," said Mirah; "I never saw him before I came to England in the
summer."

"But he has seen you often and heard you sing a great deal, has he
not?" said Gwendolen, led on partly by the wish to hear anything about
Deronda, and partly by the awkwardness which besets the readiest
person, in carrying on a dialogue when empty of matter. "He spoke of
you to me with the highest praise. He seemed to know you quite well."

"Oh, I was poor and needed help," said Mirah, in a new tone of feeling,
"and Mr. Deronda has given me the best friends in the world. That is
the only way he came to know anything about me--because he was sorry
for me. I had no friends when I came. I was in distress. I owe
everything to him."

Poor Gwendolen, who had wanted to be a struggling artist herself, could
nevertheless not escape the impression that a mode of inquiry which
would have been rather rude toward herself was an amiable condescension
to this Jewess who was ready to give her lessons. The only effect on
Mirah, as always on any mention of Deronda, was to stir reverential
gratitude and anxiety that she should be understood to have the deepest
obligation to him.

But both he and Hans, who were noticing the pair from a distance, would
have felt rather indignant if they had known that the conversation had
led up to Mirah's representation of herself in this light of neediness.
In the movement that prompted her, however, there was an exquisite
delicacy, which perhaps she could not have stated explicitly--the
feeling that she ought not to allow any one to assume in Deronda a
relation of more equality or less generous interest toward her than
actually existed. Her answer was delightful to Gwendolen: she thought
of nothing but the ready compassion which in another form she had
trusted in and found herself; and on the signals that Klesmer was about
to play she moved away in much content, entirely without presentiment
that this Jewish _protégé_ would ever make a more important difference
in her life than the possible improvement of her singing--if the
leisure and spirits of a Mrs. Grandcourt would allow of other lessons
than such as the world was giving her at rather a high charge.

With her wonted alternation from resolute care of appearances to some
rash indulgence of an impulse, she chose, under the pretext of getting
farther from the instrument, not to go again to her former seat, but
placed herself on a settee where she could only have one neighbor. She
was nearer to Deronda than before: was it surprising that he came up in
time to shake hands before the music began--then, that after he had
stood a little while by the elbow of the settee at the empty end, the
torrent-like confluences of bass and treble seemed, like a convulsion
of nature, to cast the conduct of petty mortals into insignificance,
and to warrant his sitting down?

But when at the end of Klesmer's playing there came the outburst of
talk under which Gwendolen had hoped to speak as she would to Deronda,
she observed that Mr. Lush was within hearing, leaning against the wall
close by them. She could not help her flush of anger, but she tried to
have only an air of polite indifference in saying,

"Miss Lapidoth is everything you described her to be."

"You have been very quick in discovering that," said Deronda,
ironically.

"I have not found out all the excellencies you spoke of--I don't mean
that," said Gwendolen; "but I think her singing is charming, and
herself, too. Her face is lovely--not in the least common; and she is
such a complete little person. I should think she will be a great
success."

This speech was grating on Deronda, and he would not answer it, but
looked gravely before him. She knew that he was displeased with her,
and she was getting so impatient under the neighborhood of Mr. Lush,
which prevented her from saying any word she wanted to say, that she
meditated some desperate step to get rid of it, and remained silent,
too. That constraint seemed to last a long while, neither Gwendolen nor
Deronda looking at the other, till Lush slowly relieved the wall of his
weight, and joined some one at a distance.

Gwendolen immediately said, "You despise me for talking artificially."

"No," said Deronda, looking at her coolly; "I think that is quite
excusable sometimes. But I did not think what you were last saying was
altogether artificial."

"There was something in it that displeased you," said Gwendolen. "What
was it?"

"It is impossible to explain such things," said Deronda. "One can never
communicate niceties of feeling about words and manner."

"You think I am shut out from understanding them," said Gwendolen, with
a slight tremor in her voice, which she was trying to conquer. "Have I
shown myself so very dense to everything you have said?" There was an
indescribable look of suppressed tears in her eyes, which were turned
on him.

"Not at all," said Deronda, with some softening of voice. "But
experience differs for different people. We don't all wince at the same
things. I have had plenty of proof that you are not dense." He smiled
at her.

"But one may feel things and are not able to do anything better for all
that," said Gwendolen, not smiling in return--the distance to which
Deronda's words seemed to throw her chilling her too much. "I begin to
think we can only get better by having people about us who raise good
feelings. You must not be surprised at anything in me. I think it is
too late for me to alter. I don't know how to set about being wise, as
you told me to be."

"I seldom find I do any good by my preaching. I might as well have kept
from meddling," said Deronda, thinking rather sadly that his
interference about that unfortunate necklace might end in nothing but
an added pain to him in seeing her after all hardened to another sort
of gambling than roulette.

"Don't say that," said Gwendolen, hurriedly, feeling that this might be
her only chance of getting the words uttered, and dreading the increase
of her own agitation. "If you despair of me, I shall despair. Your
saying that I should not go on being selfish and ignorant has been some
strength to me. If you say you wish you had not meddled--that means you
despair of me and forsake me. And then you will decide for me that I
shall not be good. It is you who will decide; because you might have
made me different by keeping as near to me as you could, and believing
in me."

She had not been looking at him as she spoke, but at the handle of the
fan which she held closed. With the last words she rose and left him,
returning to her former place, which had been left vacant; while every
one was settling into quietude in expectation of Mirah's voice, which
presently, with that wonderful, searching quality of subdued song in
which the melody seems simply an effect of the emotion, gave forth,
_Per pietà non dirmi addio_.

In Deronda's ear the strain was for the moment a continuance of
Gwendolen's pleading--a painful urging of something vague and
difficult, irreconcilable with pressing conditions, and yet cruel to
resist. However strange the mixture in her of a resolute pride and a
precocious air of knowing the world, with a precipitate, guileless
indiscretion, he was quite sure now that the mixture existed. Sir
Hugo's hints had made him alive to dangers that his own disposition
might have neglected; but that Gwendolen's reliance on him was
unvisited by any dream of his being a man who could misinterpret her
was as manifest as morning, and made an appeal which wrestled with his
sense of present dangers, and with his foreboding of a growing
incompatible claim on him in her mind. There was a foreshadowing of
some painful collision: on the one side the grasp of Mordecai's dying
hand on him, with all the ideals and prospects it aroused; on the other
the fair creature in silk and gems, with her hidden wound and her
self-dread, making a trustful effort to lean and find herself
sustained. It was as if he had a vision of himself besought with
outstretched arms and cries, while he was caught by the waves and
compelled to mount the vessel bound for a far-off coast. That was the
strain of excited feeling in him that went along with the notes of
Mirah's song; but when it ceased he moved from his seat with the
reflection that he had been falling into an exaggeration of his own
importance, and a ridiculous readiness to accept Gwendolen's view of
himself, as if he could really have any decisive power over her.

"What an enviable fellow you are," said Hans to him, "sitting on a sofa
with that young duchess, and having an interesting quarrel with her!"

"Quarrel with her?" repeated Deronda, rather uncomfortably.

"Oh, about theology, of course; nothing personal. But she told you what
you ought to think, and then left you with a grand air which was
admirable. Is she an Antinomian--if so, tell her I am an Antinomian
painter, and introduce me. I should like to paint her and her husband.
He has the sort of handsome _physique_ that the Duke ought to have in
_Lucrezia Borgia_--if it could go with a fine baritone, which it can't."

Deronda devoutly hoped that Hans's account of the impression his
dialogue with Gwendolen had made on a distant beholder was no more than
a bit of fantastic representation, such as was common with him.

And Gwendolen was not without her after-thoughts that her husband's
eyes might have been on her, extracting something to reprove--some
offence against her dignity as his wife; her consciousness telling her
that she had not kept up the perfect air of equability in public which
was her own ideal. But Grandcourt made no observation on her behavior.
All he said as they were driving home was,

"Lush will dine with us among the other people to-morrow. You will
treat him civilly."

Gwendolen's heart began to beat violently. The words that she wanted to
utter, as one wants to return a blow, were. "You are breaking your
promise to me--the first promise you made me." But she dared not utter
them. She was as frightened at a quarrel as if she had foreseen that it
would end with throttling fingers on her neck. After a pause, she said
in the tone rather of defeat than resentment,

"I thought you did not intend him to frequent the house again."

"I want him just now. He is useful to me; and he must be treated
civilly."

Silence. There may come a moment when even an excellent husband who has
dropped smoking under more or less of a pledge during courtship, for
the first time will introduce his cigar-smoke between himself and his
wife, with the tacit understanding that she will have to put up with
it. Mr. Lush was, so to speak, a very large cigar.

If these are the sort of lovers' vows at which Jove laughs, he must
have a merry time of it.




CHAPTER XLVI.

    "If any one should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I
    feel it could no otherwise be expressed than by making answer,
    'Because it was he, because it was I.' There is, beyond what I am able
    to say, I know not what inexplicable power that brought on this
    union."--MONTAIGNE: _On Friendship_.


The time had come to prepare Mordecai for the revelation of the
restored sister and for the change of abode which was desirable before
Mirah's meeting with her brother. Mrs. Meyrick, to whom Deronda had
confided everything except Mordecai's peculiar relation to himself, had
been active in helping him to find a suitable lodging in Brompton, not
many minutes' walk from her own house, so that the brother and sister
would be within reach of her motherly care. Her happy mixture of
Scottish fervor and Gallic liveliness had enabled her to keep the
secret close from the girls as well as from Hans, any betrayal to them
being likely to reach Mirah in some way that would raise an agitating
suspicion, and spoil the important opening of that work which was to
secure her independence, as we rather arbitrarily call one of the more
arduous and dignified forms of our dependence. And both Mrs. Meyrick
and Deronda had more reasons than they could have expressed for
desiring that Mirah should be able to maintain herself. Perhaps "the
little mother" was rather helped in her secrecy by some dubiousness in
her sentiment about the remarkable brother described to her; and
certainly if she felt any joy and anticipatory admiration, it was due
to her faith in Deronda's judgment. The consumption was a sorrowful
fact that appealed to her tenderness; but how was she to be very glad
of an enthusiasm which, to tell the truth, she could only contemplate
as Jewish pertinacity, and as rather an undesirable introduction among
them all of a man whose conversation would not be more modern and
encouraging than that of Scott's Covenanters? Her mind was anything but
prosaic, and had her soberer share of Mab's delight in the romance of
Mirah's story and of her abode with them; but the romantic or unusual
in real life requires some adaptation. We sit up at night to read about
Sakya-Mouni, St. Francis, or Oliver Cromwell; but whether we should be
glad for any one at all like them to call on us the next morning, still
more, to reveal himself as a new relation, is quite another affair.
Besides, Mrs. Meyrick had hoped, as her children did, that the
intensity of Mirah's feeling about Judaism would slowly subside, and be
merged in the gradually deepening current of loving interchange with
her new friends. In fact, her secret favorite continuation of the
romance had been no discovery of Jewish relations, but something much
more favorable to the hopes she discerned in Hans. And now--here was a
brother who would dip Mirah's mind over again in the deepest dye of
Jewish sentiment. She could not help saying to Deronda,

"I am as glad as you are that the pawnbroker is not her brother: there
are Ezras and Ezras in the world; and really it is a comfort to think
that all Jews are not like those shopkeepers who _will not_ let you get
out of their shops: and besides, what he said to you about his mother
and sister makes me bless him. I am sure he's good. But I never did
like anything fanatical. I suppose I heard a little too much preaching
in my youth and lost my palate for it."

"I don't think you will find that Mordecai obtrudes any preaching,"
said Deronda. "He is not what I should call fanatical. I call a man
fanatical when his enthusiasm is narrow and hoodwinked, so that he has
no sense of proportions, and becomes unjust and unsympathetic to men
who are out of his own track. Mordecai is an enthusiast; I should like
to keep that word for the highest order of minds--those who care
supremely for grand and general benefits to mankind. He is not a
strictly orthodox Jew, and is full of allowances for others; his
conformity in many things is an allowance for the condition of other
Jews. The people he lives with are as fond of him as possible, and they
can't in the least understand his ideas."

"Oh, well, I can live up to the level of the pawnbroker's mother, and
like him for what I see to be good in him; and for what I don't see the
merits of I will take your word. According to your definition, I
suppose one might be fanatical in worshipping common-sense; for my poor
husband used to say the world would be a poor place if there were
nothing but common-sense in it. However, Mirah's brother will have good
bedding--that I have taken care of; and I shall have this extra window
pasted up with paper to prevent draughts." (The conversation was taking
place in the destined lodging.) "It is a comfort to think that the
people of the house are no strangers to me--no hypocritical harpies.
And when the children know, we shall be able to make the rooms much
prettier."

"The next stage of the affair is to tell all to Mordecai, and get him
to move--which may be a more difficult business," said Deronda.

"And will you tell Mirah before I say anything to the children?" said
Mrs. Meyrick. But Deronda hesitated, and she went on in a tone of
persuasive deliberation--"No, I think not. Let me tell Hans and the
girls the evening before, and they will be away the next morning?"

"Yes, that will be best. But do justice to my account of Mordecai--or
Ezra, as I suppose Mirah will wish to call him: don't assist their
imagination by referring to Habakkuk Mucklewrath," said Deronda,
smiling--Mrs. Meyrick herself having used the comparison of the
Covenanters.

"Trust me, trust me," said the little mother. "I shall have to persuade
them so hard to be glad, that I shall convert myself. When I am
frightened I find it a good thing to have somebody to be angry with for
not being brave: it warms the blood."

Deronda might have been more argumentative or persuasive about the view
to be taken of Mirah's brother, if he had been less anxiously
preoccupied with the more important task immediately before him, which
he desired to acquit himself of without wounding the Cohens. Mordecai,
by a memorable answer, had made it evident that he would be keenly
alive to any inadvertance in relation to their feelings. In the
interval, he had been meeting Mordecai at the _Hand and Banner_, but
now after due reflection he wrote to him saying that he had particular
reasons for wishing to see him in his own home the next evening, and
would beg to sit with him in his workroom for an hour, if the Cohens
would not regard it as an intrusion. He would call with the
understanding that if there were any objection, Mordecai would
accompany him elsewhere. Deronda hoped in this way to create a little
expectation that would have a preparatory effect.

He was received with the usual friendliness, some additional costume in
the women and children, and in all the elders a slight air of wondering
which even in Cohen was not allowed to pass the bounds of silence--the
guest's transactions with Mordecai being a sort of mystery which he was
rather proud to think lay outside the sphere of light which enclosed
his own understanding. But when Deronda said, "I suppose Mordecai is at
home and expecting me," Jacob, who had profited by the family remarks,
went up to his knee and said, "What do you want to talk to Mordecai
about?"

"Something that is very interesting to him," said Deronda, pinching the
lad's ear, "but that you can't understand."

"Can you say this?" said Jacob, immediately giving forth a string of
his rote-learned Hebrew verses with a wonderful mixture of the throaty
and the nasal, and nodding his small head at his hearer, with a sense
of giving formidable evidence which might rather alter their mutual
position.

"No, really," said Deronda, keeping grave; "I can't say anything like
it."

"I thought not," said Jacob, performing a dance of triumph with his
small scarlet legs, while he took various objects out of the deep
pockets of his knickerbockers and returned them thither, as a slight
hint of his resources; after which, running to the door of the
workroom, he opened it wide, set his back against it, and said,
"Mordecai, here's the young swell"--a copying of his father's phrase,
which seemed to him well fitted to cap the recitation of Hebrew.

He was called back with hushes by mother and grandmother, and Deronda,
entering and closing the door behind him, saw that a bit of carpet had
been laid down, a chair placed, and the fire and lights attended to, in
sign of the Cohens' respect. As Mordecai rose to greet him, Deronda was
struck with the air of solemn expectation in his face, such as would
have seemed perfectly natural if his letter had declared that some
revelation was to be made about the lost sister. Neither of them spoke,
till Deronda, with his usual tenderness of manner, had drawn the vacant
chair from the opposite side of the hearth and had seated himself near
to Mordecai, who then said, in a tone of fervid certainty,

"You are coming to tell me something that my soul longs for."

"It is true I have something very weighty to tell you--something I
trust that you will rejoice in," said Deronda, on his guard against the
probability that Mordecai had been preparing himself for something
quite different from the fact.

"It is all revealed--it is made clear to you," said Mordecai, more
eagerly, leaning forward with clasped hands. "You are even as my
brother that sucked the breasts of my mother--the heritage is
yours--there is no doubt to divide us."

"I have learned nothing new about myself," said Deronda. The
disappointment was inevitable: it was better not to let the feeling be
strained longer in a mistaken hope.

Mordecai sank back in his chair, unable for the moment to care what was
really coming. The whole day his mind had been in a state of tension
toward one fulfillment. The reaction was sickening and he closed his
eyes.

"Except," Deronda went on gently, after a pause,--"except that I had
really some time ago come into another sort of hidden connection with
you, besides what you have spoken of as existing in your own feeling."

The eyes were not opened, but there was a fluttering in the lids.

"I had made the acquaintance of one in whom you are interested."

"One who is closely related to your departed mother," Deronda went on
wishing to make the disclosure gradual; but noticing a shrinking
movement in Mordecai, he added--"whom she and you held dear above all
others."

Mordecai, with a sudden start, laid a spasmodic grasp on Deronda's
wrist; there was a great terror in him. And Deronda divined it. A
tremor was perceptible in his clear tones as he said,

"What was prayed for has come to pass: Mirah has been delivered from
evil."

Mordecai's grasp relaxed a little, but he was panting with a tearless
sob.

Deronda went on: "Your sister is worthy of the mother you honored."

He waited there, and Mordecai, throwing himself backward in his chair,
again closed his eyes, uttering himself almost inaudibly for some
minutes in Hebrew, and then subsiding into a happy-looking silence.
Deronda, watching the expression in his uplifted face, could have
imagined that he was speaking with some beloved object: there was a new
suffused sweetness, something like that on the faces of the beautiful
dead. For the first time Deronda thought he discerned a family
resemblance to Mirah.

Presently when Mordecai was ready to listen, the rest was told. But in
accounting for Mirah's flight he made the statement about the father's
conduct as vague as he could, and threw the emphasis on her yearning to
come to England as the place where she might find her mother. Also he
kept back the fact of Mirah's intention to drown herself, and his own
part in rescuing her; merely describing the home she had found with
friends of his, whose interest in her and efforts for her he had
shared. What he dwelt on finally was Mirah's feeling about her mother
and brother; and in relation to this he tried to give every detail.

"It was in search of them," said Deronda, smiling, "that I turned into
this house: the name Ezra Cohen was just then the most interesting name
in the world to me. I confess I had fear for a long while. Perhaps you
will forgive me now for having asked you that question about the elder
Mrs. Cohen's daughter. I cared very much what I should find Mirah's
friends to be. But I had found a brother worthy of her when I knew that
her Ezra was disguised under the name of Mordecai."

"Mordecai is really my name--Ezra Mordecai Cohen."

"Is there any kinship between this family and yours?" said Deronda.

"Only the kinship of Israel. My soul clings to these people, who have
sheltered me and given me succor out of the affection that abides in
Jewish hearts, as sweet odor in things long crushed and hidden from the
outer air. It is good for me to bear with their ignorance and be bound
to them in gratitude, that I may keep in mind the spiritual poverty of
the Jewish million, and not put impatient knowledge in the stead of
loving wisdom."

"But you don't feel bound to continue with them now there is a closer
tie to draw you?" said Deronda, not without fear that he might find an
obstacle to overcome. "It seems to me right now--is it not?--that you
should live with your sister; and I have prepared a home to take you to
in the neighborhood of her friends, that she may join you there. Pray
grant me this wish. It will enable me to be with you often in the hours
when Mirah is obliged to leave you. That is my selfish reason. But the
chief reason is, that Mirah will desire to watch over you, and that you
ought to give her the guardianship of a brother's presence. You shall
have books about you. I shall want to learn of you, and to take you out
to see the river and trees. And you will have the rest and comfort that
you will be more and more in need of--nay, that I need for you. This is
the claim I make on you, now that we have found each other."

Deronda spoke in a tone of earnest, affectionate pleading, such as he
might have used to a venerated elder brother. Mordecai's eyes were
fixed on him with a listening contemplation, and he was silent for a
little while after Deronda had ceased to speak. Then he said, with an
almost reproachful emphasis,

"And you would have me hold it doubtful whether you were born a Jew!
Have we not from the first touched each other with invisible
fibres--have we not quivered together like the leaves from a common
stem with stirring from a common root? I know what I am outwardly, I am
one among the crowd of poor--I am stricken, I am dying. But our souls
know each other. They gazed in silence as those who have long been
parted and meet again, but when they found voice they were assured, and
all their speech is understanding. The life of Israel is in your veins."

Deronda sat perfectly still, but felt his face tingling. It was
impossible either to deny or assent. He waited, hoping that Mordecai
would presently give him a more direct answer. And after a pause of
meditation he did say, firmly,

"What you wish of me I will do. And our mother--may the blessing of the
Eternal be with her in our souls!--would have wished it too. I will
accept what your loving kindness has prepared, and Mirah's home shall
be mine." He paused a moment, and then added in a more melancholy tone,
"But I shall grieve to part from these parents and the little ones. You
must tell them, for my heart would fail me."

"I felt that you would want me to tell them. Shall we go now at once?"
said Deronda, much relieved by this unwavering compliance.

"Yes; let us not defer it. It must be done," said Mordecai, rising with
the air of a man who has to perform a painful duty. Then came, as an
afterthought, "But do not dwell on my sister more than is needful."

When they entered the parlor he said to the alert Jacob, "Ask your
father to come, and tell Sarah to mind the shop. My friend has
something to say," he continued, turning to the elder Mrs. Cohen. It
seemed part of Mordecai's eccentricity that he should call this
gentleman his friend; and the two women tried to show their better
manners by warm politeness in begging Deronda to seat himself in the
best place.

When Cohen entered with a pen behind his ear, he rubbed his hands and
said with loud satisfaction, "Well, sir! I'm glad you're doing us the
honor to join our family party again. We are pretty comfortable, I
think."

He looked round with shiny gladness. And when all were seated on the
hearth the scene was worth peeping in upon: on one side Baby under her
scarlet quilt in the corner being rocked by the young mother, and
Adelaide Rebekah seated on the grandmother's knee; on the other, Jacob
between his father's legs; while the two markedly different figures of
Deronda and Mordecai were in the middle--Mordecai a little backward in
the shade, anxious to conceal his agitated susceptibility to what was
going on around him. The chief light came from the fire, which brought
out the rich color on a depth of shadow, and seemed to turn into speech
the dark gems of eyes that looked at each other kindly.

"I have just been telling Mordecai of an event that makes a great
change in his life," Deronda began, "but I hope you will agree with me
that it is a joyful one. Since he thinks of you as his best friends, he
wishes me to tell you for him at once."

"Relations with money, sir?" burst in Cohen, feeling a power of
divination which it was a pity to nullify by waiting for the fact.

"No; not exactly," said Deronda, smiling. "But a very precious relation
wishes to be reunited to him--a very good and lovely young sister, who
will care for his comfort in every way."

"Married, sir?"

"No, not married."

"But with a maintenance?"

"With talents which will secure her a maintenance. A home is already
provided for Mordecai."

There was silence for a moment or two before the grandmother said in a
wailing tone,

"Well, well! and so you're going away from us, Mordecai."

"And where there's no children as there is here," said the mother,
catching the wail.

"No Jacob, and no Adelaide, and no Eugenie!" wailed the grandmother
again.

"Ay, ay, Jacob's learning 'ill all wear out of him. He must go to
school. It'll be hard times for Jacob," said Cohen, in a tone of
decision.

In the wide-open ears of Jacob his father's words sounded like a doom,
giving an awful finish to the dirge-like effect of the whole
announcement. His face had been gathering a wondering incredulous
sorrow at the notion of Mordecai's going away: he was unable to imagine
the change as anything lasting; but at the mention of "hard times for
Jacob" there was no further suspense of feeling, and he broke forth in
loud lamentation. Adelaide Rebekah always cried when her brother cried,
and now began to howl with astonishing suddenness, whereupon baby
awaking contributed angry screams, and required to be taken out of the
cradle. A great deal of hushing was necessary, and Mordecai feeling the
cries pierce him, put out his arms to Jacob, who in the midst of his
tears and sobs was turning his head right and left for general
observation. His father, who had been--saying, "Never mind, old man;
you shall go to the riders," now released him, and he went to Mordecai,
who clasped him, and laid his cheek on the little black head without
speaking. But Cohen, sensible that the master of the family must make
some apology for all this weakness, and that the occasion called for a
speech, addressed Deronda with some elevation of pitch, squaring his
elbows and resting a hand on each knee:,

"It's not as we're the people to grudge anybody's good luck, sir, or
the portion of their cup being made fuller, as I may say. I'm not an
envious man, and if anybody offered to set up Mordecai in a shop of my
sort two doors lower down, _I_ shouldn't make wry faces about it. I'm
not one of them that had need have a poor opinion of themselves, and be
frightened at anybody else getting a chance. If I'm offal, let a wise
man come and tell me, for I've never heard it yet. And in point of
business, I'm not a class of goods to be in danger. If anybody takes to
rolling me, I can pack myself up like a caterpillar, and find my feet
when I'm let alone. And though, as I may say, you're taking some of our
good works from us, which is property bearing interest, I'm not saying
but we can afford that, though my mother and my wife had the good will
to wish and do for Mordecai to the last; and a Jew must not be like a
servant who works for reward--though I see nothing against a reward if
I can get it. And as to the extra outlay in schooling, I'm neither poor
nor greedy--I wouldn't hang myself for sixpence, nor half a crown
neither. But the truth of it is, the women and children are fond of
Mordecai. You may partly see how it is, sir, by your own sense. A
Jewish man is bound to thank God, day by day, that he was not made a
woman; but a woman has to thank God that He has made her according to
His will. And we all know what He has made her--a child-bearing,
tender-hearted thing is the woman of our people. Her children are
mostly stout, as I think you'll say Addy's are, and she's not mushy,
but her heart is tender. So you must excuse present company, sir, for
not being glad all at once. And as to this young lady--for by what you
say 'young lady' is the proper term"--Cohen here threw some additional
emphasis into his look and tone--"we shall all be glad for Mordecai's
sake by-and-by, when we cast up our accounts and see where we are."

Before Deronda could summon any answer to this oddly mixed speech,
Mordecai exclaimed,

"Friends, friends! For food and raiment and shelter I would not have
sought better than you have given me. You have sweetened the morsel
with love; and what I thought of as a joy that would be left to me even
in the last months of my waning strength was to go on teaching the lad.
But now I am as one who had clad himself beforehand in his shroud, and
used himself to making the grave his bed, when the divine command
sounded in his ears, 'Arise, and go forth; the night is not yet come.'
For no light matter would I have turned away from your kindness to take
another's. But it has been taught us, as you know, that _the reward of
one duty is the power to fulfill another_--so said Ben Azai. You have
made your duty to one of the poor among your brethren a joy to you and
me; and your reward shall be that you will not rest without the joy of
like deeds in the time to come. And may not Jacob come and visit me?"

Mordecai had turned with this question to Deronda, who said,

"Surely that can be managed. It is no further than Brompton."

Jacob, who had been gradually calmed by the need to hear what was going
forward, began now to see some daylight on the future, the word "visit"
having the lively charm of cakes and general relaxation at his
grandfather's, the dealer in knives. He danced away from Mordecai, and
took up a station of survey in the middle of the hearth with his hands
in his knickerbockers.

"Well," said the grandmother, with a sigh of resignation, "I hope
there'll be nothing in the way of your getting _kosher_ meat, Mordecai.
For you'll have to trust to those you live with."

"That's all right, that's all right, you may be sure, mother," said
Cohen, as if anxious to cut off inquiry on matters in which he was
uncertain of the guest's position. "So, sir," he added, turning with a
look of amused enlightenment to Deronda, "it was better than learning
you had to talk to Mordecai about! I wondered to myself at the time. I
thought somehow there was a something."

"Mordecai will perhaps explain to you how it was that I was seeking
him," said Deronda, feeling that he had better go, and rising as he
spoke.

It was agreed that he should come again and the final move be made on
the next day but one; but when he was going Mordecai begged to walk
with him to the end of the street, and wrapped himself in coat and
comforter. It was a March evening, and Deronda did not mean to let him
go far, but he understood the wish to be outside the house with him in
communicative silence, after the exciting speech that had been filling
the last hour. No word was spoken until Deronda had proposed parting,
when he said,

"Mirah would wish to thank the Cohens for their goodness. You would
wish her to do so--to come and see them, would you not?"

Mordecai did not answer immediately, but at length said,

"I cannot tell. I fear not. There is a family sorrow, and the sight of
my sister might be to them as the fresh bleeding of wounds. There is a
daughter and sister who will never be restored as Mirah is. But who
knows the pathways? We are all of us denying or fulfilling prayers--and
men in their careless deeds walk amidst invisible outstretched arms and
pleadings made in vain. In my ears I have the prayers of generations
past and to come. My life is as nothing to me but the beginning of
fulfilment. And yet I am only another prayer--which you will fulfil."

Deronda pressed his hand, and they parted.




CHAPTER XLVII.

  "And you must love him ere to you
  He will seem worthy of your love."
                        --WORDSWORTH.


One might be tempted to envy Deronda providing new clothes for
Mordecai, and pleasing himself as if he were sketching a picture in
imagining the effect of the fine gray flannel shirts and a
dressing-gown very much like a Franciscan's brown frock, with
Mordecai's head and neck above them. Half his pleasure was the sense of
seeing Mirah's brother through her eyes, and securing her fervid joy
from any perturbing impression. And yet, after he had made all things
ready, he was visited with doubt whether he were not mistaking her, and
putting the lower effect for the higher: was she not just as capable as
he himself had been of feeling the impressive distinction in her
brother all the more for that aspect of poverty which was among the
memorials of his past? But there were the Meyricks to be propitiated
toward this too Judaic brother; and Deronda detected himself piqued
into getting out of sight everything that might feed the ready
repugnance in minds unblessed with that precious "seeing," that bathing
of all objects in a solemnity as of sun-set glow, which is begotten of
a loving reverential emotion.

And his inclination would have been the more confirmed if he had heard
the dialogue round Mrs. Meyrick's fire late in the evening, after Mirah
had gone to her room. Hans, settled now in his Chelsea rooms, had
stayed late, and Mrs. Meyrick, poking the fire into a blaze, said,

"Now, Kate, put out your candle, and all come round the fire cosily.
Hans, dear, do leave off laughing at those poems for the ninety-ninth
time, and come too. I have something wonderful to tell."

"As if I didn't know that, ma. I have seen it in the corner of your eye
ever so long, and in your pretense of errands," said Kate, while the
girls came up to put their feet on the fender, and Hans, pushing his
chair near them, sat astride it, resting his fists and chin on the back.

"Well, then, if you are so wise, perhaps you know that Mirah's brother
is found!" said Mrs. Meyrick, in her clearest accents.

"Oh, confound it!" said Hans, in the same moment.

"Hans, that is wicked," said Mab. "Suppose we had lost you?"

"I _cannot_ help being rather sorry," said Kate. "And her
mother?--where is she?"

"Her mother is dead."

"I hope the brother is not a bad man," said Amy.

"Nor a fellow all smiles and jewelry--a Crystal Palace Assyrian with a
hat on," said Hans, in the worst humor.

"Were there ever such unfeeling children?" said Mrs. Meyrick, a little
strengthened by the need for opposition. "You don't think the least bit
of Mirah's joy in the matter."

"You know, ma, Mirah hardly remembers her brother," said Kate.

"People who are lost for twelve years should never come back again,"
said Hans. "They are always in the way."

"Hans!" said Mrs. Meyrick, reproachfully. "If you had lost me for
_twenty_ years, I should have thought--"

"I said twelve years," Hans broke in. "Anywhere about twelve years is
the time at which lost relations should keep out of the way."

"Well, but it's nice finding people--there is something to tell," said
Mab, clasping her knees. "Did Prince Camaralzaman find him?"

Then Mrs. Meyrick, in her neat, narrative way, told all she knew
without interruption. "Mr. Deronda has the highest admiration for him,"
she ended--"seems quite to look up to him. And he says Mirah is just
the sister to understand this brother."

"Deronda is getting perfectly preposterous about those Jews," said Hans
with disgust, rising and setting his chair away with a bang. "He wants
to do everything he can to encourage Mirah in her prejudices."

"Oh, for shame, Hans!--to speak in that way of Mr. Deronda," said Mab.
And Mrs. Meyrick's face showed something like an under-current of
expression not allowed to get to the surface.

"And now we shall never be all together," Hans went on, walking about
with his hands thrust into the pockets of his brown velveteen coat,
"but we must have this prophet Elijah to tea with us, and Mirah will
think of nothing but sitting on the ruins of Jerusalem. She will be
spoiled as an artist--mind that--she will get as narrow as a nun.
Everything will be spoiled--our home and everything. I shall take to
drinking."

"Oh, really, Hans," said Kate, impatiently. "I do think men are the
most contemptible animals in all creation. Every one of them must have
everything to his mind, else he is unbearable."

"Oh, oh, oh, it's very dreadful!" cried Mab. "I feel as if ancient
Nineveh were come again."

"I should like to know what is the good of having gone to the
university and knowing everything, if you are so childish, Hans," said
Amy. "You ought to put up with a man that Providence sends you to be
kind to. _We_ shall have to put up with him."

"I hope you will all of you like the new Lamentations of Jeremiah--'to
be continued in our next'--that's all," said Hans, seizing his
wide-awake. "It's no use being one thing more than another if one has
to endure the company of those men with a fixed idea, staring blankly
at you, and requiring all your remarks to be small foot-notes to their
text. If you're to be under a petrifying wall, you'd better be an old
boot. I don't feel myself an old boot." Then abruptly, "Good night,
little mother," bending to kiss her brow in a hasty, desperate manner,
and condescendingly, on his way to the door, "Good-night, girls."

"Suppose Mirah knew how you are behaving," said Kate. But her answer
was a slam of the door. "I _should_ like to see Mirah when Mr. Deronda
tells her," she went on to her mother. "I know she will look so
beautiful."

But Deronda, on second thoughts, had written a letter, which Mrs.
Meyrick received the next morning, begging her to make the revelation
instead of waiting for him, not giving the real reason--that he shrank
from going again through a narrative in which he seemed to be making
himself important and giving himself a character of general
beneficence--but saying that he wished to remain with Mordecai while
Mrs. Meyrick would bring Mirah on what was to be understood as a visit,
so that there might be a little interval before that change of abode
which he expected that Mirah herself would propose.

Deronda secretly felt some wondering anxiety how far Mordecai, after
years of solitary preoccupation with ideas likely to have become the
more exclusive from continual diminution of bodily strength, would
allow him to feel a tender interest in his sister over and above the
rendering of pious duties. His feeling for the Cohens, and especially
for little Jacob, showed a persistent activity of affection; but these
objects had entered into his daily life for years; and Deronda felt it
noticeable that Mordecai asked no new questions about Mirah,
maintaining, indeed, an unusual silence on all subjects, and appearing
simply to submit to the changes that were coming over his personal
life. He donned the new clothes obediently, but said afterward to
Deronda, with a faint smile, "I must keep my old garments by me for a
remembrance." And when they were seated, awaiting Mirah, he uttered no
word, keeping his eyelids closed, but yet showing restless feeling in
his face and hands. In fact, Mordecai was undergoing that peculiar
nervous perturbation only known to those whose minds, long and
habitually moving with strong impetus in one current, are suddenly
compelled into a new or reopened channel. Susceptible people, whose
strength has been long absorbed by dormant bias, dread an interview
that imperiously revives the past, as they would dread a threatening
illness. Joy may be there, but joy, too, is terrible.

Deronda felt the infection of excitement, and when he heard the ring at
the door, he went out, not knowing exactly why, that he might see and
greet Mirah beforehand. He was startled to find that she had on the hat
and cloak in which he had first seen her--the memorable cloak that had
once been wetted for a winding-sheet. She had come down-stairs equipped
in this way; and when Mrs. Meyrick said, in a tone of question, "You
like to go in that dress, dear?" she answered, "My brother is poor, and
I want to look as much like him as I can, else he may feel distant from
me"--imagining that she should meet him in the workman's dress. Deronda
could not make any remark, but felt secretly rather ashamed of his own
fastidious arrangements. They shook hands silently, for Mirah looked
pale and awed.

When Deronda opened the door for her, Mordecai had risen, and had his
eyes turned toward it with an eager gaze. Mirah took only two or three
steps, and then stood still. They looked at each other, motionless. It
was less their own presence that they felt than another's; they were
meeting first in memories, compared with which touch was no union.
Mirah was the first to break the silence, standing where she was.

"Ezra," she said, in exactly the same tone as when she was telling of
her mother's call to him.

Mordecai with a sudden movement advanced and laid his hand on her
shoulders. He was the head taller, and looked down at her tenderly
while he said, "That was our mother's voice. You remember her calling
me?"

"Yes, and how you answered her--'Mother!'--and I knew you loved her."
Mirah threw her arms round her brother's neck, clasped her little hands
behind it, and drew down his face, kissing it with childlike
lavishness, Her hat fell backward on the ground and disclosed all her
curls.

"Ah, the dear head, the dear head?" said Mordecai, in a low loving
tone, laying his thin hand gently on the curls.

"You are very ill, Ezra," said Mirah, sadly looking at him with more
observation.

"Yes, dear child, I shall not be long with you in the body," was the
quiet answer.

"Oh, I will love you and we will talk to each other," said Mirah, with
a sweet outpouring of her words, as spontaneous as bird-notes. "I will
tell you everything, and you will teach me:--you will teach me to be a
good Jewess--what she would have liked me to be. I shall always be with
you when I am not working. For I work now. I shall get money to keep
us. Oh, I have had such good friends."

Mirah until now had quite forgotten that any one was by, but here she
turned with the prettiest attitude, keeping one hand on her brother's
arm while she looked at Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda. The little mother's
happy emotion in witnessing this meeting of brother and sister had
already won her to Mordecai, who seemed to her really to have more
dignity and refinement than she had felt obliged to believe in from
Deronda's account.

"See this dear lady!" said Mirah. "I was a stranger, a poor wanderer,
and she believed in me, and has treated me as a daughter. Please give
my brother your hand," she added, beseechingly, taking Mrs. Meyrick's
hand and putting it in Mordecai's, then pressing them both with her own
and lifting them to her lips.

"The Eternal Goodness has been with you," said Mordecai. "You have
helped to fulfill our mother's prayer."

"I think we will go now, shall we?--and return later," said Deronda,
laying a gentle pressure on Mrs. Meyrick's arm, and she immediately
complied. He was afraid of any reference to the facts about himself
which he had kept back from Mordecai, and he felt no uneasiness now in
the thought of the brother and sister being alone together.




CHAPTER XLVIII.

    'Tis hard and ill-paid task to order all things beforehand by the rule
    of our own security, as is well hinted by Machiavelli concerning
    Caesar Borgia, who, saith he, had thought of all that might occur on
    his father's death, and had provided against every evil chance save
    only one: it had never come into his mind that when his father died,
    his own death would quickly follow.


Grandcourt's importance as a subject of this realm was of the grandly
passive kind which consists in the inheritance of land. Political and
social movements touched him only through the wire of his rental, and
his most careful biographer need not have read up on
Schleswig-Holstein, the policy of Bismarck, trade-unions, household
suffrage, or even the last commercial panic. He glanced over the best
newspaper columns on these topics, and his views on them can hardly be
said to have wanted breadth, since he embraced all Germans, all
commercial men, and all voters liable to use the wrong kind of soap,
under the general epithet of "brutes;" but he took no action on these
much-agitated questions beyond looking from under his eyelids at any
man who mentioned them, and retaining a silence which served to shake
the opinions of timid thinkers.

But Grandcourt, within his own sphere of interest, showed some of the
qualities which have entered into triumphal diplomacy of the wildest
continental sort.

No movement of Gwendolen in relation to Deronda escaped him. He would
have denied that he was jealous; because jealousy would have implied
some doubt of his own power to hinder what he had determined against.
That his wife should have more inclination to another man's society
than to his own would not pain him: what he required was that she
should be as fully aware as she would have been of a locked hand-cuff,
that her inclination was helpless to decide anything in contradiction
with his resolve. However much of vacillating whim there might have
been in his entrance on matrimony, there was no vacillating in his
interpretation of the bond. He had not repented of his marriage; it had
really brought more of aim into his life, new objects to exert his will
upon; and he had not repented of his choice. His taste was fastidious,
and Gwendolen satisfied it: he would not have liked a wife who had not
received some elevation of rank from him; nor one who did not command
admiration by her mien and beauty; nor one whose nails were not of the
right shape; nor one the lobe of whose ear was at all too large and
red; nor one who, even if her nails and ears were right, was at the
same time a ninny, unable to make spirited answers. These requirements
may not seem too exacting to refined contemporaries whose own ability
to fall in love has been held in suspense for lack of indispensable
details; but fewer perhaps may follow him in his contentment that his
wife should be in a temper which would dispose her to fly out if she
dared, and that she should have been urged into marrying him by other
feelings than passionate attachment. Still, for those who prefer
command to love, one does not see why the habit of mind should change
precisely at the point of matrimony.

Grandcourt did not feel that he had chosen the wrong wife; and having
taken on himself the part of husband, he was not going in any way to be
fooled, or allow himself to be seen in a light that could be regarded
as pitiable. This was his state of mind--not jealousy; still, his
behavior in some respects was as like jealousy as yellow is to yellow,
which color we know may be the effect of very different causes.

He had come up to town earlier than usual because he wished to be on
the spot for legal consultation as to the arrangements of his will, the
transference of mortgages, and that transaction with his uncle about
the succession to Diplow, which the bait of ready money, adroitly
dangled without importunity, had finally won him to agree upon. But
another acceptable accompaniment of his being in town was the
presentation of himself with the beautiful bride whom he had chosen to
marry in spite of what other people might have expected of him. It is
true that Grandcourt went about with the sense that he did not care a
languid curse for any one's admiration: but this state of not-caring,
just as much as desire, required its related object--namely, a world of
admiring or envying spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily
at smiling persons--the persons must be and they must smile--a
rudimentary truth which is surely forgotten by those who complain of
mankind as generally contemptible, since any other aspect of the race
must disappoint the voracity of their contempt. Grandcourt, in town for
the first time with his wife, had his non-caring abstinence from curses
enlarged and diversified by splendid receptions, by conspicuous rides
and drives, by presentations of himself with her on all distinguished
occasions. He wished her to be sought after; he liked that "fellows"
should be eager to talk with her and escort her within his observation;
there was even a kind of lofty coquetry on her part that he would not
have objected to. But what he did not like were her ways in relation to
Deronda.

After the musical party at Lady Mallinger's, when Grandcourt had
observed the dialogue on the settee as keenly as Hans had done, it was
characteristic of him that he named Deronda for invitation along with
the Mallingers, tenaciously avoiding the possible suggestion to
anybody concerned that Deronda's presence or absence could be of the
least importance to him; and he made no direct observation to Gwendolen
on her behavior that evening, lest the expression of his disgust should
be a little too strong to satisfy his own pride. But a few days
afterward he remarked, without being careful of the _à propos_,

"Nothing makes a woman more of a gawky than looking out after people
and showing tempers in public. A woman ought to have good manners. Else
it's intolerable to appear with her."

Gwendolen made the expected application, and was not without alarm at
the notion of being a gawky. For she, too, with her melancholy distaste
for things, preferred that her distaste should include admirers. But
the sense of overhanging rebuke only intensified the strain of
expectation toward any meeting with Deronda. The novelty and excitement
of her town life was like the hurry and constant change of foreign
travel; whatever might be the inward despondency, there was a programme
to be fulfilled, not without gratification to many-sided self. But, as
always happens with a deep interest, the comparatively rare occasions
on which she could exchange any words with Deronda had a diffusive
effect in her consciousness, magnifying their communication with each
other, and therefore enlarging the place she imagined it to have in his
mind. How could Deronda help this? He certainly did not avoid her;
rather he wished to convince her by every delicate indirect means that
her confidence in him had not been indiscreet since it had not lowered
his respect. Moreover he liked being near her--how could it be
otherwise? She was something more than a problem: she was a lovely
woman, for the turn of whose mind and fate he had a care which, however
futile it might be, kept soliciting him as a responsibility, perhaps
all the more that, when he dared to think of his own future, he saw it
lying far away from this splendid sad-hearted creature, who, because he
had once been impelled to arrest her attention momentarily, as he might
have seized her arm with warning to hinder her from stepping where
there was danger, had turned to him with a beseeching persistent need.

One instance in which Grandcourt stimulated a feeling in Gwendolen that
he would have liked to suppress without seeming to care about it, had
relation to Mirah. Gwendolen's inclination lingered over the project of
the singing lessons as a sort of obedience to Deronda's advice, but day
followed day with that want of perceived leisure which belongs to lives
where there is no work to mark off intervals; and the continual
liability to Grandcourt's presence and surveillance seemed to flatten
every effort to the level of the boredom which his manner expressed;
his negative mind was as diffusive as fog, clinging to all objects, and
spoiling all contact.

But one morning when they were breakfasting, Gwendolen, in a recurrent
fit of determination to exercise the old spirit, said, dallying
prettily over her prawns without eating them,

"I think of making myself accomplished while we are in town, and having
singing lessons."

"Why?" said Grandcourt, languidly.

"Why?" echoed Gwendolen, playing at sauciness; "because I can't eat
_pâté de foie gras_ to make me sleepy, and I can't smoke, and I can't
go to the club to make me like to come away again--I want a variety of
_ennui_. What would be the most convenient time, when you are busy with
your lawyers and people, for me to have lessons from that little
Jewess, whose singing is getting all the rage."

"Whenever you like," said Grandcourt, pushing away his plate, and
leaning back in his chair while he looked at her with his most
lizard-like expression and, played with the ears of the tiny spaniel on
his lap (Gwendolen had taken a dislike to the dogs because they fawned
on him).

Then he said, languidly, "I don't see why a lady should sing. Amateurs
make fools of themselves. A lady can't risk herself in that way in
company. And one doesn't want to hear squalling in private."

"I like frankness: that seems to me a husband's great charm," said
Gwendolen, with her little upward movement of her chin, as she turned
her eyes away from his, and lifting a prawn before her, looked at the
boiled ingenuousness of its eyes as preferable to the lizard's. "But;"
she added, having devoured her mortification, "I suppose you don't
object to Miss Lapidoth's singing at our party on the fourth? I thought
of engaging her. Lady Brackenshaw had her, you know: and the Raymonds,
who are very particular about their music. And Mr. Deronda, who is a
musician himself and a first-rate judge, says there is no singing in
such good taste as hers for a drawing-room. I think his opinion is an
authority."

She meant to sling a small stone at her husband in that way.

"It's very indecent of Deronda to go about praising that girl," said
Grandcourt in a tone of indifference.

"Indecent!" exclaimed Gwendolen, reddening and looking at him again,
overcome by startled wonder, and unable to reflect on the probable
falsity of the phrase--"to go about praising."

"Yes; and especially when she is patronized by Lady Mallinger. He ought
to hold his tongue about her. Men can see what is his relation to her."

"Men who judge of others by themselves," said Gwendolen, turning white
after her redness, and immediately smitten with a dread of her own
words.

"Of course. And a woman should take their judgment--else she is likely
to run her head into the wrong place," said Grandcourt, conscious of
using pinchers on that white creature. "I suppose you take Deronda for
a saint."

"Oh dear no!" said Gwendolen, summoning desperately her almost
miraculous power of self-control, and speaking in a high hard tone.
"Only a little less of a monster."

She rose, pushed her chair away without hurry, and walked out of the
room with something like the care of a man who is afraid of showing
that he has taken more wine than usual. She turned the keys inside her
dressing-room doors, and sat down for some time looking pale and quiet
as when she was leaving the breakfast-room. Even in the moments after
reading the poisonous letter she had hardly had more cruel sensations
than now; for emotion was at the acute point, where it is not
distinguishable from sensation. Deronda unlike what she had believed
him to be, was an image which affected her as a hideous apparition
would have done, quite apart from the way in which it was produced. It
had taken hold of her as pain before she could consider whether it were
fiction or truth; and further to hinder her power of resistance came
the sudden perception, how very slight were the grounds of her faith in
Deronda--how little she knew of his life--how childish she had been in
her confidence. His rebukes and his severity to her began to seem
odious, along with all the poetry and lofty doctrine in the world,
whatever it might be; and the grave beauty of his face seemed the most
unpleasant mask that the common habits of men could put on.

All this went on in her with the rapidity of a sick dream; and her
start into resistance was very much like a waking. Suddenly from out
the gray sombre morning there came a stream of sunshine, wrapping her
in warmth and light where she sat in stony stillness. She moved gently
and looked round her--there was a world outside this bad dream, and the
dream proved nothing; she rose, stretching her arms upward and clasping
her hands with her habitual attitude when she was seeking relief from
oppressive feeling, and walked about the room in this flood of sunbeams.

"It is not true! What does it matter whether _he_ believes it or not?"
This is what she repeated to herself--but this was not her faith come
back again; it was only the desperate cry of faith, finding suffocation
intolerable. And how could she go on through the day in this state?
With one of her impetuous alternations, her imagination flew to wild
actions by which she would convince herself of what she wished: she
would go to Lady Mallinger and question her about Mirah; she would
write to Deronda and upbraid him with making the world all false and
wicked and hopeless to her--to him she dared pour out all the bitter
indignation of her heart. No; she would go to Mirah. This last form
taken by her need was more definitely practicable, and quickly became
imperious. No matter what came of it. She had the pretext of asking
Mirah to sing at her party on the fourth. What was she going to say
beside? How satisfy? She did not foresee--she could not wait to
foresee. If that idea which was maddening her had been a living thing,
she would have wanted to throttle it without waiting to foresee what
would come of the act. She rang her bell and asked if Mr. Grandcourt
were gone out: finding that he was, she ordered the carriage, and began
to dress for the drive; then she went down, and walked about the large
drawing-room like an imprisoned dumb creature, not recognizing herself
in the glass panels, not noting any object around her in the painted
gilded prison. Her husband would probably find out where she had been,
and punish her in some way or other--no matter--she could neither
desire nor fear anything just now but the assurance that she had not
been deluding herself in her trust.

She was provided with Mirah's address. Soon she was on the way with all
the fine equipage necessary to carry about her poor uneasy heart,
depending in its palpitations on some answer or other to questioning
which she did not know how she should put. She was as heedless of what
happened before she found that Miss Lapidoth was at home, as one is of
lobbies and passages on the way to a court of justice--heedless of
everything till she was in a room where there were folding-doors, and
she heard Deronda's voice behind it. Doubtless the identification was
helped by forecast, but she was as certain of it as if she had seen
him. She was frightened at her own agitation, and began to unbutton her
gloves that she might button them again, and bite her lips over the
pretended difficulty, while the door opened, and Mirah presented
herself with perfect quietude and a sweet smile of recognition. There
was relief in the sight of her face, and Gwendolen was able to smile in
return, while she put out her hand in silence; and as she seated
herself, all the while hearing the voice, she felt some reflux of
energy in the confused sense that the truth could not be anything that
she dreaded. Mirah drew her chair very near, as if she felt that the
sound of the conversation should be subdued, and looked at her visitor
with placid expectation, while Gwendolen began in a low tone, with
something that seemed like bashfulness,

"Perhaps you wonder to see me--perhaps I ought to have written--but I
wished to make a particular request."

"I am glad to see you instead of having a letter," said Mirah,
wondering at the changed expression and manner of the "Vandyke
duchess," as Hans had taught her to call Gwendolen. The rich color and
the calmness of her own face were in strong contrast with the pale
agitated beauty under the plumed hat.

"I thought," Gwendolen went on--"at least I hoped, you would not object
to sing at our house on the 4th--in the evening--at a party like Lady
Brackenshaw's. I should be so much obliged."

"I shall be very happy to sing for you. At ten?" said Mirah, while
Gwendolen seemed to get more instead of less embarrassed.

"At ten, please," she answered; then paused, and felt that she had
nothing more to say. She could not go. It was impossible to rise and
say good-bye. Deronda's voice was in her ears. She must say it--she
could contrive no other sentence,

"Mr. Deronda is in the next room."

"Yes," said Mirah, in her former tone. "He is reading Hebrew with my
brother."

"You have a brother?" said Gwendolen, who had heard this from Lady
Mallinger, but had not minded it then.

"Yes, a dear brother who is ill-consumptive, and Mr. Deronda is the
best of friends to him, as he has been to me," said Mirah, with the
impulse that will not let us pass the mention of a precious person
indifferently.

"Tell me," said Gwendolen, putting her hand on Mirah's, and speaking
hardly above a whisper--"tell me--tell me the truth. You are sure he is
quite good. You know no evil of him. Any evil that people say of him is
false."

Could the proud-spirited woman have behaved more like a child? But the
strange words penetrated Mirah with nothing but a sense of solemnity
and indignation. With a sudden light in her eyes and a tremor in her
voice, she said,

"Who are the people that say evil of him? I would not believe any evil
of him, if an angel came to tell it me. He found me when I was so
miserable--I was going to drown myself; I looked so poor and forsaken;
you would have thought I was a beggar by the wayside. And he treated me
as if I had been a king's daughter. He took me to the best of women. He
found my brother for me. And he honors my brother--though he too was
poor--oh, almost as poor as he could be. And my brother honors him.
That is no light thing to say"--here Mirah's tone changed to one of
profound emphasis, and she shook her head backward: "for my brother is
very learned and great-minded. And Mr. Deronda says there are few men
equal to him." Some Jewish defiance had flamed into her indignant
gratitude and her anger could not help including Gwendolen since she
seemed to have doubted Deronda's goodness.

But Gwendolen was like one parched with thirst, drinking the fresh
water that spreads through the frame as a sufficient bliss. She did not
notice that Mirah was angry with her; she was not distinctly conscious
of anything but of the penetrating sense that Deronda and his life were
no more like her husband's conception than the morning in the horizon
was like the morning mixed with street gas. Even Mirah's words sank
into the indefiniteness of her relief. She could hardly have repeated
them, or said how her whole state of feeling was changed. She pressed
Mirah's hand, and said, "Thank you, thank you," in a hurried whisper,
then rose, and added, with only a hazy consciousness, "I must go, I
shall see you--on the fourth--I am so much obliged"--bowing herself out
automatically, while Mirah, opening the door for her, wondered at what
seemed a sudden retreat into chill loftiness.

Gwendolen, indeed, had no feeling to spare in any effusiveness toward
the creature who had brought her relief. The passionate need of
contradiction to Grandcourt's estimate of Deronda, a need which had
blunted her sensibility to everything else, was no sooner satisfied
than she wanted to be gone. She began to be aware that she was out of
place, and to dread Deronda's seeing her. And once in the carriage
again, she had the vision of what awaited her at home. When she drew up
before the door in Grosvenor Square, her husband was arriving with a
cigar between his fingers. He threw it away and handed her out,
accompanying her up-stairs. She turned into the drawing-room, lest he
should follow her farther and give her no place to retreat to; then she
sat down with a weary air, taking off her gloves, rubbing her hand over
her forehead, and making his presence as much of a cipher as possible.
But he sat, too, and not far from her--just in front, where to avoid
looking at him must have the emphasis of effort.

"May I ask where you have been at this extraordinary hour?" said
Grandcourt.

"Oh, yes; I have been to Miss Lapidoth's, to ask her to come and sing
for us," said Gwendolen, laying her gloves on the little table beside
her, and looking down at them.

"And to ask her about her relations with Deronda?" said Grandcourt,
with the coldest possible sneer in his low voice which in poor
Gwendolen's ear was diabolical.

For the first time since their marriage she flashed out upon him
without inward check. Turning her eyes full on his she said, in a
biting tone,

"Yes; and what you said is false--a low, wicked falsehood."

"She told you so--did she?" returned Grandcourt, with a more thoroughly
distilled sneer.

Gwendolen was mute. The daring anger within her was turned into the
rage of dumbness. What reasons for her belief could she give? All the
reasons that seemed so strong and living within her--she saw them
suffocated and shrivelled up under her husband's breath. There was no
proof to give, but her own impression, which would seem to him her own
folly. She turned her head quickly away from him and looked angrily
toward the end of the room: she would have risen, but he was in her way.

Grandcourt saw his advantage. "It's of no consequence so far as her
singing goes," he said, in his superficial drawl. "You can have her to
sing, if you like." Then, after a pause, he added in his lowest
imperious tone, "But you will please to observe that you are not to go
near that house again. As my wife, you must take my word about what is
proper for you. When you undertook to be Mrs. Grandcourt, you undertook
not to make a fool of yourself. You have been making a fool of yourself
this morning; and if you were to go on as you have begun, you might
soon get yourself talked of at the clubs in a way you would not like.
What do _you_ know about the world? You have married _me_, and must be
guided by my opinion."

Every slow sentence of that speech had a terrific mastery in it for
Gwendolen's nature. If the low tones had come from a physician telling
her that her symptoms were those of a fatal disease, and
prognosticating its course, she could not have been more helpless
against the argument that lay in it. But she was permitted to move now,
and her husband never again made any reference to what had occurred
this morning. He knew the force of his own words. If this white-handed
man with the perpendicular profile had been sent to govern a difficult
colony, he might have won reputation among his contemporaries. He had
certainly ability, would have understood that it was safer to
exterminate than to cajole superseded proprietors, and would not have
flinched from making things safe in that way.

Gwendolen did not, for all this, part with her recovered
faith;--rather, she kept it with a more anxious tenacity, as a
Protestant of old kept his bible hidden or a Catholic his crucifix,
according to the side favored by the civil arm; and it was
characteristic of her that apart from the impression gained concerning
Deronda in that visit, her imagination was little occupied with Mirah
or the eulogised brother. The one result established for her was, that
Deronda had acted simply as a generous benefactor, and the phrase
"reading Hebrew" had fleeted unimpressively across her sense of
hearing, as a stray stork might have made its peculiar flight across
her landscape without rousing any surprised reflection on its natural
history.

But the issue of that visit, as it regarded her husband, took a
strongly active part in the process which made an habitual conflict
within her, and was the cause of some external change perhaps not
observed by any one except Deronda. As the weeks went on bringing
occasional transient interviews with her, he thought that he perceived
in her an intensifying of her superficial hardness and resolute
display, which made her abrupt betrayals of agitation the more marked
and disturbing to him.

In fact, she was undergoing a sort of discipline for the refractory
which, as little as possible like conversion, bends half the self with
a terrible strain, and exasperates the unwillingness of the other half.
Grandcourt had an active divination rather than discernment of
refractoriness in her, and what had happened about Mirah quickened his
suspicion that there was an increase of it dependent on the occasions
when she happened to see Deronda: there was some "confounded nonsense"
between them: he did not imagine it exactly as flirtation, and his
imagination in other branches was rather restricted; but it was
nonsense that evidently kept up a kind of simmering in her mind--an
inward action which might become disagreeable outward. Husbands in the
old time are known to have suffered from a threatening devoutness in
their wives, presenting itself first indistinctly as oddity, and ending
in that mild form of lunatic asylum, a nunnery: Grandcourt had a vague
perception of threatening moods in Gwendolen which the unity between
them in his views of marriage required him peremptorily to check. Among
the means he chose, one was peculiar, and was less ably calculated than
the speeches we have just heard.

He determined that she should know the main purport of the will he was
making, but he could not communicate this himself, because it involved
the fact of his relation to Mrs. Glasher and her children; and that
there should be any overt recognition of this between Gwendolen and
himself was supremely repugnant to him. Like all proud, closely-wrapped
natures, he shrank from explicitness and detail, even on trivialities,
if they were personal: a valet must maintain a strict reserve with him
on the subject of shoes and stockings. And clashing was intolerable to
him; his habitual want was to put collision out of the question by the
quiet massive pressure of his rule. But he wished Gwendolen to know
that before he made her an offer it was no secret to him that she was
aware of his relations with Lydia, her previous knowledge being the
apology for bringing the subject before her now. Some men in his place
might have thought of writing what he wanted her to know, in the form
of a letter. But Grandcourt hated writing: even writing a note was a
bore to him, and he had long been accustomed to have all his writing
done by Lush. We know that there are persons who will forego their own
obvious interest rather than do anything so disagreeable as to write
letters; and it is not probable that these imperfect utilitarians would
rush into manuscript and syntax on a difficult subject in order to save
another's feelings. To Grandcourt it did not even occur that he should,
would, or could write to Gwendolen the information in question; and the
only medium of communication he could use was Lush, who, to his mind,
was as much of an implement as pen and paper. But here too Grandcourt
had his reserves, and would not have uttered a word likely to encourage
Lush in an impudent sympathy with any supposed grievance in a marriage
which had been discommended by him. Who that has a confidant escapes
believing too little in his penetration, and too much in his
discretion? Grandcourt had always allowed Lush to know his external
affairs indiscriminately--irregularities, debts, want of ready money;
he had only used discrimination about what he would allow his confidant
to say to him; and he had been so accustomed to this human tool, that
the having him at call in London was a recovery of lost ease. It
followed that Lush knew all the provisions of the will more exactly
than they were known to the testator himself.

Grandcourt did not doubt that Gwendolen, since she was a woman who
could put two and two together, knew or suspected Lush to be the
contriver of her interview with Lydia, and that this was the reason why
her first request was for his banishment. But the bent of a woman's
inferences on mixed subjects which excites mixed passions is not
determined by her capacity for simple addition; and here Grandcourt
lacked the only organ of thinking that could have saved him from
mistake--namely, some experience of the mixed passions concerned. He
had correctly divined one-half of Gwendolen's dread--all that related
to her personal pride, and her perception that his will must conquer
hers; but the remorseful half, even if he had known of her broken
promise, was as much out of his imagination as the other side of the
moon. What he believed her to feel about Lydia was solely a tongue-tied
jealousy, and what he believed Lydia to have written with the jewels
was the fact that she had once been used to wearing them, with other
amenities such as he imputed to the intercourse with jealous women. He
had the triumphant certainty that he could aggravate the jealousy and
yet smite it with a more absolute dumbness. His object was to engage
all his wife's egoism on the same side as his own, and in his
employment of Lush he did not intend an insult to her: she ought to
understand that he was the only possible envoy. Grandcourt's view of
things was considerably fenced in by his general sense, that what
suited him others must put up with. There is no escaping the fact that
want of sympathy condemns us to corresponding stupidity. Mephistopheles
thrown upon real life, and obliged to manage his own plots, would
inevitably make blunders.

One morning he went to Gwendolen in the boudoir beyond the back
drawing-room, hat and gloves in hand, and said with his best-tempered,
most persuasive drawl, standing before her and looking down on her as
she sat with a book on her lap,

"A--Gwendolen, there's some business about property to be explained. I
have told Lush to come and explain it to you. He knows all about these
things. I am going out. He can come up now. He's the only person who
can explain. I suppose you'll not mind."

"You know that I do mind," said Gwendolen, angrily, starting up. "I
shall not see him." She showed the intention to dart away to the door.
Grandcourt was before her, with his back toward it. He was prepared for
her anger, and showed none in return, saying, with the same sort of
remonstrant tone that he might have used about an objection to dining
out,

"It's no use making a fuss. There are plenty of brutes in the world
that one has to talk to. People with any _savoir vivre_ don't make a
fuss about such things. Some business must be done. You can't expect
agreeable people to do it. If I employ Lush, the proper thing for you
is to take it as a matter of course. Not to make a fuss about it. Not
to toss your head and bite your lips about people of that sort."

The drawling and the pauses with which this speech was uttered gave
time for crowding reflections in Gwendolen, quelling her resistance.
What was there to be told her about property? This word had certain
dominant associations for her, first with her mother, then with Mrs.
Glasher and her children. What would be the use if she refused to see
Lush? Could she ask Grandcourt to tell her himself? That might be
intolerable, even if he consented, which it was certain he would not,
if he had made up his mind to the contrary. The humiliation of standing
an obvious prisoner, with her husband barring the door, was not to be
borne any longer, and she turned away to lean against a cabinet, while
Grandcourt again moved toward her.

"I have arranged for Lush to come up now, while I am out," he said,
after a long organ stop, during which Gwendolen made no sign. "Shall I
tell him he may come?"

Yet another pause before she could say "Yes"--her face turned obliquely
and her eyes cast down.

"I shall come back in time to ride, if you like to get ready," said
Grandcourt. No answer. "She is in a desperate rage," thought he. But
the rage was silent, and therefore not disagreeable to him. It followed
that he turned her chin and kissed her, while she still kept her
eyelids down, and she did not move them until he was on the other side
of the door.

What was she to do? Search where she would in her consciousness, she
found no plea to justify a plaint. Any romantic illusions she had had
in marrying this man had turned on her power of using him as she liked.
He was using her as he liked.

She sat awaiting the announcement of Lush as a sort of searing
operation that she had to go through. The facts that galled her
gathered a burning power when she thought of their lying in his mind.
It was all a part of that new gambling, in which the losing was not
simply a _minus_, but a terrible _plus_ that had never entered into her
reckoning.

Lush was neither quite pleased nor quite displeased with his task.
Grandcourt had said to him by way of conclusion, "Don't make yourself
more disagreeable than nature obliges you."

"That depends," thought Lush. But he said, "I will write a brief
abstract for Mrs. Grandcourt to read." He did not suggest that he
should make the whole communication in writing, which was a proof that
the interview did not wholly displease him.

Some provision was being made for himself in the will, and he had no
reason to be in a bad humor, even if a bad humor had been common with
him. He was perfectly convinced that he had penetrated all the secrets
of the situation; but he had no diabolical delight in it. He had only
the small movements of gratified self-loving resentment in discerning
that this marriage had fulfilled his own foresight in not being as
satisfactory as the supercilious young lady had expected it to be, and
as Grandcourt wished to feign that it was. He had no persistent spite
much stronger than what gives the seasoning of ordinary scandal to
those who repeat it and exaggerate it by their conjectures. With no
active compassion or good-will, he had just as little active
malevolence, being chiefly occupied in liking his particular pleasures,
and not disliking anything but what hindered those
pleasures--everything else ranking with the last murder and the last
_opéra bouffe_, under the head of things to talk about. Nevertheless,
he was not indifferent to the prospect of being treated uncivilly by a
beautiful woman, or to the counter-balancing fact that his present
commission put into his hands an official power of humiliating her. He
did not mean to use it needlessly; but there are some persons so gifted
in relation to us that their "How do you do?" seems charged with
offense.

By the time that Mr. Lush was announced, Gwendolen had braced herself
to a bitter resolve that he should not witness the slightest betrayal
of her feeling, whatever he might have to tell. She invited him to sit
down with stately quietude. After all, what was this man to her? He was
not in the least like her husband. Her power of hating a coarse,
familiar-mannered man, with clumsy hands, was now relaxed by the
intensity with which she hated his contrast.

He held a small paper folded in his hand while he spoke.

"I need hardly say that I should not have presented myself if Mr.
Grandcourt had not expressed a strong wish to that effect--as no doubt
he has mentioned to you."

From some voices that speech might have sounded entirely reverential,
and even timidly apologetic. Lush had no intention to the contrary, but
to Gwendolen's ear his words had as much insolence in them as his
prominent eyes, and the pronoun "you" was too familiar. He ought to
have addressed the folding-screen, and spoke of her as Mrs. Grandcourt.
She gave the smallest sign of a bow, and Lush went on, with a little
awkwardness, getting entangled in what is elegantly called tautology.

"My having been in Mr. Grandcourt's confidence for fifteen years or
more--since he was a youth, in fact--of course gives me a peculiar
position. He can speak to me of affairs that he could not mention to
any one else; and, in fact, he could not have employed any one else in
this affair. I have accepted the task out of friendship for him. Which
is my apology for accepting the task--if you would have preferred some
one else."

He paused, but she made no sign, and Lush, to give himself a
countenance in an apology which met no acceptance, opened the folded
paper, and looked at it vaguely before he began to speak again.

"This paper contains some information about Mr. Grandcourt's will, an
abstract of a part he wished you to know--if you'll be good enough to
cast your eyes over it. But there is something I had to say by way of
introduction--which I hope you'll pardon me for, if it's not quite
agreeable." Lush found that he was behaving better than he had
expected, and had no idea how insulting he made himself with his "not
quite agreeable."

"Say what you have to say without apologizing, please," said Gwendolen,
with the air she might have bestowed on a dog-stealer come to claim a
reward for finding the dog he had stolen.

"I have only to remind you of something that occurred before your
engagement to Mr. Grandcourt," said Lush, not without the rise of some
willing insolence in exchange for her scorn. "You met a lady in Cardell
Chase, if you remember, who spoke to you of her position with regard to
Mr. Grandcourt. She had children with her--one a very fine boy."

Gwendolen's lips were almost as pale as her cheeks; her passion had no
weapons--words were no better than chips. This man's speech was like a
sharp knife-edge drawn across her skin: but even her indignation at the
employment of Lush was getting merged in a crowd of other feelings, dim
and alarming as a crowd of ghosts.

"Mr. Grandcourt was aware that you were acquainted with this
unfortunate affair beforehand, and he thinks it only right that his
position and intentions should be made quite clear to you. It is an
affair of property and prospects; and if there were any objection you
had to make, if you would mention it to me--it is a subject which of
course he would rather not speak about himself--if you will be good
enough just to read this." With the last words Lush rose and presented
the paper to her.

When Gwendolen resolved that she would betray no feeling in the
presence of this man, she had not prepared herself to hear that her
husband knew the silent consciousness, the silently accepted terms on
which she had married him. She dared not raise her hand to take the
paper, least it should visibly tremble. For a moment Lush stood holding
it toward her, and she felt his gaze on her as ignominy, before she
could say even with low-toned haughtiness,

"Lay it on the table. And go into the next room, please."

Lush obeyed, thinking as he took an easy-chair in the back
drawing-room, "My lady winces considerably. She didn't know what would
be the charge for that superfine article, Henleigh Grandcourt." But it
seemed to him that a penniless girl had done better than she had any
right to expect, and that she had been uncommonly knowing for her years
and opportunities: her words to Lydia meant nothing, and her running
away had probably been part of her adroitness. It had turned out a
master-stroke.

Meanwhile Gwendolen was rallying her nerves to the reading of the
paper. She must read it. Her whole being--pride, longing for rebellion,
dreams of freedom, remorseful conscience, dread of fresh
visitation--all made one need to know what the paper contained. But at
first it was not easy to take in the meaning of the words. When she had
succeeded, she found that in the case of there being no son as issue of
her marriage, Grandcourt had made the small Henleigh his heir; that was
all she cared to extract from the paper with any distinctness. The
other statement as to what provision would be made for her in the same
case, she hurried over, getting only a confused perception of thousands
and Gadsmere. It was enough. She could dismiss the man in the next room
with the defiant energy which had revived in her at the idea that this
question of property and inheritance was meant as a finish to her
humiliations and her thraldom.

She thrust the paper between the leaves of her book, which she took in
her hand, and walked with her stateliest air into the next room, where
Lush immediately arose, awaiting her approach. When she was four yards
from him, it was hardly an instant that she paused to say in a high
tone, while she swept him with her eyelashes,

"Tell Mr. Grandcourt that his arrangements are just what I
desired"--passing on without haste, and leaving Lush time to mingle
some admiration of her graceful back with that half-amused sense of her
spirit and impertinence, which he expressed by raising his eyebrows and
just thrusting his tongue between his teeth. He really did not want her
to be worse punished, and he was glad to think that it was time to go
and lunch at the club, where he meant to have a lobster salad.

What did Gwendolen look forward to? When her husband returned he found
her equipped in her riding-dress, ready to ride out with him. She was
not again going to be hysterical, or take to her bed and say she was
ill. That was the implicit resolve adjusting her muscles before she
could have framed it in words, as she walked out of the room, leaving
Lush behind her. She was going to act in the spirit of her message, and
not to give herself time to reflect. She rang the bell for her maid,
and went with the usual care through her change of toilet. Doubtless
her husband had meant to produce a great effect on her: by-and-by
perhaps she would let him see an effect the very opposite of what he
intended; but at present all that she could show was a defiant
satisfaction in what had been presumed to be disagreeable. It came as
an instinct rather than a thought, that to show any sign which could be
interpreted as jealousy, when she had just been insultingly reminded
that the conditions were what she had accepted with her eyes open,
would be the worst self-humiliation. She said to herself that she had
not time to-day to be clear about her future actions; all she could be
clear about was that she would match her husband in ignoring any ground
for excitement. She not only rode, but went out with him to dine,
contributing nothing to alter their mutual manner, which was never that
of rapid interchange in discourse; and curiously enough she rejected a
handkerchief on which her maid had by mistake put the wrong scent--a
scent that Grandcourt had once objected to. Gwendolen would not have
liked to be an object of disgust to this husband whom she hated: she
liked all disgust to be on her side.

But to defer thought in this way was something like trying to talk
without singing in her own ears. The thought that is bound up with our
passion is as penetrative as air--everything is porous to it; bows,
smiles, conversation, repartee, are mere honeycombs where such thoughts
rushes freely, not always with a taste of honey. And without shutting
herself up in any solitude, Gwendolen seemed at the end of nine or ten
hours to have gone through a labyrinth of reflection, in which already
the same succession of prospects had been repeated, the same fallacious
outlets rejected, the same shrinking from the necessities of every
course. Already she was undergoing some hardening effect from feeling
that she was under eyes which saw her past actions solely in the light
of her lowest motives. She lived back in the scenes of her courtship,
with the new bitter consciousness of what had been in Grandcourt's
mind--certain now, with her present experience of him, that he had a
peculiar triumph in conquering her dumb repugnance, and that ever since
their marriage he had had a cold exultation in knowing her fancied
secret. Her imagination exaggerated every tyrannical impulse he was
capable of. "I will insist on being separated from him"--was her first
darting determination; then, "I will leave him whether he consents or
not. If this boy becomes his heir, I have made an atonement." But
neither in darkness nor in daylight could she imagine the scenes which
must carry out those determinations with the courage to feel them
endurable. How could she run away to her own family--carry distress
among them, and render herself an object of scandal in the society she
had left behind her? What future lay before her as Mrs. Grandcourt gone
back to her mother, who would be made destitute again by the rupture of
the marriage for which one chief excuse had been that it had brought
that mother a maintenance? She had lately been seeing her uncle and
Anna in London, and though she had been saved from any difficulty about
inviting them to stay in Grosvenor Square by their wish to be with Rex,
who would not risk a meeting with her, the transient visit she had had
from them helped now in giving stronger color to the picture of what it
would be for her to take refuge in her own family. What could she say
to justify her flight? Her uncle would tell her to go back. Her mother
would cry. Her aunt and Anna would look at her with wondering alarm.
Her husband would have power to compel her. She had absolutely nothing
that she could allege against him in judicious or judicial ears. And to
"insist on separation!" That was an easy combination of words; but
considered as an action to be executed against Grandcourt, it would be
about as practicable as to give him a pliant disposition and a dread of
other people's unwillingness. How was she to begin? What was she to say
that would not be a condemnation of herself? "If I am to have misery
anyhow," was the bitter refrain of her rebellious dreams, "I had better
have the misery that I can keep to myself." Moreover, her capability of
rectitude told her again and again that she had no right to complain of
her contract, or to withdraw from it.

And always among the images that drove her back to submission was
Deronda. The idea of herself separated from her husband, gave Deronda a
changed, perturbing, painful place in her consciousness: instinctively
she felt that the separation would be from him too, and in the
prospective vision of herself as a solitary, dubiously-regarded woman,
she felt some tingling bashfulness at the remembrance of her behavior
towards him. The association of Deronda with a dubious position for
herself was intolerable. And what would he say if he knew everything?
Probably that she ought to bear what she had brought on herself, unless
she were sure that she could make herself a better woman by taking any
other course. And what sort of woman was she to be--solitary, sickened
of life, looked at with a suspicious kind of pity?--even if she could
dream of success in getting that dreary freedom. Mrs. Grandcourt "run
away" would be a more pitiable creature than Gwendolen Harleth
condemned to teach the bishop's daughters, and to be inspected by Mrs.
Mompert.

One characteristic trait in her conduct is worth mentioning. She would
not look a second time at the paper Lush had given her; and before
ringing for her maid she locked it up in a traveling-desk which was at
hand, proudly resolved against curiosity about what was allotted to
herself in connection with Gadsmere--feeling herself branded in the
minds of her husband and his confidant with the meanness that would
accept marriage and wealth on any conditions, however dishonorable and
humiliating.

Day after day the same pattern of thinking was repeated. There came
nothing to change the situation--no new elements in the sketch--only a
recurrence which engraved it. The May weeks went on into June, and
still Mrs. Grandcourt was outwardly in the same place, presenting
herself as she was expected to do in the accustomed scenes, with the
accustomed grace, beauty, and costume; from church at one end of the
week, through all the scale of desirable receptions, to opera at the
other. Church was not markedly distinguished in her mind from the other
forms of self-presentation, for marriage had included no instruction
that enabled her to connect liturgy and sermon with any larger order of
the world than that of unexplained and perhaps inexplicable social
fashions. While a laudable zeal was laboring to carry the light of
spiritual law up the alleys where law is chiefly known as the
policeman, the brilliant Mrs. Grandcourt, condescending a little to a
fashionable rector and conscious of a feminine advantage over a learned
dean, was, so far as pastoral care and religious fellowship were
concerned, in as complete a solitude as a man in a lighthouse.

Can we wonder at the practical submission which hid her constructive
rebellion? The combination is common enough, as we know from the number
of persons who make us aware of it in their own case by a clamorous
unwearied statement of the reasons against their submitting to a
situation which, on inquiry, we discover to be the least disagreeable
within their reach. Poor Gwendolen had both too much and too little
mental power and dignity to make herself exceptional. No wonder that
Deronda now marked some hardening in a look and manner which were
schooled daily to the suppression of feeling.

For example. One morning, riding in Rotten Row with Grandcourt by her
side, she saw standing against the railing at the turn, just facing
them, a dark-eyed lady with a little girl and a blonde boy, whom she at
once recognized as the beings in all the world the most painful for her
to behold. She and Grandcourt had just slackened their pace to a walk;
he being on the outer side was the nearer to the unwelcome vision, and
Gwendolen had not presence of mind to do anything but glance away from
the dark eyes that met hers piercingly toward Grandcourt, who wheeled
past the group with an unmoved face, giving no sign of recognition.

Immediately she felt a rising rage against him mingling with her shame
for herself, and the words, "You might at least have raised your hat to
her," flew impetuously to her lips--but did not pass them. If as her
husband, in her company, he chose to ignore these creatures whom she
herself had excluded from the place she was filling, how could she be
the person to reproach him? She was dumb.

It was not chance, but her own design, that had brought Mrs. Glasher
there with her boy. She had come to town under the pretext of making
purchases--really wanting educational apparatus for her children, and
had had interviews with Lush in which she had not refused to soothe her
uneasy mind by representing the probabilities as all on the side of her
ultimate triumph. Let her keep quiet, and she might live to see the
marriage dissolve itself in one way or other--Lush hinted at several
ways--leaving the succession assured to her boy. She had had an
interview with Grandcourt, too, who had as usual told her to behave
like a reasonable woman, and threatened punishment if she were
troublesome; but had, also as usual, vindicated himself from any wish
to be stingy, the money he was receiving from Sir Hugo on account of
Diplow encouraging him to be lavish. Lydia, feeding on the
probabilities in her favor, devoured her helpless wrath along with that
pleasanter nourishment; but she could not let her discretion go
entirely without the reward of making a Medusa-apparition before
Gwendolen, vindictiveness and jealousy finding relief in an outlet of
venom, though it were as futile as that of a viper already flung on the
other side of the hedge. Hence, each day, after finding out from Lush
the likely time for Gwendolen to be riding, she had watched at that
post, daring Grandcourt so far. Why should she not take little Henleigh
into the Park?

The Medusa-apparition was made effective beyond Lydia's conception by
the shock it gave Gwendolen actually to see Grandcourt ignoring this
woman who had once been the nearest in the world to him, along with the
children she had borne him. And all the while the dark shadow thus cast
on the lot of a woman destitute of acknowledged social dignity, spread
itself over her visions of a future that might be her own, and made
part of her dread on her own behalf. She shrank all the more from any
lonely action. What possible release could there be for her from this
hated vantage ground, which yet she dared not quit, any more than if
fire had been raining outside it? What release, but death? Not her own
death. Gwendolen was not a woman who could easily think of her own
death as a near reality, or front for herself the dark entrance on the
untried and invisible. It seemed more possible that Grandcourt should
die:--and yet not likely. The power of tyranny in him seemed a power of
living in the presence of any wish that he should die. The thought that
his death was the only possible deliverance for her was one with the
thought that deliverance would never come--the double deliverance from
the injury with which other beings might reproach her and from the yoke
she had brought on her own neck. No! she foresaw him always living, and
her own life dominated by him; the "always" of her young experience not
stretching beyond the few immediate years that seemed immeasurably long
with her passionate weariness. The thought of his dying would not
subsist: it turned as with a dream-change into the terror that she
should die with his throttling fingers on her neck avenging that
thought. Fantasies moved within her like ghosts, making no break in her
more acknowledged consciousness and finding no obstruction in it: dark
rays doing their work invisibly in the broad light.

Only an evening or two after that encounter in the Park, there was a
grand concert at Klesmer's, who was living rather magnificently now in
one of the large houses in Grosvenor Place, a patron and prince among
musical professors. Gwendolen had looked forward to this occasion as
one on which she was sure to meet Deronda, and she had been meditating
how to put a question to him which, without containing a word that she
would feel a dislike to utter, would yet be explicit enough for him to
understand it. The struggle of opposite feelings would not let her
abide by her instinct that the very idea of Deronda's relation to her
was a discouragement to any desperate step towards freedom. The next
wave of emotion was a longing for some word of his to enforce a
resolve. The fact that her opportunities of conversation with him had
always to be snatched in the doubtful privacy of large parties, caused
her to live through them many times beforehand, imagining how they
would take place and what she would say. The irritation was
proportionate when no opportunity came; and this evening at Klesmer's
she included Deronda in her anger, because he looked as calm as
possible at a distance from her, while she was in danger of betraying
her impatience to every one who spoke to her. She found her only safety
in a chill haughtiness which made Mr. Vandernoodt remark that Mrs.
Grandcourt was becoming a perfect match for her husband. When at last
the chances of the evening brought Deronda near her, Sir Hugo and Mrs.
Raymond were close by and could hear every word she said. No matter:
her husband was not near, and her irritation passed without check into
a fit of daring which restored the security of her self-possession.
Deronda was there at last, and she would compel him to do what she
pleased. Already and without effort rather queenly in her air as she
stood in her white lace and green leaves she threw a royal
permissiveness into her way of saying, "I wish you would come and see
me to-morrow between five and six, Mr. Deronda."

There could be but one answer at that moment: "Certainly," with a tone
of obedience.

Afterward it occurred to Deronda that he would write a note to excuse
himself. He had always avoided making a call at Grandcourt's. He could
not persuade himself to any step that might hurt her, and whether his
excuse were taken for indifference or for the affectation of
indifference it would be equally wounding. He kept his promise.
Gwendolen had declined to ride out on the plea of not feeling well
enough having left her refusal to the last moment when the horses were
soon to be at the door--not without alarm lest her husband should say
that he too would stay at home. Become almost superstitious about his
power of suspicious divination, she had a glancing forethought of what
she would do in that case--namely, have herself denied as not well. But
Grandcourt accepted her excuse without remark, and rode off.

Nevertheless when Gwendolen found herself alone, and had sent down the
order that only Mr. Deronda was to be admitted, she began to be alarmed
at what she had done, and to feel a growing agitation in the thought
that he would soon appear, and she should soon be obliged to speak: not
of trivialities, as if she had no serious motive in asking him to come:
and yet what she had been for hours determining to say began to seem
impossible. For the first time the impulse of appeal to him was being
checked by timidity, and now that it was too late she was shaken by the
possibility that he might think her invitation unbecoming. If so, she
would have sunk in his esteem. But immediately she resisted this
intolerable fear as an infection from her husband's way of thinking.
That _he_ would say she was making a fool of herself was rather a
reason why such a judgment would be remote from Deronda's mind. But
that she could not rid herself from this sudden invasion of womanly
reticence was manifest in a kind of action which had never occurred to
her before. In her struggle between agitation and the effort to
suppress it, she was walking up and down the length of the two
drawing-rooms, where at one end a long mirror reflected her in her
black dress, chosen in the early morning with a half-admitted reference
to this hour. But above this black dress her head on its white pillar
of a neck showed to advantage. Some consciousness of this made her turn
hastily and hurry to the boudoir, where again there was a glass, but
also, tossed over a chair, a large piece of black lace which she
snatched and tied over her crown of hair so as completely to conceal
her neck, and leave only her face looking out from the black frame. In
this manifest contempt of appearance, she thought it possible to be
freer from nervousness, but the black lace did not take away the
uneasiness from her eyes and lips.

She was standing in the middle of the room when Deronda was announced,
and as he approached her she perceived that he too for some reason was
not his usual self. She could not have defined the change except by
saying that he looked less happy than usual, and appeared to be under
some effort in speaking to her. And yet the speaking was the slightest
possible. They both said, "How do you do?" quite curtly; and Gwendolen,
instead of sitting down, moved to a little distance, resting her arms
slightly on the tall back of a chair, while Deronda stood where he
was,--both feeling it difficult to say any more, though the
preoccupation in his mind could hardly have been more remote than it
was from Gwendolen's conception. She naturally saw in his embarrassment
some reflection of her own. Forced to speak, she found all her training
in concealment and self-command of no use to her and began with timid
awkwardness,

"You will wonder why I begged you to come. I wanted to ask you
something. You said I was ignorant. That is true. And what can I do but
ask you?"

And at this moment she was feeling it utterly impossible to put the
questions she had intended. Something new in her nervous manner roused
Deronda's anxiety lest there might be a new crisis. He said with the
sadness of affection in his voice,

"My only regret is, that I can be of so little use to you." The words
and the tone touched a new spring in her, and she went on with more
sense of freedom, yet still not saying anything she had designed to
say, and beginning to hurry, that she might somehow arrive at the right
words.

"I wanted to tell you that I have always been thinking of your advice,
but is it any use?--I can't make myself different, because things about
me raise bad feelings--and I must go on--I can alter nothing--it is no
use."

She paused an instant, with the consciousness that she was not finding
the right words, but began again hurriedly, "But if I go on I shall get
worse. I want not to get worse. I should like to be what you wish.
There are people who are good and enjoy great things--I know there are.
I am a contemptible creature. I feel as if I should get wicked with
hating people. I have tried to think that I would go away from
everybody. But I can't. There are so many things to hinder me. You
think, perhaps, that I don't mind. But I do mind. I am afraid of
everything. I am afraid of getting wicked. Tell me what I can do."

She had forgotten everything but that image of her helpless misery
which she was trying to make present to Deronda in broken allusive
speech--wishing to convey but not express all her need. Her eyes were
tearless, and had a look of smarting in their dilated brilliancy; there
was a subdued sob in her voice which was more and more veiled, till it
was hardly above a whisper. She was hurting herself with the jewels
that glittered on her tightly-clasped fingers pressed against her heart.

The feeling Deronda endured in these moments he afterward called
horrible. Words seemed to have no more rescue in them than if he had
been beholding a vessel in peril of wreck--the poor ship with its
many-lived anguish beaten by the inescapable storm. How could he grasp
the long-growing process of this young creature's wretchedness?--how
arrest and change it with a sentence? He was afraid of his own voice.
The words that rushed into his mind seemed in their feebleness nothing
better than despair made audible, or than that insensibility to
another's hardship which applies precept to soothe pain. He felt
himself holding a crowd of words imprisoned within his lips, as if the
letting them escape would be a violation of awe before the mysteries of
our human lot. The thought that urged itself foremost was--"Confess
everything to your husband; have nothing concealed:"--the words carried
in his mind a vision of reasons which would have needed much fuller
expressions for Gwendolen to apprehend them, but before he had begun
those brief sentences, the door opened and the husband entered.

Grandcourt had deliberately gone out and turned back to satisfy a
suspicion. What he saw was Gwendolen's face of anguish framed black
like a nun's, and Deronda standing three yards from her with a look of
sorrow such as he might have bent on the last struggle of life in a
beloved object. Without any show of surprise Grandcourt nodded to
Deronda, gave a second look at Gwendolen, passed on, and seated himself
easily at a little distance crossing his legs, taking out his
handkerchief and trifling with it elegantly.

Gwendolen had shrunk and changed her attitude on seeing him, but she
did not turn or move from her place. It was not a moment in which she
could feign anything, or manifest any strong revulsion of feeling: the
passionate movement of her last speech was still too strong within her.
What she felt beside was a dull despairing sense that her interview
with Deronda was at an end: a curtain had fallen. But he, naturally,
was urged into self-possession and effort by susceptibility to what
might follow for her from being seen by her husband in this betrayal of
agitation; and feeling that any pretense of ease in prolonging his
visit would only exaggerate Grandcourt's possible conjectures of
duplicity, he merely said,

"I will not stay longer now. Good bye."

He put out his hand, and she let him press her poor little chill
fingers; but she said no good-bye.

When he had left the room, Gwendolen threw herself into a seat, with an
expectation as dull as her despair--the expectation that she was going
to be punished. But Grandcourt took no notice: he was satisfied to have
let her know that she had not deceived him, and to keep a silence which
was formidable with omniscience. He went out that evening, and her plea
of feeling ill was accepted without even a sneer.

The next morning at breakfast he said, "I am going yachting to the
Mediterranean."

"When?" said Gwendolen, with a leap of heart which had hope in it.

"The day after to-morrow. The yacht is at Marseilles. Lush is gone to
get everything ready."

"Shall I have mamma to stay with me, then?" said Gwendolen, the new
sudden possibility of peace and affection filling her mind like a burst
of morning light.

"No; you will go with me."




CHAPTER XLIX.

        Ever in his soul
  That larger justice which makes gratitude
  Triumphed above resentment. 'Tis the mark
  Of regal natures, with the wider life.
  And fuller capability of joy:--
  Not wits exultant in the strongest lens
  To show you goodness vanished into pulp
  Never worth "thank you"--they're the devil's friars,
  Vowed to be poor as he in love and trust,
  Yet must go begging of a world that keeps
  Some human property.


Deronda, in parting from Gwendolen, had abstained from saying, "I shall
not see you again for a long while: I am going away," lest Grandcourt
should understand him to imply that the fact was of importance to her.

He was actually going away under circumstances so momentous to himself
that when he set out to fulfill his promise of calling on her, he was
already under the shadow of a solemn emotion which revived the deepest
experience of his life.

Sir Hugo had sent for him to his chambers with the note--"Come
immediately. Something has happened:" a preparation that caused him
some relief when, on entering the baronet's study, he was received with
grave affection instead of the distress which he had apprehended.

"It is nothing to grieve you, sir?" said Deronda, in a tone rather of
restored confidence than question, as he took the hand held out to him.
There was an unusual meaning in Sir Hugo's look, and a subdued emotion
in his voice, as he said,

"No, Dan, no. Sit down. I have something to say."

Deronda obeyed, not without presentiment. It was extremely rare for Sir
Hugo to show so much serious feeling.

"Not to grieve me, my boy, no. At least, if there is nothing in it that
will grieve you too much. But I hardly expected that this--just
this--would ever happen. There have been reasons why I have never
prepared you for it. There have been reasons why I have never told you
anything about your parentage. But I have striven in every way not to
make that an injury to you."

Sir Hugo paused, but Deronda could not speak. He could not say, "I have
never felt it an injury." Even if that had been true, he could not have
trusted his voice to say anything. Far more than any one but himself
could know of was hanging on this moment when the secrecy was to be
broken. Sir Hugo had never seen the grand face he delighted in so
pale--the lips pressed together with such a look of pain. He went on
with a more anxious tenderness, as if he had a new fear of wounding.

"I have acted in obedience to your mother's wishes. The secrecy was her
wish. But now she desires to remove it. She desires to see you. I will
put this letter into your hands, which you can look at by-and-by. It
will merely tell you what she wishes you to do, and where you will find
her."

Sir Hugo held out a letter written on foreign paper, which Deronda
thrust into his breast-pocket, with a sense of relief that he was not
called on to read anything immediately. The emotion on Daniel's face
had gained on the baronet, and was visibly shaking his composure. Sir
Hugo found it difficult to say more. And Deronda's whole soul was
possessed by a question which was the hardest in the world to utter.
Yet he could not bear to delay it. This was a sacramental moment. If he
let it pass, he could not recover the influences under which it was
possible to utter the words and meet the answer. For some moments his
eyes were cast down, and it seemed to both as if thoughts were in the
air between them. But at last Deronda looked at Sir Hugo, and said,
with a tremulous reverence in his voice--dreading to convey indirectly
the reproach that affection had for years been stifling,

"Is my father also living?"

The answer came immediately in a low emphatic tone--"No."

In the mingled emotions which followed that answer it was impossible to
distinguish joy from pain.

Some new light had fallen on the past for Sir Hugo too in this
interview. After a silence in which Deronda felt like one whose creed
is gone before he has religiously embraced another, the baronet said,
in a tone of confession,

"Perhaps I was wrong, Dan, to undertake what I did. And perhaps I liked
it a little too well--having you all to myself. But if you have had any
pain which I might have helped, I ask you to forgive me."

"The forgiveness has long been there," said Deronda "The chief pain has
always been on account of some one else--whom I never knew--whom I am
now to know. It has not hindered me from feeling an affection for you
which has made a large part of all the life I remember."

It seemed one impulse that made the two men clasp each other's hand for
a moment.




BOOK VII.--THE MOTHER AND THE SON


CHAPTER L.

        "If some mortal, born too soon,
  Were laid away in some great trance--the ages
  Coming and going all the while--till dawned
  His true time's advent; and could then record
  The words they spoke who kept watch by his bed,
  Then I might tell more of the breath so light
  Upon my eyelids, and the fingers warm
  Among my hair. Youth is confused; yet never
  So dull was I but, when that spirit passed,
  I turned to him, scarce consciously, as turns
  A water-snake when fairies cross his sleep."
                    --BROWNING: _Paracelsus_.


This was the letter which Sir Hugo put into Deronda's hands:,

    TO MY SON, DANIEL DERONDA.

    My good friend and yours, Sir Hugo Mallinger, will have told you that
    I wish to see you. My health is shaken, and I desire there should be
    no time lost before I deliver to you what I have long withheld. Let
    nothing hinder you from being at the _Albergo dell' Italia_ in
    Genoa by the fourteenth of this month. Wait for me there. I am
    uncertain when I shall be able to make the journey from Spezia, where
    I shall be staying. That will depend on several things. Wait for
    me--the Princess Halm-Eberstein. Bring with you the diamond ring that
    Sir Hugo gave you. I shall like to see it again.--Your unknown mother,

    LEONORA HALM-EBERSTEIN.

This letter with its colorless wording gave Deronda no clue to what was
in reserve for him; but he could not do otherwise than accept Sir
Hugo's reticence, which seemed to imply some pledge not to anticipate
the mother's disclosures; and the discovery that his life-long
conjectures had been mistaken checked further surmise. Deronda could
not hinder his imagination from taking a quick flight over what seemed
possibilities, but he refused to contemplate any of them as more likely
than another, lest he should be nursing it into a dominant desire or
repugnance, instead of simply preparing himself with resolve to meet
the fact bravely, whatever it might turn out to be.

In this state of mind he could not have communicated to any one the
reason for the absence which in some quarters he was obliged to mention
beforehand, least of all to Mordecai, whom it would affect as
powerfully as it did himself, only in rather a different way. If he
were to say, "I am going to learn the truth about my birth," Mordecai's
hope would gather what might prove a painful, dangerous excitement. To
exclude suppositions, he spoke of his journey as being undertaken by
Sir Hugo's wish, and threw as much indifference as he could into his
manner of announcing it, saying he was uncertain of its duration, but
it would perhaps be very short.

"I will ask to have the child Jacob to stay with me," said Mordecai,
comforting himself in this way, after the first mournful glances.

"I will drive round and ask Mrs. Cohen to let him come," said Mirah.

"The grandmother will deny you nothing," said Deronda. "I'm glad you
were a little wrong as well as I," he added, smiling at Mordecai. "You
thought that old Mrs. Cohen would not bear to see Mirah."

"I undervalued her heart," said Mordecai. "She is capable of rejoicing
that another's plant blooms though her own be withered."

"Oh, they are dear good people; I feel as if we all belonged to each
other," said Mirah, with a tinge of merriment in her smile.

"What should you have felt if that Ezra had been your brother?" said
Deronda, mischievously--a little provoked that she had taken kindly at
once to people who had caused him so much prospective annoyance on her
account.

Mirah looked at him with a slight surprise for a moment, and then said,
"He is not a bad man--I think he would never forsake any one." But when
she uttered the words she blushed deeply, and glancing timidly at
Mordecai, turned away to some occupation. Her father was in her mind,
and this was a subject on which she and her brother had a painful
mutual consciousness. "If he should come and find us!" was a thought
which to Mirah sometimes made the street daylight as shadowy as a
haunted forest where each turn screened for her an imaginary apparition.

Deronda felt what was her involuntary allusion, and understood the
blush. How could he be slow to understand feelings which now seemed
nearer than ever to his own? for the words of his mother's letter
implied that his filial relation was not to be freed from painful
conditions; indeed, singularly enough that letter which had brought his
mother nearer as a living reality had thrown her into more remoteness
for his affections. The tender yearning after a being whose life might
have been the worse for not having his care and love, the image of a
mother who had not had all her dues, whether of reverence or
compassion, had long been secretly present with him in his observation
of all the women he had come near. But it seemed now that this
picturing of his mother might fit the facts no better than his former
conceptions about Sir Hugo. He wondered to find that when this mother's
very hand-writing had come to him with words holding her actual
feeling, his affections had suddenly shrunk into a state of comparative
neutrality toward her. A veiled figure with enigmatic speech had thrust
away that image which, in spite of uncertainty, his clinging thought
had gradually modeled and made the possessor of his tenderness and
duteous longing. When he set off to Genoa, the interest really
uppermost in his mind had hardly so much relation to his mother as to
Mordecai and Mirah.

"God bless you, Dan!" Sir Hugo had said, when they shook hands.
"Whatever else changes for you, it can't change my being the oldest
friend you have known, and the one who has all along felt the most for
you. I couldn't have loved you better if you'd been my own-only I
should have been better pleased with thinking of you always as the
future master of the Abbey instead of my fine nephew; and then you
would have seen it necessary for you to take a political line.
However--things must be as they may." It was a defensive movement of
the baronet's to mingle purposeless remarks with the expression of
serious feeling.

When Deronda arrived at the _Italia_ in Genoa, no Princess
Halm-Eberstein was there; but on the second day there was a letter for
him, saying that her arrival might happen within a week, or might be
deferred a fortnight and more; she was under circumstances which made
it impossible for her to fix her journey more precisely, and she
entreated him to wait as patiently as he could.

With this indefinite prospect of suspense on matters of supreme moment
to him, Deronda set about the difficult task of seeking amusement on
philosophic grounds, as a means of quieting excited feeling and giving
patience a lift over a weary road. His former visit to the superb city
had been only cursory, and left him much to learn beyond the prescribed
round of sight-seeing, by spending the cooler hours in observant
wandering about the streets, the quay, and the environs; and he often
took a boat that he might enjoy the magnificent view of the city and
harbor from the sea. All sights, all subjects, even the expected
meeting with his mother, found a central union in Mordecai and Mirah,
and the ideas immediately associated with them; and among the thoughts
that most filled his mind while his boat was pushing about within view
of the grand harbor was that of the multitudinous Spanish Jews
centuries ago driven destitute from their Spanish homes, suffered to
land from the crowded ships only for a brief rest on this grand quay of
Genoa, overspreading it with a pall of famine and plague--dying mothers
and dying children at their breasts--fathers and sons a-gaze at each
other's haggardness, like groups from a hundred Hunger-towers turned
out beneath the midday sun. Inevitably dreamy constructions of a
possible ancestry for himself would weave themselves with historic
memories which had begun to have a new interest for him on his
discovery of Mirah, and now, under the influence of Mordecai, had
become irresistibly dominant. He would have sealed his mind against
such constructions if it had been possible, and he had never yet fully
admitted to himself that he wished the facts to verify Mordecai's
conviction: he inwardly repeated that he had no choice in the matter,
and that wishing was folly--nay, on the question of parentage, wishing
seemed part of that meanness which disowns kinship: it was a disowning
by anticipation. What he had to do was simply to accept the fact; and
he had really no strong presumption to go upon, now that he was assured
of his mistake about Sir Hugo. There had been a resolved concealment
which made all inference untrustworthy, and the very name he bore might
be a false one. If Mordecai was wrong--if he, the so-called Daniel
Deronda, were held by ties entirely aloof from any such course as his
friend's pathetic hope had marked out?--he would not say "I wish"; but
he could not help feeling on which side the sacrifice lay.

Across these two importunate thoughts, which he resisted as much as one
can resist anything in that unstrung condition which belongs to
suspense, there came continually an anxiety which he made no effort to
banish--dwelling on it rather with a mournfulness, which often seems to
us the best atonement we can make to one whose need we have been unable
to meet. The anxiety was for Gwendolen. In the wonderful mixtures of
our nature there is a feeling distinct from that exclusive passionate
love of which some men and women (by no means all) are capable, which
yet is not the same with friendship, nor with a merely benevolent
regard, whether admiring or compassionate: a man, say--for it is a man
who is here concerned--hardly represents to himself this shade of
feeling toward a woman more nearly than in words, "I should have loved
her, if----": the "if" covering some prior growth in the inclinations,
or else some circumstances which have made an inward prohibitory law as
a stay against the emotions ready to quiver out of balance. The "if" in
Deronda's case carried reasons of both kinds; yet he had never
throughout his relations with Gwendolen been free from the nervous
consciousness that there was something to guard against not only on her
account but on his own--some precipitancy in the manifestations of
impulsive feeling--some ruinous inroad of what is but momentary on the
permanent chosen treasure of the heart--some spoiling of her trust,
which wrought upon him now as if it had been the retreating cry of a
creature snatched and carried out of his reach by swift horsemen or
swifter waves, while his own strength was only a stronger sense of
weakness. How could his feelings for Gwendolen ever be exactly like his
feelings for other women, even when there was one by whose side he
desired to stand apart from them? Strangely the figure entered into the
pictures of his present and future; strangely (and now it seemed sadly)
their two lots had come in contact, hers narrowly personal, his charged
with far-reaching sensibilities, perhaps with durable purposes, which
were hardly more present to her than the reasons why men migrate are
present to the birds that come as usual for the crumbs and find them no
more. Not that Deronda was too ready to imagine himself of supreme
importance to a woman; but her words of insistance that he must "remain
near her--must not forsake her"--continually recurred to him with the
clearness and importunity of imagined sounds, such as Dante has said
pierce us like arrows whose points carry the sharpness of pity,

  "Lamenti saettaron me diversi
  Cà che di piefermti avean gli strali?"

Day after day passed, and the very air of Italy seemed to carry the
consciousness that war had been declared against Austria, and every day
was a hurrying march of crowded Time toward the world-changing battle
of Sadowa. Meanwhile, in Genoa, the noons were getting hotter, the
converging outer roads getting deeper with white dust, the oleanders in
the tubs along the wayside gardens looking more and more like fatigued
holiday-makers, and the sweet evening changing her office--scattering
abroad those whom the midday had sent under shelter, and sowing all
paths with happy social sounds, little tinklings of mule-bells and
whirrings of thrumbed strings, light footsteps and voices, if not
leisurely, then with the hurry of pleasure in them; while the
encircling heights, crowned with forts, skirted with fine dwellings and
gardens, seemed also to come forth and gaze in fullness of beauty after
their long siesta, till all strong color melted in the stream of
moonlight which made the Streets a new spectacle with shadows, both
still and moving, on cathedral steps and against the façades of massive
palaces; and then slowly with the descending moon all sank in deep
night and silence, and nothing shone but the port lights of the great
Lanterna in the blackness below, and the glimmering stars in the
blackness above. Deronda, in his suspense, watched this revolving of
the days as he might have watched a wonderful clock where the striking
of the hours was made solemn with antique figures advancing and
retreating in monitory procession, while he still kept his ear open for
another kind of signal which would have its solemnity too: He was
beginning to sicken of occupation, and found himself contemplating all
activity with the aloofness of a prisoner awaiting ransom. In his
letters to Mordecai and Hans, he had avoided writing about himself, but
he was really getting into that state of mind to which all subjects
become personal; and the few books he had brought to make him a refuge
in study were becoming unreadable, because the point of view that life
would make for him was in that agitating moment of uncertainty which is
close upon decision.

Many nights were watched through by him in gazing from the open window
of his room on the double, faintly pierced darkness of the sea and the
heavens; often in struggling under the oppressive skepticism which
represented his particular lot, with all the importance he was allowing
Mordecai to give it, as of no more lasting effect than a dream--a set
of changes which made passion to him, but beyond his consciousness were
no more than an imperceptible difference of mass and shadow; sometimes
with a reaction of emotive force which gave even to sustained
disappointment, even to the fulfilled demand of sacrifice, the nature
of a satisfied energy, and spread over his young future, whatever it
might be, the attraction of devoted service; sometimes with a sweet
irresistible hopefulness that the very best of human possibilities
might befall him--the blending of a complete personal love in one
current with a larger duty; and sometimes again in a mood of rebellion
(what human creature escapes it?) against things in general because
they are thus and not otherwise, a mood in which Gwendolen and her
equivocal fate moved as busy images of what was amiss in the world
along with the concealments which he had felt as a hardship in his own
life, and which were acting in him now under the form of an afflicting
doubtfulness about the mother who had announced herself coldly and
still kept away.

But at last she was come. One morning in his third week of waiting
there was a new kind of knock at the door. A servant in Chasseurs
livery entered and delivered in French the verbal message that, the
Princess Halm-Eberstein had arrived, that she was going to rest during
the day, but would be obliged if Monsieur would dine early, so as to be
at liberty at seven, when she would be able to receive him.




CHAPTER LI.

    She held the spindle as she sat,
    Errina with the thick-coiled mat
    Of raven hair and deepest agate eyes,
    Gazing with a sad surprise
    At surging visions of her destiny--
    To spin the byssus drearily
    In insect-labor, while the throng
  Of gods and men wrought deeds that poets wrought in song.


When Deronda presented himself at the door of his mother's apartment in
the _Italia_ he felt some revival of his boyhood with its premature
agitations. The two servants in the antechamber looked at him markedly,
a little surprised that the doctor their lady had come to consult was
this striking young gentleman whose appearance gave even the severe
lines of an evening dress the credit of adornment. But Deronda could
notice nothing until, the second door being opened, he found himself in
the presence of a figure which at the other end of the large room stood
awaiting his approach.

She was covered, except as to her face and part of her arms, with black
lace hanging loosely from the summit of her whitening hair to the long
train stretching from her tall figure. Her arms, naked to the elbow,
except for some rich bracelets, were folded before her, and the fine
poise of her head made it look handsomer than it really was. But
Deronda felt no interval of observation before he was close in front of
her, holding the hand she had put out and then raising it to his lips.
She still kept her hand in his and looked at him examiningly; while his
chief consciousness was that her eyes were piercing and her face so
mobile that the next moment she might look like a different person. For
even while she was examining him there was a play of the brow and
nostril which made a tacit language. Deronda dared no movement, not
able to conceive what sort of manifestation her feeling demanded; but
he felt himself changing color like a girl, and yet wondering at his
own lack of emotion; he had lived through so many ideal meetings with
his mother, and they had seemed more real than this! He could not even
conjecture in what language she would speak to him. He imagined it
would not be English. Suddenly, she let fall his hand, and placed both
hers on his shoulders, while her face gave out a flash of admiration in
which every worn line disappeared and seemed to leave a restored youth.

"You are a beautiful creature!" she said, in a low melodious voice,
with syllables which had what might be called a foreign but agreeable
outline. "I knew you would be." Then she kissed him on each cheek, and
he returned the kisses. But it was something like a greeting between
royalties.

She paused a moment while the lines were coming back into her face, and
then said in a colder tone, "I am your mother. But you can have no love
for me."

"I have thought of you more than of any other being in the world," said
Deronda, his voice trembling nervously.

"I am not like what you thought I was," said the mother decisively,
withdrawing her hands from his shoulders, and folding her arms as
before, looking at him as if she invited him to observe her. He had
often pictured her face in his imagination as one which had a likeness
to his own: he saw some of the likeness now, but amidst more striking
differences. She was a remarkable looking being. What was it that gave
her son a painful sense of aloofness?--Her worn beauty had a
strangeness in it as if she were not quite a human mother, but a
Melusina, who had ties with some world which is independent of ours.

"I used to think that you might be suffering," said Deronda, anxious
above all not to wound her. "I used to wish that I could be a comfort
to you."

"I _am_ suffering. But with a suffering that you can't comfort," said
the Princess, in a harder voice than before, moving to a sofa where
cushions had been carefully arranged for her. "Sit down." She pointed
to a seat near her; and then discerning some distress in Deronda's
face, she added, more gently, "I am not suffering at this moment. I am
at ease now. I am able to talk."

Deronda seated himself and waited for her to speak again. It seemed as
if he were in the presence of a mysterious Fate rather than of the
longed-for mother. He was beginning to watch her with wonder, from the
spiritual distance to which she had thrown him.

"No," she began: "I did not send for you to comfort me. I could not
know beforehand--I don't know now--what you will feel toward me. I have
not the foolish notion that you can love me merely because I am your
mother, when you have never seen or heard of me in all your life. But I
thought I chose something better for you than being with me. I did not
think I deprived you of anything worth having."

"You cannot wish me to believe that your affection would not have been
worth having," said Deronda, finding that she paused as if she expected
him to make some answer.

"I don't mean to speak ill of myself," said the princess, with proud
impetuosity, "But I had not much affection to give you. I did not want
affection. I had been stifled with it. I wanted to live out the life
that was in me, and not to be hampered with other lives. You wonder
what I was. I was no princess then." She rose with a sudden movement,
and stood as she had done before. Deronda immediately rose too; he felt
breathless.

"No princess in this tame life that I live in now. I was a great
singer, and I acted as well as I sang. All the rest were poor beside
me. Men followed me from one country to another. I was living a myriad
lives in one. I did not want a child."

There was a passionate self-defence in her tone. She had cast all
precedent out of her mind. Precedent had no excuse for her and she
could only seek a justification in the intensest words she could find
for her experience. She seemed to fling out the last words against some
possible reproach in the mind of her son, who had to stand and hear
them--clutching his coat-collar as if he were keeping himself above
water by it, and feeling his blood in the sort of commotion that might
have been excited if he had seen her going through some strange rite of
a religion which gave a sacredness to crime. What else had she to tell
him? She went on with the same intensity and a sort of pale
illumination in her face.

"I did not want to marry. I was forced into marrying your
father--forced, I mean, by my father's wishes and commands; and
besides, it was my best way of getting some freedom. I could rule my
husband, but not my father. I had a right to be free. I had a right to
seek my freedom from a bondage that I hated."

She seated herself again, while there was that subtle movement in her
eyes and closed lips which is like the suppressed continuation of
speech. Deronda continued standing, and after a moment or two she
looked up at him with a less defiant pleading as she said,

"And the bondage I hated for myself I wanted to keep you from. What
better could the most loving mother have done? I relieved you from the
bondage of having been born a Jew."

"Then I _am_ a Jew?" Deronda burst out with a deep-voiced energy that
made his mother shrink a little backward against her cushions. "My
father was a Jew, and you are a Jewess?"

"Yes, your father was my cousin," said the mother, watching him with a
change in her look, as if she saw something that she might have to be
afraid of.

"I am glad of it," said Deronda, impetuously, in the veiled voice of
passion. He could not have imagined beforehand how he would have come
to say that which he had never hitherto admitted. He could not have
dreamed that it would be in impulsive opposition to his mother. He was
shaken by a mixed anger which no reflection could come soon enough to
check, against this mother who it seemed had borne him unwillingly, had
willingly made herself a stranger to him, and--perhaps--was now making
herself known unwillingly. This last suspicion seemed to flash some
explanation over her speech.

But the mother was equally shaken by an anger differently mixed, and
her frame was less equal to any repression. The shaking with her was
visibly physical, and her eyes looked the larger for her pallid
excitement as she said violently,

"Why do you say you are glad? You are an English gentleman. I secured
you that."

"You did not know what you secured me. How could you choose my
birthright for me?" said Deronda, throwing himself sideways into his
chair again, almost unconsciously, and leaning his arm over the back,
while he looked away from his mother.

He was fired with an intolerance that seemed foreign to him. But he was
now trying hard to master himself and keep silence. A horror had swept
in upon his anger lest he should say something too hard in this moment
which made an epoch never to be recalled. There was a pause before his
mother spoke again, and when she spoke her voice had become more firmly
resistant in its finely varied tones:

"I chose for you what I would have chosen for myself. How could I know
that you would have the spirit of my father in you? How could I know
that you would love what I hated?--if you really love to be a Jew." The
last words had such bitterness in them that any one overhearing might
have supposed some hatred had arisen between the mother and son.

But Deronda had recovered his fuller self. He was recalling his
sensibilities to what life had been and actually was for her whose best
years were gone, and who with the signs of suffering in her frame was
now exerting herself to tell him of a past which was not his alone but
also hers. His habitual shame at the acceptance of events as if they
were his only, helped him even here. As he looked at his mother
silently after her last words, his face regained some of its
penetrative calm; yet it seemed to have a strangely agitating influence
over her: her eyes were fixed on him with a sort of fascination, but
not with any repose of maternal delight.

"Forgive me, if I speak hastily," he said, with diffident gravity. "Why
have you resolved now on disclosing to me what you took care to have me
brought up in ignorance of? Why--since you seem angry that I should be
glad?"

"Oh--the reasons of our actions!" said the Princess, with a ring of
something like sarcastic scorn. "When you are as old as I am, it will
not seem so simple a question--'Why did you do this?' People talk of
their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have
the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster,
but I have not felt exactly what other women feel--or say they feel,
for fear of being thought unlike others. When you reproach me in your
heart for sending you away from me, you mean that I ought to say I felt
about you as other women say they feel about their children. I did
_not_ feel that. I was glad to be freed from you. But I did well for
you, and I gave you your father's fortune. Do I seem now to be revoking
everything?--Well, there are reasons. I feel many things that I cannot
understand. A fatal illness has been growing in me for a year. I shall
very likely not live another year. I will not deny anything I have
done. I will not pretend to love where I have no love. But shadows are
rising round me. Sickness makes them. If I have wronged the dead--I
have but little time to do what I left undone."

The varied transitions of tone with which this speech was delivered
were as perfect as the most accomplished actress could have made them.
The speech was in fact a piece of what may be called sincere acting;
this woman's nature was one in which all feeling--and all the more when
it was tragic as well as real--immediately became matter of conscious
representation: experience immediately passed into drama, and she acted
her own emotions. In a minor degree this is nothing uncommon, but in
the Princess the acting had a rare perfection of physiognomy, voice,
and gesture. It would not be true to say that she felt less because of
this double consciousness: she felt--that is, her mind went
through--all the more, but with a difference; each nucleus of pain or
pleasure had a deep atmosphere of the excitement or spiritual
intoxication which at once exalts and deadens. But Deronda made no
reflection of this kind. All his thoughts hung on the purport of what
his mother was saying; her tones and her wonderful face entered into
his agitation without being noted. What he longed for with an awed
desire was to know as much as she would tell him of the strange mental
conflict under which it seemed he had been brought into the world; what
his compassionate nature made the controlling idea within him were the
suffering and the confession that breathed through her later words, and
these forbade any further question, when she paused and remained
silent, with her brow knit, her head turned a little away from him, and
her large eyes fixed as if on something incorporeal. He must wait for
her to speak again. She did so with strange abruptness, turning her
eyes upon him suddenly, and saying more quickly,

"Sir Hugo has written much about you. He tells me you have a wonderful
mind--you comprehend everything--you are wiser than he is with all his
sixty years. You say you are glad to know that you were born a Jew. I
am not going to tell you that I have changed my mind about that. Your
feelings are against mine. You don't thank me for what I did. Shall you
comprehend your mother, or only blame her?"

"There is not a fibre within me but makes me wish to comprehend her,"
said Deronda, meeting her sharp gaze solemnly. "It is a bitter reversal
of my longing to think of blaming her. What I have been most trying to
do for fifteen years is to have some understanding of those who differ
from myself."

"Then you have become unlike your grandfather in that." said the
mother, "though you are a young copy of him in your face. He never
comprehended me, or if he did, he only thought of fettering me into
obedience. I was to be what he called 'the Jewish woman' under pain of
his curse. I was to feel everything I did not feel, and believe
everything I did not believe. I was to feel awe for the bit of
parchment in the _mezuza_ over the door; to dread lest a bit of butter
should touch a bit of meat; to think it beautiful that men should bind
the _tephillin_ on them, and women not,--to adore the wisdom of such
laws, however silly they might seem to me. I was to love the long
prayers in the ugly synagogue, and the howling, and the gabbling, and
the dreadful fasts, and the tiresome feasts, and my father's endless
discoursing about our people, which was a thunder without meaning in my
ears. I was to care forever about what Israel had been; and I did not
care at all. I cared for the wide world, and all that I could represent
in it. I hated living under the shadow of my father's strictness.
Teaching, teaching for everlasting--'this you must be,' 'that you must
not be'--pressed on me like a frame that got tighter and tighter as I
grew. I wanted to live a large life, with freedom to do what every one
else did, and be carried along in a great current, not obliged to care.
Ah!"--here her tone changed to one of a more bitter incisiveness--"you
are glad to have been born a Jew. You say so. That is because you have
not been brought up as a Jew. That separateness seems sweet to you
because I saved you from it."

"When you resolved on that, you meant that I should never know my
origin?" said Deronda, impulsively. "You have at least changed in your
feeling on that point."

"Yes, that was what I meant. That is what I persevered in. And it is
not true to say that I have changed. Things have changed in spite of
me. I am still the same Leonora"--she pointed with her forefinger to
her breast--"here within me is the same desire, the same will, the same
choice, _but_"--she spread out her hands, palm upward, on each side of
her, as she paused with a bitter compression of her lip, then let her
voice fall into muffled, rapid utterance--"events come upon us like
evil enchantments: and thoughts, feelings, apparitions in the darkness
are events--are they not? I don't consent. We only consent to what we
love. I obey something tyrannic"--she spread out her hands again--"I am
forced to be withered, to feel pain, to be dying slowly. Do I love
that? Well, I have been forced to obey my dead father. I have been
forced to tell you that you are a Jew, and deliver to you what he
commanded me to deliver."

"I beseech you to tell me what moved you--when you were young, I
mean--to take the course you did," said Deronda, trying by this
reference to the past to escape from what to him was the heart-rending
piteousness of this mingled suffering and defiance. "I gather that my
grandfather opposed your bent to be an artist. Though my own experience
has been quite different, I enter into the painfulness of your
struggle. I can imagine the hardship of an enforced renunciation."

"No," said the Princess, shaking her head and folding her arms with an
air of decision. "You are not a woman. You may try--but you can never
imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to
suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out--'this is
the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted
for; a woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must
be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as
cakes are, by a fixed receipt.' That was what my father wanted. He
wished I had been a son; he cared for me as a make-shift link. His
heart was set on his Judaism. He hated that Jewish women should be
thought of by the Christian world as a sort of ware to make public
singers and actresses of. As if we were not the more enviable for that!
That is a chance of escaping from bondage."

"Was my grandfather a learned man?" said Deronda, eager to know
particulars that he feared his mother might not think of.

She answered impatiently, putting up her hand, "Oh, yes,--and a clever
physician--and good: I don't deny that he was good. A man to be admired
in a play--grand, with an iron will. Like the old Foscari before he
pardons. But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They
would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the world, they
throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women. But
nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child than his
daughter, and she was like himself."

She had folded her arms again, and looked as if she were ready to face
some impending attempt at mastery.

"Your father was different. Unlike me--all lovingness and affection. I
knew I could rule him; and I made him secretly promise me, before I
married him, that he would put no hindrance in the way of my being an
artist. My father was on his deathbed when we were married: from the
first he had fixed his mind on my marrying my cousin Ephraim. And when
a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half
her strength must be concealment. I meant to have my will in the end,
but I could only have it by seeming to obey. I had an awe of my
father--always I had had an awe of him: it was impossible to help it. I
hated to feel awed--I wished I could have defied him openly; but I
never could. It was what I could not imagine: I could not act it to
myself that I should begin to defy my father openly and succeed. And I
never would risk failure."

This last sentence was uttered with an abrupt emphasis, and she paused
after it as if the words had raised a crowd of remembrances which
obstructed speech. Her son was listening to her with feelings more and
more highly mixed; the first sense of being repelled by the frank
coldness which had replaced all his preconceptions of a mother's tender
joy in the sight of him; the first impulses of indignation at what
shocked his most cherished emotions and principles--all these busy
elements of collision between them were subsiding for a time, and
making more and more room for that effort at just allowance and that
admiration of a forcible nature whose errors lay along high pathways,
which he would have felt if, instead of being his mother, she had been
a stranger who had appealed to his sympathy. Still it was impossible to
be dispassionate: he trembled lest the next thing she had to say would
be more repugnant to him than what had gone before: he was afraid of
the strange coërcion she seemed to be under to lay her mind bare: he
almost wished he could say, "Tell me only what is necessary," and then
again he felt the fascination which made him watch her and listen to
her eagerly. He tried to recall her to particulars by asking,

"Where was my grandfather's home?"

"Here in Genoa, where I was married; and his family had lived here
generations ago. But my father had been in various countries."

"You must surely have lived in England?"

"My mother was English--a Jewess of Portuguese descent. My father
married her in England. Certain circumstances of that marriage made all
the difference in my life: through that marriage my father thwarted his
own plans. My mother's sister was a singer, and afterward she married
the English partner of a merchant's house here in Genoa, and they came
and lived here eleven years. My mother died when I was eight years old,
and my father allowed me to be continually with my Aunt Leonora and be
taught under her eyes, as if he had not minded the danger of her
encouraging my wish to be a singer, as she had been. But this was it--I
saw it again and again in my father:--he did not guard against
consequences, because he felt sure he could hinder them if he liked.
Before my aunt left Genoa, I had had enough teaching to bring out the
born singer and actress within me: my father did not know everything
that was done; but he knew that I was taught music and singing--he knew
my inclination. That was nothing to him: he meant that I should obey
his will. And he was resolved that I should marry my cousin Ephraim,
the only one left of my father's family that he knew. I wanted not to
marry. I thought of all plans to resist it, but at last I found that I
could rule my cousin, and I consented. My father died three weeks after
we were married, and then I had my way!" She uttered these words almost
exultantly; but after a little pause her face changed, and she said in
a biting tone, "It has not lasted, though. My father is getting his way
now."

She began to look more contemplatively again at her son, and presently
said,

"You are like him--but milder--there is something of your own father in
you; and he made it the labor of his life to devote himself to me:
wound up his money-changing and banking, and lived to wait upon me--he
went against his conscience for me. As I loved the life of my art, so
he loved me. Let me look at your hand again: the hand with the ring on.
It was your father's ring."

He drew his chair nearer to her and gave her his hand. We know what
kind of a hand it was: her own, very much smaller, was of the same
type. As he felt the smaller hand holding his, as he saw nearer to him
the face that held the likeness of his own, aged not by time but by
intensity, the strong bent of his nature toward a reverential
tenderness asserted itself above every other impression and in his most
fervent tone he said,

"Mother! take us all into your heart--the living and the dead. Forgive
every thing that hurts you in the past. Take my affection."

She looked at him admiringly rather than lovingly, then kissed him on
the brow, and saying sadly, "I reject nothing, but I have nothing to
give," she released his hand and sank back on her cushions. Deronda
turned pale with what seems always more of a sensation than an
emotion--the pain of repulsed tenderness. She noticed the expression of
pain, and said, still with melodious melancholy in her tones,

"It is better so. We must part again soon and you owe me no duties. I
did not wish you to be born. I parted with you willingly. When your
father died I resolved that I would have no more ties, but such as I
could free myself from. I was the Alcharisi you have heard of: the name
had magic wherever it was carried. Men courted me. Sir Hugo Mallinger
was one who wished to marry me. He was madly in love with me. One day I
asked him, 'Is there a man capable of doing something for love of me,
and expecting nothing in return?' He said: 'What is it you want done?'
I said, 'Take my boy and bring him up as an Englishman, and never let
him know anything about his parents.' You were little more than two
years old, and were sitting on his foot. He declared that he would pay
money to have such a boy. I had not meditated much on the plan
beforehand, but as soon as I had spoken about it, it took possession of
me as something I could not rest without doing. At first he thought I
was not serious, but I convinced him, and he was never surprised at
anything. He agreed that it would be for your good, and the finest
thing for you. A great singer and actress is a queen, but she gives no
royalty to her son. All that happened at Naples. And afterward I made
Sir Hugo the trustee of your fortune. That is what I did; and I had a
joy in doing it. My father had tyrannized over me--he cared more about
a grandson to come than he did about me: I counted as nothing. You were
to be such a Jew as he; you were to be what he wanted. But you were my
son, and it was my turn to say what you should be. I said you should
not know you were a Jew."

"And for months events have been preparing me to be glad that I am a
Jew," said Deronda, his opposition roused again. The point touched the
quick of his experience. "It would always have been better that I
should have known the truth. I have always been rebelling against the
secrecy that looked like shame. It is no shame to have Jewish
parents--the shame is to disown it."

"You say it was a shame to me, then, that I used that secrecy," said
his mother, with a flash of new anger. "There is no shame attaching to
me. I have no reason to be ashamed. I rid myself of the Jewish tatters
and gibberish that make people nudge each other at sight of us, as if
we were tattooed under our clothes, though our faces are as whole as
theirs. I delivered you from the pelting contempt that pursues Jewish
separateness. I am not ashamed that I did it. It was the better for
you."

"Then why have you now undone the secrecy?--no, not undone it--the
effects will never be undone. But why have you now sent for me to tell
me that I am a Jew?" said Deronda, with an intensity of opposition in
feeling that was almost bitter. It seemed as if her words had called
out a latent obstinacy of race in him.

"Why?--ah, why?" said the Princess, rising quickly and walking to the
other side of the room, where she turned round and slowly approached
him, as he, too, stood up. Then she began to speak again in a more
veiled voice. "I can't explain; I can only say what is. I don't love my
father's religion now any more than I did then. Before I married the
second time I was baptized; I made myself like the people I lived
among. I had a right to do it; I was not like a brute, obliged to go
with my own herd. I have not repented; I will not say that I have
repented. But yet"--here she had come near to her son, and paused; then
again retreated a little and stood still, as if resolute not to give
way utterly to an imperious influence; but, as she went on speaking,
she became more and more unconscious of anything but the awe that
subdued her voice. "It is illness, I don't doubt that it has been
gathering illness--my mind has gone back: more than a year ago it
began. You see my gray hair, my worn look: it has all come fast.
Sometimes I am in an agony of pain--I dare say I shall be to-night.
Then it is as if all the life I have chosen to live, all thoughts, all
will, forsook me and left me alone in spots of memory, and I can't get
away: my pain seems to keep me there. My childhood--my girlhood--the
day of my marriage--the day of my father's death--there seems to be
nothing since. Then a great horror comes over me: what do I know of
life or death? and what my father called 'right' may be a power that is
laying hold of me--that is clutching me now. Well, I will satisfy him.
I cannot go into the darkness without satisfying him. I have hidden
what was his. I thought once I would burn it. I have not burned it. I
thank God I have not burned it!"

She threw herself on her cushions again, visibly fatigued. Deronda,
moved too strongly by her suffering for other impulses to act within
him, drew near her, and said, entreatingly,

"Will you not spare yourself this evening? Let us leave the rest till
to-morrow."

"No," she said decisively. "I will confess it all, now that I have come
up to it. Often when I am at ease it all fades away; my whole self
comes quite back; but I know it will sink away again, and the other
will come--the poor, solitary, forsaken remains of self, that can
resist nothing. It was my nature to resist, and say, 'I have a right to
resist.' Well, I say so still when I have any strength in me. You have
heard me say it, and I don't withdraw it. But when my strength goes,
some other right forces itself upon me like iron in an inexorable hand;
and even when I am at ease, it is beginning to make ghosts upon the
daylight. And now you have made it worse for me," she said, with a
sudden return of impetuosity; "but I shall have told you everything.
And what reproach is there against me," she added bitterly, "since I
have made you glad to be a Jew? Joseph Kalonymos reproached me: he said
you had been turned into a proud Englishman, who resented being touched
by a Jew. I wish you had!" she ended, with a new marvelous alternation.
It was as if her mind were breaking into several, one jarring the other
into impulsive action.

"Who is Joseph Kalonymos?" said Deronda, with a darting recollection of
that Jew who touched his arm in the Frankfort synagogue.

"Ah! some vengeance sent him back from the East, that he might see you
and come to reproach me. He was my father's friend. He knew of your
birth: he knew of my husband's death, and once, twenty years ago, after
he had been away in the Levant, he came to see me and inquire about
you. I told him that you were dead: I meant you to be dead to all the
world of my childhood. If I had said that your were living, he would
have interfered with my plans: he would have taken on him to represent
my father, and have tried to make me recall what I had done. What could
I do but say you were dead? The act was done. If I had told him of it
there would have been trouble and scandal--and all to conquer me, who
would not have been conquered. I was strong then, and I would have had
my will, though there might have been a hard fight against me. I took
the way to have it without any fight. I felt then that I was not really
deceiving: it would have come to the same in the end; or if not to the
same, to something worse. He believed me and begged that I would give
up to him the chest that my father had charged me and my husband to
deliver to our eldest son. I knew what was in the chest--things that
had been dinned in my ears since I had had any understanding--things
that were thrust on my mind that I might feel them like a wall around
my life--my life that was growing like a tree. Once, after my husband
died, I was going to burn the chest. But it was difficult to burn; and
burning a chest and papers looks like a shameful act. I have committed
no shameful act--except what Jews would call shameful. I had kept the
chest, and I gave it to Joseph Kalonymos. He went away mournful, and
said, 'If you marry again, and if another grandson is born to him who
is departed, I will deliver up the chest to him.' I bowed in silence. I
meant not to marry again--no more than I meant to be the shattered
woman that I am now."

She ceased speaking, and her head sank back while she looked vaguely
before her. Her thought was traveling through the years, and when she
began to speak again her voice had lost its argumentative spirit, and
had fallen into a veiled tone of distress.

"But months ago this Kalonymos saw you in the synagogue at Frankfort.
He saw you enter the hotel, and he went to ask your name. There was
nobody else in the world to whom the name would have told anything
about me."

"Then it is not my real name?" said Deronda, with a dislike even to
this trifling part of the disguise which had been thrown round him.

"Oh, as real as another," said his mother, indifferently. "The Jews
have always been changing their names. My father's family had kept the
name of Charisi: my husband was a Charisi. When I came out as a singer,
we made it Alcharisi. But there had been a branch of the family my
father had lost sight of who called themselves Deronda, and when I
wanted a name for you, and Sir Hugo said, 'Let it be a foreign name,' I
thought of Deronda. But Joseph Kalonymos had heard my father speak of
the Deronda branch, and the name confirmed his suspicion. He began to
suspect what had been done. It was as if everything had been whispered
to him in the air. He found out where I was. He took a journey into
Russia to see me; he found me weak and shattered. He had come back
again, with his white hair, and with rage in his soul against me. He
said I was going down to the grave clad in falsehood and
robbery--falsehood to my father and robbery of my own child. He accused
me of having kept the knowledge of your birth from you, and having
brought you up as if you had been the son of an English gentleman.
Well, it was true; and twenty years before I would have maintained that
I had a right to do it. But I can maintain nothing now. No faith is
strong within me. My father may have God on his side. This man's words
were like lion's teeth upon me. My father's threats eat into me with my
pain. If I tell everything--if I deliver up everything--what else can
be demanded of me? I cannot make myself love the people I have never
loved--is it not enough that I lost the life I did love?"

She had leaned forward a little in her low-toned pleading, that seemed
like a smothered cry: her arms and hands were stretched out at full
length, as if strained in beseeching, Deronda's soul was absorbed in
the anguish of compassion. He could not mind now that he had been
repulsed before. His pity made a flood of forgiveness within him. His
single impulse was to kneel by her and take her hand gently, between
his palms, while he said in that exquisite voice of soothing which
expresses oneness with the sufferer,

"Mother, take comfort!"

She did not seem inclined to repulse him now, but looked down at him
and let him take both her hands to fold between his. Gradually tears
gathered, but she pressed her handkerchief against her eyes and then
leaned her cheek against his brow, as if she wished that they should
not look at each other.

"Is it not possible that I could be near you often and comfort you?"
said Deronda. He was under that stress of pity that propels us on
sacrifices.

"No, not possible," she answered, lifting up her head again and
withdrawing her hand as if she wished him to move away. "I have a
husband and five children. None of them know of your existence."

Deronda felt painfully silenced. He rose and stood at a little distance.

"You wonder why I married," she went on presently, under the influence
of a newly-recurring thought. "I meant never to marry again. I meant to
be free and to live for my art. I had parted with you. I had no bonds.
For nine years I was a queen. I enjoyed the life I had longed for. But
something befell me. It was like a fit of forgetfulness. I began to
sing out of tune. They told me of it. Another woman was thrusting
herself in my place. I could not endure the prospect of failure and
decline. It was horrible to me." She started up again, with a shudder,
and lifted screening hands like one who dreads missiles. "It drove me
to marry. I made believe that I preferred being the wife of a Russian
noble to being the greatest lyric actress of Europe; I made believe--I
acted that part. It was because I felt my greatness sinking away from
me, as I feel my life sinking now. I would not wait till men said, 'She
had better go.'"

She sank into her seat again, and looked at the evening sky as she went
on: "I repented. It was a resolve taken in desperation. That singing
out of tune was only like a fit of illness; it went away. I repented;
but it was too late. I could not go back. All things hindered, me--all
things."

A new haggardness had come in her face, but her son refrained from
again urging her to leave further speech till the morrow: there was
evidently some mental relief for her in an outpouring such as she could
never have allowed herself before. He stood still while she maintained
silence longer than she knew, and the light was perceptibly fading. At
last she turned to him and said,

"I can bear no more now." She put out her hand, but then quickly
withdrew it saying, "Stay. How do I know that I can see you again? I
cannot bear to be seen when I am in pain."

She drew forth a pocket-book, and taking out a letter said, "This is
addressed to the banking-house in Mainz, where you are to go for your
grandfather's chest. It is a letter written by Joseph Kalonymos: if he
is not there himself, this order of his will be obeyed."

When Deronda had taken the letter, she said, with effort but more
gently than before, "Kneel again, and let me kiss you."

He obeyed, and holding his head between her hands, she kissed him
solemnly on the brow. "You see, I had no life left to love you with,"
she said, in a low murmur. "But there is more fortune for you. Sir Hugo
was to keep it in reserve. I gave you all your father's fortune. They
can never accuse me of robbery there."

"If you had needed anything I would have worked for you," said Deronda,
conscious of disappointed yearning--a shutting out forever from long
early vistas of affectionate imagination.

"I need nothing that the skill of man can give me," said his mother,
still holding his head, and perusing his features. "But perhaps now I
have satisfied my father's will, your face will come instead of
his--your young, loving face."

"But you will see me again?" said Deronda, anxiously.

"Yes--perhaps. Wait, wait. Leave me now."




CHAPTER LII.

    "La même fermeté qui sert à résister à l'amour sert aussi à le rendre
    violent et durable; et les personnes faibles qui sont toujours
    agitées des passions n'en sont presque jamais véritablement remplies."
    --LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.


Among Deronda's letters the next morning was one from Hans Meyrick of
four quarto pages, in the small, beautiful handwriting which ran in the
Meyrick family.

    MY DEAR DERONDA,--In return for your sketch of Italian movements and
    your view of the world's affairs generally, I may say that here at
    home the most judicious opinion going as to the effects of present
    causes is that "time will show." As to the present causes of past
    effects, it is now seen that the late swindling telegrams account for
    the last year's cattle plague--which is a refutation of philosophy
    falsely so called, and justifies the compensation to the farmers. My
    own idea that a murrain will shortly break out in the commercial
    class, and that the cause will subsequently disclose itself in the
    ready sale of all rejected pictures, has been called an unsound use of
    analogy; but there are minds that will not hesitate to rob even the
    neglected painter of his solace. To my feeling there is great beauty
    in the conception that some bad judge might give a high price for my
    Berenice series, and that the men in the city would have already been
    punished for my ill-merited luck.

    Meanwhile I am consoling myself for your absence by finding my
    advantage in it--shining like Hesperus when Hyperion has departed;
    sitting with our Hebrew prophet, and making a study of his head, in
    the hours when he used to be occupied with you--getting credit with
    him as a learned young Gentile, who would have been a Jew if he could
    --and agreeing with him in the general principle, that whatever is
    best is for that reason Jewish. I never held it my _forte_ to be
    a severe reasoner, but I can see that if whatever is best is A, and B
    happens to be best, B must be A, however little you might have
    expected it beforehand. On that principle I could see the force of a
    pamphlet I once read to prove that all good art was Protestant.
    However, our prophet is an uncommonly interesting sitter--a better
    model than Rembrandt had for his Rabbi--and I never come away from him
    without a new discovery. For one thing, it is a constant wonder to me
    that, with all his fiery feeling for his race and their traditions, he
    is no straight-laced Jew, spitting after the word Christian, and
    enjoying the prospect that the Gentile mouth will water in vain for a
    slice of the roasted Leviathan, while Israel will be sending up plates
    for more, _ad libitum_, (You perceive that my studies had taught
    me what to expect from the orthodox Jew.) I confess that I have always
    held lightly by your account of Mordecai, as apologetic, and merely
    part of your disposition to make an antedeluvian point of view lest
    you should do injustice to the megatherium. But now I have given ear
    to him in his proper person, I find him really a sort of
    philosophical-allegorical-mystical believer, and yet with a sharp
    dialectic point, so that any argumentative rattler of peas in a
    bladder might soon be pricked in silence by him. The mixture may be
    one of the Jewish prerogatives, for what I know. In fact, his mind
    seems so broad that I find my own correct opinions lying in it quite
    commodiously, and how they are to be brought into agreement with the
    vast remainder is his affair, not mine. I leave it to him to settle
    our basis, never yet having seen a basis which is not a
    world-supporting elephant, more or less powerful and expensive to keep.
    My means will not allow me to keep a private elephant. I go into mystery
    instead, as cheaper and more lasting--a sort of gas which is likely to
    be continually supplied by the decomposition of the elephants. And if
    I like the look of an opinion, I treat it civilly, without suspicious
    inquiries. I have quite a friendly feeling toward Mordecai's notion
    that a whole Christian is three-fourths a Jew, and that from the
    Alexandrian time downward the most comprehensive minds have been
    Jewish; for I think of pointing out to Mirah that, Arabic and other
    incidents of life apart, there is really little difference between me
    and--Maimonides. But I have lately been finding out that it is your
    shallow lover who can't help making a declaration. If Mirah's ways
    were less distracting, and it were less of a heaven to be in her
    presence and watch her, I must long ago have flung myself at her feet,
    and requested her to tell me, with less indirectness, whether she
    wished me to blow my brains out. I have a knack of hoping, which is as
    good as an estate in reversion, if one can keep from the temptation of
    turning it into certainty, which may spoil all. My Hope wanders among
    the orchard blossoms, feels the warm snow falling on it through the
    sunshine, and is in doubt of nothing; but, catching sight of Certainty
    in the distance, sees an ugly Janus-faced deity, with a dubious wink
    on the hither side of him, and turns quickly away. But you, with your
    supreme reasonableness, and self-nullification, and preparation for
    the worst--you know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious
    maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called
    deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment,
    whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only escapes by
    transformation. (You observe my new vein of allegory?) Seriously,
    however, I must be permitted to allege that truth will prevail, that
    prejudice will melt before it, that diversity, accompanied by merit,
    will make itself felt as fascination, and that no virtuous aspiration
    will be frustrated--all which, if I mistake not, are doctrines of the
    schools, and they imply that the Jewess I prefer will prefer me. Any
    blockhead can cite generalities, but the mind-master discerns the
    particular cases they represent.

    I am less convinced that my society makes amends to Mordecai for your
    absence, but another substitute occasionally comes in the form of
    Jacob Cohen. It is worth while to catch our prophet's expression when
    he has that remarkable type of young Israel on his knee, and pours
    forth some Semitic inspiration with a sublime look of melancholy
    patience and devoutness. Sometimes it occurs to Jacob that Hebrew will
    be more edifying to him if he stops his ears with his palms, and
    imitates the venerable sounds as heard through that muffled medium.
    When Mordecai gently draws down the little fists and holds them fast,
    Jacob's features all take on an extraordinary activity, very much as
    if he was walking through a menagerie and trying to imitate every
    animal in turn, succeeding best with the owl and the peccary. But I
    dare say you have seen something of this. He treats me with the
    easiest familiarity, and seems in general to look at me as a second-hand
    Christian commodity, likely to come down in price; remarking on
    my disadvantages with a frankness which seems to imply some thoughts
    of future purchase. It is pretty, though, to see the change in him if
    Mirah happens to come in. He turns child suddenly--his age usually
    strikes one as being like the Israelitish garments in the desert,
    perhaps near forty, yet with an air of recent production. But, with
    Mirah, he reminds me of the dogs that have been brought up by women,
    and remain manageable by them only. Still, the dog is fond of Mordecai
    too, and brings sugar-plums to share with him, filling his own mouth
    to rather an embarrassing extent, and watching how Mordecai deals with
    a smaller supply. Judging from this modern Jacob at the age of six, my
    astonishment is that his race has not bought us all up long ago, and
    pocketed our feebler generations in the form of stock and scrip, as so
    much slave property. There is one Jewess I should not mind being slave
    to. But I wish I did not imagine that Mirah gets a little sadder, and
    tries all the while to hide it. It is natural enough, of course, while
    she has to watch the slow death of this brother, whom she has taken to
    worshipping with such looks of loving devoutness that I am ready to
    wish myself in his place.

    For the rest, we are a little merrier than usual. Rex Gascoigne--you
    remember a head you admired among my sketches, a fellow with a good
    upper lip, reading law--has got some rooms in town now not far off us,
    and has had a neat sister (upper lip also good) staying with him the
    last fortnight. I have introduced them both to my mother and the
    girls, who have found out from Miss Gascoigne that she is cousin to
    your Vandyke duchess!!! I put the notes of exclamation to mark the
    surprise that the information at first produced on my feeble
    understanding. On reflection I discovered that there was not the least
    ground for surprise, unless I had beforehand believed that nobody
    could be anybody's cousin without my knowing it. This sort of
    surprise, I take it, depends on a liveliness of the spine, with a more
    or less constant nullity of brain. There was a fellow I used to meet
    at Rome who was in an effervescence of surprise at contact with the
    simplest information. Tell him what you would--that you were fond of
    easy boots--he would always say, "No! are you?" with the same energy
    of wonder: the very fellow of whom pastoral Browne wrote
    prophetically,

      "A wretch so empty that if e'er there be
      In nature found the least vacuity
      'Twill be in him."

    I have accounted for it all--he had a lively spine.

    However, this cousinship with the duchess came out by chance one day
    that Mirah was with them at home and they were talking about the
    Mallingers. _Apropos_; I am getting so important that I have
    rival invitations. Gascoigne wants me to go down with him to his
    father's rectory in August and see the country round there. But I
    think self-interest well understood will take me to Topping Abbey, for
    Sir Hugo has invited me, and proposes--God bless him for his rashness!
    --that I should make a picture of his three daughters sitting on a
    bank--as he says, in the Gainsborough style. He came to my studio the
    other day and recommended me to apply myself to portrait. Of course I
    know what that means.--"My good fellow, your attempts at the historic
    and poetic are simply pitiable. Your brush is just that of a
    successful portrait-painter--it has a little truth and a great
    facility in falsehood--your idealism will never do for gods and
    goddesses and heroic story, but it may fetch a high price as flattery.
    Fate, my friend, has made you the hinder wheel--_rota  posterior
    curras, et in axe secundo_--run behind, because you can't help it."
    --What great effort it evidently costs our friends to give us these
    candid opinions! I have even known a man to take the trouble to call,
    in order to tell me that I had irretrievably exposed my want of
    judgment in treating my subject, and that if I had asked him we would
    have lent me his own judgment. Such was my ingratitude and my
    readiness at composition, that even while he was speaking I inwardly
    sketched a Last Judgment with that candid friend's physiognomy on the
    left. But all this is away from Sir Hugo, whose manner of implying
    that one's gifts are not of the highest order is so exceedingly
    good-natured and comfortable that I begin to feel it an advantage not
    to be among those poor fellows at the tip-top. And his kindness to me
    tastes all the better because it comes out of his love for you, old
    boy. His chat is uncommonly amusing. By the way, he told me that your
    Vandyke duchess is gone with her husband yachting to the Mediterranean.
    I bethink me that it is possible to land from a yacht, or to be taken
    on to a yacht from the land. Shall you by chance have an opportunity of
    continuing your theological discussion with the fair Supralapsarian--I
    think you said her tenets were of that complexion? Is Duke Alphonso
    also theological?--perhaps an Arian who objects to triplicity. (Stage
    direction. While D. is reading, a profound scorn gathers in his face
    till at the last word he flings down the letter, grasps his coat-collar
    in a statuesque attitude and so remains with a look generally
    tremendous, throughout the following soliloquy, "O night, O blackness,
    etc., etc.")

    Excuse the brevity of this letter. You are not used to more from me
    than a bare statement of facts, without comment or digression. One
    fact I have omitted--that the Klesmers on the eve of departure have
    behaved magnificently, shining forth as might be expected from the
    planets of genius and fortune in conjunction. Mirah is rich with their
    oriental gifts.

    What luck it will be if you come back and present yourself at the
    Abbey while I am there! I am going to behave with consummate
    discretion and win golden opinions, But I shall run up to town now and
    then, just for a peep into Gad Eden. You see how far I have got in
    Hebrew lore--up with my Lord Bolingbroke, who knew no Hebrew, but
    "understood that sort of learning and what is writ about it." If Mirah
    commanded, I would go to a depth below the tri-literal roots. Already
    it makes no difference to me whether the points are there or not. But
    while her brother's life lasts I suspect she would not listen to a
    lover, even one whose "hair is like a flock of goats on Mount
    Gilead"--and I flatter myself that few heads would bear that trying
    comparison better than mine. So I stay with my hope among the
    orchard-blossoms.

    Your devoted,

    HANS MEYRICK.

Some months before, this letter from Hans would have divided Deronda's
thoughts irritatingly: its romancing, about Mirah would have had an
unpleasant edge, scarcely anointed with any commiseration for his
friend's probable disappointment. But things had altered since March.
Mirah was no longer so critically placed with regard to the Meyricks,
and Deronda's own position had been undergoing a change which had just
been crowned by the revelation of his birth. The new opening toward the
future, though he would not trust in any definite visions, inevitably
shed new lights, and influenced his mood toward past and present;
hence, what Hans called his hope now seemed to Deronda, not a
mischievous unreasonableness which roused his indignation, but an
unusually persistent bird-dance of an extravagant fancy, and he would
have felt quite able to pity any consequent suffering of his friend's,
if he had believed in the suffering as probable. But some of the busy
thought filling that long day, which passed without his receiving any
new summons from his mother, was given to the argument that Hans
Meyrick's nature was not one in which love could strike the deep roots
that turn disappointment into sorrow: it was too restless, too readily
excitable by novelty, too ready to turn itself into imaginative
material, and wear its grief as a fantastic costume. "Already he is
beginning to play at love: he is taking the whole affair as a comedy,"
said Deronda to himself; "he knows very well that there is no chance
for him. Just like him--never opening his eyes on any possible
objection I could have to receive his outpourings about Mirah. Poor old
Hans! If we were under a fiery hail together he would howl like a
Greek, and if I did not howl too it would never occur to him that I was
as badly off as he. And yet he is tender-hearted and affectionate in
intention, and I can't say that he is not active in imagining what goes
on in other people--but then he always imagines it to fit his own
inclination."

With this touch of causticity Deronda got rid of the slight heat at
present raised by Hans's naive expansiveness. The nonsense about
Gwendolen, conveying the fact that she was gone yachting with her
husband, only suggested a disturbing sequel to his own strange parting
with her. But there was one sentence in the letter which raised a more
immediate, active anxiety. Hans's suspicion of a hidden sadness in
Mirah was not in the direction of his wishes, and hence, instead of
distrusting his observation here, Deronda began to conceive a cause for
the sadness. Was it some event that had occurred during his absence, or
only the growing fear of some event? Was it something, perhaps
alterable, in the new position which had been made for her? Or--had
Mordecai, against his habitual resolve, communicated to her those
peculiar cherished hopes about him, Deronda, and had her quickly
sensitive nature been hurt by the discovery that her brother's will or
tenacity of visionary conviction had acted coercively on their
friendship--been hurt by the fear that there was more of pitying
self-suppression than of equal regard in Deronda's relation to him? For
amidst all Mirah's quiet renunciation, the evident thirst of soul with
which she received the tribute of equality implied a corresponding pain
if she found that what she had taken for a purely reverential regard
toward her brother had its mixture of condescension.

In this last conjecture of Deronda's he was not wrong as to the quality
in Mirah's nature on which he was founding--the latent protest against
the treatment she had all her life being subject to until she met him.
For that gratitude which would not let her pass by any notice of their
acquaintance without insisting on the depth of her debt to him, took
half its fervor from the keen comparison with what others had thought
enough to render to her. Deronda's affinity in feeling enabled him to
penetrate such secrets. But he was not near the truth in admitting the
idea that Mordecai had broken his characteristic reticence. To no soul
but Deronda himself had he yet breathed the history of their relation
to each other, or his confidence about his friend's origin: it was not
only that these subjects were for him too sacred to be spoken of
without weighty reason, but that he had discerned Deronda's shrinking
at any mention of his birth; and the severity of reserve which had
hindered Mordecai from answering a question on a private affair of the
Cohen family told yet more strongly here.

"Ezra, how is it?" Mirah one day said to him--"I am continually going
to speak to Mr. Deronda as if he were a Jew?"

He smiled at her quietly, and said, "I suppose it is because he treats
us as if he were our brother. But he loves not to have the difference
of birth dwelt upon."

"He has never lived with his parents, Mr. Hans, says," continued Mirah,
to whom this was necessarily a question of interest about every one for
whom she had a regard.

"Seek not to know such things from Mr. Hans," said Mordecai, gravely,
laying his hand on her curls, as he was wont. "What Daniel Deronda
wishes us to know about himself is for him to tell us."

And Mirah felt herself rebuked, as Deronda had done. But to be rebuked
in this way by Mordecai made her rather proud.

"I see no one so great as my brother," she said to Mrs. Meyrick one day
that she called at the Chelsea house on her way home, and, according to
her hope, found the little mother alone. "It is difficult to think that
he belongs to the same world as those people I used to live amongst. I
told you once that they made life seem like a madhouse; but when I am
with Ezra he makes me feel that his life is a great good, though he has
suffered so much; not like me, who wanted to die because I had suffered
a little, and only for a little while. His soul is so full, it is
impossible for him to wish for death as I did. I get the same sort of
feeling from him that I got yesterday, when I was tired, and came home
through the park after the sweet rain had fallen and the sunshine lay
on the grass and flowers. Everything in the sky and under the sky
looked so pure and beautiful that the weariness and trouble and folly
seemed only a small part of what is, and I became more patient and
hopeful."

A dove-like note of melancholy in this speech caused Mrs. Meyrick to
look at Mirah with new examination. After laying down her hat and
pushing her curls flat, with an air of fatigue, she placed herself on a
chair opposite her friend in her habitual attitude, her feet and hands
just crossed; and at a distance she might have seemed a colored statue
of serenity. But Mrs. Meyrick discerned a new look of suppressed
suffering in her face, which corresponded to the hint that to be
patient and hopeful required some extra influence.

"Is there any fresh trouble on your mind, my dear?" said Mrs. Meyrick,
giving up her needlework as a sign of concentrated attention.

Mirah hesitated before she said, "I am too ready to speak of troubles,
I think. It seems unkind to put anything painful into other people's
minds, unless one were sure it would hinder something worse. And
perhaps I am too hasty and fearful."

"Oh, my dear, mothers are made to like pain and trouble for the sake of
their children. Is it because the singing lessons are so few, and are
likely to fall off when the season comes to an end? Success in these
things can't come all at once." Mrs. Meyrick did not believe that she
was touching the real grief; but a guess that could be corrected would
make an easier channel for confidence.

"No, not that," said Mirah, shaking her head gently. "I have been a
little disappointed because so many ladies said they wanted me to give
them or their daughters lessons, and then I never heard of them again,
But perhaps after the holidays I shall teach in some schools. Besides,
you know, I am as rich as a princess now. I have not touched the
hundred pounds that Mrs. Klesmer gave me; and I should never be afraid
that Ezra would be in want of anything, because there is Mr. Deronda,"
and he said, 'It is the chief honor of my life that your brother will
share anything with me.' Oh, no! Ezra and I can have no fears for each
other about such things as food and clothing."

"But there is some other fear on your mind," said Mrs. Meyrick not
without divination--"a fear of something that may disturb your peace;
Don't be forecasting evil, dear child, unless it is what you can guard
against. Anxiety is good for nothing if we can't turn it into a
defense. But there's no defense against all the things that might be.
Have you any more reason for being anxious now than you had a month
ago?"

"Yes, I have," said Mirah. "I have kept it from Ezra. I have not dared
to tell him. Pray forgive me that I can't do without telling you. I
_have_ more reason for being anxious. It is five days ago now. I am
quite sure I saw my father."

Mrs. Meyrick shrank into a smaller space, packing her arms across her
chest and leaning forward--to hinder herself from pelting that father
with her worst epithets.

"The year has changed him," Mirah went on. "He had already been much
altered and worn in the time before I left him. You remember I said how
he used sometimes to cry. He was always excited one way or the other. I
have told Ezra everything that I told you, and he says that my father
had taken to gambling, which makes people easily distressed, and then
again exalted. And now--it was only a moment that I saw him--his face
was more haggard, and his clothes were shabby. He was with a much
worse-looking man, who carried something, and they were hurrying along
after an omnibus."

"Well, child, he did not see you, I hope?"

"No. I had just come from Mrs. Raymond's, and I was waiting to cross
near the Marble Arch. Soon he was on the omnibus and gone out of sight.
It was a dreadful moment. My old life seemed to have come back again,
and it was worse than it had ever been before. And I could not help
feeling it a new deliverance that he was gone out of sight without
knowing that I was there. And yet it hurt me that I was feeling so--it
seemed hateful in me--almost like words I once had to speak in a play,
that 'I had warmed my hands in the blood of my kindred.' For where
might my father be going? What may become of him? And his having a
daughter who would own him in spite of all, might have hindered the
worst. Is there any pain like seeing what ought to be the best things
in life turned into the worst? All those opposite feelings were meeting
and pressing against each other, and took up all my strength. No one
could act that. Acting is slow and poor to what we go through within. I
don't know how I called a cab. I only remember that I was in it when I
began to think, 'I cannot tell Ezra; he must not know.'"

"You are afraid of grieving him?" Mrs. Meyrick asked, when Mirah had
paused a little.

"Yes--and there is something more," said Mirah, hesitatingly, as if she
were examining her feeling before she would venture to speak of it. "I
want to tell you; I cannot tell any one else. I could not have told my
own mother: I should have closed it up before her. I feel shame for my
father, and it is perhaps strange--but the shame is greater before Ezra
than before any one else in the world. He desired me to tell him all
about my life, and I obeyed him. But it is always like a smart to me to
know that those things about my father are in Ezra's mind. And--can you
believe it? when the thought haunts me how it would be if my father
were to come and show himself before us both, what seems as if it would
scorch me most is seeing my father shrinking before Ezra. That is the
truth. I don't know whether it is a right feeling. But I can't help
thinking that I would rather try to maintain my father in secret, and
bear a great deal in that way, if I could hinder him from meeting my
brother."

"You must not encourage that feeling, Mirah," said Mrs. Meyrick,
hastily. "It would be very dangerous; it would be wrong. You must not
have concealment of that sort."

"But ought I now to tell Ezra that I have seen my father?" said Mirah,
with deprecation in her tone.

"No," Mrs. Meyrick answered, dubitatively. "I don't know that it is
necessary to do that. Your father may go away with the birds. It is not
clear that he came after you; you may never see him again. And then
your brother will have been spared a useless anxiety. But promise me
that if your father sees you--gets hold of you in any way again--and
you will let us all know. Promise me that solemnly, Mirah. I have a
right to ask it."

Mirah reflected a little, then leaned forward to put her hands in Mrs.
Meyrick's, and said, "Since you ask it, I do promise. I will bear this
feeling of shame. I have been so long used to think that I must bear
that sort of inward pain. But the shame for my father burns me more
when I think of his meeting Ezra." She was silent a moment or two, and
then said, in a new tone of yearning compassion, "And we are his
children--and he was once young like us--and my mother loved him. Oh! I
cannot help seeing it all close, and it hurts me like a cruelty."

Mirah shed no tears: the discipline of her whole life had been against
indulgence in such manifestation, which soon falls under the control of
strong motives; but it seemed that the more intense expression of
sorrow had entered into her voice. Mrs. Meyrick, with all her quickness
and loving insight, did not quite understand that filial feeling in
Mirah which had active roots deep below her indignation for the worst
offenses. She could conceive that a mother would have a clinging pity
and shame for a reprobate son, but she was out of patience with what
she held an exaggerated susceptibility on behalf of this father, whose
reappearance inclined her to wish him under the care of a turnkey.
Mirah's promise, however, was some security against her weakness.

That incident was the only reason that Mirah herself could have stated
for the hidden sadness which Hans had divined. Of one element in her
changed mood she could have given no definite account: it was something
as dim as the sense of approaching weather-change, and had extremely
slight external promptings, such as we are often ashamed to find all we
can allege in support of the busy constructions that go on within us,
not only without effort, but even against it, under the influence of
any blind emotional stirring. Perhaps the first leaven of uneasiness
was laid by Gwendolen's behavior on that visit which was entirely
superfluous as a means of engaging Mirah to sing, and could have no
other motive than the excited and strange questioning about Deronda.
Mirah had instinctively kept the visit a secret, but the active
remembrance of it had raised a new susceptibility in her, and made her
alive as she had never been before to the relations Deronda must have
with that society which she herself was getting frequent glimpses of
without belonging to it. Her peculiar life and education had produced
in her an extraordinary mixture of unworldliness, with knowledge of the
world's evil, and even this knowledge was a strange blending of direct
observation with the effects of reading and theatrical study. Her
memory was furnished with abundant passionate situation and intrigue,
which she never made emotionally her own, but felt a repelled aloofness
from, as she had done from the actual life around her. Some of that
imaginative knowledge began now to weave itself around Mrs. Grandcourt;
and though Mirah would admit no position likely to affect her reverence
for Deronda, she could not avoid a new painfully vivid association of
his general life with a world away from her own, where there might be
some involvement of his feeling and action with a woman like Gwendolen,
who was increasingly repugnant to her--increasingly, even after she had
ceased to see her; for liking and disliking can grow in meditation as
fast as in the more immediate kind of presence. Any disquietude
consciously due to the idea that Deronda's deepest care might be for
something remote not only from herself but even from his friendship for
her brother, she would have checked with rebuking questions:--What was
she but one who had shared his generous kindness with many others? and
his attachment to her brother, was it not begun late to be soon ended?
Other ties had come before, and others would remain after this had been
cut by swift-coming death. But her uneasiness had not reached that
point of self-recognition in which she would have been ashamed of it as
an indirect, presumptuous claim on Deronda's feeling. That she or any
one else should think of him as her possible lover was a conception
which had never entered her mind; indeed it was equally out of the
question with Mrs. Meyrick and the girls, who with Mirah herself
regarded his intervention in her life as something exceptional, and
were so impressed by his mission as her deliverer and guardian that
they would have held it an offense to him at his holding any other
relation toward her: a point of view which Hans also had readily
adopted. It is a little hard upon some men that they appear to sink for
us in becoming lovers. But precisely to this innocence of the Meyricks
was owing the disturbance of Mirah's unconsciousness. The first
occasion could hardly have been more trivial, but it prepared her
emotive nature for a deeper effect from what happened afterward.

It was when Anna Gascoigne, visiting the Meyricks; was led to speak of
her cousinship with Gwendolen. The visit had been arranged that Anna
might see Mirah; the three girls were at home with their mother, and
there was naturally a flux of talk among six feminine creatures, free
from the presence of a distorting male standard. Anna Gascoigne felt
herself much at home with the Meyrick girls, who knew what it was to
have a brother, and to be generally regarded as of minor importance in
the world; and she had told Rex that she thought the University very
nice, because brothers made friends there whose families were not rich
and grand, and yet (like the University) were very nice. The Meyricks
seemed to her almost alarmingly clever, and she consulted them much on
the best mode of teaching Lotta, confiding to them that she herself was
the least clever of her family. Mirah had lately come in, and there was
a complete bouquet of young faces around the tea-table--Hafiz, seated a
little aloft with large eyes on the alert, regarding the whole scene as
an apparatus for supplying his allowance of milk.

"Think of our surprise, Mirah," said Kate. "We were speaking of Mr.
Deronda and the Mallingers, and it turns out that Miss Gascoigne knows
them."

"I only knew about them," said Anna, a little flushed with excitement,
what she had heard and now saw of the lovely Jewess being an almost
startling novelty to her. "I have not even seen them. But some months
ago, my cousin married Sir Hugo Mallinger's nephew, Mr. Grandcourt, who
lived in Sir Hugo's place at Diplow, near us."

"There!" exclaimed Mab, clasping her hands. "Something must come of
that. Mrs. Grandcourt, the Vandyke duchess, is your cousin?"

"Oh, yes; I was her bridesmaid," said Anna. "Her mamma and mine are
sisters. My aunt was much richer before last year, but then she and
mamma lost all their fortune. Papa is a clergyman, you know, so it
makes very little difference to us, except that we keep no carriage,
and have no dinner parties--and I like it better. But it was very sad
for poor Aunt Davilow, for she could not live with us, because she has
four daughters besides Gwendolen; but then, when she married Mr.
Grandcourt, it did not signify so much, because of his being so rich."

"Oh, this finding out relationships is delightful!" said Mab. "It is
like a Chinese puzzle that one has to fit together. I feel sure
something wonderful may be made of it, but I can't tell what."

"Dear me, Mab," said Amy, "relationships must branch out. The only
difference is, that we happen to know some of the people concerned.
Such things are going on every day."

"And pray, Amy, why do you insist on the number nine being so
wonderful?" said Mab. "I am sure that is happening every day. Never
mind, Miss Gascoigne; please go on. And Mr. Deronda?--have you never
seen Mr. Deronda? You _must_ bring him in."

"No, I have not seen him," said Anna; "but he was at Diplow before my
cousin was married, and I have heard my aunt speaking of him to papa.
She said what you have been saying about him--only not so much: I mean,
about Mr. Deronda living with Sir Hugo Mallinger, and being so nice,
she thought. We talk a great deal about every one who comes near
Pennicote, because it is so seldom there is any one new. But I
remember, when I asked Gwendolen what she thought of Mr. Deronda, she
said, 'Don't mention it, Anna: but I think his hair is dark.' That was
her droll way of answering: she was always so lively. It is really
rather wonderful that I should come to hear so much about him, all
through Mr. Hans knowing Rex, and then my having the pleasure of
knowing you," Anna ended, looking at Mrs. Meyrick with a shy grace.

"The pleasure is on our side too; but the wonder would have been, if
you had come to this house without hearing of Mr. Deronda--wouldn't it,
Mirah?" said Mrs. Meyrick.

Mirah smiled acquiescently, but had nothing to say. A confused
discontent took possession of her at the mingling of names and images
to which she had been listening.

"My son calls Mrs. Grandcourt the Vandyke duchess," continued Mrs.
Meyrick, turning again to Anna; "he thinks her so striking and
picturesque."

"Yes," said Anna. "Gwendolen was always so beautiful--people fell
dreadfully in love with her. I thought it a pity, because it made them
unhappy."

"And how do you like Mr. Grandcourt, the happy lover?" said Mrs.
Meyrick, who, in her way, was as much interested as Mab in the hints
she had been hearing of vicissitude in the life of a widow with
daughters.

"Papa approved of Gwendolen's accepting him, and my aunt says he is
very generous," said Anna, beginning with a virtuous intention of
repressing her own sentiments; but then, unable to resist a rare
occasion for speaking them freely, she went on--"else I should have
thought he was not very nice--rather proud, and not at all lively, like
Gwendolen. I should have thought some one younger and more lively would
have suited her better. But, perhaps, having a brother who seems to us
better than any one makes us think worse of others."

"Wait till you see Mr. Deronda," said Mab, nodding significantly.
"Nobody's brother will do after him."

"Our brothers _must_ do for people's husbands," said Kate, curtly,
"because they will not get Mr. Deronda. No woman will do for him to
marry."

"No woman ought to want him to marry him," said Mab, with indignation.
"_I_ never should. Fancy finding out that he had a tailor's bill, and
used boot-hooks, like Hans. Who ever thought of his marrying?"

"I have," said Kate. "When I drew a wedding for a frontispiece to
'Hearts and Diamonds,' I made a sort of likeness to him for the
bridegroom, and I went about looking for a grand woman who would do for
his countess, but I saw none that would not be poor creatures by the
side of him."

"You should have seen this Mrs. Grandcourt then," said Mrs. Meyrick.
"Hans says that she and Mr. Deronda set each other off when they are
side by side. She is tall and fair. But you know her, Mirah--you can
always say something descriptive. What do _you_ think of Mrs.
Grandcourt?"

"I think she is the _Princess of Eboli_ in _Don Carlos_," said Mirah,
with a quick intensity. She was pursuing an association in her own mind
not intelligible to her hearers--an association with a certain actress
as well as the part she represented.

"Your comparison is a riddle for me, my dear," said Mrs. Meyrick,
smiling.

"You said that Mrs. Grandcourt was tall and fair," continued Mirah,
slightly paler. "That is quite true."

Mrs. Meyrick's quick eye and ear detected something unusual, but
immediately explained it to herself. Fine ladies had often wounded
Mirah by caprices of manner and intention.

"Mrs. Grandcourt had thought of having lessons of Mirah," she said
turning to Anna. "But many have talked of having lessons, and then have
found no time. Fashionable ladies have too much work to do."

And the chat went on without further insistance on the _Princess of
Eboli_. That comparison escaped Mirah's lips under the urgency of a
pang unlike anything she had felt before. The conversation from the
beginning had revived unpleasant impressions, and Mrs. Meyrick's
suggestion of Gwendolen's figure by the side of Deronda's had the
stinging effect of a voice outside her, confirming her secret
conviction that this tall and fair woman had some hold on his lot. For
a long while afterward she felt as if she had had a jarring shock
through her frame.

In the evening, putting her cheek against her brother's shoulder as she
was sitting by him, while he sat propped up in bed under a new
difficulty of breathing, she said,

"Ezra, does it ever hurt your love for Mr. Deronda that so much of his
life was all hidden away from you--that he is amongst persons and cares
about persons who are all so unlike us--I mean unlike you?"

"No, assuredly no," said Mordecai. "Rather it is a precious thought to
me that he has a preparation which I lacked, and is an accomplished
Egyptian." Then, recollecting that his words had reference which his
sister must not yet understand, he added. "I have the more to give him,
since his treasure differs from mine. That is a blessedness in
friendship."

Mirah mused a little.

"Still," she said, "it would be a trial to your love for him if that
other part of his life were like a crowd in which he had got entangled,
so that he was carried away from you--I mean in his thoughts, and not
merely carried out of sight as he is now--and not merely for a little
while, but continually. How should you bear that! Our religion commands
us to bear. But how should you bear it?"

"Not well, my sister--not well; but it will never happen," said
Mordecai, looking at her with a tender smile. He thought that her heart
needed comfort on his account.

Mirah said no more. She mused over the difference between her own state
of mind and her brother's, and felt her comparative pettiness. Why
could she not be completely satisfied with what satisfied his larger
judgment? She gave herself no fuller reason than a painful sense of
unfitness--in what? Airy possibilities to which she could give no
outline, but to which one name and one figure gave the wandering
persistency of a blot in her vision. Here lay the vaguer source of the
hidden sadness rendered noticeable to Hans by some diminution of that
sweet ease, that ready joyousness of response in her speech and smile,
which had come with the new sense of freedom and safety, and had made
her presence like the freshly-opened daisies and clear bird-notes after
the rain. She herself regarded her uneasiness as a sort of ingratitude
and dullness of sensibility toward the great things that had been given
her in her new life; and whenever she threw more energy than usual into
her singing, it was the energy of indignation against the shallowness
of her own content. In that mood she once said, "Shall I tell you what
is the difference between you and me, Ezra? You are a spring in the
drought, and I am an acorn-cup; the waters of heaven fill me, but the
least little shake leaves me empty."

"Why, what has shaken thee?" said Mordecai. He fell into this antique
form of speech habitually in talking to his sister and to the Cohen
children.

"Thoughts," said Mirah; "thoughts that come like the breeze and shake
me--bad people, wrong things, misery--and how they might touch our
life."

"We must take our portion, Mirah. It is there. On whose shoulder would
we lay it, that we might be free?"

The one voluntary sign she made of her inward care was this distant
allusion.




CHAPTER LIII.

  "My desolation does begin to make
  A better life."
      --SHAKESPEARE: _Antony and Cleopatra._


Before Deronda was summoned to a second interview with his mother, a
day had passed in which she had only sent him a message to say that she
was not yet well enough to receive him again; but on the third morning
he had a note saying, "I leave to-day. Come and see me at once."

He was shown into the same room as before; but it was much darkened
with blinds and curtains. The Princess was not there, but she presently
entered, dressed in a loose wrap of some soft silk, in color a dusky
orange, her head again with black lace floating about it, her arms
showing themselves bare from under her wide sleeves. Her face seemed
even more impressive in the sombre light, the eyes larger, the lines
more vigorous. You might have imagined her a sorceress who would
stretch forth her wonderful hand and arm to mix youth-potions for
others, but scorned to mix them for herself, having had enough of youth.

She put her arms on her son's shoulders at once, and kissed him on both
cheeks, then seated herself among her cushions with an air of assured
firmness and dignity unlike her fitfulness in their first interview,
and told Deronda to sit down by her. He obeyed, saying, "You are quite
relieved now, I trust?"

"Yes, I am at ease again. Is there anything more that you would like to
ask me?" she said, with the matter of a queen rather than of a mother.

"Can I find the house in Genoa where you used to live with my
grandfather?" said Deronda.

"No," she answered, with a deprecating movement of her arm, "it is
pulled down--not to be found. But about our family, and where my father
lived at various times--you will find all that among the papers in the
chest, better than I can tell you. My father, I told you, was a
physician. My mother was a Morteira. I used to hear all those things
without listening. You will find them all. I was born amongst them
without my will. I banished them as soon as I could."

Deronda tried to hide his pained feeling, and said, "Anything else that
I should desire to know from you could only be what it is some
satisfaction to your own feeling to tell me."

"I think I have told you everything that could be demanded of me," said
the Princess, looking coldly meditative. It seemed as if she had
exhausted her emotion in their former interview. The fact was, she had
said to herself, "I have done it all. I have confessed all. I will not
go through it again. I will save myself from agitation." And she was
acting out that scheme.

But to Deronda's nature the moment was cruel; it made the filial
yearning of his life a disappointed pilgrimage to a shrine where there
were no longer the symbols of sacredness. It seemed that all the woman
lacking in her was present in him, as he said, with some tremor in his
voice,

"Then are we to part and I never be anything to you?"

"It is better so," said the Princess, in a softer, mellower voice.
"There could be nothing but hard duty for you, even if it were possible
for you to take the place of my son. You would not love me. Don't deny
it," she said, abruptly, putting up her hand. "I know what is the
truth. You don't like what I did. You are angry with me. You think I
robbed you of something. You are on your grandfather's side, and you
will always have a condemnation of me in your heart."

Deronda felt himself under a ban of silence. He rose from his seat by
her, preferring to stand, if he had to obey that imperious prohibition
of any tenderness. But his mother now looked up at him with a new
admiration in her glance, saying,

"You are wrong to be angry with me. You are the better for what I did."
After pausing a little, she added, abruptly, "And now tell me what you
shall do?"

"Do you mean now, immediately," said Deronda; "or as to the course of
my future life?"

"I mean in the future. What difference will it make to you that I have
told you about your birth?"

"A very great difference," said Deronda, emphatically. "I can hardly
think of anything that would make a greater difference."

"What shall you do then?" said the Princess, with more sharpness. "Make
yourself just like your grandfather--be what he wished you--turn
yourself into a Jew like him?"

"That is impossible. The effect of my education can never be done away
with. The Christian sympathies in which my mind was reared can never
die out of me," said Deronda, with increasing tenacity of tone. "But I
consider it my duty--it is the impulse of my feeling--to identify
myself, as far as possible, with my hereditary people, and if I can see
any work to be done for them that I can give my soul and hand to I
shall choose to do it."

His mother had her eyes fixed on him with a wondering speculation,
examining his face as if she thought that by close attention she could
read a difficult language there. He bore her gaze very firmly,
sustained by a resolute opposition, which was the expression of his
fullest self. She bent toward him a little, and said, with a decisive
emphasis,

"You are in love with a Jewess."

Deronda colored and said, "My reasons would be independent of any such
fact."

"I know better. I have seen what men are," said the Princess,
peremptorily. "Tell me the truth. She is a Jewess who will not accept
any one but a Jew. There _are_ a few such," she added, with a touch of
scorn.

Deronda had that objection to answer which we all have known in
speaking to those who are too certain of their own fixed
interpretations to be enlightened by anything we may say. But besides
this, the point immediately in question was one on which he felt a
repugnance either to deny or affirm. He remained silent, and she
presently said,

"You love her as your father loved me, and she draws you after her as I
drew him."

Those words touched Deronda's filial imagination, and some tenderness
in his glance was taken by his mother as an assent. She went on with
rising passion: "But I was leading him the other way. And now your
grandfather is getting his revenge."

"Mother," said Deronda, remonstrantly, "don't let us think of it in
that way. I will admit that there may come some benefit from the
education you chose for me. I prefer cherishing the benefit with
gratitude, to dwelling with resentment on the injury. I think it would
have been right that I should have been brought up with the
consciousness that I was a Jew, but it must always have been a good to
me to have as wide an instruction and sympathy as possible. And now,
you have restored me my inheritance--events have brought a fuller
restitution than you could have made--you have been saved from robbing
my people of my service and me of my duty: can you not bring your whole
soul to consent to this?"

Deronda paused in his pleading: his mother looked at him listeningly,
as if the cadence of his voice were taking her ear, yet she shook her
head slowly. He began again, even more urgently.

"You have told me that you sought what you held the best for me: open
your heart to relenting and love toward my grandfather, who sought what
he held the best for you."

"Not for me, no," she said, shaking her head with more absolute denial,
and folding her arms tightly. "I tell you, he never thought of his
daughter except as an instrument. Because I had wants outside his
purpose, I was to be put in a frame and tortured. If that is the right
law for the world, I will not say that I love it. If my acts were
wrong--if it is God who is exacting from me that I should deliver up
what I withheld--who is punishing me because I deceived my father and
did not warn him that I should contradict his trust--well, I have told
everything. I have done what I could. And _your_ soul consents. That is
enough. I have after all been the instrument my father wanted.--'I
desire a grandson who shall have a true Jewish heart. Every Jew should
rear his family as if he hoped that a Deliverer might spring from it.'"

In uttering these last sentences the Princess narrowed her eyes, waved
her head up and down, and spoke slowly with a new kind of chest-voice,
as if she were quoting unwillingly.

"Were those my grandfather's words?" said Deronda.

"Yes, yes; and you will find them written. I wanted to thwart him,"
said the Princess, with a sudden outburst of the passion she had shown
in the former interview. Then she added more slowly, "You would have me
love what I have hated from the time I was so high"--here she held her
left hand a yard from the floor.--"That can never be. But what does it
matter? His yoke has been on me, whether I loved it or not. You are the
grandson he wanted. You speak as men do--as if you felt yourself wise.
What does it all mean?"

Her tone was abrupt and scornful. Deronda, in his pained feeling, and
under the solemn urgency of the moment, had to keep a clutching
remembrance of their relationship, lest his words should become cruel.
He began in a deep entreating tone:

"Mother, don't say that I feel myself wise. We are set in the midst of
difficulties. I see no other way to get any clearness than by being
truthful--not by keeping back facts which may--which should carry
obligation within them--which should make the only guidance toward
duty. No wonder if such facts come to reveal themselves in spite of
concealments. The effects prepared by generations are likely to triumph
over a contrivance which would bend them all to the satisfaction of
self. Your will was strong, but my grandfather's trust which you
accepted and did not fulfill--what you call his yoke--is the expression
of something stronger, with deeper, farther-spreading roots, knit into
the foundations of sacredness for all men. You renounced me--you still
banish me--as a son"--there was an involuntary movement of indignation
in Deronda's voice--"But that stronger Something has determined that I
shall be all the more the grandson whom also you willed to annihilate."

His mother was watching him fixedly, and again her face gathered
admiration. After a moment's silence she said, in a low, persuasive
tone,

"Sit down again," and he obeyed, placing himself beside her. She laid
her hand on his shoulder and went on,

"You rebuke me. Well--I am the loser. And you are angry because I
banish you. What could you do for me but weary your own patience? Your
mother is a shattered woman. My sense of life is little more than a
sense of what was--except when the pain is present. You reproach me
that I parted with you. I had joy enough without you then. Now you are
come back to me, and I cannot make you a joy. Have you the cursing
spirit of the Jew in you? Are you not able to forgive me? Shall you be
glad to think that I am punished because I was not a Jewish mother to
you?"

"How can you ask me that?" said Deronda, remonstrantly. "Have I not
besought you that I might now at least be a son to you? My grief is
that you have declared me helpless to comfort you. I would give up much
that is dear for the sake of soothing your anguish."

"You shall give up nothing," said his mother, with the hurry of
agitation. "You shall be happy. You shall let me think of you as happy.
I shall have done you no harm. You have no reason to curse me. You
shall feel for me as they feel for the dead whom they say prayers
for--you shall long that I may be freed from all suffering--from all
punishment. And I shall see you instead of always seeing your
grandfather. Will any harm come to me because I broke his trust in the
daylight after he was gone into darkness? I cannot tell:--if you think
_Kaddish_ will help me--say it, say it. You will come between me and
the dead. When I am in your mind, you will look as you do now--always
as if you were a tender son--always--as if I had been a tender mother."

She seemed resolved that her agitation should not conquer her, but he
felt her hand trembling on his shoulder. Deep, deep compassion hemmed
in all words. With a face of beseeching he put his arm around her and
pressed her head tenderly under his. They sat so for some moments. Then
she lifted her head again and rose from her seat with a great sigh, as
if in that breath she were dismissing a weight of thoughts. Deronda,
standing in front of her, felt that the parting was near. But one of
her swift alternations had come upon his mother.

"Is she beautiful?" she said, abruptly.

"Who?" said Deronda, changing color.

"The woman you love."

It was not a moment for deliberate explanation. He was obliged to say,
"Yes."

"Not ambitious?"

"No, I think not."

"Not one who must have a path of her own?"

"I think her nature is not given to make great claims."

"She is not like that?" said the Princess, taking from her wallet a
miniature with jewels around it, and holding it before her son. It was
her own in all the fire of youth, and as Deronda looked at it with
admiring sadness, she said, "Had I not a rightful claim to be something
more than a mere daughter and mother? The voice and the genius matched
the face. Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be
an artist, though my father's will was against it. My nature gave me a
charter."

"I do acknowledge that," said Deronda, looking from the miniature to
her face, which even in its worn pallor had an expression of living
force beyond anything that the pencil could show.

"Will you take the portrait?" said the Princess, more gently. "If she
is a kind woman, teach her to think of me kindly."

"I shall be grateful for the portrait," said Deronda, "but--I ought to
say, I have no assurance that she whom I love will have any love for
me. I have kept silence."

"Who and what is she?" said the mother. The question seemed a command.

"She was brought up as a singer for the stage," said Deronda, with
inward reluctance. "Her father took her away early from her mother, and
her life has been unhappy. She is very young--only twenty. Her father
wished to bring her up in disregard--even in dislike of her Jewish
origin, but she has clung with all her affection to the memory of her
mother and the fellowship of her people."

"Ah, like you. She is attached to the Judaism she knows nothing of,"
said the Princess, peremptorily. "That is poetry--fit to last through
an opera night. Is she fond of her artist's life--is her singing worth
anything?"

"Her singing is exquisite. But her voice is not suited to the stage. I
think that the artist's life has been made repugnant to her."

"Why, she is made for you then. Sir Hugo said you were bitterly against
being a singer, and I can see that you would never have let yourself be
merged in a wife, as your father was."

"I repeat," said Deronda, emphatically--"I repeat that I have no
assurance of her love for me, of the possibility that we can ever be
united. Other things--painful issues may lie before me. I have always
felt that I should prepare myself to renounce, not cherish that
prospect. But I suppose I might feel so of happiness in general.
Whether it may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do
without it."

"Do you feel in that way?" said his mother, laying her hands on his
shoulders, and perusing his face, while she spoke in a low meditative
tone, pausing between her sentences. "Poor boy!----I wonder how it
would have been if I had kept you with me----whether you would have
turned your heart to the old things against mine----and we should have
quarreled----your grandfather would have been in you----and you would
have hampered my life with your young growth from the old root."

"I think my affection might have lasted through all our quarreling,"
said Deronda, saddened more and more, "and that would not have
hampered--surely it would have enriched your life."

"Not then, not then----I did not want it then----I might have been glad
of it now," said the mother, with a bitter melancholy, "if I could have
been glad of anything."

"But you love your other children, and they love you?" said Deronda,
anxiously.

"Oh, yes," she answered, as to a question about a matter of course,
while she folded her arms again. "But,"----she added in a deeper
tone,----"I am not a loving woman. That is the truth. It is a talent to
love--I lack it. Others have loved me--and I have acted their love. I
know very well what love makes of men and women--it is subjection. It
takes another for a larger self, enclosing this one,"--she pointed to
her own bosom. "I was never willingly subject to any man. Men have been
subject to me."

"Perhaps the man who was subject was the happier of the two," said
Deronda--not with a smile, but with a grave, sad sense of his mother's
privation.

"Perhaps--but I _was_ happy--for a few years I was happy. If I had not
been afraid of defeat and failure, I might have gone on. I
miscalculated. What then? It is all over. Another life! Men talk of
'another life,' as if it only began on the other side of the grave. I
have long entered on another life." With the last words she raised her
arms till they were bare to the elbow, her brow was contracted in one
deep fold, her eyes were closed, her voice was smothered: in her dusky
flame-colored garment, she looked like a dreamed visitant from some
region of departed mortals.

Deronda's feeling was wrought to a pitch of acuteness in which he was
no longer quite master of himself. He gave an audible sob. His mother,
opened her eyes, and letting her hands again rest on his shoulders,
said,

"Good-bye, my son, good-bye. We shall hear no more of each other. Kiss
me."

He clasped his arms round her neck, and they kissed each other.

Deronda did not know how he got out of the room. He felt an older man.
All his boyish yearnings and anxieties about his mother had vanished.
He had gone through a tragic experience which must forever solemnize
his life and deepen the significance of the acts by which he bound
himself to others.




CHAPTER LIV.

        "The unwilling brain
  Feigns often what it would not; and we trust
  Imagination with such phantasies
  As the tongue dares not fashion into words;
  Which have no words, their horror makes them dim
  To the mind's eye."
                                          --SHELLEY.


Madonna Pia, whose husband, feeling himself injured by her, took her to
his castle amid the swampy flats of the Maremma and got rid of her
there, makes a pathetic figure in Dante's Purgatory, among the sinners
who repented at the last and desire to be remembered compassionately by
their fellow-countrymen. We know little about the grounds of mutual
discontent between the Siennese couple, but we may infer with some
confidence that the husband had never been a very delightful companion,
and that on the flats of the Maremma his disagreeable manners had a
background which threw them out remarkably; whence in his desire to
punish his wife to the unmost, the nature of things was so far against
him that in relieving himself of her he could not avoid making the
relief mutual. And thus, without any hardness to the poor Tuscan lady,
who had her deliverance long ago, one may feel warranted in thinking of
her with a less sympathetic interest than of the better known Gwendolen
who, instead of being delivered from her errors on earth and cleansed
from their effect in purgatory, is at the very height of her
entanglement in those fatal meshes which are woven within more closely
than without, and often make the inward torture disproportionate to
what is discernable as outward cause.

In taking his wife with him on a yachting expedition, Grandcourt had no
intention to get rid of her; on the contrary, he wanted to feel more
securely that she was his to do as he liked with, and to make her feel
it also. Moreover, he was himself very fond of yachting: its dreamy
do-nothing absolutism, unmolested by social demands, suited his
disposition, and he did not in the least regard it as an equivalent for
the dreariness of the Maremma. He had his reasons for carrying
Gwendolen out of reach, but they were not reasons that can seem black
in the mere statement. He suspected a growing spirit of opposition in
her, and his feeling about the sentimental inclination she betrayed for
Deronda was what in another man he would have called jealousy. In
himself it seemed merely a resolution to put an end to such foolery as
must have been going on in that prearranged visit of Deronda's which he
had divined and interrupted.

And Grandcourt might have pleaded that he was perfectly justified in
taking care that his wife should fulfill the obligations she had
accepted. Her marriage was a contract where all the ostensible
advantages were on her side, and it was only of those advantages that
her husband should use his power to hinder her from any injurious self
committal or unsuitable behavior. He knew quite well that she had not
married him--had not overcome her repugnance to certain facts--out of
love to him personally; he had won her by the rank and luxuries he had
to give her, and these she had got: he had fulfilled his side of the
contract.

And Gwendolen, we know, was thoroughly aware of the situation. She
could not excuse herself by saying that there had been a tacit part of
the contract on her side--namely, that she meant to rule and have her
own way. With all her early indulgence in the disposition to dominate,
she was not one of the narrow-brained women who through life regard all
their own selfish demands as rights, and every claim upon themselves as
an injury. She had a root of conscience in her, and the process of
purgatory had begun for her on the green earth: she knew that she had
been wrong.

But now enter into the soul of this young creature as she found
herself, with the blue Mediterranean dividing her from the world, on
the tiny plank-island of a yacht, the domain of the husband to whom she
felt that she had sold herself, and had been paid the strict
price--nay, paid more than she had dared to ask in the handsome
maintenance of her mother:--the husband to whom she had sold her
truthfulness and sense of justice, so that he held them throttled into
silence, collared and dragged behind him to witness what he would,
without remonstrance.

What had she to complain of? The yacht was of the prettiest; the cabin
fitted up to perfection, smelling of cedar, soft-cushioned, hung with
silk, expanded with mirrors; the crew such as suited an elegant toy,
one of them having even ringlets, as well as a bronze complexion and
fine teeth; and Mr. Lush was not there, for he had taken his way back
to England as soon as he had seen all and everything on board.
Moreover, Gwendolen herself liked the sea: it did not make her ill; and
to observe the rigging of the vessel and forecast the necessary
adjustments was a sort of amusement that might have gratified her
activity and enjoyment of imaginary rule; the weather was fine, and
they were coasting southward, where even the rain-furrowed,
heat-cracked clay becomes gem-like with purple shadows, and where one
may float between blue and blue in an open-eyed dream that the world
has done with sorrow.

But what can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for
beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression? What sort of Moslem
paradise would quiet the terrible fury of moral repulsion and cowed
resistance which, like an eating pain intensifying into torture,
concentrates the mind in that poisonous misery? While Gwendolen,
throned on her cushions at evening, and beholding the glory of sea and
sky softening as if with boundless love around her, was hoping that
Grandcourt in his march up and down was not going to pause near her,
not going to look at her or speak to her, some woman, under a smoky
sky, obliged to consider the price of eggs in arranging her dinner, was
listening for the music of a footstep that would remove all risk from
her foretaste of joy; some couple, bending cheek by cheek, over a bit
of work done by the one and delighted in by the other, were reckoning
the earnings that would make them rich enough for a holiday among the
furze and heather.

Had Grandcourt the least conception of what was going on in the breast
of his wife? He conceived that she did not love him; but was that
necessary? She was under his power, and he was not accustomed to soothe
himself, as some cheerfully-disposed persons are, with the conviction
that he was very generally and justly beloved. But what lay quite away
from his conception was, that she could have any special repulsion for
him personally. How could she? He himself knew what personal repulsion
was--nobody better; his mind was much furnished with a sense of what
brutes his fellow-creatures were, both masculine and feminine; what
odious familiarities they had, what smirks, what modes of flourishing
their handkerchiefs, what costume, what lavender water, what bulging
eyes, and what foolish notions of making themselves agreeable by
remarks which were not wanted. In this critical view of mankind there
was an affinity between him and Gwendolen before their marriage, and we
know that she had been attractingly wrought upon by the refined
negations he presented to her. Hence he understood her repulsion for
Lush. But how was he to understand or conceive her present repulsion
for Henleigh Grandcourt? Some men bring themselves to believe, and not
merely maintain, the non-existence of an external world; a few others
believe themselves objects of repulsion to a woman without being told
so in plain language. But Grandcourt did not belong to this eccentric
body of thinkers. He had all his life had reason to take a flattering
view of his own attractiveness, and to place himself in fine antithesis
to the men who, he saw at once, must be revolting to a woman of taste.
He had no idea of moral repulsion, and could not have believed, if he
had been told it, that there may be a resentment and disgust which will
gradually make beauty more detestable than ugliness, through
exasperation at that outward virtue in which hateful things can flaunt
themselves or find a supercilious advantage.

How, then, could Grandcourt divine what was going on in Gwendolen's
breast?

For their behavior to each other scandalized no observer--not even the
foreign maid, warranted against sea-sickness; nor Grandcourt's own
experienced valet: still less the picturesque crew, who regarded them
as a model couple in high life. Their companionship consisted chiefly
in a well-bred silence. Grandcourt had no humorous observations at
which Gwendolen could refuse to smile, no chit-chat to make small
occasions of dispute. He was perfectly polite in arranging an
additional garment over her when needful, and in handing her any object
that he perceived her to need, and she could not fall into the
vulgarity of accepting or rejecting such politeness rudely.

Grandcourt put up his telescope and said, "There's a plantation of
sugar-canes at the foot of that rock; should you like to look?"

Gwendolen said, "Yes, please," remembering that she must try and
interest herself in sugar-canes as something outside her personal
affairs. Then Grandcourt would walk up and down and smoke for a long
while, pausing occasionally to point out a sail on the horizon, and at
last would seat himself and look at Gwendolen with his narrow immovable
gaze, as if she were part of the complete yacht; while she, conscious
of being looked at was exerting her ingenuity not to meet his eyes. At
dinner he would remark that the fruit was getting stale, and they must
put in somewhere for more; or, observing that she did not drink the
wine, he asked her if she would like any other kind better. A lady was
obliged to respond to these things suitably; and even if she had not
shrunk from quarrelling on other grounds, quarreling with Grandcourt
was impossible; she might as well have made angry remarks to a
dangerous serpent ornamentally coiled in her cabin without invitation.
And what sort of dispute could a woman of any pride and dignity begin
on a yacht?

Grandcourt had intense satisfaction in leading his wife captive after
this fashion; it gave their life on a small scale a royal
representation and publicity in which every thing familiar was got rid
of, and every body must do what was expected of them whatever might be
their private protest--the protest (kept strictly private) adding to
the piquancy of despotism.

To Gwendolen, who even in the freedom of her maiden time, had had very
faint glimpses of any heroism or sublimity, the medium that now thrust
itself everywhere before her view was this husband and her relation to
him. The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often
virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed
gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for
a human being, may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the
minds of those who live with them--like a piece of yellow and wavy
glass that distorts form and makes color an affliction. Their trivial
sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless
_ennui_, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade
through a pantheon of ugly idols. Gwendolen had that kind of window
before her, affecting the distant equally with the near. Some unhappy
wives are soothed by the possibility that they may become mothers; but
Gwendolen felt that to desire a child for herself would have been a
consenting to the completion of the injury she had been guilty of. She
was reduced to dread lest she should become a mother. It was not the
image of a new sweetly-budding life that came as a vision of
deliverance from the monotony of distaste: it was an image of another
sort. In the irritable, fluctuating stages of despair, gleams of hope
came in the form of some possible accident. To dwell on the benignity
of accident was a refuge from worse temptation.

The embitterment of hatred is often as unaccountable to onlookers as
the growth of devoted love, and it not only seems but is really out of
direct relation with any outward causes to be alleged. Passion is of
the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a
predominance which determines all currents toward itself, and makes the
whole life its tributary. And the intensest form of hatred is that
rooted in fear, which compels to silence and drives vehemence into a
constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of the detested
object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance with which the
persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed their
suffering into dumbness. Such hidden rites went on in the secrecy of
Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing effect--rather with the effect
of a struggling terror. Side by side with the dread of her husband had
grown the self-dread, which urged her to flee from the pursuing images
wrought by her pent-up impulse. The vision of her past wrong-doing, and
what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly illumination over
every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, such as she had
made in her marriage. Moreover, she had learned to see all her acts
through the impression they would make on Deronda: whatever relief
might come to her, she could not sever it from the judgment of her that
would be created in his mind. Not one word of flattery, of indulgence,
of dependence on her favor, could be fastened on by her in all their
intercourse, to weaken his restraining power over her (in this way
Deronda's effort over himself was repaid); and amid the dreary
uncertainties of her spoiled life the possible remedies that lay in his
mind, nay, the remedy that lay in her feeling for him, made her only
hope. He seemed to her a terrible-browed angel, from whom she could not
think of concealing any deed so as to win an ignorant regard from him:
it belonged to the nature of their relation that she should be
truthful, for his power over her had begun in the raising of a
self-discontent which could be satisfied only by genuine change. But in
no concealment had she now any confidence: her vision of what she had
to dread took more decidedly than ever the form of some fiercely
impulsive deed, committed as in a dream that she would instantaneously
wake from to find the effects real though the images had been false: to
find death under her hands, but instead of darkness, daylight; instead
of satisfied hatred, the dismay of guilt; instead of freedom, the palsy
of a new terror--a white dead face from which she was forever trying to
flee and forever held back. She remembered Deronda's words: they were
continually recurring in her thought,

"Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of
increasing your remorse. * * * Take your fear as a safeguard. It is
like quickness of hearing. It may make consequences passionately
present to you."

And so it was. In Gwendolen's consciousness temptation and dread met
and stared like two pale phantoms, each seeing itself in the
other--each obstructed by its own image; and all the while her fuller
self beheld the apparitions and sobbed for deliverance from them.

Inarticulate prayers, no more definite than a cry, often swept out from
her into the vast silence, unbroken except by her husband's breathing
or the plash of the wave or the creaking of the masts; but if ever she
thought of definite help, it took the form of Deronda's presence and
words, of the sympathy he might have for her, of the direction he might
give her. It was sometimes after a white-lipped fierce-eyed temptation
with murdering fingers had made its demon-visit that these best moments
of inward crying and clinging for rescue would come to her, and she
would lie with wide-open eyes in which the rising tears seemed a
blessing, and the thought, "I will not mind if I can keep from getting
wicked," seemed an answer to the indefinite prayer.

So the days passed, taking with them light breezes beyond and about the
Balearic Isles, and then to Sardinia, and then with gentle change
persuading them northward again toward Corsica. But this floating,
gentle-wafted existence, with its apparently peaceful influences, was
becoming as bad as a nightmare to Gwendolen.

"How long are we to be yachting?" she ventured to ask one day after
they had been touching at Ajaccio, and the mere fact of change in going
ashore had given her a relief from some of the thoughts which seemed
now to cling about the very rigging of the vessel, mix with the air in
the red silk cabin below, and make the smell of the sea odious.

"What else should we do?" said Grandcourt. "I'm not tired of it. I
don't see why we shouldn't stay out any length of time. There's less to
bore one in this way. And where would you go to? I'm sick of foreign
places. And we shall have enough of Ryelands. Would you rather be at
Ryelands?"

"Oh, no," said Gwendolen, indifferently, finding all places alike
undescribable as soon as she imagined herself and her husband in them.
"I only wondered how long you would like this."

"I like yachting longer than anything else," said Grandcourt; "and I
had none last year. I suppose you are beginning to tire of it. Women
are so confoundedly whimsical. They expect everything to give way to
them."

"Oh, dear, no!" said Gwendolen, letting out her scorn in a flute-like
tone. "I never expect you to give way."

"Why should I?" said Grandcourt, with his inward voice, looking at her,
and then choosing an orange--for they were at table.

She made up her mind to a length of yatching that she could not see
beyond; but the next day, after a squall which had made her rather ill
for the first time, he came down to her and said,

"There's been the devil's own work in the night. The skipper says we
shall have to stay at Genoa for a week while things are set right."

"Do you mind that?" said Gwendolen, who lay looking very white amidst
her white drapery.

"I should think so. Who wants to be broiling at Genoa?"

"It will be a change," said Gwendolen, made a little incautious by her
languor.

"_I_ don't want any change. Besides, the place is intolerable; and one
can't move along the roads. I shall go out in a boat, as I used to do,
and manage it myself. One can get a few hours every day in that way
instead of striving in a damnable hotel."

Here was a prospect which held hope in it. Gwendolen thought of hours
when she would be alone, since Grandcourt would not want to take her in
the said boat, and in her exultation at this unlooked-for relief, she
had wild, contradictory fancies of what she might do with her
freedom--that "running away" which she had already innumerable times
seen to be a worse evil than any actual endurance, now finding new
arguments as an escape from her worse self. Also, visionary relief on a
par with the fancy of a prisoner that the night wind may blow down the
wall of his prison and save him from desperate devices, insinuated
itself as a better alternative, lawful to wish for.

The fresh current of expectation revived her energies, and enabled her
to take all things with an air of cheerfulness and alacrity that made a
change marked enough to be noticed by her husband. She watched through
the evening lights to the sinking of the moon with less of awed
loneliness than was habitual to her--nay, with a vague impression that
in this mighty frame of things there might be some preparation of
rescue for her. Why not?--since the weather had just been on her side.
This possibility of hoping, after her long fluctuation amid fears, was
like a first return of hunger to the long-languishing patient.

She was waked the next morning by the casting of the anchor in the port
of Genoa--waked from a strangely-mixed dream in which she felt herself
escaping over the Mont Cenis, and wondering to find it warmer even in
the moonlight on the snow, till suddenly she met Deronda, who told her
to go back.

In an hour or so from that dream she actually met Deronda. But it was
on the palatial staircase of the _Italia_, where she was feeling warm
in her light woolen dress and straw hat; and her husband was by her
side.

There was a start of surprise in Deronda before he could raise his hat
and pass on. The moment did not seem to favor any closer greeting, and
the circumstances under which they had last parted made him doubtful
whether Grandcourt would be civilly inclined to him.

The doubt might certainly have been changed into a disagreeable
certainty, for Grandcourt on this unaccountable appearance of Deronda
at Genoa of all places, immediately tried to conceive how there could
have been an arrangement between him and Gwendolen. It is true that
before they were well in their rooms, he had seen how difficult it was
to shape such an arrangement with any probability, being too
cool-headed to find it at once easily credible that Gwendolen had not
only while in London hastened to inform Deronda of the yachting
project, but had posted a letter to him from Marseilles or Barcelona,
advising him to travel to Genoa in time for the chance of meeting her
there, or of receiving a letter from her telling of some other
destination--all which must have implied a miraculous foreknowledge in
her, and in Deronda a bird-like facility in flying about and perching
idly. Still he was there, and though Grandcourt would not make a fool
of himself by fabrications that others might call preposterous, he was
not, for all that, disposed to admit fully that Deronda's presence was,
so far as Gwendolen was concerned, a mere accident. It was a disgusting
fact; that was enough; and no doubt she was well pleased. A man out of
temper does not wait for proofs before feeling toward all things
animate and inanimate as if they were in a conspiracy against him, but
at once threshes his horse or kicks his dog in consequence. Grandcourt
felt toward Gwendolen and Deronda as if he knew them to be in a
conspiracy against him, and here was an event in league with them. What
he took for clearly certain--and so far he divined the truth--was that
Gwendolen was now counting on an interview with Deronda whenever her
husband's back was turned.

As he sat taking his coffee at a convenient angle for observing her, he
discerned something which he felt sure was the effect of a secret
delight--some fresh ease in moving and speaking, some peculiar meaning
in her eyes, whatever she looked on. Certainly her troubles had not
marred her beauty. Mrs. Grandcourt was handsomer than Gwendolen
Harleth: her grace and expression were informed by a greater variety of
inward experience, giving new play to her features, new attitudes in
movement and repose; her whole person and air had the nameless
something which often makes a woman more interesting after marriage
than before, less confident that all things are according to her
opinion, and yet with less of deer-like shyness--more fully a human
being.

This morning the benefits of the voyage seemed to be suddenly revealing
themselves in a new elasticity of mien. As she rose from the table and
put her two heavily-jewelled hands on each side of her neck, according
to her wont, she had no art to conceal that sort of joyous expectation
which makes the present more bearable than usual, just as when a man
means to go out he finds it easier to be amiable to the family for a
quarter of an hour beforehand. It is not impossible that a terrier
whose pleasure was concerned would perceive those amiable signs and
know their meaning--know why his master stood in a peculiar way, talked
with alacrity, and even had a peculiar gleam in his eye, so that on the
least movement toward the door, the terrier would scuttle to be in
time. And, in dog fashion, Grandcourt discerned the signs of
Gwendolen's expectation, interpreting them with the narrow correctness
which leaves a world of unknown feeling behind.

"A--just ring, please, and tell Gibbs to order some dinner for us at
three," said Grandcourt, as he too rose, took out a cigar, and then
stretched his hand toward the hat that lay near. "I'm going to send
Angus to find a little sailing-boat for us to go out in; one that I can
manage, with you at the tiller. It's uncommonly pleasant these fine
evenings--the least boring of anything we can do."

Gwendolen turned cold. There was not only the cruel disappointment;
there was the immediate conviction that her husband had determined to
take her because he would not leave her out of his sight; and probably
this dual solitude in a boat was the more attractive to him because it
would be wearisome to her. They were not on the plank-island; she felt
it the more possible to begin a contest. But the gleaming content had
died out of her. There was a change in her like that of a glacier after
sunset.

"I would rather not go in the boat," she said. "Take some one else with
you."

"Very well; if you don't go, I shall not go," said Grandcourt. "We
shall stay suffocating here, that's all."

"I can't bear to go in a boat," said Gwendolen, angrily.

"That is a sudden change," said Grandcourt, with a slight sneer. "But,
since you decline, we shall stay indoors."

He laid down his hat again, lit his cigar, and walked up and down the
room, pausing now and then to look out of the windows. Gwendolen's
temper told her to persist. She knew very well now that Grandcourt
would not go without her; but if he must tyrannize over her, he should
not do it precisely in the way he would choose. She would oblige him to
stay in the hotel. Without speaking again, she passed into the
adjoining bedroom and threw herself into a chair with her anger, seeing
no purpose or issue--only feeling that the wave of evil had rushed back
upon her, and dragged her away from her momentary breathing-place.

Presently Grandcourt came in with his hat on, but threw it off and sat
down sideways on a chair nearly in front of her, saying, in his
superficial drawl,

"Have you come round yet? or do you find it agreeable to be out of
temper. You make things uncommonly pleasant for me."

"Why do you want to make them unpleasant for _me_?" said Gwendolen,
getting helpless again, and feeling the hot tears rise.

"Now, will you be good enough to say what it is you have to complain
of?" said Grandcourt, looking into her eyes, and using his most inward
voice. "Is it that I stay indoors when you stay?"

She could give no answer. The sort of truth that made any excuse for
her anger could not be uttered. In the conflict of despair and
humiliation she began to sob, and the tears rolled down her cheeks--a
form of agitation which she had never shown before in her husband's
presence.

"I hope this is useful," said Grandcourt, after a moment or two. "All I
can say is, it's most confoundedly unpleasant. What the devil women can
see in this kind of thing, I don't know. _You_ see something to be got
by it, of course. All I can see is, that we shall be shut up here when
we might have been having a pleasant sail."

"Let us go, then," said Gwendolen, impetuously. "Perhaps we shall be
drowned." She began to sob again.

This extraordinary behavior, which had evidently some relation to
Deronda, gave more definiteness to Grandcourt's conclusions. He drew
his chair quite close in front of her, and said, in a low tone, "Just
be quiet and listen, will you?"

There seemed to be a magical effect in this close vicinity. Gwendolen
shrank and ceased to sob. She kept her eyelids down and clasped her
hands tightly.

"Let us understand each other," said Grandcourt, in the same tone. "I
know very well what this nonsense means. But if you suppose I am going
to let you make a fool of me, just dismiss that notion from your mind.
What are you looking forward to, if you can't behave properly as my
wife? There is disgrace for you, if you like to have it, but I don't
know anything else; and as to Deronda, it's quite clear that he hangs
back from you."

"It's all false!" said Gwendolen, bitterly. "You don't in the least
imagine what is in my mind. I have seen enough of the disgrace that
comes in that way. And you had better leave me at liberty to speak with
any one I like. It will be better for you."

"You will allow me to judge of that," said Grandcourt, rising and
moving to a little distance toward the window, but standing there
playing with his whiskers as if he were awaiting something.

Gwendolen's words had so clear and tremendous a meaning for herself
that she thought they must have expressed it to Grandcourt, and had no
sooner uttered them than she dreaded their effect. But his soul was
garrisoned against presentiments and fears: he had the courage and
confidence that belong to domination, and he was at that moment feeling
perfectly satisfied that he held his wife with bit and bridle. By the
time they had been married a year she would cease to be restive. He
continued standing with his air of indifference, till she felt her
habitual stifling consciousness of having an immovable obstruction in
her life, like the nightmare of beholding a single form that serves to
arrest all passage though the wide country lies open.

"What decision have you come to?" he said, presently looking at her.
"What orders shall I give?"

"Oh, let us go," said Gwendolen. The walls had begun to be an
imprisonment, and while there was breath in this man he would have the
mastery over her. His words had the power of thumb-screws and the cold
touch of the rock. To resist was to act like a stupid animal unable to
measure results.

So the boat was ordered. She even went down to the quay again with him
to see it before midday. Grandcourt had recovered perfect quietude of
temper, and had a scornful satisfaction in the attention given by the
nautical groups to the _milord_, owner of the handsome yacht which had
just put in for repairs, and who being an Englishman was naturally so
at home on the sea that he could manage a sail with the same ease that
he could manage a horse. The sort of exultation he had discerned in
Gwendolen this morning she now thought that she discerned in him; and
it was true that he had set his mind on this boating, and carried out
his purpose as something that people might not expect him to do, with
the gratified impulse of a strong will which had nothing better to
exert itself upon. He had remarkable physical courage, and was proud of
it--or rather he had a great contempt for the coarser, bulkier men who
generally had less. Moreover, he was ruling that Gwendolen should go
with him.

And when they came down again at five o'clock, equipped for their
boating, the scene was as good as a theatrical representation for all
beholders. This handsome, fair-skinned English couple, manifesting the
usual eccentricity of their nation, both of them proud, pale, and calm,
without a smile on their faces, moving like creatures who were
fulfilling a supernatural destiny--it was a thing to go out and see, a
thing to paint. The husband's chest, back, and arms, showed very well
in his close-fitting dress, and the wife was declared to be a statue.

Some suggestions were proffered concerning a possible change in the
breeze, and the necessary care in putting about, but Grandcourt's
manner made the speakers understand that they were too officious, and
that he knew better than they.

Gwendolen, keeping her impassable air, as they moved away from the
strand, felt her imagination obstinately at work. She was not afraid of
any outward dangers--she was afraid of her own wishes which were taking
shapes possible and impossible, like a cloud of demon-faces. She was
afraid of her own hatred, which under the cold iron touch that had
compelled her to-day had gathered a fierce intensity. As she sat
guiding the tiller under her husband's eyes, doing just what he told
her, the strife within her seemed like her own effort to escape from
herself. She clung to the thought of Deronda: she persuaded herself
that he would not go away while she was there--he knew that she needed
help. The sense that he was there would save her from acting out the
evil within. And yet quick, quick, came images, plans of evil that
would come again and seize her in the night, like furies preparing the
deed that they would straightway avenge.

They were taken out of the port and carried eastward by a gentle
breeze. Some clouds tempered the sunlight, and the hour was always
deepening toward the supreme beauty of evening. Sails larger and
smaller changed their aspect like sensitive things, and made a cheerful
companionship, alternately near and far. The grand city shone more
vaguely, the mountains looked out above it, and there was stillness as
in an island sanctuary. Yet suddenly Gwendolen let her hands fall, and
said in a scarcely audible tone, "God help me!"

"What is the matter?" said Grandcourt, not distinguishing the words.

"Oh, nothing," said Gwendolen, rousing herself from her momentary
forgetfulness and resuming the ropes.

"Don't you find this pleasant?" said Grandcourt.

"Very."

"You admit now we couldn't have done anything better?"

"No--I see nothing better. I think we shall go on always, like the
Flying Dutchman," said Gwendolen wildly.

Grandcourt gave her one of his narrow examining glances, and then said,
"If you like, we can go to Spezia in the morning, and let them take us
up there."

"No; I shall like nothing better than this."

"Very well: we'll do the same to-morrow. But we must be turning in
soon. I shall put about."




CHAPTER LV.

        "Ritorna a tua scienza
  Che vuoi, quanto la cosa e più perfetta
  Più senta if bene, e cosi la doglienza."
                                         --DANTE.


When Deronda met Gwendolen and Grandcourt on the staircase, his mind
was seriously preoccupied. He had just been summoned to the second
interview with his mother.

In two hours after his parting from her he knew that the Princess
Halm-Eberstein had left the hotel, and so far as the purpose of his
journey to Genoa was concerned, he might himself have set off on his
way to Mainz, to deliver the letter from Joseph Kalonymos, and get
possession of the family chest. But mixed mental conditions, which did
not resolve themselves into definite reasons, hindered him from
departure. Long after the farewell he was kept passive by a weight of
retrospective feeling. He lived again, with the new keenness of emotive
memory, through the exciting scenes which seemed past only in the sense
of preparation for their actual presence in his soul. He allowed
himself in his solitude to sob, with perhaps more than a woman's
acuteness of compassion, over that woman's life so near to his, and yet
so remote. He beheld the world changed for him by the certitude of ties
that altered the poise of hopes and fears, and gave him a new sense of
fellowship, as if under cover of the night he had joined the wrong band
of wanderers, and found with the rise of morning that the tents of his
kindred were grouped far off. He had a quivering imaginative sense of
close relation to the grandfather who had been animated by strong
impulses and beloved thoughts, which were now perhaps being roused from
their slumber within himself. And through all this passionate
meditation Mordecai and Mirah were always present, as beings who
clasped hands with him in sympathetic silence.

Of such quick, responsive fibre was Deronda made, under that mantle of
self-controlled reserve into which early experience had thrown so much
of his young strength.

When the persistent ringing of a bell as a signal reminded him of the
hour he thought of looking into _Bradshaw_, and making the brief
necessary preparations for starting by the next train--thought of it,
but made no movement in consequence. Wishes went to Mainz and what he
was to get possession of there--to London and the beings there who made
the strongest attachments of his life; but there were other wishes that
clung in these moments to Genoa, and they kept him where he was by that
force which urges us to linger over an interview that carries a
presentiment of final farewell or of overshadowing sorrow. Deronda did
not formally say, "I will stay over to-night, because it is Friday, and
I should like to go to the evening service at the synagogue where they
must all have gone; and besides, I may see the Grandcourts again." But
simply, instead of packing and ringing for his bill, he sat doing
nothing at all, while his mind went to the synagogue and saw faces
there probably little different from those of his grandfather's time,
and heard the Spanish-Hebrew liturgy which had lasted through the
seasons of wandering generations like a plant with wandering seed, that
gives the far-off lands a kinship to the exile's home--while, also, his
mind went toward Gwendolen, with anxious remembrance of what had been,
and with a half-admitted impression that it would be hardness in him
willingly to go away at once without making some effort, in spite of
Grandcourt's probable dislike, to manifest the continuance of his
sympathy with her since their abrupt parting.

In this state of mind he deferred departure, ate his dinner without
sense of flavor, rose from it quickly to find the synagogue, and in
passing the porter asked if Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt were still in the
hotel, and what was the number of their apartment. The porter gave him
the number, but added that they were gone out boating. That information
had somehow power enough over Deronda to divide his thoughts with the
memories wakened among the sparse _talithim_ and keen dark faces of
worshippers whose way of taking awful prayers and invocations with the
easy familiarity which might be called Hebrew dyed Italian, made him
reflect that his grandfather, according to the Princess's hints of his
character, must have been almost as exceptional a Jew as Mordecai. But
were not men of ardent zeal and far-reaching hope everywhere
exceptional? the men who had the visions which, as Mordecai said, were
the creators and feeders of the world--moulding and feeding the more
passive life which without them would dwindle and shrivel into the
narrow tenacity of insects, unshaken by thoughts beyond the reach of
their antennae. Something of a mournful impatience perhaps added itself
to the solicitude about Gwendolen (a solicitude that had room to grow
in his present release from immediate cares) as an incitement to hasten
from the synagogue and choose to take his evening walk toward the quay,
always a favorite haunt with him, and just now attractive with the
possibility that he might be in time to see the Grandcourts come in
from their boating. In this case, he resolved that he would advance to
greet them deliberately, and ignore any grounds that the husband might
have for wishing him elsewhere.

The sun had set behind a bank of cloud, and only a faint yellow light
was giving its farewell kisses to the waves, which were agitated by an
active breeze. Deronda, sauntering slowly within sight of what took
place on the strand, observed the groups there concentrating their
attention on a sailing-boat which was advancing swiftly landward, being
rowed by two men. Amidst the clamorous talk in various languages,
Deronda held it the surer means of getting information not to ask
questions, but to elbow his way to the foreground and be an
unobstructed witness of what was occurring. Telescopes were being used,
and loud statements made that the boat held somebody who had been
drowned. One said it was the _milord_ who had gone out in a sailing
boat; another maintained that the prostrate figure he discerned was
_miladi_; a Frenchman who had no glass would rather say that it was
_milord_ who had probably taken his wife out to drown her, according to
the national practice--a remark which an English skipper immediately
commented on in our native idiom (as nonsense which--had undergone a
mining operation), and further dismissed by the decision that the
reclining figure was a woman. For Deronda, terribly excited by
fluctuating fears, the strokes of the oars as he watched them were
divided by swift visions of events, possible and impossible, which
might have brought about this issue, or this broken-off fragment of an
issue, with a worse half undisclosed--if this woman apparently snatched
from the waters were really Mrs. Grandcourt.

But soon there was no longer any doubt: the boat was being pulled to
land, and he saw Gwendolen half raising herself on her hands, by her
own effort, under her heavy covering of tarpaulin and pea-jackets--pale
as one of the sheeted dead, shivering, with wet hair streaming, a wild
amazed consciousness in her eyes, as if she had waked up in a world
where some judgment was impending, and the beings she saw around were
coming to seize her. The first rower who jumped to land was also wet
through, and ran off; the sailors, close about the boat, hindered
Deronda from advancing, and he could only look on while Gwendolen gave
scared glances, and seemed to shrink with terror as she was carefully,
tenderly helped out, and led on by the strong arms of those rough,
bronzed men, her wet clothes clinging about her limbs, and adding to
the impediment of her weakness. Suddenly her wandering eyes fell on
Deronda, standing before her, and immediately, as if she had been
expecting him and looking for him, she tried to stretch out her arms,
which were held back by her supporters, saying, in a muffled voice,

"It is come, it is come! He is dead!"

"Hush, hush!" said Deronda, in a tone of authority; "quiet yourself."
Then to the men who were assisting her, "I am a connection of this
lady's husband. If you will get her on to the _Italia_ as quickly as
possible, I will undertake everything else."

He stayed behind to hear from the remaining boatman that her husband
had gone down irrecoverably, and that his boat was left floating empty.
He and his comrade had heard a cry, had come up in time to see the lady
jump in after her husband, and had got her out fast enough to save her
from much damage.

After this, Deronda hastened to the hotel to assure himself that the
best medical help would be provided; and being satisfied on this point,
he telegraphed the event to Sir Hugo, begging him to come forthwith,
and also to Mr. Gascoigne, whose address at the rectory made his
nearest known way of getting the information to Gwendolen's mother.
Certain words of Gwendolen's in the past had come back to him with the
effectiveness of an inspiration: in moments of agitated confession she
had spoken of her mother's presence, as a possible help, if she could
have had it.




CHAPTER LVI.

  "The pang, the curse with which they died,
    Had never passed away:
  I could not draw my eyes from theirs,
    Nor lift them up to pray."
                                  --COLERIDGE.


Deronda did not take off his clothes that night. Gwendolen, after
insisting on seeing him again before she would consent to be undressed,
had been perfectly quiet, and had only asked him, with a whispering,
repressed eagerness, to promise that he would come to her when she sent
for him in the morning. Still, the possibility that a change might come
over her, the danger of a supervening feverish condition, and the
suspicion that something in the late catastrophe was having an effect
which might betray itself in excited words, acted as a foreboding
within him. He mentioned to her attendant that he should keep himself
ready to be called if there were any alarming change of symptoms,
making it understood by all concerned that he was in communication with
her friends in England, and felt bound meanwhile to take all care on
her behalf--a position which it was the easier for him to assume,
because he was well known to Grandcourt's valet, the only old servant
who had come on the late voyage.

But when fatigue from the strangely various emotion of the day at last
sent Deronda to sleep, he remained undisturbed except by the morning
dreams, which came as a tangled web of yesterday's events, and finally
waked him, with an image drawn by his pressing anxiety.

Still, it was morning, and there had been no summons--an augury which
cheered him while he made his toilet, and reflected that it was too
early to send inquiries. Later, he learned that she had passed a too
wakeful night, but had shown no violent signs of agitation, and was at
last sleeping. He wondered at the force that dwelt in this creature, so
alive to dread; for he had an irresistible impression that even under
the effects of a severe physical shock she was mastering herself with a
determination of concealment. For his own part, he thought that his
sensibilities had been blunted by what he had been going through in the
meeting with his mother: he seemed to himself now to be only fulfilling
claims, and his more passionate sympathy was in abeyance. He had lately
been living so keenly in an experience quite apart from Gwendolen's
lot, that his present cares for her were like a revisiting of scenes
familiar in the past, and there was not yet a complete revival of the
inward response to them.

Meanwhile he employed himself in getting a formal, legally recognized
statement from the fisherman who had rescued Gwendolen. Few details
came to light. The boat in which Grandcourt had gone out had been found
drifting with its sail loose, and had been towed in. The fishermen
thought it likely that he had been knocked overboard by the flapping of
the sail while putting about, and that he had not known how to swim;
but, though they were near, their attention had been first arrested by
a cry which seemed like that of a man in distress, and while they were
hastening with their oars, they heard a shriek from the lady, and saw
her jump in.

On re-entering the hotel, Deronda was told that Gwendolen had risen,
and was desiring to see him. He was shown into a room darkened by
blinds and curtains, where she was seated with a white shawl wrapped
round her, looking toward the opening door like one waiting uneasily.
But her long hair was gathered up and coiled carefully, and, through
all, the blue stars in her ears had kept their place: as she started
impulsively to her full height, sheathed in her white shawl, her face
and neck not less white, except for a purple line under her eyes, her
lips a little apart with the peculiar expression of one accused and
helpless, she looked like the unhappy ghost of that Gwendolen Harleth
whom Deronda had seen turning with firm lips and proud self-possession
from her losses at the gaming table. The sight pierced him with pity,
and the effects of all their past relations began to revive within him.

"I beseech you to rest--not to stand," said Deronda, as he approached
her; and she obeyed, falling back into her chair again.

"Will you sit down near me?" she said. "I want to speak very low."

She was in a large arm-chair, and he drew a small one near to her side.
The action seemed to touch her peculiarly: turning her pale face full
upon his, which was very near, she said, in the lowest audible tone,
"You know I am a guilty woman?"

Deronda himself turned paler as he said, "I know nothing." He did not
dare to say more.

"He is dead." She uttered this with the same undertoned decision.

"Yes," said Deronda, in a mournful suspense which made him reluctant to
speak.

"His face will not be seen above the water again," said Gwendolen, in a
tone that was not louder, but of a suppressed eagerness, while she held
both her hands clenched.

"No."

"Not by any one else--only by me--a dead face--I shall never get away
from it."

It was with an inward voice of desperate self-repression that she spoke
these last words, while she looked away from Deronda toward something
at a distance from her on the floor. She was seeing the whole
event--her own acts included--through an exaggerating medium of
excitement and horror? Was she in a state of delirium into which there
entered a sense of concealment and necessity for self-repression? Such
thoughts glanced through Deronda as a sort of hope. But imagine the
conflict of feeling that kept him silent. She was bent on confession,
and he dreaded hearing her confession. Against his better will he
shrank from the task that was laid on him: he wished, and yet rebuked
the wish as cowardly, that she could bury her secrets in her own bosom.
He was not a priest. He dreaded the weight of this woman's soul flung
upon his own with imploring dependence. But she spoke again, hurriedly,
looking at him,

"You will not say that I ought to tell the world? you will not say that
I ought to be disgraced? I could not do it. I could not bear it. I
cannot have my mother know. Not if I were dead. I could not have her
know. I must tell you; but you will not say that any one else should
know."

"I can say nothing in my ignorance," said Deronda, mournfully, "except
that I desire to help you."

"I told you from the beginning--as soon as I could--I told you I was
afraid of myself." There was a piteous pleading in the low murmur in
which Deronda turned his ear only. Her face afflicted him too much. "I
felt a hatred in me that was always working like an evil
spirit--contriving things. Everything I could do to free myself came
into my mind; and it got worse--all things got worse. That is why I
asked you to come to me in town. I thought then I would tell you the
worst about myself. I tried. But I could not tell everything. And _he_
came in."

She paused, while a shudder passed through her; but soon went on.

"I will tell you everything now. Do you think a woman who cried, and
prayed, and struggled to be saved from herself, could be a murderess?"

"Great God!" said Deronda, in a deep, shaken voice, "don't torture me
needlessly. You have not murdered him. You threw yourself into the
water with the impulse to save him. Tell me the rest afterward. This
death was an accident that you could not have hindered."

"Don't be impatient with me." The tremor, the childlike beseeching in
these words compelled Deronda to turn his head and look at her face.
The poor quivering lips went on. "You said--you used to say--you felt
more for those who had done something wicked and were miserable; you
said they might get better--they might be scourged into something
better. If you had not spoken in that way, Everything would have been
worse. I _did_ remember all you said to me. It came to me always. It
came to me at the very last--that was the reason why I--But now, if you
cannot bear with me when I tell you everything--if you turn away from
me and forsake me, what shall I do? Am I worse than I was when you
found me and wanted to make me better? All the wrong I have done was in
me then--and more--and more--if you had not come and been patient with
me. And now--will you forsake me?"

Her hands, which had been so tightly clenched some minutes before, were
now helplessly relaxed and trembling on the arm of her chair. Her
quivering lips remained parted as she ceased speaking. Deronda could
not answer; he was obliged to look away. He took one of her hands, and
clasped it as if they were going to walk together like two children: it
was the only way in which he could answer, "I will not forsake you."
And all the while he felt as if he were putting his name to a blank
paper which might be filled up terribly. Their attitude, his adverted
face with its expression of a suffering which he was solemnly resolved
to undergo, might have told half the truth of the situation to a
beholder who had suddenly entered.

That grasp was an entirely new experience to Gwendolen: she had never
before had from any man a sign of tenderness which her own being had
needed, and she interpreted its powerful effect on her into a promise
of inexhaustible patience and constancy. The stream of renewed strength
made it possible for her to go on as she had begun--with that fitful,
wandering confession where the sameness of experience seems to nullify
the sense of time or of order in events. She began again in a
fragmentary way,

"All sorts of contrivances in my mind--but all so difficult. And I
fought against them--I was terrified at them--I saw his dead
face"--here her voice sank almost to a whisper close to Deronda's
ear--"ever so long ago I saw it and I wished him to be dead. And yet it
terrified me. I was like two creatures. I could not speak--I wanted to
kill--it was as strong as thirst--and then directly--I felt beforehand
I had done something dreadful, unalterable--that would make me like an
evil spirit. And it came--it came."

She was silent a moment or two, as if her memory had lost itself in a
web where each mesh drew all the rest.

"It had all been in my mind when I first spoke to you--when we were at
the Abbey. I had done something then. I could not tell you that. It was
the only thing I did toward carrying out my thoughts. They went about
over everything; but they all remained like dreadful dreams--all but
one. I did one act--and I never undid it--it is there still--as long
ago as when we were at Ryelands. There it was--something my fingers
longed for among the beautiful toys in the cabinet in my boudoir--small
and sharp like a long willow leaf in a silver sheath. I locked it in
the drawer of my dressing-case. I was continually haunted with it and
how I should use it. I fancied myself putting it under my pillow. But I
never did. I never looked at it again. I dared not unlock the drawer:
it had a key all to itself; and not long ago, when we were in the
yacht, I dropped the key into the deep water. It was my wish to drop it
and deliver myself. After that I began to think how I could open the
drawer without the key: and when I found we were to stay at Genoa, it
came into my mind that I could get it opened privately at the hotel.
But then, when we were going up the stairs, I met you; and I thought I
should talk to you alone and tell you this--everything I could not tell
you in town; and then I was forced to go out in the boat."

A sob had for the first time risen with the last words, and she sank
back in her chair. The memory of that acute disappointment seemed for
the moment to efface what had come since. Deronda did not look at her,
but he said, insistently,

"And it has all remained in your imagination. It has gone on only in
your thought. To the last the evil temptation has been resisted?"

There was silence. The tears had rolled down her cheeks. She pressed
her handkerchief against them and sat upright. She was summoning her
resolution; and again, leaning a little toward Deronda's ear, she began
in a whisper,

"No, no; I will tell you everything as God knows it. I will tell you no
falsehood; I will tell you the exact truth. What should I do else? I
used to think I could never be wicked. I thought of wicked people as if
they were a long way off me. Since then I have been wicked. I have felt
wicked. And everything has been a punishment to me--all the things I
used to wish for--it is as if they had been made red-hot. The very
daylight has often been a punishment to me. Because--you know--I ought
not to have married. That was the beginning of it. I wronged some one
else. I broke my promise. I meant to get pleasure for myself, and it
all turned to misery. I wanted to make my gain out of another's
loss--you remember?--it was like roulette--and the money burned into
me. And I could not complain. It was as if I had prayed that another
should lose and I should win. And I had won, I knew it all--I knew I
was guilty. When we were on the sea, and I lay awake at night in the
cabin, I sometimes felt that everything I had done lay open without
excuse--nothing was hidden--how could anything be known to me only?--it
was not my own knowledge, it was God's that had entered into me, and
even the stillness--everything held a punishment for me--everything but
you. I always thought that you would not want me to be punished--you
would have tried and helped me to be better. And only thinking of that
helped me. You will not change--you will not want to punish me now?"

Again a sob had risen.

"God forbid!" groaned Deronda. But he sat motionless.

This long wandering with the conscious-stricken one over her past was
difficult to bear, but he dared not again urge her with a question. He
must let her mind follow its own need. She unconsciously left intervals
in her retrospect, not clearly distinguishing between what she said and
what she had only an inward vision of. Her next words came after such
an interval.

"That all made it so hard when I was forced to go in the boat. Because
when I saw you it was an unexpected joy, and I thought I could tell you
everything--about the locked-up drawer and what I had not told you
before. And if I had told you, and knew it was in your mind, it would
have less power over me. I hoped and trusted in that. For after all my
struggles and my crying, the hatred and rage, the temptation that
frightened me, the longing, the thirst for what I dreaded, always came
back. And that disappointment--when I was quite shut out from speaking
to you, and was driven to go in the boat--brought all the evil back, as
if I had been locked in a prison with it and no escape. Oh, it seems so
long ago now since I stepped into that boat! I could have given up
everything in that moment, to have the forked lightning for a weapon to
strike him dead."

Some of the compressed fierceness that she was recalling seemed to find
its way into her undertoned utterance. After a little silence she said,
with agitated hurry,

"If he were here again, what should I do? I cannot wish him here--and
yet I cannot bear his dead face. I was a coward. I ought to have borne
contempt. I ought to have gone away--gone and wandered like a beggar
rather than to stay to feel like a fiend. But turn where I would there
was something I could not bear. Sometimes I thought he would kill _me_
if I resisted his will. But now--his dead face is there, and I cannot
bear it."

Suddenly loosing Deronda's hand, she started up, stretching her arms to
their full length upward, and said with a sort of moan,

"I have been a cruel woman! What can _I_ do but cry for help? _I_ am
sinking. Die--die--you are forsaken--go down, go down into darkness.
Forsaken--no pity--_I_ shall be forsaken."

She sank in her chair again and broke into sobs. Even Deronda had no
place in her consciousness at that moment. He was completely unmanned.
Instead of finding, as he had imagined, that his late experience had
dulled his susceptibility to fresh emotion, it seemed that the lot of
this young creature, whose swift travel from her bright rash girlhood
into this agony of remorse he had had to behold in helplessness,
pierced him the deeper because it came close upon another sad
revelation of spiritual conflict: he was in one of those moments when
the very anguish of passionate pity makes us ready to choose that we
will know pleasure no more, and live only for the stricken and
afflicted. He had risen from his seat while he watched that terrible
outburst--which seemed the more awful to him because, even in this
supreme agitation, she kept the suppressed voice of one who confesses
in secret. At last he felt impelled to turn his back toward her and
walk to a distance.

But presently there was stillness. Her mind had opened to the sense
that he had gone away from her. When Deronda turned round to approach
her again, he saw her face bent toward him, her eyes dilated, her lips
parted. She was an image of timid forlorn beseeching--too timid to
entreat in words while he kept himself aloof from her. Was she forsaken
by him--now--already? But his eyes met hers sorrowfully--met hers for
the first time fully since she had said, "You know I am a guilty
woman," and that full glance in its intense mournfulness seemed to say,
"I know it, but I shall all the less forsake you." He sat down by her
side again in the same attitude--without turning his face toward her
and without again taking her hand.

Once more Gwendolen was pierced, as she had been by his face of sorrow
at the Abbey, with a compunction less egoistic than that which urged
her to confess, and she said, in a tone of loving regret,

"I make you very unhappy."

Deronda gave an indistinct "Oh," just shrinking together and changing
his attitude a little. Then he had gathered resolution enough to say
clearly, "There is no question of being happy or unhappy. What I most
desire at this moment is what will most help you. Tell me all you feel
it a relief to tell."

Devoted as these words were, they widened his spiritual distance from
her, and she felt it more difficult to speak: she had a vague need of
getting nearer to that compassion which seemed to be regarding her from
a halo of superiority, and the need turned into an impulse to humble
herself more. She was ready to throw herself on her knees before him;
but no--her wonderfully mixed consciousness held checks on that
impulse, and she was kept silent and motionless by the pressure of
opposing needs. Her stillness made Deronda at last say,

"Perhaps you are too weary. Shall I go away, and come again whenever
you wish it?"

"No, no," said Gwendolen--the dread of his leaving her bringing back
her power of speech. She went on with her low-toned eagerness, "I want
to tell you what it was that came over me in that boat. I was full of
rage at being obliged to go--full of rage--and I could do nothing but
sit there like a galley slave. And then we got away--out of the
port--into the deep--and everything was still--and we never looked at
each other, only he spoke to order me--and the very light about me
seemed to hold me a prisoner and force me to sit as I did. It came over
me that when I was a child I used to fancy sailing away into a world
where people were not forced to live with any one they did not like--I
did not like my father-in-law to come home. And now, I thought, just
the opposite had come to me. I had stepped into a boat, and my life was
a sailing and sailing away--gliding on and no help--always into
solitude with _him_, away from deliverance. And because I felt more
helpless than ever, my thoughts went out over worse things--I longed
for worse things--I had cruel wishes--I fancied impossible ways of--I
did not want to die myself; I was afraid of our being drowned together.
If it had been any use I should have prayed--I should have prayed that
something might befall him. I should have prayed that he might sink out
of my sight and leave me alone. I knew no way of killing him there, but
I did, I did kill him in my thoughts."

She sank into silence for a minute, submerged by the weight of memory
which no words could represent.

"But yet, all the while I felt that I was getting more wicked. And what
had been with me so much, came to me just then--what you once
said--about dreading to increase my wrong-doing and my remorse--I
should hope for nothing then. It was all like a writing of fire within
me. Getting wicked was misery--being shut out forever from knowing what
you--what better lives were. That had always been coming back to me
then--but yet with a despair--a feeling that it was no use--evil wishes
were too strong. I remember then letting go the tiller and saying 'God
help me!' But then I was forced to take it again and go on; and the
evil longings, the evil prayers came again and blotted everything else
dim, till, in the midst of them--I don't know how it was--he was
turning the sail--there was a gust--he was struck--I know nothing--I
only know that I saw my wish outside me."

She began to speak more hurriedly, and in more of a whisper.

"I saw him sink, and my heart gave a leap as if it were going out of
me. I think I did not move. I kept my hands tight. It was long enough
for me to be glad, and yet to think it was no use--he would come up
again. And he _was_ come--farther off--the boat had moved. It was all
like lightning. 'The rope!' he called out in a voice--not his own--I
hear it now--and I stooped for the rope--I felt I must--I felt sure he
could swim, and he would come back whether or not, and I dreaded him.
That was in my mind--he would come back. But he was gone down again,
and I had the rope in my hand--no, there he was again--his face above
the water--and he cried again--and I held my hand, and my heart said,
'Die!'--and he sank; and I felt 'It is done--I am wicked, I am
lost!--and I had the rope in my hand--I don't know what I thought--I
was leaping away from myself--I would have saved him then. I was
leaping from my crime, and there it was--close to me as I fell--there
was the dead face--dead, dead. It can never be altered. That was what
happened. That was what I did. You know it all. It can never be
altered."

She sank back in her chair, exhausted with the agitation of memory and
speech. Deronda felt the burden on his spirit less heavy than the
foregoing dread. The word "guilty" had held a possibility of
interpretations worse than the fact; and Gwendolen's confession, for
the very reason that her conscience made her dwell on the determining
power of her evil thoughts, convinced him the more that there had been
throughout a counterbalancing struggle of her better will. It seemed
almost certain that her murderous thought had had no outward
effect--that, quite apart from it, the death was inevitable. Still, a
question as to the outward effectiveness of a criminal desire dominant
enough to impel even a momentary act, cannot alter our judgment of the
desire; and Deronda shrank from putting that question forward in the
first instance. He held it likely that Gwendolen's remorse aggravated
her inward guilt, and that she gave the character of decisive action to
what had been an inappreciably instantaneous glance of desire. But her
remorse was the precious sign of a recoverable nature; it was the
culmination of that self-disapproval which had been the awakening of a
new life within her; it marked her off from the criminals whose only
regret is failure in securing their evil wish. Deronda could not utter
one word to diminish that sacred aversion to her worst self--that
thorn-pressure which must come with the crowning of the sorrowful
better, suffering because of the worse. All this mingled thought and
feeling kept him silent; speech was too momentous to be ventured on
rashly. There were no words of comfort that did not carry some
sacrilege. If he had opened his lips to speak, he could only have
echoed, "It can never be altered--it remains unaltered, to alter other
things." But he was silent and motionless--he did not know how
long--before he turned to look at her, and saw her sunk back with
closed eyes, like a lost, weary, storm-beaten white doe, unable to rise
and pursue its unguided way. He rose and stood before her. The movement
touched her consciousness, and she opened her eyes with a slight
quivering that seemed like fear.

"You must rest now. Try to rest: try to sleep. And may I see you again
this evening--to-morrow--when you have had some rest? Let us say no
more now."

The tears came, and she could not answer except by a slight movement of
the head. Deronda rang for attendance, spoke urgently of the necessity
that she should be got to rest, and then left her.




CHAPTER LVII.

    "The unripe grape, the ripe, and the dried. All things are changes,
    not into nothing, but into that which is not at present."--MARCUS
    AURELIUS.

    Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life,
    And righteous or unrighteous, being done,
    Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself
    Be laid in darkness, and the universe
    Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more.


In the evening she sent for him again. It was already near the hour at
which she had been brought in from the sea the evening before, and the
light was subdued enough with blinds drawn up and windows open. She was
seated gazing fixedly on the sea, resting her cheek on her hand,
looking less shattered than when he had left her, but with a deep
melancholy in her expression which as Deronda approached her passed
into an anxious timidity. She did not put out her hand, but said, "How
long ago it is!" Then, "Will you sit near me again a little while?"

He placed himself by her side as he had done before, and seeing that
she turned to him with that indefinable expression which implies a wish
to say something, he waited for her to speak. But again she looked
toward the window silently, and again turned with the same expression,
which yet did not issue in speech. There was some fear hindering her,
and Deronda, wishing to relieve her timidity, averted his face.
Presently he heard her cry imploringly,

"You will not say that any one else should know?"

"Most decidedly not," said Deronda. "There is no action that ought to
be taken in consequence. There is no injury that could be righted in
that way. There is no retribution that any mortal could apportion
justly."

She was so still during a pause that she seemed to be holding her
breath before she said,

"But if I had not had that murderous will--that moment--if I had thrown
the rope on the instant--perhaps it would have hindered death?"

"No--I think not," said Deronda, slowly. "If it were true that he could
swim, he must have been seized with cramp. With your quickest, utmost
effort, it seems impossible that you could have done anything to save
him. That momentary murderous will cannot, I think, have altered the
course of events. Its effect is confined to the motives in your own
breast. Within ourselves our evil will is momentous, and sooner or
later it works its way outside us--it may be in the vitiation that
breeds evil acts, but also it may be in the self-abhorrence that stings
us into better striving."

"I am saved from robbing others--there are others--they will have
everything--they will have what they ought to have. I knew that some
time before I left town. You do not suspect me of wrong desires about
those things?" She spoke hesitatingly.

"I had not thought of them," said Deronda; "I was thinking too much of
the other things."

"Perhaps you don't quite know the beginning of it all," said Gwendolen,
slowly, as if she were overcoming her reluctance. "There was some one
else he ought to have married. And I knew it, and I told her I would
not hinder it. And I went away--that was when you first saw me. But
then we became poor all at once, and I was very miserable, and I was
tempted. I thought, 'I shall do as I like and make everything right.' I
persuaded myself. And it was all different. It was all dreadful. Then
came hatred and wicked thoughts. That was how it all came. I told you I
was afraid of myself. And I did what you told me--I did try to make my
fear a safeguard. I thought of what would be if I--I felt what would
come--how I should dread the morning--wishing it would be always
night--and yet in the darkness always seeing something--seeing death.
If you did not know how miserable I was, you might--but now it has all
been no use. I can care for nothing but saving the rest from
knowing--poor mamma, who has never been happy."

There was silence again before she said with a repressed sob--"You
cannot bear to look at me any more. You think I am too wicked. You do
not believe that I can become any better--worth anything--worthy
enough--I shall always be too wicked to--" The voice broke off helpless.

Deronda's heart was pierced. He turned his eyes on her poor beseeching
face and said, "I believe that you may become worthier than you have
ever yet been--worthy to lead a life that may be a blessing. No evil
dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in,
and make no effort to escape from. You _have_ made efforts--you will go
on making them."

"But you were the beginning of them. You must not forsake me," said
Gwendolen, leaning with her clasped hands on the arm of her chair and
looking at him, while her face bore piteous traces of the
life-experience concentrated in the twenty-four hours--that new
terrible life lying on the other side of the deed which fulfills a
criminal desire. "I will bear any penance. I will lead any life you
tell me. But you must not forsake me. You must be near. If you had been
near me--if I could have said everything to you, I should have been
different. You will not forsake me?"

"It could never be my impulse to forsake you," said Deronda promptly,
with that voice which, like his eyes, had the unintentional effect of
making his ready sympathy seem more personal and special than it really
was. And in that moment he was not himself quite free from a foreboding
of some such self-committing effect. His strong feeling for this
stricken creature could not hinder rushing images of future difficulty.
He continued to meet her appealing eyes as he spoke, but it was with
the painful consciousness that to her ear his words might carry a
promise which one day would seem unfulfilled: he was making an
indefinite promise to an indefinite hope. Anxieties, both immediate and
distant, crowded on his thought, and it was under their influence that,
after a moment's silence, he said,

"I expect Sir Hugo Mallinger to arrive by to-morrow night at least; and
I am not without hope that Mrs. Davilow may shortly follow him. Her
presence will be the greatest comfort to you--it will give you a motive
to save her from unnecessary pain?"

"Yes, yes--I will try. And you will not go away?"

"Not till after Sir Hugo has come."

"But we shall all go to England?"

"As soon as possible," said Deronda, not wishing to enter into
particulars.

Gwendolen looked toward the window again with an expression which
seemed like a gradual awakening to new thoughts. The twilight was
perceptibly deepening, but Deronda could see a movement in her eyes and
hands such as accompanies a return of perception in one who has been
stunned.

"You will always be with Sir Hugo now!" she said presently, looking at
him. "You will always live at the Abbey--or else at Diplow?"

"I am quite uncertain where I shall live," said Deronda, coloring.

She was warned by his changed color that she had spoken too rashly, and
fell silent. After a little while she began, again looking away,

"It is impossible to think how my life will go on. I think now it would
be better for me to be poor and obliged to work."

"New promptings will come as the days pass. When you are among your
friends again, you will discern new duties," said Deronda. "Make it a
task now to get as well and calm--as much like yourself as you can,
before--" He hesitated.

"Before my mother comes," said Gwendolen. "Ah! I must be changed. I
have not looked at myself. Should you have known me," she added,
turning toward him, "if you had met me now?--should you have known me
for the one you saw at Leubronn?"

"Yes, I should have known you," said Deronda, mournfully. "The outside
change is not great. I should have seen at once that it was you, and
that you had gone through some great sorrow."

"Don't wish now that you had never seen me; don't wish that," said
Gwendolen, imploringly, while the tears gathered.

"I should despise myself for wishing it," said Deronda. "How could I
know what I was wishing? We must find our duties in what comes to us,
not in what we imagine might have been. If I took to foolish wishing of
that sort, I should wish--not that I had never seen you, but that I had
been able to save you from this."

"You have saved me from worse," said Gwendolen, in a sobbing voice. "I
should have been worse if it had not been for you. If you had not been
good, I should have been more wicked than I am."

"It will be better for me to go now," said Deronda, worn in spirit by
the perpetual strain of this scene. "Remember what we said of your
task--to get well and calm before other friends come."

He rose as he spoke, and she gave him her hand submissively. But when
he had left her she sank on her knees, in hysterical crying. The
distance between them was too great. She was a banished soul--beholding
a possible life which she had sinned herself away from.

She was found in this way, crushed on the floor. Such grief seemed
natural in a poor lady whose husband had been drowned in her presence.




BOOK VIII.--FRUIT AND SEED.


CHAPTER LVIII.


  "Much adoe there was, God wot;
  He wold love and she wold not."
                   --NICHOLAS BRETON.


Extension, we know, is a very imperfect measure of things; and the
length of the sun's journeying can no more tell us how life has
advanced than the acreage of a field can tell us what growths may be
active within it. A man may go south, and, stumbling over a bone, may
meditate upon it till he has found a new starting-point for anatomy; or
eastward, and discover a new key to language telling a new story of
races; or he may head an expedition that opens new continental
pathways, get himself maimed in body, and go through a whole heroic
poem of resolve and endurance; and at the end of a few months he may
come back to find his neighbors grumbling at the same parish grievance
as before, or to see the same elderly gentleman treading the pavement
in discourse with himself, shaking his head after the same percussive
butcher's boy, and pausing at the same shop-window to look at the same
prints. If the swiftest thinking has about the pace of a greyhound, the
slowest must be supposed to move, like the limpet, by an apparent
sticking, which after a good while is discerned to be a slight
progression. Such differences are manifest in the variable intensity
which we call human experience, from the revolutionary rush of change
which makes a new inner and outer life, to that quiet recurrence of the
familiar, which has no other epochs than those of hunger and the
heavens.

Something of this contrast was seen in the year's experience which had
turned the brilliant, self-confident Gwendolen Harleth of the Archery
Meeting into the crushed penitent impelled to confess her unworthiness
where it would have been her happiness to be held worthy; while it had
left her family in Pennicote without deeper change than that of some
outward habits, and some adjustment of prospects and intentions to
reduced income, fewer visits, and fainter compliments. The rectory was
as pleasant a home as before: and the red and pink peonies on the lawn,
the rows of hollyhocks by the hedges, had bloomed as well this year as
last: the rector maintained his cheerful confidence in the good will of
patrons and his resolution to deserve it by diligence in the
fulfillment of his duties, whether patrons were likely to hear of it or
not; doing nothing solely with an eye to promotion except, perhaps, the
writing of two ecclesiastical articles, which having no signature, were
attributed to some one else, except by the patrons who had a special
copy sent them, and these certainly knew the author but did not read
the articles. The rector, however, chewed no poisonous cud of suspicion
on this point: he made marginal notes on his own copies to render them
a more interesting loan, and was gratified that the Archdeacon and
other authorities had nothing to say against the general tenor of his
argument. Peaceful authorship!--living in the air of the fields and
downs, and not in the thrice-breathed breath of criticism--bringing no
Dantesque leanness; rather, assisting nutrition by complacency, and
perhaps giving a more suffusive sense of achievement than the
production of a whole _Divina Commedia_. Then there was the father's
recovered delight in his favorite son, which was a happiness
outweighing the loss of eighteen hundred a year. Of whatever nature
might be the hidden change wrought in Rex by the disappointment of his
first love, it was apparently quite secondary to that evidence of more
serious ambition which dated from the family misfortune; indeed, Mr.
Gascoigne was inclined to regard the little affair which had caused him
so much anxiety the year before as an evaporation of superfluous
moisture, a kind of finish to the baking process which the human dough
demands. Rex had lately come down for a summer visit to the rectory,
bringing Anna home, and while he showed nearly the old liveliness with
his brothers and sisters, he continued in his holiday the habits of the
eager student, rising early in the morning and shutting himself up
early in the evenings to carry on a fixed course of study.

"You don't repent the choice of the law as a profession, Rex?" said his
father.

"There is no profession I would choose before it," said Rex. "I should
like to end my life as a first-rate judge, and help to draw up a code.
I reverse the famous dictum. I should say, 'Give me something to do
with making the laws, and let who will make the songs.'"

"You will have to stow in an immense amount of rubbish, I
suppose--that's the worst of it," said the rector.

"I don't see that law-rubbish is worse than any other sort. It is not
so bad as the rubbishy literature that people choke their minds with.
It doesn't make one so dull. Our wittiest men have often been lawyers.
Any orderly way of looking at things as cases and evidence seems to me
better than a perpetual wash of odds and ends bearing on nothing in
particular. And then, from a higher point of view, the foundations and
the growth of law make the most interesting aspects of philosophy and
history. Of course there will be a good deal that is troublesome,
drudging, perhaps exasperating. But the great prizes in life can't be
won easily--I see that."

"Well, my boy, the best augury of a man's success in his profession is
that he thinks it the finest in the world. But I fancy it so with most
work when a man goes into it with a will. Brewitt, the blacksmith, said
to me the other day that his 'prentice had no mind to his trade; 'and
yet, sir,' said Brewitt, 'what would a young fellow have if he doesn't
like the blacksmithing?"

The rector cherished a fatherly delight, which he allowed to escape him
only in moderation. Warham, who had gone to India, he had easily borne
parting with, but Rex was that romance of later life which a man
sometimes finds in a son whom he recognizes as superior to himself,
picturing a future eminence for him according to a variety of famous
examples. It was only to his wife that he said with decision: "Rex will
be a distinguished man, Nancy, I am sure of it--as sure as Paley's
father was about his son."

"Was Paley an old bachelor?" said Mrs. Gascoigne.

"That is hardly to the point, my dear," said the rector, who did not
remember that irrelevant detail. And Mrs. Gascoigne felt that she had
spoken rather weakly.

This quiet trotting of time at the rectory was shared by the group who
had exchanged the faded dignity of Offendene for the low white house
not a mile off, well enclosed with evergreens, and known to the
villagers, as "Jodson's." Mrs. Davilow's delicate face showed only a
slight deepening of its mild melancholy, her hair only a few more
silver lines, in consequence of the last year's trials; the four girls
had bloomed out a little from being less in the shade; and the good
Jocosa preserved her serviceable neutrality toward the pleasures and
glories of the world as things made for those who were not "in a
situation."

The low narrow drawing-room, enlarged by two quaint projecting windows,
with lattices wide open on a July afternoon to the scent of monthly
roses, the faint murmurs of the garden, and the occasional rare sound
of hoofs and wheels seeming to clarify the succeeding silence, made
rather a crowded, lively scene, Rex and Anna being added to the usual
group of six. Anna, always a favorite with her younger cousins, had
much to tell of her new experience, and the acquaintances she had made
in London, and when on her first visit she came alone, many questions
were asked her about Gwendolen's house in Grosvenor Square, what
Gwendolen herself had said, and what any one else had said about
Gwendolen. Had Anna been to see Gwendolen after she had known about the
yacht? No:--an answer which left speculation free concerning everything
connected with that interesting unknown vessel beyond the fact that
Gwendolen had written just before she set out to say that Mr.
Grandcourt and she were going yachting on the Mediterranean, and again
from Marseilles to say that she was sure to like the yachting, the
cabins were very elegant, and she would probably not send another
letter till she had written quite a long diary filled with _dittos_.
Also, this movement of Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt had been mentioned in
"the newspaper;" so that altogether this new phase of Gwendolen's
exalted life made a striking part of the sisters' romance, the
book-devouring Isabel throwing in a corsair or two to make an adventure
that might end well.

But when Rex was present, the girls, according to instructions, never
started this fascinating topic, and to-day there had only been animated
descriptions of the Meyricks and their extraordinary Jewish friends,
which caused some astonished questioning from minds to which the idea
of live Jews, out of a book, suggested a difference deep enough to be
almost zoological, as of a strange race in Pliny's Natural History that
might sleep under the shade of its own ears. Bertha could not imagine
what Jews believed now; and she had a dim idea that they rejected the
Old Testament since it proved the New; Miss Merry thought that Mirah
and her brother could "never have been properly argued with," and the
amiable Alice did not mind what the Jews believed, she was sure she
"couldn't bear them." Mrs. Davilow corrected her by saying that the
great Jewish families who were in society were quite what they ought to
be both in London and Paris, but admitted that the commoner unconverted
Jews were objectionable; and Isabel asked whether Mirah talked just as
they did, or whether you might be with her and not find out that she
was a Jewess.

Rex, who had no partisanship with the Israelites, having made a
troublesome acquaintance with the minutiae of their ancient history in
the form of "cram," was amusing himself by playfully exaggerating the
notion of each speaker, while Anna begged them all to understand that
he was only joking, when the laughter was interrupted by the bringing
in of a letter for Mrs. Davilow. A messenger had run with it in great
haste from the rectory. It enclosed a telegram, and as Mrs. Davilow
read and re-read it in silence and agitation, all eyes were turned on
her with anxiety, but no one dared to speak. Looking up at last and
seeing the young faces "painted with fear," she remembered that they
might be imagining something worse than the truth, something like her
own first dread which made her unable to understand what was written,
and she said, with a sob which was half relief,

"My dears, Mr. Grandcourt--" She paused an instant, and then began
again, "Mr. Grandcourt is drowned."

Rex started up as if a missile had been suddenly thrown into the room.
He could not help himself, and Anna's first look was at him. But then,
gathering some self-command while Mrs. Davilow was reading what the
rector had written on the enclosing paper, he said,

"Can I do anything, aunt? Can I carry any word to my father from you?"

"Yes, dear. Tell him I will be ready--he is very good. He says he will
go with me to Genoa--he will be here at half-past six. Jocosa and
Alice, help me to get ready. She is safe--Gwendolen is safe--but she
must be ill. I am sure she must be very ill. Rex, dear--Rex and
Anna--go and and tell your father I will be quite ready. I would not
for the world lose another night. And bless him for being ready so
soon. I can travel night and day till we get there."

Rex and Anna hurried away through the sunshine which was suddenly
solemn to them, without uttering a word to each other: she chiefly
possessed by solicitude about any reopening of his wound, he struggling
with a tumultuary crowd of thoughts that were an offence against his
better will. The tumult being undiminished when they were at the
rectory gate, he said,

"Nannie, I will leave you to say everything to my father. If he wants
me immediately, let me know. I shall stay in the shrubbery for ten
minutes--only ten minutes."

Who has been quite free from egoistic escapes of the imagination,
picturing desirable consequences on his own future in the presence of
another's misfortune, sorrow, or death? The expected promotion or
legacy is the common type of a temptation which makes speech and even
prayer a severe avoidance of the most insistent thoughts, and sometimes
raises an inward shame, a self-distaste that is worse than any other
form of unpleasant companionship. In Rex's nature the shame was
immediate, and overspread like an ugly light all the hurrying images of
what might come, which thrust themselves in with the idea that
Gwendolen was again free--overspread them, perhaps, the more
persistently because every phantasm of a hope was quickly nullified by
a more substantial obstacle. Before the vision of "Gwendolen free" rose
the impassable vision of "Gwendolen rich, exalted, courted;" and if in
the former time, when both their lives were fresh, she had turned from
his love with repugnance, what ground was there for supposing that her
heart would be more open to him in the future?

These thoughts, which he wanted to master and suspend, were like a
tumultuary ringing of opposing chimes that he could not escape from by
running. During the last year he had brought himself into a state of
calm resolve, and now it seemed that three words had been enough to
undo all that difficult work, and cast him back into the wretched
fluctuations of a longing which he recognized as simply perturbing and
hopeless. And at this moment the activity of such longing had an
untimeliness that made it repulsive to his better self. Excuse poor
Rex; it was not much more than eighteen months since he had been laid
low by an archer who sometimes touches his arrow with a subtle,
lingering poison. The disappointment of a youthful passion has effects
as incalculable as those of small-pox which may make one person plain
and a genius, another less plain and more foolish, another plain
without detriment to his folly, and leave perhaps the majority without
obvious change. Everything depends--not on the mere fact of
disappointment, but--on the nature affected and the force that stirs
it. In Rex's well-endowed nature, brief as the hope had been, the
passionate stirring had gone deep, and the effect of disappointment was
revolutionary, though fraught with a beneficent new order which
retained most of the old virtues; in certain respects he believed that
it had finally determined the bias and color of his life. Now, however,
it seemed that his inward peace was hardly more than that of republican
Florence, and his heart no better than the alarm-bell that made work
slack and tumult busy.

Rex's love had been of that sudden, penetrating, clinging sort which
the ancients knew and sung, and in singing made a fashion of talk for
many moderns whose experience has by no means a fiery, demonic
character. To have the consciousness suddenly steeped with another's
personality, to have the strongest inclinations possessed by an image
which retains its dominance in spite of change and apart from
worthiness--nay, to feel a passion which clings faster for the tragic
pangs inflicted by a cruel, reorganized unworthiness--is a phase of
love which in the feeble and common-minded has a repulsive likeness to
his blind animalism insensible to the higher sway of moral affinity or
heaven-lit admiration. But when this attaching force is present in a
nature not of brutish unmodifiableness, but of a human dignity that can
risk itself safely, it may even result in a devotedness not unfit to be
called divine in a higher sense than the ancient. Phlegmatic
rationality stares and shakes its head at these unaccountable
prepossessions, but they exist as undeniably as the winds and waves,
determining here a wreck and there a triumphant voyage.

This sort of passion had nested in the sweet-natured, strong Rex, and
he had made up his mind to its companionship, as if it had been an
object supremely dear, stricken dumb and helpless, and turning all the
future of tenderness into a shadow of the past. But he had also made up
his mind that his life was not to be pauperized because he had had to
renounce one sort of joy; rather, he had begun life again with a new
counting-up of the treasures that remained to him, and he had even felt
a release of power such as may come from ceasing to be afraid of your
own neck.

And now, here he was pacing the shrubbery, angry with himself that the
sense of irrevocableness in his lot, which ought in reason to have been
as strong as ever, had been shaken by a change of circumstances that
could make no change in relation to him. He told himself the truth
quite roughly,

"She would never love me; and that is not the question--I could never
approach her as a lover in her present position. I am exactly of no
consequence at all, and am not likely to be of much consequence till my
head is turning gray. But what has that to do with it? She would not
have me on any terms, and I would not ask her. It is a meanness to be
thinking about it now--no better than lurking about the battle-field to
strip the dead; but there never was more gratuitous sinning. I have
nothing to gain there--absolutely nothing. Then why can't I face the
facts, and behave as they demand, instead of leaving my father to
suppose that there are matters he can't speak to me about, though I
might be useful in them?"

The last thought made one wave with the impulse that sent Rex walking
firmly into the house and through the open door of the study, where he
saw his father packing a traveling-desk.

"Can I be of any use, sir?" said Rex, with rallied courage, as his
father looked up at him.

"Yes, my boy; when I'm gone, just see to my letters, and answer where
necessary, and send me word of everything. Dymock will manage the
parish very well, and you will stay with your mother, or, at least, go
up and down again, till I come back, whenever that may be."

"You will hardly be very long, sir, I suppose," said Rex, beginning to
strap a railway rug. "You will perhaps bring my cousin back to
England?" He forced himself to speak of Gwendolen for the first time,
and the rector noticed the epoch with satisfaction.

"That depends," he answered, taking the subject as a matter-of-course
between them. "Perhaps her mother may stay there with her, and I may
come back very soon. This telegram leaves us in ignorance which is
rather anxious. But no doubt the arrangements of the will lately made
are satisfactory, and there may possibly be an heir yet to be born. In
any case, I feel confident that Gwendolen will be liberally--I should
expect, splendidly--provided for."

"It must have been a great shock for her," said Rex, getting more
resolute after the first twinge had been borne. "I suppose he was a
devoted husband."

"No doubt of it," said the rector, in his most decided manner. "Few men
of his position would have come forward as he did under the
circumstances."

Rex had never seen Grandcourt, had never been spoken to about him by
any one of the family, and knew nothing of Gwendolen's flight from her
suitor to Leubronn. He only knew that Grandcourt, being very much in
love with her, had made her an offer in the first weeks of her sudden
poverty, and had behaved very handsomely in providing for her mother
and sisters. That was all very natural and what Rex himself would have
liked to do. Grandcourt had been a lucky fellow, and had had some
happiness before he got drowned. Yet Rex wondered much whether
Gwendolen had been in love with the successful suitor, or had only
forborne to tell him that she hated being made love to.




CHAPTER LIX.

  "I count myself in nothing else so happy
  As in a soul remembering my good friends."
                                  --SHAKESPEARE.


Sir Hugo Mallinger was not so prompt in starting for Genoa as Mr.
Gascoigne had been, and Deronda on all accounts would not take his
departure until he had seen the baronet. There was not only
Grandcourt's death, but also the late crisis in his own life to make
reasons why his oldest friend would desire to have the unrestrained
communication of speech with him, for in writing he had not felt able
to give any details concerning the mother who had come and gone like an
apparition. It was not till the fifth evening that Deronda, according
to telegram, waited for Sir Hugo at the station, where he was to arrive
between eight and nine; and while he was looking forward to the sight
of the kind, familiar face, which was part of his earliest memories,
something like a smile, in spite of his late tragic experience, might
have been detected in his eyes and the curve of his lips at the idea of
Sir Hugo's pleasure in being now master of his estates, able to leave
them to his daughters, or at least--according to a view of inheritance
which had just been strongly impressed on Deronda's imagination--to
take makeshift feminine offspring as intermediate to a satisfactory
heir in a grandson. We should be churlish creatures if we could have no
joy in our fellow-mortals' joy, unless it were in agreement with our
theory of righteous distribution and our highest ideal of human good:
what sour corners our mouths would get--our eyes, what frozen glances!
and all the while our own possessions and desires would not exactly
adjust themselves to our ideal. We must have some comradeship with
imperfection; and it is, happily, possible to feel gratitude even where
we discern a mistake that may have been injurious, the vehicle of the
mistake being an affectionate intention prosecuted through a life-time
of kindly offices. Deronda's feeling and judgment were strongly against
the action of Sir Hugo in making himself the agent of a falsity--yes, a
falsity: he could give no milder name to the concealment under which he
had been reared. But the baronet had probably had no clear knowledge
concerning the mother's breach of trust, and with his light, easy way
of taking life, had held it a reasonable preference in her that her son
should be made an English gentleman, seeing that she had the
eccentricity of not caring to part from her child, and be to him as if
she were not. Daniel's affectionate gratitude toward Sir Hugo made him
wish to find grounds of excuse rather than blame; for it is as possible
to be rigid in principle and tender in blame, as it is to suffer from
the sight of things hung awry, and yet to be patient with the hanger
who sees amiss. If Sir Hugo in his bachelorhood had been beguiled into
regarding children chiefly as a product intended to make life more
agreeable to the full-grown, whose convenience alone was to be
consulted in the disposal of them--why, he had shared an assumption
which, if not formally avowed, was massively acted on at that date of
the world's history; and Deronda, with all his keen memory of the
painful inward struggle he had gone through in his boyhood, was able
also to remember the many signs that his experience had been entirely
shut out from Sir Hugo's conception. Ignorant kindness may have the
effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty
would be an ignorant _un_kindness, the most remote from Deronda's large
imaginative lenience toward others. And perhaps now, after the
searching scenes of the last ten days, in which the curtain had been
lifted for him from the secrets of lives unlike his own, he was more
than ever disposed to check that rashness of indignation or resentment
which has an unpleasant likeness to the love of punishing. When he saw
Sir Hugo's familiar figure descending from the railway carriage, the
life-long affection which had been well accustomed to make excuses,
flowed in and submerged all newer knowledge that might have seemed
fresh ground for blame.

"Well, Dan," said Sir Hugo, with a serious fervor, grasping Deronda's
hand. He uttered no other words of greeting; there was too strong a
rush of mutual consciousness. The next thing was to give orders to the
courier, and then to propose walking slowly in, the mild evening, there
being no hurry to get to the hotel.

"I have taken my journey easily, and am in excellent condition," he
said, as he and Deronda came out under the starlight, which was still
faint with the lingering sheen of day. "I didn't hurry in setting off,
because I wanted to inquire into things a little, and so I got sight of
your letter to Lady Mallinger before I started. But now, how is the
widow?"

"Getting calmer," said Deronda. "She seems to be escaping the bodily
illness that one might have feared for her, after her plunge and
terrible excitement. Her uncle and mother came two days ago, and she is
being well taken care of."

"Any prospect of an heir being born?"

"From what Mr. Gascoigne said to me, I conclude not. He spoke as if it
were a question whether the widow would have the estates for her life."

"It will not be much of a wrench to her affections, I fancy, this loss
of the husband?" said Sir Hugo, looking round at Deronda.

"The suddenness of the death has been a great blow to her," said
Deronda, quietly evading the question.

"I wonder whether Grandcourt gave her any notion what were the
provisions of his will?" said Sir Hugo.

"Do you know what they are, sir?" parried Deronda.

"Yes, I do," said the baronet, quickly. "Gad! if there is no prospect
of a legitimate heir, he has left everything to a boy he had by a Mrs.
Glasher; you know nothing about the affair, I suppose, but she was a
sort of wife to him for a good many years, and there are three older
children--girls. The boy is to take his father's name; he is Henleigh
already, and he is to be Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt. The Mallinger
will be of no use to him, I am happy to say; but the young dog will
have more than enough with his fourteen years' minority--no need to
have had holes filled up with my fifty thousand for Diplow that he had
no right to: and meanwhile my beauty, the young widow, is to put up
with a poor two thousand a year and the house at Gadsmere--a nice kind
of banishment for her if she chose to shut herself up there, which I
don't think she will. The boy's mother has been living there of late
years. I'm perfectly disgusted with Grandcourt. I don't know that I'm
obliged to think the better of him because he's drowned, though, so far
as my affairs are concerned, nothing in his life became him like the
leaving it."

"In my opinion he did wrong when he married this wife--not in leaving
his estates to the son," said Deronda, rather dryly.

"I say nothing against his leaving the land to the lad," said Sir Hugo;
"but since he had married this girl he ought to have given her a
handsome provision, such as she could live on in a style fitted to the
rank he had raised her to. She ought to have had four or five thousand
a year and the London house for her life; that's what I should have
done for her. I suppose, as she was penniless, her friends couldn't
stand out for a settlement, else it's ill trusting to the will a man
may make after he's married. Even a wise man generally lets some folly
ooze out of him in his will--my father did, I know; and if a fellow has
any spite or tyranny in him, he's likely to bottle off a good deal for
keeping in that sort of document. It's quite clear Grandcourt meant
that his death should put an extinguisher on his wife, if she bore him
no heir."

"And, in the other case, I suppose everything would have been
reversed--illegitimacy would have had the extinguisher?" said Deronda,
with some scorn.

"Precisely--Gadsmere and the two thousand. It's queer. One nuisance is
that Grandcourt has made me an executor; but seeing he was the son of
my only brother, I can't refuse to act. And I shall mind it less if I
can be of any use to the widow. Lush thinks she was not in ignorance
about the family under the rose, and the purport of the will. He hints
that there was no very good understanding between the couple. But I
fancy you are the man who knew most about what Mrs. Grandcourt felt or
did not feel--eh, Dan?" Sir Hugo did not put this question with his
usual jocoseness, but rather with a lowered tone of interested inquiry;
and Deronda felt that any evasion would be misinterpreted. He answered
gravely,

"She was certainly not happy. They were unsuited to each other. But as
to the disposal of the property--from all I have seen of her, I should
predict that she will be quite contented with it."

"Then she is not much like the rest of her sex; that's all I can say,"
said Sir Hugo, with a slight shrug. "However, she ought to be something
extraordinary, for there must be an entanglement between your horoscope
and hers--eh? When that tremendous telegram came, the first thing Lady
Mallinger said was, 'How very strange that it should be Daniel who
sends it!' But I have had something of the same sort in my own life. I
was once at a foreign hotel where a lady had been left by her husband
without money. When I heard of it, and came forward to help her, who
should she be but an early flame of mine, who had been fool enough to
marry an Austrian baron with a long mustache and short affection? But
it was an affair of my own that called me there--nothing to do with
knight-errantry, any more than you coming to Genoa had to do with the
Grandcourts."

There was silence for a little while. Sir Hugo had begun to talk of the
Grandcourts as the less difficult subject between himself and Deronda;
but they were both wishing to overcome a reluctance to perfect
frankness on the events which touched their relation to each other.
Deronda felt that his letter, after the first interview with his
mother, had been rather a thickening than a breaking of the ice, and
that he ought to wait for the first opening to come from Sir Hugo. Just
when they were about to lose sight of the port, the baronet turned, and
pausing as if to get a last view, said in a tone of more serious
feeling--"And about the main business of your coming to Genoa, Dan? You
have not been deeply pained by anything you have learned, I hope? There
is nothing that you feel need change your position in any way? You
know, whatever happens to you must always be of importance to me."

"I desire to meet your goodness by perfect confidence, sir," said
Deronda. "But I can't answer those questions truly by a simple yes or
no. Much that I have heard about the past has pained me. And it has
been a pain to meet and part with my mother in her suffering state, as
I have been compelled to do, But it is no pain--it is rather a clearing
up of doubts for which I am thankful, to know my parentage. As to the
effect on my position, there will be no change in my gratitude to you,
sir, for the fatherly care and affection you have always shown me. But
to know that I was born a Jew, may have a momentous influence on my
life, which I am hardly able to tell you of at present."

Deronda spoke the last sentence with a resolve that overcame some
diffidence. He felt that the differences between Sir Hugo's nature and
his own would have, by-and-by, to disclose themselves more markedly
than had ever yet been needful. The baronet gave him a quick glance,
and turned to walk on. After a few moments' silence, in which he had
reviewed all the material in his memory which would enable him to
interpret Deronda's words, he said,

"I have long expected something remarkable from you, Dan; but, for
God's sake, don't go into any eccentricities! I can tolerate any man's
difference of opinion, but let him tell it me without getting himself
up as a lunatic. At this stage of the world, if a man wants to be taken
seriously, he must keep clear of melodrama. Don't misunderstand me. I
am not suspecting you of setting up any lunacy on your own account. I
only think you might easily be led arm in arm with a lunatic,
especially if he wanted defending. You have a passion for people who
are pelted, Dan. I'm sorry for them too; but so far as company goes,
it's a bad ground of selection. However, I don't ask you to anticipate
your inclination in anything you have to tell me. When you make up your
mind to a course that requires money, I have some sixteen thousand
pounds that have been accumulating for you over and above what you have
been having the interest of as income. And now I am come, I suppose you
want to get back to England as soon as you can?"

"I must go first to Mainz to get away a chest of my grandfather's, and
perhaps to see a friend of his," said Deronda. "Although the chest has
been lying there these twenty years, I have an unreasonable sort of
nervous eagerness to get it away under my care, as if it were more
likely now than before that something might happen to it. And perhaps I
am the more uneasy, because I lingered after my mother left, instead of
setting out immediately. Yet I can't regret that I was here--else Mrs.
Grandcourt would have had none but servants to act for her."

"Yes, yes," said Sir Hugo, with a flippancy which was an escape of some
vexation hidden under his more serious speech; "I hope you are not
going to set a dead Jew above a living Christian."

Deronda colored, and repressed a retort. They were just turning into
the _Italia_.




CHAPTER LX.

    "But I shall say no more of this at this time; for this is to be felt
    and not to be talked of; and they who never touched it with their
    fingers may secretly perhaps laugh at it in their hearts and be never
    the wiser."--JEREMY TAYLOR.

    The Roman Emperor in the legend put to death ten learned Israelites to
    avenge the sale of Joseph by his brethren. And there have always been
    enough of his kidney, whose piety lies in punishing who can see the
    justice of grudges but not of gratitude. For you shall never convince
    the stronger feeling that it hath not the stronger reason, or incline
    him who hath no love to believe that there is good ground for loving.
    As we may learn from the order of word-making, wherein _love_
    precedeth _lovable_.


When Deronda presented his letter at the banking-house in the _Schuster
Strasse_ at Mainz, and asked for Joseph Kalonymos, he was presently
shown into an inner room, where, seated at a table arranging open
letters, was the white-bearded man whom he had seen the year before in
the synagogue at Frankfort. He wore his hat--it seemed to be the same
old felt hat as before--and near him was a packed portmanteau with a
wrap and overcoat upon it. On seeing Deronda enter he rose, but did not
advance or put out his hand. Looking at him with small penetrating eyes
which glittered like black gems in the midst of his yellowish face and
white hair, he said in German,

"Good! It is now you who seek me, young man."

"Yes; I seek you with gratitude, as a friend of my grandfather's," said
Deronda, "and I am under an obligation to you for giving yourself much
trouble on my account." He spoke without difficulty in that liberal
German tongue which takes many strange accents to its maternal bosom.

Kalonymos now put out his hand and said cordially, "So you are no
longer angry at being something more than an Englishman?"

"On the contrary. I thank you heartily for helping to save me from
remaining in ignorance of my parentage, and for taking care of the
chest that my grandfather left in trust for me."

"Sit down, sit down," said Kalonymos, in a quick undertone, seating
himself again, and pointing to a chair near him. Then deliberately
laying aside his hat and showing a head thickly covered, with white
hair, he stroked and clutched his beard while he looked examiningly at
the young face before him. The moment wrought strongly on Deronda's
imaginative susceptibility: in the presence of one linked still in
zealous friendship with the grandfather whose hope had yearned toward
him when he was unborn, and who, though dead, was yet to speak with him
in those written memorials which, says Milton, "contain a potency of
life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are," he
seemed to himself to be touching the electric chain of his own
ancestry; and he bore the scrutinizing look of Kalonymos with a
delighted awe, something like what one feels in the solemn
commemoration of acts done long ago but still telling markedly on the
life of to-day. Impossible for men of duller, fibre--men whose
affection is not ready to diffuse itself through the wide travel of
imagination, to comprehend, perhaps even to credit this sensibility of
Deronda's; but it subsisted, like their own dullness, notwithstanding
their lack of belief in it--and it gave his face an expression which
seemed very satisfactory to the observer.

He said in Hebrew, quoting from one of the fine hymns in the Hebrew
liturgy, "As thy goodness has been great to the former generations,
even so may it be to the latter." Then after pausing a little he began,
"Young man, I rejoice that I was not yet set off again on my travels,
and that you are come in time for me to see the image of my friend as
he was in his youth--no longer perverted from the fellowship of your
people--no longer shrinking in proud wrath from the touch of him who
seemed to be claiming you as a Jew. You come with thankfulness yourself
to claim the kindred and heritage that wicked contrivance would have
robbed you of. You come with a willing soul to declare, 'I am the
grandson of Daniel Charisi.' Is it not so?"

"Assuredly it is," said Deronda. "But let me say that I should at no
time have been inclined to treat a Jew with incivility simply because
he was a Jew. You can understand that I shrank from saying to a
stranger, 'I know nothing of my mother.'"

"A sin, a sin!" said Kalonymos, putting up his hand and closing his
eyes in disgust. "A robbery of our people--as when our youths and
maidens were reared for the Roman Edom. But it is frustrated. I have
frustrated it. When Daniel Charisi--may his Rock and his Redeemer guard
him!--when Daniel Charisi was a stripling and I was a lad little above
his shoulder, we made a solemn vow always to be friends. He said, 'Let
us bind ourselves with duty, as if we were sons of the same mother.'
That was his bent from first to last--as he said, to fortify his soul
with bonds. It was a saying of his, 'Let us bind love with duty; for
duty is the love of law; and law is the nature of the Eternal.' So we
bound ourselves. And though we were much apart in our later life, the
bond has never been broken. When he was dead, they sought to rob him;
but they could not rob him of me. I rescued that remainder of him which
he had prized and preserved for his offspring. And I have restored to
him the offspring they had robbed him of. I will bring you the chest
forthwith."

Kalonymos left the room for a few minutes, and returned with a clerk
who carried the chest, set it down on the floor, drew off a leather
cover, and went out again. It was not very large, but was made heavy by
ornamental bracers and handles of gilt iron. The wood was beautifully
incised with Arabic lettering.

"So!" said Kalonymos, returning to his seat. "And here is the curious
key," he added, taking it from a small leathern bag. "Bestow it
carefully. I trust you are methodic and wary." He gave Deronda the
monitory and slightly suspicious look with which age is apt to commit
any object to the keeping of youth.

"I shall be more careful of this than of any other property," said
Deronda, smiling and putting the key in his breast-pocket. "I never
before possessed anything that was a sign to me of so much cherished
hope and effort. And I shall never forget that the effort was partly
yours. Have you time to tell me more of my grandfather? Or shall I be
trespassing in staying longer?"

"Stay yet a while. In an hour and eighteen minutes I start for
Trieste," said Kalonymos, looking at his watch, "and presently my sons
will expect my attention. Will you let me make you known to them, so
that they may have the pleasure of showing hospitality to my friend's
grandson? They dwell here in ease and luxury, though I choose to be a
wanderer."

"I shall be glad if you will commend me to their acquaintance for some
future opportunity," said Deronda. "There are pressing claims calling
me to England--friends who may be much in need of my presence. I have
been kept away from them too long by unexpected circumstances. But to
know more of you and your family would be motive enough to bring me
again to Mainz."

"Good! Me you will hardly find, for I am beyond my threescore years and
ten, and I am a wanderer, carrying my shroud with me. But my sons and
their children dwell here in wealth and unity. The days are changed for
us since Karl the Great fetched my ancestors from Italy to bring some
tincture of knowledge to our rough German brethren. I and my
contemporaries have had to fight for it too. Our youth fell on evil
days; but this we have won; we increase our wealth in safety, and the
learning of all Germany is fed and fattened by Jewish brains--though
they keep not always their Jewish hearts. Have you been left altogether
ignorant of your people's life, young man?"

"No," said Deronda, "I have lately, before I had any true suspicion of
my parentage, been led to study everything belonging to their history
with more interest than any other subject. It turns out that I have
been making myself ready to understand my grandfather a little." He was
anxious less the time should be consumed before this circuitous course
of talk could lead them back to the topic he most cared about. Age does
not easily distinguish between what it needs to express and what youth
needs to know-distance seeming to level the objects of memory; and
keenly active as Joseph Kalonymos showed himself, an inkstand in the
wrong place would have hindered his imagination from getting to
Beyrout: he had been used to unite restless travel with punctilious
observation. But Deronda's last sentence answered its purpose.

"So-you would perhaps have been such a man as he if your education had
not hindered; for you are like him in features:--yet not altogether,
young man. He had an iron will in his face: it braced up everybody
about him. When he was quite young he had already got one deep upright
line in his brow. I see none of that in you. Daniel Charisi used to
say, 'Better, a wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast enemy
than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.'
What he despised most was indifference. He had longer reasons than I
can give you."

"Yet his knowledge was not narrow?" said Deronda, with a tacit
reference to the usual excuse for indecision--that it comes from
knowing too much.

"Narrow? no," said Kalonymos, shaking his head with a compassionate
smile "From his childhood upward, he drank in learning as easily as the
plant sucks up water. But he early took to medicine and theories about
life and health. He traveled to many countries, and spent much of his
substance in seeing and knowing. What he used to insist on was that the
strength and wealth of mankind depended on the balance of separateness
and communication, and he was bitterly against our people losing
themselves among the Gentiles; 'It's no better,' said he, 'than the
many sorts of grain going back from their variety into sameness.' He
mingled all sorts of learning; and in that he was like our Arabic
writers in the golden time. We studied together, but he went beyond me.
Though we were bosom friends, and he poured himself out to me, we were
as different as the inside and outside of the bowl. I stood up for two
notions of my own: I took Charisi's sayings as I took the shape of the
trees: they were there, not to be disputed about. It came to the same
thing in both of us; we were both faithful Jews, thankful not to be
Gentiles. And since I was a ripe man, I have been what I am now, for
all but age-loving to wander, loving transactions, loving to behold all
things, and caring nothing about hardship. Charisi thought continually
of our people's future: he went with all his soul into that part of our
religion: I, not. So we have freedom, I am content. Our people wandered
before they were driven. Young man when I am in the East, I lie much on
deck and watch the greater stars. The sight of them satisfies me. I
know them as they rise, and hunger not to know more. Charisi was
satisfied with no sight, but pieced it out with what had been before
and what would come after. Yet we loved each other, and as he said, he
bound our love with duty; we solemnly pledged ourselves to help and
defend each other to the last. I have fulfilled my pledge." Here
Kalonymos rose, and Deronda, rising also, said,

"And in being faithful to him you have caused justice to be done to me.
It would have been a robbery of me too that I should never have known
of the inheritance he had prepared for me. I thank you with my whole
soul."

"Be worthy of him, young man. What is your vocation?" This question was
put with a quick abruptness which embarrassed Deronda, who did not feel
it quite honest to allege his law-reading as a vocation. He answered,

"I cannot say that I have any."

"Get one, get one. The Jew must be diligent. You will call yourself a
Jew and profess the faith of your fathers?" said Kalonymos, putting his
hand on Deronda's shoulder and looking sharply in his face.

"I shall call myself a Jew," said Deronda, deliberately, becoming
slightly paler under the piercing eyes of his questioner. "But I will
not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have
believed. Our fathers themselves changed the horizon of their belief
and learned of other races. But I think I can maintain my grandfather's
notion of separateness with communication. I hold that my first duty is
to my own people, and if there is anything to be done toward restoring
or perfecting their common life, I shall make that my vocation."

It happened to Deronda at that moment, as it has often happened to
others, that the need for speech made an epoch in resolve. His respect
for the questioner would not let him decline to answer, and by the
necessity to answer he found out the truth for himself.

"Ah, you argue and you look forward--you are Daniel Charisi's
grandson," said Kalonymos, adding a benediction in Hebrew.

With that they parted; and almost as soon as Deronda was in London, the
aged man was again on shipboard, greeting the friendly stars without
any eager curiosity.




CHAPTER LXI.

  "Within the gentle heart Love shelters him,
    As birds within the green shade of the grove.
  Before the gentle heart, in Nature's scheme,
    Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love."
            --GUIDO GUNICELLI (_Rossetti's Translation_).


There was another house besides the white house at Pennicote, another
breast besides Rex Gascoigne's, in which the news of Grandcourt's death
caused both strong agitation and the effort to repress it.

It was Hans Meyrick's habit to send or bring in the _Times_ for his
mother's reading. She was a great reader of news, from the
widest-reaching politics to the list of marriages; the latter, she
said, giving her the pleasant sense of finishing the fashionable novels
without having read them, and seeing the heroes and heroines happy
without knowing what poor creatures they were. On a Wednesday, there
were reasons why Hans always chose to bring the paper, and to do so
about the time that Mirah had nearly ended giving Mab her weekly
lesson, avowing that he came then because he wanted to hear Mirah sing.
But on the particular Wednesday now in question, after entering the
house as quietly as usual with his latch-key, he appeared in the
parlor, shaking the _Times_ aloft with a crackling noise, in
remorseless interruption of Mab's attempt to render _Lascia ch'io
pianga_ with a remote imitation of her teacher. Piano and song ceased
immediately; Mirah, who had been playing the accompaniment,
involuntarily started up and turned round, the crackling sound, after
the occasional trick of sounds, having seemed to her something
thunderous; and Mab said,

"O-o-o, Hans! why do you bring a more horrible noise than my singing?"

"What on earth is the wonderful news?" said Mrs. Meyrick, who was the
only other person in the room. "Anything about Italy--anything about
the Austrians giving up Venice?"

"Nothing about Italy, but something from Italy," said Hans, with a
peculiarity in his tone and manner which set his mother interpreting.
Imagine how some of us feel and behave when an event, not disagreeable
seems to be confirming and carrying out our private constructions. We
say, "What do you think?" in a pregnant tone to some innocent person
who has not embarked his wisdom in the same boat with ours, and finds
our information flat.

"Nothing bad?" said Mrs. Meyrick anxiously, thinking immediately of
Deronda; and Mirah's heart had been already clutched by the same
thought.

"Not bad for anybody we care much about," said Hans, quickly; "rather
uncommonly lucky, I think. I never knew anybody die conveniently
before. Considering what a dear gazelle I am, I am constantly wondering
to find myself alive."

"Oh me, Hans!" said Mab, impatiently, "if you must talk of yourself,
let it be behind your own back. What _is_ it that has happened?"

"Duke Alfonso is drowned, and the Duchess is alive, that's all," said
Hans, putting the paper before Mrs. Meyrick, with his finger against a
paragraph. "But more than all is--Deronda was at Genoa in the same
hotel with them, and he saw her brought in by the fishermen who had got
her out of the water time enough to save her from any harm. It seems
they saw her jump in after her husband, which was a less judicious
action than I should have expected of the Duchess. However Deronda is a
lucky fellow in being there to take care of her."

Mirah had sunk on the music stool again, with her eyelids down and her
hands tightly clasped; and Mrs. Meyrick, giving up the paper to Mab,
said,

"Poor thing! she must have been fond of her husband to jump in after
him."

"It was an inadvertence--a little absence of mind," said Hans, creasing
his face roguishly, and throwing himself into a chair not far from
Mirah. "Who can be fond of a jealous baritone, with freezing glances,
always singing asides?--that was the husband's _rôle_, depend upon it.
Nothing can be neater than his getting drowned. The Duchess is at
liberty now to marry a man with a fine head of hair, and glances that
will melt instead of freezing her. And I shall be invited to the
wedding."

Here Mirah started from her sitting posture, and fixing her eyes on
Hans, with an angry gleam in them, she said, in a deeply-shaken voice
of indignation,

"Mr. Hans, you ought not to speak in that way. Mr. Deronda would not
like you to speak so. Why will you say he is lucky--why will you use
words of that sort about life and death--when what is life to one is
death to another? How do you know it would be lucky if he loved Mrs.
Grandcourt? It might be a great evil to him. She would take him away
from my brother--I know she would. Mr. Deronda would not call that
lucky to pierce my brother's heart."

All three were struck with the sudden transformation. Mirah's face,
with a look of anger that might have suited Ithuriel, pale, even to the
lips that were usually so rich of tint, was not far from poor Hans, who
sat transfixed, blushing under it as if he had been a girl, while he
said, nervously,

"I am a fool and a brute, and I withdraw every word. I'll go and hang
myself like Judas--if it's allowable to mention him." Even in Hans's
sorrowful moments, his improvised words had inevitably some drollery.

But Mirah's anger was not appeased: how could it be? She had burst into
indignant speech as creatures in intense pain bite and make their teeth
meet even through their own flesh, by way of making their agony
bearable. She said no more, but, seating herself at the piano, pressed
the sheet of music before her, as if she thought of beginning to play
again.

It was Mab who spoke, while Mrs. Meyrick's face seemed to reflect some
of Hans' discomfort.

"Mirah is quite right to scold you, Hans. You are always taking Mr.
Deronda's name in vain. And it is horrible, joking in that way about
his marrying Mrs. Grandcourt. Men's minds must be very black, I think,"
ended Mab, with much scorn.

"Quite true, my dear," said Hans, in a low tone, rising and turning on
his heel to walk toward the back window.

"We had better go on, Mab; you have not given your full time to the
lesson," said Mirah, in a higher tone than usual. "Will you sing this
again, or shall I sing it to you?"

"Oh, please sing it to me," said Mab, rejoiced to take no more notice
of what had happened.

And Mirah immediately sang _Lascia ch'io pianga_, giving forth its
melodious sobs and cries with new fullness and energy. Hans paused in
his walk and leaned against the mantel-piece, keeping his eyes
carefully away from his mother's. When Mirah had sung her last note and
touched the last chord, she rose and said, "I must go home now. Ezra
expects me."

She gave her hand silently to Mrs. Meyrick and hung back a little, not
daring to look at her, instead of kissing her, as usual. But the little
mother drew Mirah's face down to hers, and said, soothingly, "God bless
you, my dear." Mirah felt that she had committed an offense against
Mrs. Meyrick by angrily rebuking Hans, and mixed with the rest of her
suffering was the sense that she had shown something like a proud
ingratitude, an unbecoming assertion of superiority. And her friend had
divined this compunction.

Meanwhile Hans had seized his wide-awake, and was ready to open the
door.

"Now, Hans," said Mab, with what was really a sister's tenderness
cunningly disguised, "you are not going to walk home with Mirah. I am
sure she would rather not. You are so dreadfully disagreeable to-day."

"I shall go to take care of her, if she does not forbid me," said Hans,
opening the door.

Mirah said nothing, and when he had opened the outer door for her and
closed it behind him, he walked by her side unforbidden. She had not
the courage to begin speaking to him again--conscious that she had
perhaps been unbecomingly severe in her words to him, yet finding only
severer words behind them in her heart. Besides, she was pressed upon
by a crowd of thoughts thrusting themselves forward as interpreters of
that consciousness which still remained unaltered to herself.

Hans, on his side, had a mind equally busy. Mirah's anger had waked in
him a new perception, and with it the unpleasant sense that he was a
dolt not to have had it before. Suppose Mirah's heart were entirely
preoccupied with Deronda in another character than that of her own and
her brother's benefactor; the supposition was attended in Hans's mind
with anxieties which, to do him justice, were not altogether selfish.
He had a strong persuasion, which only direct evidence to the contrary
could have dissipated, and that was that there was a serious attachment
between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt; he had pieced together many
fragments of observation, and gradually gathered knowledge, completed
by what his sisters had heard from Anna Gascoigne, which convinced him
not only that Mrs. Grandcourt had a passion for Deronda, but also,
notwithstanding his friend's austere self-repression, that Deronda's
susceptibility about her was the sign of concealed love. Some men,
having such a conviction, would have avoided allusions that could have
roused that susceptibility; but Hans's talk naturally fluttered toward
mischief, and he was given to a form of experiment on live animals
which consisted in irritating his friends playfully. His experiments
had ended in satisfying him that what he thought likely was true.

On the other hand, any susceptibility Deronda had manifested about a
lover's attentions being shown to Mirah, Hans took to be sufficiently
accounted for by the alleged reason, namely, her dependent position;
for he credited his friend with all possible unselfish anxiety for
those whom he could rescue and protect. And Deronda's insistence that
Mirah would never marry one who was not a Jew necessarily seemed to
exclude himself, since Hans shared the ordinary opinion, which he knew
nothing to disturb, that Deronda was the son of Sir Hugo Mallinger.

Thus he felt himself in clearness about the state of Deronda's
affections; but now, the events which really struck him as concurring
toward the desirable union with Mrs. Grandcourt, had called forth a
flash of revelation from Mirah--a betrayal of her passionate feeling on
this subject which had made him melancholy on her account as well as
his own--yet on the whole less melancholy than if he had imagined
Deronda's hopes fixed on her. It is not sublime, but it is common, for
a man to see the beloved object unhappy because his rival loves
another, with more fortitude and a milder jealousy than if he saw her
entirely happy in his rival. At least it was so with the mercurial
Hans, who fluctuated between the contradictory states of feeling,
wounded because Mirah was wounded, and of being almost obliged to
Deronda for loving somebody else. It was impossible for him to give
Mirah any direct sign of the way in which he had understood her anger,
yet he longed that his speechless companionship should be eloquent in a
tender, penitent sympathy which is an admissible form of wooing a
bruised heart.

Thus the two went side by side in a companionship that yet seemed an
agitated communication, like that of two chords whose quick vibrations
lie outside our hearing. But when they reached the door of Mirah's
home, and Hans said "Good-bye," putting out his hand with an appealing
look of penitence, she met the look with melancholy gentleness, and
said, "Will you not come in and see my brother?"

Hans could not but interpret this invitation as a sign of pardon. He
had not enough understanding of what Mirah's nature had been wrought
into by her early experience, to divine how the very strength of her
late excitement had made it pass more quickly into the resolute
acceptance of pain. When he had said, "If you will let me," and they
went in together, half his grief was gone, and he was spinning a little
romance of how his devotion might make him indispensable to Mirah in
proportion as Deronda gave his devotion elsewhere. This was quite fair,
since his friend was provided for according to his own heart; and on
the question of Judaism Hans felt thoroughly fortified:--who ever heard
in tale or history that a woman's love went in the track of her race
and religion? Moslem and Jewish damsels were always attracted toward
Christians, and now if Mirah's heart had gone forth too precipitately
toward Deronda, here was another case in point. Hans was wont to make
merry with his own arguments, to call himself a Giaour, and antithesis
the sole clue to events; but he believed a little in what he laughed
at. And thus his bird-like hope, constructed on the lightest
principles, soared again in spite of heavy circumstances.

They found Mordecai looking singularly happy, holding a closed letter
in his hand, his eyes glowing with a quiet triumph which in his
emaciated face gave the idea of a conquest over assailing death. After
the greeting between him and Hans, Mirah put her arm round her
brother's neck and looked down at the letter in his hand, without the
courage to ask about it, though she felt sure that it was the cause of
his happiness.

"A letter from Daniel Deronda," said Mordecai, answering her look.
"Brief--only saying that he hopes soon to return. Unexpected claims
have detained him. The promise of seeing him again is like the bow in
the cloud to me," continued Mordecai, looking at Hans; "and to you it
must be a gladness. For who has two friends like him?"

While Hans was answering Mirah slipped away to her own room; but not to
indulge in any outburst of the passion within her. If the angels, once
supposed to watch the toilet of women, had entered the little chamber
with her and let her shut the door behind them, they would only have
seen her take off her hat, sit down and press her hands against her
temples as if she had suddenly reflected that her head ached; then rise
to dash cold water on her eyes and brow and hair till her backward
curls were full of crystal beads, while she had dried her brow and
looked out like a freshly-opened flower from among the dewy tresses of
the woodland; then give deep sighs of relief, and putting on her little
slippers, sit still after that action for a couple of minutes, which
seemed to her so long, so full of things to come, that she rose with an
air of recollection, and went down to make tea.

Something of the old life had returned. She had been used to remember
that she must learn her part, must go to rehearsal, must act and sing
in the evening, must hide her feelings from her father; and the more
painful her life grew, the more she had been used to hide. The force of
her nature had long found its chief action in resolute endurance, and
to-day the violence of feeling which had caused the first jet of anger
had quickly transformed itself into a steady facing of trouble, the
well-known companion of her young years. But while she moved about and
spoke as usual, a close observer might have discerned a difference
between this apparent calm, which was the effect of restraining energy,
and the sweet genuine calm of the months when she first felt a return
of her infantine happiness.

Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of
calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at
the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will
alter the course of the storm. Mirah felt no such surprise when
familiar Sorrow came back from brief absence, and sat down with her
according to the old use and wont. And this habit of expecting trouble
rather than joy, hindered her from having any persistent belief in
opposition to the probabilities which were not merely suggested by
Hans, but were supported by her own private knowledge and long-growing
presentiment. An attachment between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt, to end
in their future marriage, had the aspect of a certainty for her
feeling. There had been no fault in him: facts had ordered themselves
so that there was a tie between him and this woman who belonged to
another world than hers and Ezra's--nay, who seemed another sort of
being than Deronda, something foreign that would be a disturbance in
his life instead of blending with it. Well, well--but if it could have
been deferred so as to make no difference while Ezra was there! She did
not know all the momentousness of the relation between Deronda and her
brother, but she had seen, and instinctively felt enough to forebode
its being incongruous with any close tie to Mrs. Grandcourt; at least
this was the clothing that Mirah first gave to her mortal repugnance.
But in the still, quick action of her consciousness, thoughts went on
like changing states of sensation unbroken by her habitual acts; and
this inward language soon said distinctly that the mortal repugnance
would remain even if Ezra were secured from loss.

"What I have read about and sung about and seen acted, is happening to
me--this that I am feeling is the love that makes jealousy;" so
impartially Mirah summed up the charge against herself. But what
difference could this pain of hers make to any one else? It must remain
as exclusively her own, and hidden, as her early yearning and devotion
to her lost mother. But unlike that devotion, it was something that she
felt to be a misfortune of her nature--a discovery that what should
have been pure gratitude and reverence had sunk into selfish pain, that
the feeling she had hitherto delighted to pour out in words was
degraded into something she was ashamed to betray--an absurd longing
that she who had received all and given nothing should be of importance
where she was of no importance--an angry feeling toward another woman
who possessed the good she wanted. But what notion, what vain reliance
could it be that had lain darkly within her and was now burning itself
into sight as disappointment and jealousy? It was as if her soul had
been steeped in poisonous passion by forgotten dreams of deep sleep,
and now flamed out in this unaccountable misery. For with her waking
reason she had never entertained what seemed the wildly unfitting
thought that Deronda could love her. The uneasiness she had felt before
had been comparatively vague and easily explained as part of a general
regret that he was only a visitant in her and her brother's world, from
which the world where his home lay was as different as a portico with
lights and lacqueys was different from the door of a tent, where the
only splendor came from the mysterious inaccessible stars. But her
feeling was no longer vague: the cause of her pain--the image of Mrs.
Grandcourt by Deronda's side, drawing him farther and farther into the
distance, was as definite as pincers on her flesh. In the Psyche-mould
of Mirah's frame there rested a fervid quality of emotion, sometimes
rashly supposed to require the bulk of a Cleopatra; her impressions had
the thoroughness and tenacity that give to the first selection of
passionate feeling the character of a lifelong faithfulness. And now a
selection had declared itself, which gave love a cruel heart of
jealousy: she had been used to a strong repugnance toward certain
objects that surrounded her, and to walk inwardly aloof from them while
they touched her sense. And now her repugnance concentrated itself on
Mrs. Grandcourt, of whom she involuntarily conceived more evil than she
knew. "I could bear everything that used to be--but this is worse--this
is worse,--I used not to have horrible feelings!" said the poor child
in a loud whisper to her pillow. Strange that she should have to pray
against any feeling which concerned Deronda!

But this conclusion had been reached through an evening spent in
attending to Mordecai, whose exaltation of spirit in the prospect of
seeing his friend again, disposed him to utter many thoughts aloud to
Mirah, though such communication was often interrupted by intervals
apparently filled with an inward utterance that animated his eyes and
gave an occasional silent action to his lips. One thought especially
occupied him.

"Seest thou, Mirah," he said once, after a long silence, "the _Shemah_,
wherein we briefly confess the divine Unity, is the chief devotional
exercise of the Hebrew; and this made our religion the fundamental
religion for the whole world; for the divine Unity embraced as its
consequence the ultimate unity of mankind. See, then--the nation which
has been scoffed at for its separateness, has given a binding theory to
the human race. Now, in complete unity a part possesses the whole as
the whole possesses every part: and in this way human life is tending
toward the image of the Supreme Unity: for as our life becomes more
spiritual by capacity of thought, and joy therein, possession tends to
become more universal, being independent of gross material contact; so
that in a brief day the soul of man may know in fuller volume the good
which has been and is, nay, is to come, than all he could possess in a
whole life where he had to follow the creeping paths of the senses. In
this moment, my sister, I hold the joy of another's future within me: a
future which these eyes will not see, and which my spirit may not then
recognize as mine. I recognize it now, and love it so, that I can lay
down this poor life upon its altar and say: 'Burn, burn indiscernibly
into that which shall be, which is my love and not me.' Dost thou
understand, Mirah?"

"A little," said Mirah, faintly, "but my mind is too poor to have felt
it."

"And yet," said Mordecai, rather insistently, "women are specially
framed for the love which feels possession in renouncing, and is thus a
fit image of what I mean. Somewhere in the later _Midrash_, I think, is
the story of a Jewish maiden who loved a Gentile king so well, that
this was what she did:--she entered into prison and changed clothes
with the woman who was beloved by the king, that she might deliver that
woman from death by dying in her stead, and leave the king to be happy
in his love which was not for her. This is the surpassing love, that
loses self in the object of love."

"No, Ezra, no," said Mirah, with low-toned intensity, "that was not it.
She wanted the king when she was dead to know what she had done, and
feel that she was better than the other. It was her strong self,
wanting to conquer, that made her die."

Mordecai was silent a little, and then argued,

"That might be, Mirah. But if she acted so, believing the king would
never know."

"You can make the story so in your mind, Ezra, because you are great,
and like to fancy the greatest that could be. But I think it was not
really like that. The Jewish girl must have had jealousy in her heart,
and she wanted somehow to have the first place in the king's mind. That
is what she would die for."

"My sister, thou hast read too many plays, where the writers delight in
showing the human passions as indwelling demons, unmixed with the
relenting and devout elements of the soul. Thou judgest by the plays,
and not by thy own heart, which is like our mother's."

Mirah made no answer.




CHAPTER LXII.

  "Das Gluck ist eine leichte Dirne,
  Und weilt nicht gern am selben Ort;
  Sie streicht das Haar dir von der Stirn
  Und kusst dich rasch und flattert fort

  Frau Ungluck hat im Gegentheile
  Dich liebefest an's Herz gedruckt;
  Sie sagt, sie habe keine Eile,
  Setzt sich zu dir ans Bett und strickt."
                                     --HEINE.


Something which Mirah had lately been watching for as the fulfilment of
a threat, seemed now the continued visit of that familiar sorrow which
had lately come back, bringing abundant luggage.

Turning out of Knightsbridge, after singing at a charitable morning
concert in a wealthy house, where she had been recommended by Klesmer,
and where there had been the usual groups outside to see the departing
company, she began to feel herself dogged by footsteps that kept an
even pace with her own. Her concert dress being simple black, over
which she had thrown a dust cloak, could not make her an object of
unpleasant attention, and render walking an imprudence; but this
reflection did not occur to Mirah: another kind of alarm lay uppermost
in her mind. She immediately thought of her father, and could no more
look round than if she had felt herself tracked by a ghost. To turn and
face him would be voluntarily to meet the rush of emotions which
beforehand seemed intolerable. If it were her father he must mean to
claim recognition, and he would oblige her to face him. She must wait
for that compulsion. She walked on, not quickening her pace--of what
use was that?--but picturing what was about to happen as if she had the
full certainty that the man behind her was her father; and along with
her picturing went a regret that she had given her word to Mrs. Meyrick
not to use any concealment about him. The regret at last urged her, at
least, to try and hinder any sudden betrayal that would cause her
brother an unnecessary shock. Under the pressure of this motive, she
resolved to turn before she reached her own door, and firmly will the
encounter instead of merely submitting to it. She had already reached
the entrance of the small square where her home lay, and had made up
her mind to turn, when she felt her embodied presentiment getting
closer to her, then slipping to her side, grasping her wrist, and
saying, with a persuasive curl of accent, "Mirah!"

She paused at once without any start; it was the voice she expected,
and she was meeting the expected eyes. Her face was as grave as if she
had been looking at her executioner, while his was adjusted to the
intention of soothing and propitiating her. Once a handsome face, with
bright color, it was now sallow and deep-lined, and had that peculiar
impress of impudent suavity which comes from courting favor while
accepting disrespect. He was lightly made and active, with something of
youth about him which made the signs of age seem a disguise; and in
reality he was hardly fifty-seven. His dress was shabby, as when she
had seen him before. The presence of this unreverend father now, more
than ever, affected Mirah with the mingled anguish of shame and grief,
repulsion and pity--more than ever, now that her own world was changed
into one where there was no comradeship to fence him from scorn and
contempt.

Slowly, with a sad, tremulous voice, she said, "It is you, father."

"Why did you run away from me, child?" he began with rapid speech which
was meant to have a tone of tender remonstrance, accompanied with
various quick gestures like an abbreviated finger-language. "What were
you afraid of? You knew I never made you do anything against your will.
It was for your sake I broke up your engagement in the Vorstadt,
because I saw it didn't suit you, and you repaid me by leaving me to
the bad times that came in consequence. I had made an easier engagement
for you at the Vorstadt Theater in Dresden: I didn't tell you, because
I wanted to take you by surprise. And you left me planted
there--obliged to make myself scarce because I had broken contract.
That was hard lines for me, after I had given up everything for the
sake of getting you an education which was to be a fortune to you. What
father devoted himself to his daughter more than I did to you? You know
how I bore that disappointment in your voice, and made the best of it:
and when I had nobody besides you, and was getting broken, as a man
must who has had to fight his way with his brains--you chose that time
to leave me. Who else was it you owed everything to, if not to me? and
where was your feeling in return? For what my daughter cared, I might
have died in a ditch."

Lapidoth stopped short here, not from lack of invention, but because he
had reached a pathetic climax, and gave a sudden sob, like a woman's,
taking out hastily an old yellow silk handkerchief. He really felt that
his daughter had treated him ill--a sort of sensibility which is
naturally strong in unscrupulous persons, who put down what is owing to
them, without any _per contra_. Mirah, in spite of that sob, had energy
enough not to let him suppose that he deceived her. She answered more
firmly, though it was the first time she had ever used accusing words
to him.

"You know why I left you, father; and I had reason to distrust you,
because I felt sure that you had deceived my mother. If I could have
trusted you, I would have stayed with you and worked for you."

"I never meant to deceive your mother, Mirah," said Lapidoth, putting
back his handkerchief, but beginning with a voice that seemed to
struggle against further sobbing. "I meant to take you back to her, but
chances hindered me just at the time, and then there came information
of her death. It was better for you that I should stay where I was, and
your brother could take care of himself. Nobody had any claim on me but
you. I had word of your mother's death from a particular friend, who
had undertaken to manage things for me, and I sent him over money to
pay expenses. There's one chance to be sure--" Lapidoth had quickly
conceived that he must guard against something unlikely, yet
possible--"he may have written me lies for the sake of getting the
money out of me."

Mirah made no answer; she could not bear to utter the only true one--"I
don't believe one word of what you say"--and she simply showed a wish
that they should walk on, feeling that their standing still might draw
down unpleasant notice. Even as they walked along, their companionship
might well have made a passer-by turn back to look at them. The figure
of Mirah, with her beauty set off by the quiet, careful dress of an
English lady, made a strange pendant to this shabby, foreign-looking,
eager, and gesticulating man, who withal had an ineffaceable jauntiness
of air, perhaps due to the bushy curls of his grizzled hair, the
smallness of his hands and feet, and his light walk.

"You seem to have done well for yourself, Mirah? _You_ are in no want,
I see," said the father, looking at her with emphatic examination.

"Good friends who found me in distress have helped me to get work,"
said Mirah, hardly knowing what she actually said, from being occupied
with what she would presently have to say. "I give lessons. I have sung
in private houses. I have just been singing at a private concert." She
paused, and then added, with significance, "I have very good friends,
who know all about me."

"And you would be ashamed they should see your father in this plight?
No wonder. I came to England with no prospect, but the chance of
finding you. It was a mad quest; but a father's heart is
superstitious--feels a loadstone drawing it somewhere or other. I might
have done very well, staying abroad: when I hadn't you to take care of,
I could have rolled or settled as easily as a ball; but it's hard being
lonely in the world, when your spirit's beginning to break. And I
thought my little Mirah would repent leaving her father when she came
to look back. I've had a sharp pinch to work my way; I don't know what
I shall come down to next. Talents like mine are no use in this
country. When a man's getting out at elbows nobody will believe in him.
I couldn't get any decent employ with my appearance. I've been obliged
to get pretty low for a shilling already."

Mirah's anxiety was quick enough to imagine her father's sinking into a
further degradation, which she was bound to hinder if she could. But
before she could answer his string of inventive sentences, delivered
with as much glibness as if they had been learned by rote, he added
promptly,

"Where do you live, Mirah?"

"Here, in this square. We are not far from the house."

"In lodgings?"

"Yes."

"Any one to take care of you?"

"Yes," said Mirah again, looking full at the keen face which was turned
toward hers--"my brother."

The father's eyelids fluttered as if the lightning had come across
them, and there was a slight movement of the shoulders. But he said,
after a just perceptible pause: "Ezra? How did you know--how did you
find him?"

"That would take long to tell. Here we are at the door. My brother
would not wish me to close it on you."

Mirah was already on the doorstep, but had her face turned toward her
father, who stood below her on the pavement. Her heart had begun to
beat faster with the prospect of what was coming in the presence of
Ezra; and already in this attitude of giving leave to the father whom
she had been used to obey--in this sight of him standing below her,
with a perceptible shrinking from the admission which he had been
indirectly asking for, she had a pang of the peculiar, sympathetic
humiliation and shame--the stabbed heart of reverence--which belongs to
a nature intensely filial.

"Stay a minute, _Liebchen_," said Lapidoth, speaking in a lowered tone;
"what sort of man has Ezra turned out?"

"A good man--a wonderful man," said Mirah, with slow emphasis, trying
to master the agitation which made her voice more tremulous as she went
on. She felt urged to prepare her father for the complete penetration
of himself which awaited him. "But he was very poor when my friends
found him for me--a poor workman. Once--twelve years ago--he was strong
and happy, going to the East, which he loved to think of; and my mother
called him back because--because she had lost me. And he went to her,
and took care of her through great trouble, and worked for her till she
died--died in grief. And Ezra, too, had lost his health and strength.
The cold had seized him coming back to my mother, because she was
forsaken. For years he has been getting weaker--always poor, always
working--but full of knowledge, and great-minded. All who come near him
honor him. To stand before him is like standing before a prophet of
God"--Mirah ended with difficulty, her heart throbbing--"falsehoods are
no use."

She had cast down her eyes that she might not see her father while she
spoke the last words--unable to bear the ignoble look of frustration
that gathered in his face. But he was none the less quick in invention
and decision.

"Mirah, _Liebchen_," he said, in the old caressing way, "shouldn't you
like me to make myself a little more respectable before my son sees me?
If I had a little sum of money, I could fit myself out and come home to
you as your father ought, and then I could offer myself for some decent
place. With a good shirt and coat on my back, people would be glad
enough to have me. I could offer myself for a courier, if I didn't look
like a broken-down mountebank. I should like to be with my children,
and forget and forgive. But you have never seen your father look like
this before. If you had ten pounds at hand--or I could appoint you to
bring it me somewhere--I could fit myself out by the day after
to-morrow."

Mirah felt herself under a temptation which she must try to overcome.
She answered, obliging herself to look at him again,

"I don't like to deny you what you ask, father; but I have given a
promise not to do things for you in secret. It _is_ hard to see you
looking needy; but we will bear that for a little while; and then you
can have new clothes, and we can pay for them." Her practical sense
made her see now what was Mrs. Meyrick's wisdom in exacting a promise
from her.

Lapidoth's good humor gave way a little. He said, with a sneer, "You
are a hard and fast young lady--you have been learning useful
virtues--keeping promises not to help your father with a pound or two
when you are getting money to dress yourself in silk--your father who
made an idol of you, and gave up the best part of his life to providing
for you."

"It seems cruel--I know it seems cruel," said Mirah, feeling this a
worse moment than when she meant to drown herself. Her lips were
suddenly pale. "But, father, it is more cruel to break the promises
people trust in. That broke my mother's heart--it has broken Ezra's
life. You and I must eat now this bitterness from what has been. Bear
it. Bear to come in and be cared for as you are."

"To-morrow, then," said Lapidoth, almost turning on his heel away from
this pale, trembling daughter, who seemed now to have got the
inconvenient world to back her; but he quickly turned on it again, with
his hands feeling about restlessly in his pockets, and said, with some
return to his appealing tone, "I'm a little cut up with all this,
Mirah. I shall get up my spirits by to-morrow. If you've a little money
in your pocket, I suppose it isn't against your promise to give me a
trifle--to buy a cigar with."

Mirah could not ask herself another question--could not do anything
else than put her cold trembling hands in her pocket for her
_portemonnaie_ and hold it out. Lapidoth grasped it at once, pressed
her fingers the while, said, "Good-bye, my little girl--to-morrow
then!" and left her. He had not taken many steps before he looked
carefully into all the folds of the purse, found two half-sovereigns
and odd silver, and, pasted against the folding cover, a bit of paper
on which Ezra had inscribed, in a beautiful Hebrew character, the name
of his mother, the days of her birth, marriage, and death, and the
prayer, "May Mirah be delivered from evil." It was Mirah's liking to
have this little inscription on many articles that she used. The father
read it, and had a quick vision of his marriage day, and the bright,
unblamed young fellow he was at that time; teaching many things, but
expecting by-and-by to get money more easily by writing; and very fond
of his beautiful bride Sara--crying when she expected him to cry, and
reflecting every phase of her feeling with mimetic susceptibility.
Lapidoth had traveled a long way from that young self, and thought of
all that this inscription signified with an unemotional memory, which
was like the ocular perception of a touch to one who has lost the sense
of touch, or like morsels on an untasting palate, having shape and
grain, but no flavor. Among the things we may gamble away in a lazy
selfish life is the capacity for ruth, compunction, or any unselfish
regret--which we may come to long for as one in slow death longs to
feel laceration, rather than be conscious of a widening margin where
consciousness once was. Mirah's purse was a handsome one--a gift to
her, which she had been unable to reflect about giving away--and
Lapidoth presently found himself outside of his reverie, considering
what the purse would fetch in addition to the sum it contained, and
what prospect there was of his being able to get more from his daughter
without submitting to adopt a penitential form of life under the eyes
of that formidable son. On such a subject his susceptibilities were
still lively.

Meanwhile Mirah had entered the house with her power of reticence
overcome by the cruelty of her pain. She found her brother quietly
reading and sifting old manuscripts of his own, which he meant to
consign to Deronda. In the reaction from the long effort to master
herself, she fell down before him and clasped his knees, sobbing, and
crying, "Ezra, Ezra!"

He did not speak. His alarm for her spending itself on conceiving the
cause of her distress, the more striking from the novelty in her of
this violent manifestation. But Mirah's own longing was to be able to
speak and tell him the cause. Presently she raised her hand, and still
sobbing, said brokenly,

"Ezra, my father! our father! He followed me. I wanted him to come in.
I said you would let him come in. And he said No, he would not--not
now, but to-morrow. And he begged for money from me. And I gave him my
purse, and he went away."

Mirah's words seemed to herself to express all the misery she felt in
them. Her brother found them less grievous than his preconceptions, and
said gently, "Wait for calm, Mirah, and then tell me all,"--putting off
her hat and laying his hands tenderly on her head. She felt the
soothing influence, and in a few minutes told him as exactly as she
could all that had happened.

"He will not come to-morrow," said Mordecai. Neither of them said to
the other what they both thought, namely, that he might watch for
Mirah's outgoings and beg from her again.

"Seest thou," he presently added, "our lot is the lot of Israel. The
grief and the glory are mingled as the smoke and the flame. It is
because we children have inherited the good that we feel the evil.
These things are wedded for us, as our father was wedded to our mother."

The surroundings were of Brompton, but the voice might have come from a
Rabbi transmitting the sentences of an elder time to be registered in
_Babli_--by which (to our ears) affectionate-sounding diminutive is
meant the voluminous Babylonian Talmud. "The Omnipresent," said a
Rabbi, "is occupied in making marriages." The levity of the saying lies
in the ear of him who hears it; for by marriages the speaker meant all
the wondrous combinations of the universe whose issue makes our good
and evil.




CHAPTER LXIII.

    "Moses, trotz seiner Bafeindung der Kunst, dennoch selber ein grosser
    Künstler war und den wahren Künstlergeist besass. Nur war dieser
    Künstlergeist bei ihm, wie bei seinen ägyptischen Landsleuteu, nurauf
    das Colossale und Unverwustliche gerichtet. Aber nicht vie die
    Aegypter formirte er seine Kunstwerke aus Backstem und Granit, sondern
    er baute Menchen-pyramiden, er meisselte Menschen Obelisken, ernahm
    einen armen Hirtenstamm und Schuf daraus ein Volk, das ebenfalls den
    Jahrhahunderten, trotzen sollte * * * er Schuf Israel."--HEINE:
    _Gestandnisse_.


Imagine the difference in Deronda's state of mind when he left England
and when he returned to it. He had set out for Genoa in total
uncertainty how far the actual bent of his wishes and affections would
be encouraged--how far the claims revealed to him might draw him into
new paths, far away from the tracks his thoughts had lately been
pursuing with a consent of desire which uncertainty made dangerous. He
came back with something like a discovered charter warranting the
inherited right that his ambition had begun to yearn for: he came back
with what was better than freedom--with a duteous bond which his
experience had been preparing him to accept gladly, even if it had been
attended with no promise of satisfying a secret passionate longing
never yet allowed to grow into a hope. But now he dared avow to himself
the hidden selection of his love. Since the hour when he left the house
at Chelsea in full-hearted silence under the effect of Mirah's farewell
look and words--their exquisite appealingness stirring in him that
deep-laid care for womanhood which had begun when his own lip was like
a girl's--her hold on his feeling had helped him to be blameless in
word and deed under the difficult circumstances we know of. There
seemed no likelihood that he could ever woo this creature who had
become dear to him amidst associations that forbade wooing; yet she had
taken her place in his soul as a beloved type--reducing the power of
other fascination and making a difference in it that became deficiency.
The influence had been continually strengthened. It had lain in the
course of poor Gwendolen's lot that her dependence on Deronda tended to
rouse in him the enthusiasm of self-martyring pity rather than of
personal love, and his less constrained tenderness flowed with the
fuller stream toward an indwelling image in all things unlike
Gwendolen. Still more, his relation to Mordecai had brought with it a
new nearness to Mirah which was not the less agitating because there
was no apparent change in his position toward her; and she had
inevitably been bound up in all the thoughts that made him shrink from
an issue disappointing to her brother. This process had not gone on
unconsciously in Deronda: he was conscious of it as we are of some
covetousness that it would be better to nullify by encouraging other
thoughts than to give it the insistency of confession even to
ourselves: but the jealous fire had leaped out at Hans's pretensions,
and when his mother accused him of being in love with a Jewess any
evasion suddenly seemed an infidelity. His mother had compelled him to
a decisive acknowledgment of his love, as Joseph Kalonymos had
compelled him to a definite expression of his resolve. This new state
of decision wrought on Deronda with a force which surprised even
himself. There was a release of all the energy which had long been
spent in self-checking and suppression because of doubtful conditions;
and he was ready to laugh at his own impetuosity when, as he neared
England on his way from Mainz, he felt the remaining distance more and
more of an obstruction. It was as if he had found an added soul in
finding his ancestry--his judgment no longer wandering in the mazes of
impartial sympathy, but choosing, with that partiality which is man's
best strength, the closer fellowship that makes sympathy
practical--exchanging that bird's eye reasonableness which soars to
avoid preference and loses all sense of quality for the generous
reasonableness of drawing shoulder to shoulder with men of like
inheritance. He wanted now to be again with Mordecai, to pour forth
instead of restraining his feeling, to admit agreement and maintain
dissent, and all the while to find Mirah's presence without the
embarrassment of obviously seeking it, to see her in the light of a new
possibility, to interpret her looks and words from a new
starting-point. He was not greatly alarmed about the effect of Hans's
attentions, but he had a presentiment that her feeling toward himself
had from the first lain in a channel from which it was not likely to be
diverted into love. To astonish a woman by turning into her lover when
she has been thinking of you merely as a Lord Chancellor is what a man
naturally shrinks from: he is anxious to create an easier transition.

What wonder that Deronda saw no other course than to go straight from
the London railway station to the lodgings in that small square in
Brompton? Every argument was in favor of his losing no time. He had
promised to run down the next day to see Lady Mallinger at the Abbey,
and it was already sunset. He wished to deposit the precious chest with
Mordecai, who would study its contents, both in his absence and in
company with him; and that he should pay this visit without pause would
gratify Mordecai's heart. Hence, and for other reasons, it gratified
Deronda's heart. The strongest tendencies of his nature were rushing in
one current--the fervent affectionateness which made him delight in
meeting the wish of beings near to him, and the imaginative need of
some far-reaching relation to make the horizon of his immediate, daily
acts. It has to be admitted that in this classical, romantic,
world-historic position of his, bringing as it were from its
hiding-place his hereditary armor, he wore--but so, one must suppose,
did the most ancient heroes, whether Semitic or Japhetic--the summer
costume of his contemporaries. He did not reflect that the drab tints
were becoming to him, for he rarely went to the expense of such
thinking; but his own depth of coloring, which made the becomingness,
got an added radiance in the eyes, a fleeting and returning glow in the
skin, as he entered the house wondering what exactly he should find. He
made his entrance as noiseless as possible.

It was the evening of that same afternoon on which Mirah had had the
interview with her father. Mordecai, penetrated by her grief, and also
the sad memories which the incident had awakened, had not resumed his
task of sifting papers: some of them had fallen scattered on the floor
in the first moments of anxiety, and neither he nor Mirah had thought
of laying them in order again. They had sat perfectly still together,
not knowing how long; while the clock ticked on the mantelpiece, and
the light was fading, Mirah, unable to think of the food that she ought
to have been taking, had not moved since she had thrown off her
dust-cloak and sat down beside Mordecai with her hand in his, while he
had laid his head backward, with closed eyes and difficult breathing,
looking, Mirah thought, as he would look when the soul within him could
no longer live in its straitened home. The thought that his death might
be near was continually visiting her when she saw his face in this way,
without its vivid animation; and now, to the rest of her grief, was
added the regret that she had been unable to control the violent
outburst which had shaken him. She sat watching him--her oval cheeks
pallid, her eyes with the sorrowful brilliancy left by young tears, her
curls in as much disorder as a just-awakened child's--watching that
emaciated face, where it might have been imagined that a veil had been
drawn never to be lifted, as if it were her dead joy which had left her
strong enough to live on in sorrow. And life at that moment stretched
before Mirah with more than a repetition of former sadness. The shadow
of the father was there, and more than that, a double bereavement--of
one living as well as one dead.

But now the door was opened, and while none entered, a well-known voice
said: "Daniel Deronda--may he come in?"

"Come! come!" said Mordecai, immediately rising with an irradiated face
and opened eyes--apparently as little surprised as if he had seen
Deronda in the morning, and expected this evening visit; while Mirah
started up blushing with confused, half-alarmed expectation.

Yet when Deronda entered, the sight of him was like the clearness after
rain: no clouds to come could hinder the cherishing beam of that
moment. As he held out his right hand to Mirah, who was close to her
brother's left, he laid his other hand on Mordecai's right shoulder,
and stood so a moment, holding them both at once, uttering no word, but
reading their faces, till he said anxiously to Mirah, "Has anything
happened?--any trouble?"

"Talk not of trouble now," said Mordecai, saving her from the need to
answer. "There is joy in your face--let the joy be ours."

Mirah thought, "It is for something he cannot tell us." But they all
sat down, Deronda drawing a chair close in front of Mordecai.

"That is true," he said, emphatically. "I have a joy which will remain
to us even in the worst trouble. I did not tell you the reason of my
journey abroad, Mordecai, because--never mind--I went to learn my
parentage. And you were right. I am a Jew."

The two men clasped hands with a movement that seemed part of the flash
from Mordecai's eyes, and passed through Mirah like an electric shock.
But Deronda went on without pause, speaking from Mordecai's mind as
much as from his own,

"We have the same people. Our souls have the same vocation. We shall
not be separated by life or by death."

Mordecai's answer was uttered in Hebrew, and in no more than a loud
whisper. It was in the liturgical words which express the religious
bond: "Our God and the God of our fathers."

The weight of feeling pressed too strongly on that ready-winged speech
which usually moved in quick adaptation to every stirring of his fervor.

Mirah fell on her knees by her brother's side, and looked at his now
illuminated face, which had just before been so deathly. The action was
an inevitable outlet of the violent reversal from despondency to a
gladness which came over her as solemnly as if she had been beholding a
religious rite. For the moment she thought of the effect on her own
life only through the effect on her brother.

"And it is not only that I am a Jew," Deronda went on, enjoying one of
those rare moments when our yearnings and our acts can be completely
one, and the real we behold is our ideal good; "but I come of a strain
that has ardently maintained the fellowship of our race--a line of
Spanish Jews that has borne many students and men of practical power.
And I possess what will give us a sort of communion with them. My
grandfather, Daniel Charisi, preserved manuscripts, family records
stretching far back, in the hope that they would pass into the hands of
his grandson. And now his hope is fulfilled, in spite of attempts to
thwart it by hiding my parentage from me. I possess the chest
containing them, with his own papers, and it is down below in this
house. I mean to leave it with you, Mordecai, that you may help me to
study the manuscripts. Some of them I can read easily enough--those in
Spanish and Italian. Others are in Hebrew, and, I think, Arabic; but
there seem to be Latin translations. I was only able to look at them
cursorily while I stayed at Mainz. We will study them together."

Deronda ended with that bright smile which, beaming out from the
habitual gravity of his face, seemed a revelation (the reverse of the
continual smile that discredits all expression). But when this happy
glance passed from Mordecai to rest on Mirah, it acted like a little
too much sunshine, and made her change her attitude. She had knelt
under an impulse with which any personal embarrassment was incongruous,
and especially any thoughts about how Mrs. Grandcourt might stand to
this new aspect of things--thoughts which made her color under
Deronda's glance, and rise to take her seat again in her usual posture
of crossed hands and feet, with the effort to look as quiet as
possible. Deronda, equally sensitive, imagined that the feeling of
which he was conscious, had entered too much into his eyes, and had
been repugnant to her. He was ready enough to believe that any
unexpected manifestation might spoil her feeling toward him--and then
his precious relation to brother and sister would be marred. If Mirah
could have no love for him, any advances of love on his part would make
her wretched in that continual contact with him which would remain
inevitable.

While such feelings were pulsating quickly in Deronda and Mirah,
Mordecai, seeing nothing in his friend's presence and words but a
blessed fulfillment, was already speaking with his old sense of
enlargement in utterance,

"Daniel, from the first, I have said to you, we know not all the
pathways. Has there not been a meeting among them, as of the operations
in one soul, where an idea being born and breathing draws the elements
toward it, and is fed and glows? For all things are bound together in
that Omnipresence which is the place and habitation of the world, and
events are of a glass wherethrough our eyes see some of the pathways.
And if it seems that the erring and unloving wills of men have helped
to prepare you, as Moses was prepared, to serve your people the better,
that depends on another order than the law which must guide our
footsteps. For the evil will of man makes not a people's good except by
stirring the righteous will of man; and beneath all the clouds with
which our thought encompasses the Eternal, this is clear--that a people
can be blessed only by having counsellors and a multitude whose will
moves in obedience to the laws of justice and love. For see, now, it
was your loving will that made a chief pathway, and resisted the effect
of evil; for, by performing the duties of brotherhood to my sister, and
seeking out her brother in the flesh, your soul has been prepared to
receive with gladness this message of the Eternal, 'behold the
multitude of your brethren.'"

"It is quite true that you and Mirah have been my teachers," said
Deronda. "If this revelation had been made to me before I knew you
both, I think my mind would have rebelled against it. Perhaps I should
have felt then--'If I could have chosen, I would not have been a Jew.'
What I feel now is--that my whole being is a consent to the fact. But
it has been the gradual accord between your mind and mine which has
brought about that full consent."

At the moment Deronda was speaking, that first evening in the book-shop
was vividly in his remembrance, with all the struggling aloofness he
had then felt from Mordecai's prophetic confidence. It was his nature
to delight in satisfying to the utmost the eagerly-expectant soul,
which seemed to be looking out from the face before him, like the
long-enduring watcher who at last sees the mountain signal-flame; and
he went on with fuller fervor,

"It is through your inspiration that I have discerned what may be my
life's task. It is you who have given shape to what, I believe, was an
inherited yearning--the effect of brooding, passionate thoughts in many
ancestors--thoughts that seem to have been intensely present in my
grandfather. Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe
brought up in a city of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for
painting, and born blind--the ancestral life would lie within them as a
dim longing for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound
habit of their inherited frames would be like a cunningly-wrought
musical instrument, never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy
mysterious meanings of its intricate structure that, under the right
touch, gives music. Something like that, I think, has been my
experience. Since I began to read and know, I have always longed for
some ideal task, in which I might feel myself the heart and brain of a
multitude--some social captainship, which would come to me as a duty,
and not be striven for as a personal prize. You have raised the image
of such a task for me--to bind our race together in spite of heresy.
You have said to me--'Our religion united us before it divided us--it
made us a people before it made Rabbanites and Karaites.' I mean to try
what can be done with that union--I mean to work in your spirit.
Failure will not be ignoble, but it would be ignoble for me not to try."

"Even as my brother that fed at the breasts of my mother," said
Mordecai, falling back in his chair with a look of exultant repose, as
after some finished labor.

To estimate the effect of this ardent outpouring from Deronda we must
remember his former reserve, his careful avoidance of premature assent
or delusive encouragement, which gave to this decided pledge of himself
a sacramental solemnity, both for his own mind and Mordecai's. On Mirah
the effect was equally strong, though with a difference: she felt a
surprise which had no place in her brother's mind, at Deronda's
suddenly revealed sense of nearness to them: there seemed to be a
breaking of day around her which might show her other facts unlike her
forebodings in the darkness. But after a moment's silence Mordecai
spoke again,

"It has begun already--the marriage of our souls. It waits but the
passing away of this body, and then they who are betrothed shall unite
in a stricter bond, and what is mine shall be thine. Call nothing mine
that I have written, Daniel; for though our masters delivered rightly
that everything should be quoted in the name of him that said it--and
their rule is good--yet it does not exclude the willing marriage which
melts soul into soul, and makes thought fuller as the clear waters are
made fuller, where the fullness is inseparable and the clearness is
inseparable. For I have judged what I have written, and I desire the
body that I gave my thought to pass away as this fleshly body will
pass; but let the thought be born again from our fuller soul which
shall be called yours."

"You must not ask me to promise that," said Deronda, smiling. "I must
be convinced first of special reasons for it in the writings
themselves. And I am too backward a pupil yet. That blent transmission
must go on without any choice of ours; but what we can't hinder must
not make our rule for what we ought to choose. I think our duty is
faithful tradition where we can attain it. And so you would insist for
any one but yourself. Don't ask me to deny my spiritual parentage, when
I am finding the clue of my life in the recognition of natural
parentage."

"I will ask for no promise till you see the reason," said Mordecai.
"You have said the truth: I would obey the Master's rule for another.
But for years my hope, nay, my confidence, has been, not that the
imperfect image of my thought, which is an ill-shaped work of the
youthful carver who has seen a heavenly pattern, and trembles in
imitating the vision--not that this should live, but that my vision and
passion should enter into yours--yea, into yours; for he whom I longed
for afar, was he not you whom I discerned as mine when you came near?
Nevertheless, you shall judge. For my soul is satisfied." Mordecai
paused, and then began in a changed tone, reverting to previous
suggestions from Deronda's disclosure: "What moved your parents----?"
but he immediately checked himself, and added, "Nay, I ask not that you
should tell me aught concerning others, unless it is your pleasure."

"Some time--gradually--you will know all," said Deronda. "But now tell
me more about yourselves, and how the time has passed since I went
away. I am sure there has been some trouble. Mirah has been in distress
about something."

He looked at Mirah, but she immediately turned to her brother,
appealing to him to give the difficult answer. She hoped he would not
think it necessary to tell Deronda the facts about her father on such
an evening as this. Just when Deronda had brought himself so near, and
identified himself with her brother, it was cutting to her that he
should hear of this disgrace clinging about them, which seemed to have
become partly his. To relieve herself she rose to take up her hat and
cloak, thinking she would go to her own room: perhaps they would speak
more easily when she had left them. But meanwhile Mordecai said,

"To-day there has been a grief. A duty which seemed to have gone far
into the distance, has come back and turned its face upon us, and
raised no gladness--has raised a dread that we must submit to. But for
the moment we are delivered from any visible yoke. Let us defer
speaking of it as if this evening which is deepening about us were the
beginning of the festival in which we must offer the first fruits of
our joy, and mingle no mourning with them."

Deronda divined the hinted grief, and left it in silence, rising as he
saw Mirah rise, and saying to her, "Are you going? I must leave almost
immediately--when I and Mrs. Adam have mounted the precious chest, and
I have delivered the key to Mordecai--no, Ezra,--may I call him Ezra
now? I have learned to think of him as Ezra since I have heard you call
him so."

"Please call him Ezra," said Mirah, faintly, feeling a new timidity
under Deronda's glance and near presence. Was there really something
different about him, or was the difference only in her feeling? The
strangely various emotions of the last few hours had exhausted her; she
was faint with fatigue and want of food. Deronda, observing her pallor
and tremulousness, longed to show more feeling, but dared not. She put
out her hand with an effort to smile, and then he opened the door for
her. That was all.

A man of refined pride shrinks from making a lover's approaches to a
woman whose wealth or rank might make them appear presumptuous or
low-motived; but Deronda was finding a more delicate difficulty in a
position which, superficially taken, was the reverse of that--though to
an ardent reverential love, the loved woman has always a kind of wealth
and rank which makes a man keenly susceptible about the aspect of his
addresses. Deronda's difficulty was what any generous man might have
felt in some degree; but it affected him peculiarly through his
imaginative sympathy with a mind in which gratitude was strong. Mirah,
he knew, felt herself bound to him by deep obligations, which to her
sensibilities might give every wish of his the aspect of a claim; and
an inability to fulfill it would cause her a pain continually revived
by their inevitable communion in care of Ezra. Here were fears not of
pride only, but of extreme tenderness. Altogether, to have the
character of a benefactor seemed to Deronda's anxiety an insurmountable
obstacle to confessing himself a lover, unless in some inconceivable
way it could be revealed to him that Mirah's heart had accepted him
beforehand. And the agitation on his own account, too, was not small.

Even a man who has practised himself in love-making till his own
glibness has rendered him sceptical, may at last be overtaken by the
lover's awe--may tremble, stammer, and show other signs of recovered
sensibility no more in the range of his acquired talents than pins and
needles after numbness: how much more may that energetic timidity
possess a man whose inward history has cherished his susceptibilities
instead of dulling them, and has kept all the language of passion fresh
and rooted as the lovely leafage about the hill-side spring!

As for Mirah her dear head lay on its pillow that night with its former
suspicions thrown out of shape but still present, like an ugly story
which had been discredited but not therefore dissipated. All that she
was certain of about Deronda seemed to prove that he had no such
fetters upon him as she had been allowing herself to believe in. His
whole manner as well as his words implied that there were no hidden
bonds remaining to have any effect in determining his future. But
notwithstanding this plainly reasonable inference, uneasiness still
clung about Mirah's heart. Deronda was not to blame, but he had an
importance for Mrs. Grandcourt which must give her some hold on him.
And the thought of any close confidence between them stirred the little
biting snake that had long lain curled and harmless in Mirah's gentle
bosom.

But did she this evening feel as completely as before that her jealousy
was no less remote from any possibility for herself personally than if
her human soul had been lodged in the body of a fawn that Deronda had
saved from the archers? Hardly. Something indefinable had happened and
made a difference. The soft warm rain of blossoms which had fallen just
where she was--did it really come because she was there? What spirit
was there among the boughs?




CHAPTER LXIV.

        "Questa montagna e tale,
  Che sempre al cominciar di sotto a grave.
  E quanto uom piu va su e men fa male."
                  --DANTE: _Il Purgatorio_.


It was not many days after her mother's arrival that Gwendolen would
consent to remain at Genoa. Her desire to get away from that gem of the
sea, helped to rally her strength and courage. For what place, though
it were the flowery vale of Enna, may not the inward sense turn into a
circle of punishment where the flowers are no better than a crop of
flame-tongues burning the soles of our feet?

"I shall never like to see the Mediterranean again," said Gwendolen, to
her mother, who thought that she quite understood her child's
feeling--even in her tacit prohibition of any express reference to her
late husband.

Mrs. Davilow, indeed, though compelled formally to regard this time as
one of severe calamity, was virtually enjoying her life more than she
had ever done since her daughter's marriage. It seemed that her darling
was brought back to her not merely with all the old affection, but with
a conscious cherishing of her mother's nearness, such as we give to a
possession that we have been on the brink of losing.

"Are you there, mamma?" cried Gwendolen, in the middle of the night (a
bed had been made for her mother in the same room with hers), very much
as she would have done in her early girlhood, if she had felt
frightened in lying awake.

"Yes, dear; can I do anything for you?"

"No, thank you; only I like so to know you are there. Do you mind my
waking you?" (This question would hardly have been Gwendolen's in her
early girlhood.)

"I was not asleep, darling."

"It seemed not real that you were with me. I wanted to make it real. I
can bear things if you are with me. But you must not lie awake, anxious
about me. You must be happy now. You must let me make you happy now at
last--else what shall I do?"

"God bless you, dear; I have the best happiness I can have, when you
make much of me."

But the next night, hearing that she was sighing and restless Mrs.
Davilow said, "Let me give you your sleeping-draught, Gwendolen."

"No, mamma, thank you; I don't want to sleep."

"It would be so good for you to sleep more, my darling."

"Don't say what would be good for me, mamma," Gwendolen answered,
impetuously. "You don't know what would be good for me. You and my
uncle must not contradict me and tell me anything is good for me when I
feel it is not good."

Mrs. Davilow was silent, not wondering that the poor child was
irritable. Presently Gwendolen said,

"I was always naughty to you, mamma."

"No, dear, no."

"Yes, I was," said Gwendolen insistently. "It is because I was always
wicked that I am miserable now."

She burst into sobs and cries. The determination to be silent about all
the facts of her married life and its close, reacted in these escapes
of enigmatic excitement.

But dim lights of interpretation were breaking on the mother's mind
through the information that came from Sir Hugo to Mr. Gascoigne, and,
with some omissions, from Mr. Gascoigne to herself. The good-natured
baronet, while he was attending to all decent measures in relation to
his nephew's death, and the possible washing ashore of the body,
thought it the kindest thing he could do to use his present friendly
intercourse with the rector as an opportunity for communicating with
him, in the mildest way, the purport of Grandcourt's will, so as to
save him the additional shock that would be in store for him if he
carried his illusions all the way home. Perhaps Sir Hugo would have
been communicable enough without that kind motive, but he really felt
the motive. He broke the unpleasant news to the rector by degrees: at
first he only implied his fear that the widow was not so splendidly
provided for as Mr. Gascoigne, nay, as the baronet himself had
expected; and only at last, after some previous vague reference to
large claims on Grandcourt, he disclosed the prior relations which, in
the unfortunate absence of a legitimate heir, had determined all the
splendor in another direction.

The rector was deeply hurt, and remembered, more vividly than he had
ever done before, how offensively proud and repelling the manners of
the deceased had been toward him--remembered also that he himself, in
that interesting period just before the arrival of the new occupant at
Diplow, had received hints of former entangling dissipations, and an
undue addiction to pleasure, though he had not foreseen that the
pleasure which had probably, so to speak, been swept into private
rubbish-heaps, would ever present itself as an array of live
caterpillars, disastrous to the green meat of respectable people. But
he did not make these retrospective thoughts audible to Sir Hugo, or
lower himself by expressing any indignation on merely personal grounds,
but behaved like a man of the world who had become a conscientious
clergyman. His first remark was,

"When a young man makes his will in health, he usually counts on living
a long while. Probably Mr. Grandcourt did not believe that this will
would ever have its present effect." After a moment, he added, "The
effect is painful in more ways than one. Female morality is likely to
suffer from this marked advantage and prominence being given to
illegitimate offspring."

"Well, in point of fact," said Sir Hugo, in his comfortable way, "since
the boy is there, this was really the best alternative for the disposal
of the estates. Grandcourt had nobody nearer than his cousin. And it's
a chilling thought that you go out of this life only for the benefit of
a cousin. A man gets a little pleasure in making his will, if it's for
the good of his own curly heads; but it's a nuisance when you're giving
the bequeathing to a used-up fellow like yourself, and one you don't
care two straws for. It's the next worse thing to having only a life
interest in your estates. No; I forgive Grandcourt for that part of his
will. But, between ourselves, what I don't forgive him for, is the
shabby way he has provided for your niece--_our_ niece, I will say--no
better a position than if she had been a doctor's widow. Nothing grates
on me more than that posthumous grudgingness toward a wife. A man ought
to have some pride and fondness for his widow. _I_ should, I know. I
take it as a test of a man, that he feels the easier about his death
when he can think of his wife and daughters being comfortable after it.
I like that story of the fellows in the Crimean war, who were ready to
go to the bottom of the sea if their widows were provided for."

"It has certainly taken me by surprise," said Mr. Gascoigne, "all the
more because, as the one who stood in the place of father to my niece,
I had shown my reliance on Mr. Grandcourt's apparent liberality in
money matters by making no claims for her beforehand. That seemed to me
due to him under the circumstances. Probably you think me blamable."

"Not blamable exactly. I respect a man for trusting another. But take
my advice. If you marry another niece, though it may be to the
Archbishop of Canterbury, bind him down. Your niece can't be married
for the first time twice over. And if he's a good fellow, he'll wish to
be bound. But as to Mrs. Grandcourt, I can only say that I feel my
relation to her all the nearer because I think that she has not been
well treated. And I hope you will urge her to rely on me as a friend."

Thus spake the chivalrous Sir Hugo, in his disgust at the young and
beautiful widow of a Mallinger Grandcourt being left with only two
thousand a year and a house in a coal-mining district. To the rector
that income naturally appeared less shabby and less accompanied with
mortifying privations; but in this conversation he had devoured a much
keener sense than the baronet's of the humiliation cast over his niece,
and also over her nearest friends, by the conspicuous publishing of her
husband's relation to Mrs. Glasher. And like all men who are good
husbands and fathers, he felt the humiliation through the minds of the
women who would be chiefly affected by it; so that the annoyance of
first hearing the facts was far slighter than what he felt in
communicating them to Mrs. Davilow, and in anticipating Gwendolen's
feeling whenever her mother saw fit to tell her of them. For the good
rector had an innocent conviction that his niece was unaware of Mrs.
Glasher's existence, arguing with masculine soundness from what maidens
and wives were likely to know, do, and suffer, and having had a most
imperfect observation of the particular maiden and wife in question.
Not so Gwendolen's mother, who now thought that she saw an explanation
of much that had been enigmatic in her child's conduct and words before
and after her engagement, concluding that in some inconceivable way
Gwendolen had been informed of this left-handed marriage and the
existence of the children. She trusted to opportunities that would
arise in moments of affectionate confidence before and during their
journey to England, when she might gradually learn how far the actual
state of things was clear to Gwendolen, and prepare her for anything
that might be a disappointment. But she was spared from devices on the
subject.

"I hope you don't expect that I am going to be rich and grand, mamma,"
said Gwendolen, not long after the rector's communication; "perhaps I
shall have nothing at all."

She was dressed, and had been sitting long in quiet meditation. Mrs.
Davilow was startled, but said, after a moment's reflection,

"Oh yes, dear, you will have something. Sir Hugo knows all about the
will."

"That will not decide," said Gwendolen, abruptly.

"Surely, dear: Sir Hugo says you are to have two thousand a year and
the house at Gadsmere."

"What I have will depend on what I accept," said Gwendolen. "You and my
uncle must not attempt to cross me and persuade me about this. I will
do everything I can do to make you happy, but in anything about my
husband I must not be interfered with. Is eight hundred a year enough
for you, mamma?"

"More than enough, dear. You must not think of giving me so much." Mrs.
Davilow paused a little, and then said, "Do you know who is to have the
estates and the rest of the money?"

"Yes," said Gwendolen, waving her hand in dismissal of the subject. "I
know everything. It is all perfectly right, and I wish never to have it
mentioned."

The mother was silent, looked away, and rose to fetch a fan-screen,
with a slight flush on her delicate cheeks. Wondering, imagining, she
did not like to meet her daughter's eyes, and sat down again under a
sad constraint. What wretchedness her child had perhaps gone through,
which yet must remain as it always had been, locked away from their
mutual speech. But Gwendolen was watching her mother with that new
divination which experience had given her; and in tender relenting at
her own peremptoriness, said, "Come and sit nearer to me, mamma, and
don't be unhappy."

Mrs. Davilow did as she was told, but bit her lips in the vain attempt
to hinder smarting tears. Gwendolen leaned toward her caressingly and
said, "I mean to be very wise; I do, really. And good--oh, so good to
you, dear, old, sweet mamma, you won't know me. Only you must not cry."

The resolve that Gwendolen had in her mind was that she would ask
Deronda whether she ought to accept any of her husband's money--whether
she might accept what would enable her to provide for her mother. The
poor thing felt strong enough to do anything that would give her a
higher place in Deronda's mind.

An invitation that Sir Hugo pressed on her with kind urgency was that
she and Mrs. Davilow should go straight with him to Park Lane, and make
his house their abode as long as mourning and other details needed
attending to in London. Town, he insisted, was just then the most
retired of places; and he proposed to exert himself at once in getting
all articles belonging to Gwendolen away from the house in Grosvenor
Square. No proposal could have suited her better than this of staying a
little while in Park Lane. It would be easy for her there to have an
interview with Deronda, if she only knew how to get a letter into his
hands, asking him to come to her. During the journey, Sir Hugo, having
understood that she was acquainted with the purport of her husband's
will, ventured to talk before her and to her about her future
arrangements, referring here and there to mildly agreeable prospects as
matters of course, and otherwise shedding a decorous cheerfulness over
her widowed position. It seemed to him really the more graceful course
for a widow to recover her spirits on finding that her husband had not
dealt as handsomely by her as he might have done; it was the testator's
fault if he compromised all her grief at his departure by giving a
testamentary reason for it, so that she might be supposed to look sad,
not because he had left her, but because he had left her poor. The
baronet, having his kindliness doubly fanned by the favorable wind on
his fortunes and by compassion for Gwendolen, had become quite fatherly
in his behavior to her, called her "my dear," and in mentioning
Gadsmere to Mr. Gascoigne, with its various advantages and
disadvantages, spoke of what "we" might do to make the best of that
property. Gwendolen sat by in pale silence while Sir Hugo, with his
face turned toward Mrs. Davilow or Mr. Gascoigne, conjectured that Mrs.
Grandcourt might perhaps prefer letting Gadsmere to residing there
during any part of the year, in which case he thought that it might be
leased on capital terms to one of the fellows engaged with the coal:
Sir Hugo had seen enough of the place to know that it was as
comfortable and picturesque a box as any man need desire, providing his
desires were circumscribed within a coal area.

"_I_ shouldn't mind about the soot myself," said the baronet, with that
dispassionateness which belongs to the potential mood. "Nothing is more
healthy. And if one's business lay there, Gadsmere would be a paradise.
It makes quite a feature in Scrogg's history of the county, with the
little tower and the fine piece of water--the prettiest print in the
book."

"A more important place than Offendene, I suppose?" said Mr. Gascoigne.

"Much," said the baronet, decisively. "I was there with my poor
brother--it is more than a quarter of a century ago, but I remember it
very well. The rooms may not be larger, but the grounds are on a
different scale."

"Our poor dear Offendene is empty after all," said Mrs. Davilow. "When
it came to the point, Mr. Haynes declared off, and there has been no
one to take it since. I might as well have accepted Lord Brackenshaw's
kind offer that I should remain in it another year rent-free: for I
should have kept the place aired and warmed."

"I hope you've something snug instead," said Sir Hugo.

"A little too snug," said Mr. Gascoigne, smiling at his sister-in-law.
"You are rather thick upon the ground."

Gwendolen had turned with a changed glance when her mother spoke of
Offendene being empty. This conversation passed during one of the long
unaccountable pauses often experienced in foreign trains at some
country station. There was a dreamy, sunny stillness over the hedgeless
fields stretching to the boundary of poplars; and to Gwendolen the talk
within the carriage seemed only to make the dreamland larger with an
indistinct region of coal-pits, and a purgatorial Gadsmere which she
would never visit; till at her mother's words, this mingled, dozing
view seemed to dissolve and give way to a more wakeful vision of
Offendene and Pennicote under their cooler lights. She saw the gray
shoulders of the downs, the cattle-specked fields, the shadowy
plantations with rutted lanes where the barked timber lay for a wayside
seat, the neatly-clipped hedges on the road from the parsonage to
Offendene, the avenue where she was gradually discerned from the
window, the hall-door opening, and her mother or one of the troublesome
sisters coming out to meet her. All that brief experience of a quiet
home which had once seemed a dullness to be fled from, now came back to
her as a restful escape, a station where she found the breath of
morning and the unreproaching voice of birds after following a lure
through a long Satanic masquerade, which she had entered on with an
intoxicated belief in its disguises, and had seen the end of in
shrieking fear lest she herself had become one of the evil spirits who
were dropping their human mummery and hissing around her with serpent
tongues.

In this way Gwendolen's mind paused over Offendene and made it the
scene of many thoughts; but she gave no further outward sign of
interest in this conversation, any more than in Sir Hugo's opinion on
the telegraphic cable or her uncle's views of the Church Rate Abolition
Bill. What subjects will not our talk embrace in leisurely
day-journeying from Genoa to London? Even strangers, after glancing
from China to Peru and opening their mental stores with a liberality
threatening a mutual impression of poverty on any future meeting, are
liable to become excessively confidential. But the baronet and the
rector were under a still stronger pressure toward cheerful
communication: they were like acquaintances compelled to a long drive
in a mourning-coach who having first remarked that the occasion is a
melancholy one, naturally proceed to enliven it by the most
miscellaneous discourse. "I don't mind telling _you_," said Sir Hugo to
the rector, in mentioning some private details; while the rector,
without saying so, did not mind telling the baronet about his sons, and
the difficulty of placing them in the world. By the dint of discussing
all persons and things within driving-reach of Diplow, Sir Hugo got
himself wrought to a pitch of interest in that former home, and of
conviction that it was his pleasant duty to regain and strengthen his
personal influence in the neighborhood, that made him declare his
intention of taking his family to the place for a month or two before
the autumn was over; and Mr. Gascoigne cordially rejoiced in that
prospect. Altogether, the journey was continued and ended with mutual
liking between the male fellow-travellers.

Meanwhile Gwendolen sat by like one who had visited the spirit-world
and was full to the lips of an unutterable experience that threw a
strange unreality over all the talk she was hearing of her own and the
world's business; and Mrs. Davilow was chiefly occupied in imagining
what her daughter was feeling, and in wondering what was signified by
her hinted doubt whether she would accept her husband's bequest.
Gwendolen in fact had before her the unsealed wall of an immediate
purpose shutting off every other resolution. How to scale the wall? She
wanted again to see and consult Deronda, that she might secure herself
against any act he would disapprove. Would her remorse have maintained
its power within her, or would she have felt absolved by secrecy, if it
had not been for that outer conscience which was made for her by
Deronda? It is hard to say how much we could forgive ourselves if we
were secure from judgment by another whose opinion is the
breathing-medium of all our joy--who brings to us with close pressure
and immediate sequence that judgment of the Invisible and Universal
which self-flattery and the world's tolerance would easily melt and
disperse. In this way our brother may be in the stead of God to us, and
his opinion which has pierced even to the joints and marrow, may be our
virtue in the making. That mission of Deronda to Gwendolen had begun
with what she had felt to be his judgment of her at the gaming-table.
He might easily have spoiled it:--much of our lives is spent in marring
our own influence and turning others' belief in us into a widely
concluding unbelief which they call knowledge of the world, while it is
really disappointment in you or me. Deronda had not spoiled his mission.

But Gwendolen had forgotten to ask him for his address in case she
wanted to write, and her only way of reaching him was through Sir Hugo.
She was not in the least blind to the construction that all witnesses
might put on her giving signs of dependence on Deronda, and her seeking
him more than he sought her: Grandcourt's rebukes had sufficiently
enlightened her pride. But the force, the tenacity of her nature had
thrown itself into that dependence, and she would no more let go her
hold on Deronda's help, or deny herself the interview her soul needed,
because of witnesses, than if she had been in prison in danger of being
condemned to death. When she was in Park Lane and knew that the baronet
would be going down to the Abbey immediately (just to see his family
for a couple of days and then return to transact needful business for
Gwendolen), she said to him without any air of hesitation, while her
mother was present,

"Sir Hugo, I wish to see Mr. Deronda again as soon as possible. I don't
know his address. Will you tell it me, or let him know that I want to
see him?"

A quick thought passed across Sir Hugo's face, but made no difference
to the ease with which he said, "Upon my word, I don't know whether
he's at his chambers or the Abbey at this moment. But I'll make sure of
him. I'll send a note now to his chambers telling him to come, and if
he's at the Abbey I can give him your message and send him up at once.
I am sure he will want to obey your wish," the baronet ended, with
grave kindness, as if nothing could seem to him more in the appropriate
course of things than that she should send such a message.

But he was convinced that Gwendolen had a passionate attachment to
Deronda, the seeds of which had been laid long ago, and his former
suspicion now recurred to him with more strength than ever, that her
feeling was likely to lead her into imprudences--in which kind-hearted
Sir Hugo was determined to screen and defend her as far as lay in his
power. To him it was as pretty a story as need be that this fine
creature and his favorite Dan should have turned out to be formed for
each other, and that the unsuitable husband should have made his exit
in such excellent time. Sir Hugo liked that a charming woman should be
made as happy as possible. In truth, what most vexed his mind in this
matter at present was a doubt whether the too lofty and inscrutable Dan
had not got some scheme or other in his head, which would prove to be
dearer to him than the lovely Mrs. Grandcourt, and put that
neatly-prepared marriage with her out of the question. It was among the
usual paradoxes of feeling that Sir Hugo, who had given his fatherly
cautions to Deronda against too much tenderness in his relations with
the bride, should now feel rather irritated against him by the
suspicion that he had not fallen in love as he ought to have done. Of
course all this thinking on Sir Hugo's part was eminently premature,
only a fortnight or so after Grandcourt's death. But it is the trick of
thinking to be either premature or behind-hand.

However, he sent the note to Deronda's chambers, and it found him there.




CHAPTER LXV.

  "O, welcome, pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope,
  Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!"
                                         --MILTON.


Deronda did not obey Gwendolen's new summons without some agitation.
Not his vanity, but his keen sympathy made him susceptible to the
danger that another's heart might feel larger demands on him than he
would be able to fulfill; and it was no longer a matter of argument
with him, but of penetrating consciousness, that Gwendolen's soul clung
to his with a passionate need. We do not argue the existence of the
anger or the scorn that thrills through us in a voice; we simply feel
it, and it admits of no disproof. Deronda felt this woman's destiny
hanging on his over a precipice of despair. Any one who knows him
cannot wonder at his inward confession, that if all this had happened
little more than a year ago, he would hardly have asked himself whether
he loved her; the impetuous determining impulse which would have moved
him would have been to save her from sorrow, to shelter her life
forevermore from the dangers of loneliness, and carry out to the last
the rescue he had begun in that monitory redemption of the necklace.
But now, love and duty had thrown other bonds around him, and that
impulse could no longer determine his life; still, it was present in
him as a compassionate yearning, a painful quivering at the very
imagination of having again and again to meet the appeal of her eyes
and words. The very strength of the bond, the certainty of the resolve,
that kept him asunder from her, made him gaze at her lot apart with the
more aching pity.

He awaited her coming in the back drawing-room--part of that white and
crimson space where they had sat together at the musical party, where
Gwendolen had said for the first time that her lot depended on his not
forsaking her, and her appeal had seemed to melt into the melodic
cry--_Per pietà non dirmi addio_. But the melody had come from Mirah's
dear voice.

Deronda walked about this room, which he had for years known by heart,
with a strange sense of metamorphosis in his own life. The familiar
objects around him, from Lady Mallinger's gently smiling portrait to
the also human and urbane faces of the lions on the pilasters of the
chimney-piece, seemed almost to belong to a previous state of existence
which he was revisiting in memory only, not in reality; so deep and
transforming had been the impressions he had lately experienced, so new
were the conditions under which he found himself in the house he had
been accustomed to think of as a home--standing with his hat in his
hand awaiting the entrance of a young creature whose life had also been
undergoing a transformation--a tragic transformation toward a wavering
result, in which he felt with apprehensiveness that his own action was
still bound up.

But Gwendolen was come in, looking changed; not only by her mourning
dress, but by a more satisfied quietude of expression than he had seen
in her face at Genoa. Her satisfaction was that Deronda was there; but
there was no smile between them as they met and clasped hands; each was
full of remembrance--full of anxious prevision. She said, "It was good
of you to come. Let us sit down," immediately seating herself in the
nearest chair. He placed himself opposite to her.

"I asked you to come because I want you to tell me what I ought to do,"
she began, at once. "Don't be afraid of telling me what you think is
right, because it seems hard. I have made up my mind to do it. I was
afraid once of being poor; I could not bear to think of being under
other people; and that was why I did something--why I married. I have
borne worse things now. I think I could bear to be poor, if you think I
ought. Do you know about my husband's will?"

"Yes, Sir Hugo told me," said Deronda, already guessing the question
she had to ask.

"Ought I to take anything he has left me? I will tell you what I have
been thinking," said Gwendolen, with a more nervous eagerness. "Perhaps
you may not quite know that I really did think a good deal about my
mother when I married. I _was_ selfish, but I did love her, and feel
about her poverty; and what comforted me most at first, when I was
miserable, was her being better off because I had married. The thing
that would be hardest to me now would be to see her in poverty again;
and I have been thinking that if I took enough to provide for her, and
no more--nothing for myself--it would not be wrong; for I was very
precious to my mother--and he took me from her--and he meant--and if
she had known--"

Gwendolen broke off. She had been preparing herself for this interview
by thinking of hardly anything else than this question of right toward
her mother; but the question had carried with it thoughts and reasons
which it was impossible for her to utter, and these perilous
remembrances swarmed between her words, making her speech more and more
agitated and tremulous. She looked down helplessly at her hands, now
unladen of all rings except her wedding-ring.

"Do not hurt yourself by speaking of that," said Deronda, tenderly.
"There is no need; the case is very simple. I think I can hardly judge
wrongly about it. You consult me because I am the only person to whom
you have confided the most painful part of your experience: and I can
understand your scruples." He did not go on immediately, waiting for
her to recover herself. The silence seemed to Gwendolen full of the
tenderness that she heard in his voice, and she had courage to lift up
her eyes and look at him as he said, "You are conscious of something
which you feel to be a crime toward one who is dead. You think that you
have forfeited all claim as a wife. You shrink from taking what was
his. You want to keep yourself from profiting by his death. Your
feeling even urges you to some self-punishment--some scourging of the
self that disobeyed your better will--the will that struggled against
temptation. I have known something of that myself. Do I understand you?"

"Yes--at least, I want to be good--not like what I have been," said
Gwendolen. "I will try to bear what you think I ought to bear. I have
tried to tell you the worst about myself. What ought I to do?"

"If no one but yourself were concerned in this question of income,"
said Deronda, "I should hardly dare to urge you against any remorseful
prompting; but I take as a guide now, your feeling about Mrs. Davilow,
which seems to me quite just. I cannot think that your husband's dues
even to yourself are nullified by any act you have committed. He
voluntarily entered into your life, and affected its course in what is
always the most momentous way. But setting that aside, it was due from
him in his position that he should provide for your mother, and he of
course understood that if this will took effect she would share the
provision he had made for you."

"She has had eight hundred a year. What I thought of was to take that
and leave the rest," said Gwendolen. She had been so long inwardly
arguing for this as a permission, that her mind could not at once take
another attitude.

"I think it is not your duty to fix a limit in that way," said Deronda.
"You would be making a painful enigma for Mrs. Davilow; an income from
which you shut yourself out must be embittered to her. And your own
course would become too difficult. We agreed at Genoa that the burden
on your conscience is one what no one ought to be admitted to the
knowledge of. The future beneficence of your life will be best
furthered by your saving all others from the pain of that knowledge. In
my opinion you ought simply to abide by the provisions of your
husband's will, and let your remorse tell only on the use that you will
make of your monetary independence."

In uttering the last sentence Deronda automatically took up his hat
which he had laid on the floor beside him. Gwendolen, sensitive to his
slightest movement, felt her heart giving a great leap, as if it too
had a consciousness of its own, and would hinder him from going: in the
same moment she rose from her chair, unable to reflect that the
movement was an acceptance of his apparent intention to leave her; and
Deronda, of course, also rose, advancing a little.

"I will do what you tell me," said Gwendolen, hurriedly; "but what else
shall I do?" No other than these simple words were possible to her; and
even these were too much for her in a state of emotion where her proud
secrecy was disenthroned: as the child-like sentences fell from her
lips they re-acted on her like a picture of her own helplessness, and
she could not check the sob which sent the large tears to her eyes.
Deronda, too, felt a crushing pain; but imminent consequences were
visible to him, and urged him to the utmost exertion of conscience.
When she had pressed her tears away, he said, in a gently questioning
tone,

"You will probably be soon going with Mrs. Davilow into the country."

"Yes, in a week or ten days." Gwendolen waited an instant, turning her
eyes vaguely toward the window, as if looking at some imagined
prospect. "I want to be kind to them all--they can be happier than I
can. Is that the best I can do?"

"I think so. It is a duty that cannot be doubtful," said Deronda. He
paused a little between his sentences, feeling a weight of anxiety on
all his words. "Other duties will spring from it. Looking at your life
as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it
cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive: but
once beginning to act with that penitential, loving purpose you have in
your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions--there will be
newly-opening needs--continually coming to carry you on from day to
day. You will find your life growing like a plant."

Gwendolen turned her eyes on him with the look of one athirst toward
the sound of unseen waters. Deronda felt the look as if she had been
stretching her arms toward him from a forsaken shore. His voice took an
affectionate imploringness when he said,

"This sorrow, which has cut down to the root, has come to you while you
are so young--try to think of it not as a spoiling of your life, but as
a preparation for it. Let it be a preparation----" Any one overhearing
his tones would have thought he was entreating for his own happiness.
"See! you have been saved from the worst evils that might have come
from your marriage, which you feel was wrong. You have had a vision of
injurious, selfish action--a vision of possible degradation; think that
a severe angel, seeing you along the road of error, grasped you by the
wrist and showed you the horror of the life you must avoid. And it has
come to you in your spring-time. Think of it as a preparation. You can,
you will, be among the best of women, such as make others glad that
they were born."

The words were like the touch of a miraculous hand to Gwendolen.
Mingled emotions streamed through her frame with a strength that seemed
the beginning of a new existence, having some new power or other which
stirred in her vaguely. So pregnant is the divine hope of moral
recovery with the energy that fulfills it. So potent in us is the
infused action of another soul, before which we bow in complete love.
But the new existence seemed inseparable from Deronda: the hope seemed
to make his presence permanent. It was not her thought, that he loved
her, and would cling to her--a thought would have tottered with
improbability; it was her spiritual breath. For the first time since
that terrible moment on the sea a flush rose and spread over her cheek,
brow and neck, deepened an instant or two, and then gradually
disappeared. She did not speak.

Deronda advanced and put out his hand, saying, "I must not weary you."

She was startled by the sense that he was going, and put her hand in
his, still without speaking.

"You look ill yet--unlike yourself," he added, while he held her hand.

"I can't sleep much," she answered, with some return of her dispirited
manner. "Things repeat themselves in me so. They come back--they will
all come back," she ended, shudderingly, a chill fear threatening her.

"By degrees they will be less insistent," said Deronda. He could not
drop her hand or move away from her abruptly.

"Sir Hugo says he shall come to stay at Diplow," said Gwendolen,
snatching at previously intended words which had slipped away from her.
"You will come too."

"Probably," said Deronda, and then feeling that the word was cold, he
added, correctively, "Yes, I shall come," and then released her hand,
with the final friendly pressure of one who has virtually said good-bye.

"And not again here, before I leave town?" said Gwendolen, with timid
sadness, looking as pallid as ever.

What could Deronda say? "If I can be of any use--if you wish
me--certainly I will."

"I must wish it," said Gwendolen, impetuously; "you know I must wish
it. What strength have I? Who else is there?" Again a sob was rising.

Deronda felt a pang, which showed itself in his face. He looked
miserable as he said, "I will certainly come."

Gwendolen perceived the change in his face; but the intense relief of
expecting him to come again could not give way to any other feeling,
and there was a recovery of the inspired hope and courage in her.

"Don't be unhappy about me," she said, in a tone of affectionate
assurance. "I shall remember your words--every one of them. I shall
remember what you believe about me; I shall try."

She looked at him firmly, and put out her hand again as if she had
forgotten what had passed since those words of his which she promised
to remember. But there was no approach to a smile on her lips. She had
never smiled since her husband's death. When she stood still and in
silence, she looked like a melancholy statue of the Gwendolen whose
laughter had once been so ready when others were grave.

It is only by remembering the searching anguish which had changed the
aspect of the world for her that we can understand her behavior to
Deronda--the unreflecting openness, nay, the importunate pleading, with
which she expressed her dependence on him. Considerations such as would
have filled the minds of indifferent spectators could not occur to her,
any more than if flames had been mounting around her, and she had flung
herself into his open arms and clung about his neck that he might carry
her into safety. She identified him with the struggling regenerative
process in her which had begun with his action. Is it any wonder that
she saw her own necessity reflected in his feeling? She was in that
state of unconscious reliance and expectation which is a common
experience with us when we are preoccupied with our own trouble or our
own purposes. We diffuse our feeling over others, and count on their
acting from our motives. Her imagination had not been turned to a
future union with Deronda by any other than the spiritual tie which had
been continually strengthening; but also it had not been turned toward
a future separation from him. Love-making and marriage--how could they
now be the imagery in which poor Gwendolen's deepest attachment could
spontaneously clothe itself? Mighty Love had laid his hand upon her;
but what had he demanded of her? Acceptance of rebuke--the hard task of
self-change--confession--endurance. If she cried toward him, what then?
She cried as the child cries whose little feet have fallen
backward--cried to be taken by the hand, lest she should lose herself.

The cry pierced Deronda. What position could have been more difficult
for a man full of tenderness, yet with clear foresight? He was the only
creature who knew the real nature of Gwendolen's trouble: to withdraw
himself from any appeal of hers would be to consign her to a dangerous
loneliness. He could not reconcile himself to the cruelty of apparently
rejecting her dependence on him; and yet in the nearer or farther
distance he saw a coming wrench, which all present strengthening of
their bond would make the harder.

He was obliged to risk that. He went once and again to Park Lane before
Gwendolen left; but their interviews were in the presence of Mrs.
Davilow, and were therefore less agitating. Gwendolen, since she had
determined to accept her income, had conceived a project which she
liked to speak of: it was, to place her mother and sisters with herself
in Offendene again, and, as she said, piece back her life unto that
time when they first went there, and when everything was happiness
about her, only she did not know it. The idea had been mentioned to Sir
Hugo, who was going to exert himself about the letting of Gadsmere for
a rent which would more than pay the rent of Offendene. All this was
told to Deronda, who willingly dwelt on a subject that seemed to give
some soothing occupation to Gwendolen. He said nothing and she asked
nothing, of what chiefly occupied himself. Her mind was fixed on his
coming to Diplow before the autumn was over; and she no more thought of
the Lapidoths--the little Jewess and her brother--as likely to make a
difference in her destiny, than of the fermenting political and social
leaven which was making a difference in the history of the world. In
fact poor Gwendolen's memory had been stunned, and all outside the
lava-lit track of her troubled conscience, and her effort to get
deliverance from it, lay for her in dim forgetfulness.




CHAPTER LXVI.


  "One day still fierce 'mid many a day struck calm."
                    --BROWNING: _The King and the Book_.


Meanwhile Ezra and Mirah, whom Gwendolen did not include in her
thinking about Deronda, were having their relation to him drawn closer
and brought into fuller light.

The father Lapidoth had quitted his daughter at the doorstep, ruled by
that possibility of staking something in play or betting which
presented itself with the handling of any sum beyond the price of
staying actual hunger, and left no care for alternative prospects or
resolutions. Until he had lost everything he never considered whether
he would apply to Mirah again or whether he would brave his son's
presence. In the first moment he had shrunk from encountering Ezra as
he would have shrunk from any other situation of disagreeable
constraint; and the possession of Mirah's purse was enough to banish
the thought of future necessities. The gambling appetite is more
absolutely dominant than bodily hunger, which can be neutralized by an
emotional or intellectual excitation; but the passion for watching
chances--the habitual suspensive poise of the mind in actual or
imaginary play--nullifies the susceptibility of other excitation. In
its final, imperious stage, it seems the unjoyous dissipation of
demons, seeking diversion on the burning marl of perdition.

But every form of selfishness, however abstract and unhuman, requires
the support of at least one meal a day; and though Lapidoth's appetite
for food and drink was extremely moderate, he had slipped into a
shabby, unfriendly form of life in which the appetite could not be
satisfied without some ready money. When, in a brief visit at a house
which announced "Pyramids" on the window-blind, he had first doubled
and trebled and finally lost Mirah's thirty shillings, he went out with
her empty purse in his pocket, already balancing in his mind whether he
should get another immediate stake by pawning the purse, or whether he
should go back to her giving himself a good countenance by restoring
the purse, and declaring that he had used the money in paying a score
that was standing against him. Besides, among the sensibilities still
left strong in Lapidoth was the sensibility to his own claims, and he
appeared to himself to have a claim on any property his children might
possess, which was stronger than the justice of his son's resentment.
After all, to take up his lodging with his children was the best thing
he could do; and the more he thought of meeting Ezra the less he winced
from it, his imagination being more wrought on by the chances of his
getting something into his pocket with safety and without exertion,
than by the threat of a private humiliation. Luck had been against him
lately; he expected it to turn--and might not the turn begin with some
opening of supplies which would present itself through his daughter's
affairs and the good friends she had spoken of? Lapidoth counted on the
fascination of his cleverness--an old habit of mind which early
experience had sanctioned: and it is not only women who are unaware of
their diminished charm, or imagine that they can feign not to be worn
out.

The result of Lapidoth's rapid balancing was that he went toward the
little square in Brompton with the hope that, by walking about and
watching, he might catch sight of Mirah going out or returning, in
which case his entrance into the house would be made easier. But it was
already evening--the evening of the day next to that which he had first
seen her; and after a little waiting, weariness made him reflect that
he might ring, and if she were not at home he might ask the time at
which she was expected. But on coming near the house he knew that she
was at home: he heard her singing.

Mirah, seated at the piano, was pouring forth "_Herz, mein Herz_,"
while Ezra was listening with his eyes shut, when Mrs. Adam opened the
door, and said in some embarrassment,

"A gentleman below says he is your father, miss."

"I will go down to him," said Mirah, starting up immediately and
looking at her brother.

"No, Mirah, not so," said Ezra, with decision. "Let him come up, Mrs.
Adam."

Mirah stood with her hands pinching each other, and feeling sick with
anxiety, while she continued looking at Ezra, who had also risen, and
was evidently much shaken. But there was an expression in his face
which she had never seen before; his brow was knit, his lips seemed
hardened with the same severity that gleamed from his eye.

When Mrs. Adam opened the door to let in the father, she could not help
casting a look at the group, and after glancing from the younger man to
the elder, said to herself as she closed the door, "Father, sure
enough." The likeness was that of outline, which is always most
striking at the first moment; the expression had been wrought into the
strongest contrasts by such hidden or inconspicuous differences as can
make the genius of a Cromwell within the outward type of a father who
was no more than a respectable parishioner.

Lapidoth had put on a melancholy expression beforehand, but there was
some real wincing in his frame as he said,

"Well, Ezra, my boy, you hardly know me after so many years."

"I know you--too well--father," said Ezra, with a slow biting solemnity
which made the word father a reproach.

"Ah, you are not pleased with me. I don't wonder at it. Appearances
have been against me. When a man gets into straits he can't do just as
he would by himself or anybody else, _I_'ve suffered enough, I know,"
said Lapidoth, quickly. In speaking he always recovered some glibness
and hardihood; and now turning toward Mirah, he held out her purse,
saying, "Here's your little purse, my dear. I thought you'd be anxious
about it because of that bit of writing. I've emptied it, you'll see,
for I had a score to pay for food and lodging. I knew you would like me
to clear myself, and here I stand--without a single farthing in my
pocket--at the mercy of my children. You can turn me out if you like,
without getting a policeman. Say the word, Mirah; say, 'Father, I've
had enough of you; you made a pet of me, and spent your all on me, when
I couldn't have done without you; but I can do better without you
now,'--say that, and I'm gone out like a spark. I shan't spoil your
pleasure again." The tears were in his voice as usual, before he had
finished.

"You know I could never say it, father," answered Mirah, with not the
less anguish because she felt the falsity of everything in his speech
except the implied wish to remain in the house.

"Mirah, my sister, leave us!" said Ezra, in a tone of authority.

She looked at her brother falteringly, beseechingly--in awe of his
decision, yet unable to go without making a plea for this father who
was like something that had grown in her flesh with pain. She went
close to her brother, and putting her hand in his, said, in a low
voice, but not so low as to be unheard by Lapidoth, "Remember,
Ezra--you said my mother would not have shut him out."

"Trust me, and go," said Ezra.

She left the room, but after going a few steps up the stairs, sat down
with a palpitating heart. If, because of anything her brother said to
him, he went away-,

Lapidoth had some sense of what was being prepared for him in his son's
mind, but he was beginning to adjust himself to the situation and find
a point of view that would give him a cool superiority to any attempt
at humiliating him. This haggard son, speaking as from a sepulchre, had
the incongruity which selfish levity learns to see in suffering, and
until the unrelenting pincers of disease clutch its own flesh. Whatever
preaching he might deliver must be taken for a matter of course, as a
man finding shelter from hail in an open cathedral might take a little
religious howling that happened to be going on there.

Lapidoth was not born with this sort of callousness: he had achieved it.

"This home that we have here," Ezra began, "is maintained partly by the
generosity of a beloved friend who supports me, and partly by the
labors of my sister, who supports herself. While we have a home we will
not shut you out from it. We will not cast you out to the mercy of your
vices. For you are our father, and though you have broken your bond, we
acknowledge ours. But I will never trust you. You absconded with money,
leaving your debts unpaid; you forsook my mother; you robbed her of her
little child and broke her heart; you have become a gambler, and where
shame and conscience were there sits an insatiable desire; you were
ready to sell my sister--you had sold her, but the price was denied
you. The man who has done these things must never expect to be trusted
any more. We will share our food with you--you shall have a bed, and
clothing. We will do this duty to you, because you are our father. But
you will never be trusted. You are an evil man: you made the misery of
our mother. That such a man is our father is a brand on our flesh which
will not cease smarting. But the Eternal has laid it upon us; and
though human justice were to flog you for crimes, and your body fell
helpless before the public scorn, we would still say, 'This is our
father; make way, that we may carry him out of your sight.'"

Lapidoth, in adjusting himself to what was coming, had not been able to
foresee the exact intensity of the lightning or the exact course it
would take--that it would not fall outside his frame but through it. He
could not foresee what was so new to him as this voice from the soul of
his son. It touched that spring of hysterical excitability which Mirah
used to witness in him when he sat at home and sobbed. As Ezra ended,
Lapidoth threw himself into a chair and cried like a woman, burying his
face against the table--and yet, strangely, while this hysterical
crying was an inevitable reaction in him under the stress of his son's
words, it was also a conscious resource in a difficulty; just as in
early life, when he was a bright-faced curly young man, he had been
used to avail himself of this subtly-poised physical susceptibility to
turn the edge of resentment or disapprobation.

Ezra sat down again and said nothing--exhausted by the shock of his own
irrepressible utterance, the outburst of feelings which for years he
had borne in solitude and silence. His thin hands trembled on the arms
of the chair; he would hardly have found voice to answer a question; he
felt as if he had taken a step toward beckoning Death. Meanwhile
Mirah's quick expectant ear detected a sound which her heart
recognized: she could not stay out of the room any longer. But on
opening the door her immediate alarm was for Ezra, and it was to his
side that she went, taking his trembling hand in hers, which he pressed
and found support in; but he did not speak or even look at her. The
father with his face buried was conscious that Mirah had entered, and
presently lifted up his head, pressed his handkerchief against his
eyes, put out his hand toward her, and said with plaintive hoarseness,
"Good-bye, Mirah; your father will not trouble you again. He deserves
to die like a dog by the roadside, and he will. If your mother had
lived, she would have forgiven me--thirty-four years ago I put the ring
on her finger under the _Chuppa_, and we were made one. She would have
forgiven me, and we should have spent our old age together. But I
haven't deserved it. Good-bye."

He rose from the chair as he said the last "good-bye." Mirah had put
her hand in his and held him. She was not tearful and grieving, but
frightened and awe-struck, as she cried out,

"No, father, no!" Then turning to her brother, "Ezra, you have not
forbidden him?--Stay, father, and leave off wrong things. Ezra, I
cannot bear it. How can I say to my father, 'Go and die!'"

"I have not said it," Ezra answered, with great effort. "I have said,
stay and be sheltered."

"Then you will stay, father--and be taken care of--and come with me,"
said Mirah, drawing him toward the door.

This was really what Lapidoth wanted. And for the moment he felt a sort
of comfort in recovering his daughter's dutiful attendance, that made a
change of habits seem possible to him. She led him down to the parlor
below, and said,

"This is my sitting-room when I am not with Ezra, and there is a
bed-room behind which shall be yours. You will stay and be good,
father. Think that you are come back to my mother, and that she has
forgiven you--she speaks to you through me." Mirah's tones were
imploring, but she could not give one of her former caresses.

Lapidoth quickly recovered his composure, began to speak to Mirah of
the improvement in her voice, and other easy subjects, and when Mrs.
Adam came to lay out his supper, entered into converse with her in
order to show her that he was not a common person, though his clothes
were just now against him.

But in his usual wakefulness at night, he fell to wondering what money
Mirah had by her, and went back over old Continental hours at
_Roulette_, reproducing the method of his play, and the chances that
had frustrated it. He had had his reasons for coming to England, but
for most things it was a cursed country.

These were the stronger visions of the night with Lapidoth, and not the
worn frame of his ireful son uttering a terrible judgment. Ezra did
pass across the gaming-table, and his words were audible; but he passed
like an insubstantial ghost, and his words had the heart eaten out of
them by numbers and movements that seemed to make the very tissue of
Lapidoth's consciousness.




CHAPTER LXVII.

  The godhead in us wrings our noble deeds
  From our reluctant selves.


It was an unpleasant surprise to Deronda when he returned from the
Abbey to find the undesirable father installed in the lodgings at
Brompton. Mirah had felt it necessary to speak of Deronda to her
father, and even to make him as fully aware as she could of the way in
which the friendship with Ezra had begun, and of the sympathy which had
cemented it. She passed more lightly over what Deronda had done for
her, omitting altogether the rescue from drowning, and speaking of the
shelter she had found in Mrs. Meyrick's family so as to leave her
father to suppose that it was through these friends Deronda had become
acquainted with her. She could not persuade herself to more
completeness in her narrative: she could not let the breath of her
father's soul pass over her relation to Deronda. And Lapidoth, for
reasons, was not eager in his questioning about the circumstances of
her flight and arrival in England. But he was much interested in the
fact of his children having a beneficent friend apparently high in the
world.

It was the brother who told Deronda of this new condition added to
their life. "I am become calm in beholding him now," Ezra ended, "and I
try to think it possible that my sister's tenderness, and the daily
tasting a life of peace, may win him to remain aloof from temptation. I
have enjoined her, and she has promised, to trust him with no money. I
have convinced her that he will buy with it his own destruction."

Deronda first came on the third day from Ladipoth's arrival. The new
clothes for which he had been measured were not yet ready, and wishing
to make a favorable impression, he did not choose to present himself in
the old ones. He watched for Deronda's departure, and, getting a view
of him from the window, was rather surprised at his youthfulness, which
Mirah had not mentioned, and which he had somehow thought out of the
question in a personage who had taken up a grave friendship and hoary
studies with the sepulchral Ezra. Lapidoth began to imagine that
Deronda's real or chief motive must be that he was in love with Mirah.
And so much the better; for a tie to Mirah had more promise of
indulgence for her father than a tie to Ezra: and Lapidoth was not
without the hope of recommending himself to Deronda, and of softening
any hard prepossessions. He was behaving with much amiability, and
trying in all ways at his command to get himself into easy
domestication with his children--entering into Mirah's music, showing
himself docile about smoking, which Mrs. Adam could not tolerate in her
parlor, and walking out in the square with his German pipe, and the
tobacco with which Mirah supplied him. He was too acute to offer any
present remonstrance against the refusal of money, which Mirah told him
that she must persist in as a solemn duty promised to her brother. He
was comfortable enough to wait.

The next time Deronda came, Lapidoth, equipped in his new clothes, and
satisfied with his own appearance, was in the room with Ezra, who was
teaching himself, as a part of his severe duty, to tolerate his
father's presence whenever it was imposed. Deronda was cold and
distant, the first sight of this man, who had blighted the lives of his
wife and children, creating in him a repulsion that was even a physical
discomfort. But Lapidoth did not let himself be discouraged, asked
leave to stay and hear the reading of papers from the old chest, and
actually made himself useful in helping to decipher some difficult
German manuscript. This led him to suggest that it might be desirable
to make a transcription of the manuscript, and he offered his services
for this purpose, and also to make copies of any papers in Roman
characters. Though Ezra's young eyes he observed were getting weak, his
own were still strong. Deronda accepted the offer, thinking that
Lapidoth showed a sign of grace in the willingness to be employed
usefully; and he saw a gratified expression in Ezra's face, who,
however, presently said, "Let all the writing be done here; for I
cannot trust the papers out of my sight, lest there be an accident by
burning or otherwise." Poor Ezra felt very much as if he had a convict
on leave under his charge. Unless he saw his father working, it was not
possible to believe that he would work in good faith. But by this
arrangement he fastened on himself the burden of his father's presence,
which was made painful not only through his deepest, longest
associations, but also through Lapidoth's restlessness of temperament,
which showed itself the more as he become familiarized with his
situation, and lost any awe he had felt of his son. The fact was, he
was putting a strong constraint on himself in confining his attention
for the sake of winning Deronda's favor; and like a man in an
uncomfortable garment he gave himself relief at every opportunity,
going out to smoke, or moving about and talking, or throwing himself
back in his chair and remaining silent, but incessantly carrying on a
dumb language of facial movement or gesticulation: and if Mirah were in
the room, he would fall into his old habit of talk with her, gossiping
about their former doings and companions, or repeating quirks and
stories, and plots of the plays he used to adapt, in the belief that he
could at will command the vivacity of his earlier time. All this was a
mortal infliction to Ezra; and when Mirah was at home she tried to
relieve him, by getting her father down into the parlor and keeping
watch over him there. What duty is made of a single difficult resolve?
The difficulty lies in the daily unflinching support of consequences
that mar the blessed return of morning with the prospect of irritation
to be suppressed or shame to be endured. And such consequences were
being borne by these, as by many other heroic children of an unworthy
father--with the prospect, at least to Mirah, of their stretching
onward through the solid part of life.

Meanwhile Lapidoth's presence had raised a new impalpable partition
between Deronda and Mirah--each of them dreading the soiling inferences
of his mind, each of them interpreting mistakenly the increased reserve
and diffidence of the other. But it was not very long before some light
came to Deronda.

As soon as he could, after returning from his brief visit to the Abbey,
he had called at Hans Meyrick's rooms, feeling it, on more grounds than
one, a due of friendship that Hans should be at once acquainted with
the reasons of his late journey, and the changes of intention it had
brought about. Hans was not there; he was said to be in the country for
a few days; and Deronda, after leaving a note, waited a week, rather
expecting a note in return. But receiving no word, and fearing some
freak of feeling in the incalculably susceptible Hans, whose proposed
sojourn at the Abbey he knew had been deferred, he at length made a
second call, and was admitted into the painting-room, where he found
his friend in a light coat, without a waistcoat, his long hair still
wet from a bath, but with a face looking worn and wizened--anything but
country-like. He had taken up his palette and brushes, and stood before
his easel when Deronda entered, but the equipment and attitude seemed
to have been got up on short notice.

As they shook hands, Deronda said, "You don't look much as if you had
been in the country, old fellow. Is it Cambridge you have been to?"

"No," said Hans, curtly, throwing down his palette with the air of one
who has begun to feign by mistake; then pushing forward a chair for
Deronda, he threw himself into another, and leaned backward with his
hands behind his head, while he went on, "I've been to
I-don't-know-where--No man's land--and a mortally unpleasant country it
is."

"You don't mean to say you have been drinking, Hans," said Deronda, who
had seated himself opposite, in anxious survey.

"Nothing so good. I've been smoking opium. I always meant to do it some
time or other, to try how much bliss could be got by it; and having
found myself just now rather out of other bliss, I thought it judicious
to seize the opportunity. But I pledge you my word I shall never tap a
cask of that bliss again. It disagrees with my constitution."

"What has been the matter? You were in good spirits enough when you
wrote to me."

"Oh, nothing in particular. The world began to look seedy--a sort of
cabbage-garden with all the cabbages cut. A malady of genius, you may
be sure," said Hans, creasing his face into a smile; "and, in fact, I
was tired of being virtuous without reward, especially in this hot
London weather."

"Nothing else? No real vexation?" said Deronda.

Hans shook his head.

"I came to tell you of my own affairs, but I can't do it with a good
grace if you are to hide yours."

"Haven't an affair in the world," said Hans, in a flighty way, "except
a quarrel with a bric-à-brac man. Besides, as it is the first time in
our lives that you ever spoke to me about your own affairs, you are
only beginning to pay a pretty long debt."

Deronda felt convinced that Hans was behaving artificially, but he
trusted to a return of the old frankness by-and-by if he gave his own
confidence.

"You laughed at the mystery of my journey to Italy, Hans," he began.
"It was for an object that touched my happiness at the very roots. I
had never known anything about my parents, and I really went to Genoa
to meet my mother. My father has been long dead--died when I was an
infant. My mother was the daughter of an eminent Jew; my father was her
cousin. Many things had caused me to think of this origin as almost a
probability before I set out. I was so far prepared for the result that
I was glad of it--glad to find myself a Jew."

"You must not expect me to look surprised, Deronda," said Hans, who had
changed his attitude, laying one leg across the other and examining the
heel of his slipper.

"You knew it?"

"My mother told me. She went to the house the morning after you had
been there--brother and sister both told her. You may imagine we can't
rejoice as they do. But whatever you are glad of, I shall come to be
glad of in the end--_when_ exactly the end may be I can't predict,"
said Hans, speaking in a low tone, which was as usual with him as it
was to be out of humor with his lot, and yet bent on making no fuss
about it.

"I quite understand that you can't share my feeling," said Deronda;
"but I could not let silence lie between us on what casts quite a new
light over my future. I have taken up some of Mordecai's ideas, and I
mean to try and carry them out, so far as one man's efforts can go. I
dare say I shall by and by travel to the East and be away for some
years."

Hans said nothing, but rose, seized his palette and began to work his
brush on it, standing before his picture with his back to Deronda, who
also felt himself at a break in his path embarrassed by Hans's
embarrassment.

Presently Hans said, again speaking low, and without turning, "Excuse
the question, but does Mrs. Grandcourt know of all this?"

"No; and I must beg of you, Hans," said Deronda, rather angrily, "to
cease joking on that subject. Any notions you have are wide of the
truth--are the very reverse of the truth."

"I am no more inclined to joke than I shall be at my own funeral," said
Hans. "But I am not at all sure that you are aware what are my notions
on that subject."

"Perhaps not," said Deronda. "But let me say, once for all, that in
relation to Mrs. Grandcourt, I never have had, and never shall have the
position of a lover. If you have ever seriously put that interpretation
on anything you have observed, you are supremely mistaken."

There was silence a little while, and to each the silence was like an
irritating air, exaggerating discomfort.

"Perhaps I have been mistaken in another interpretation, also," said
Hans, presently.

"What is that?"

"That you had no wish to hold the position of a lover toward another
woman, who is neither wife nor widow."

"I can't pretend not to understand you, Meyrick. It is painful that our
wishes should clash. I hope you will tell me if you have any ground for
supposing that you would succeed."

"That seems rather a superfluous inquiry on your part, Deronda," said
Hans, with some irritation.

"Why superfluous?"

"Because you are perfectly convinced on the subject--and probably have
had the very best evidence to convince you."

"I will be more frank with you than you are with me," said Deronda,
still heated by Hans' show of temper, and yet sorry for him. "I have
never had the slightest evidence that I should succeed myself. In fact,
I have very little hope."

Hans looked round hastily at his friend, but immediately turned to his
picture again.

"And in our present situation," said Deronda, hurt by the idea that
Hans suspected him of insincerity, and giving an offended emphasis to
his words, "I don't see how I can deliberately make known my feeling to
her. If she could not return it, I should have embittered her best
comfort; for neither she nor I can be parted from her brother, and we
should have to meet continually. If I were to cause her that sort of
pain by an unwilling betrayal of my feeling, I should be no better than
a mischievous animal."

"I don't know that I have ever betrayed _my_ feeling to her," said
Hans, as if he were vindicating himself.

"You mean that we are on a level, then; you have no reason to envy me."

"Oh, not the slightest," said Hans, with bitter irony. "You have
measured my conceit and know that it out-tops all your advantages."

"I am a nuisance to you, Meyrick. I am sorry, but I can't help it,"
said Deronda, rising. "After what passed between us before, I wished to
have this explanation; and I don't see that any pretensions of mine
have made a real difference to you. They are not likely to make any
pleasant difference to myself under present circumstances. Now the
father is there--did you know that the father is there?"

"Yes. If he were not a Jew I would permit myself to damn him--with
faint praise, I mean," said Hans, but with no smile.

"She and I meet under greater constraint than ever. Things might go on
in this way for two years without my getting any insight into her
feeling toward me. That is the whole state of affairs, Hans. Neither
you nor I have injured the other, that I can see. We must put up with
this sort of rivalry in a hope that is likely enough to come to
nothing. Our friendship can bear that strain, surely."

"No, it can't," said Hans, impetuously, throwing down his tools,
thrusting his hands into his coat-pockets, and turning round to face
Deronda, who drew back a little and looked at him with amazement. Hans
went on in the same tone,

"Our friendship--my friendship--can't bear the strain of behaving to
you like an ungrateful dastard and grudging you your happiness. For you
_are_ the happiest dog in the world. If Mirah loves anybody better than
her brother, _you are the man_."

Hans turned on his heel and threw himself into his chair, looking up at
Deronda with an expression the reverse of tender. Something like a
shock passed through Deronda, and, after an instant, he said,

"It is a good-natured fiction of yours, Hans."

"I am not in a good-natured mood. I assure you I found the fact
disagreeable when it was thrust on me--all the more, or perhaps all the
less, because I believed then that your heart was pledged to the
duchess. But now, confound you! you turn out to be in love in the right
place--a Jew--and everything eligible."

"Tell me what convinced you--there's a good fellow," said Deronda,
distrusting a delight that he was unused to.

"Don't ask. Little mother was witness. The upshot is, that Mirah is
jealous of the duchess, and the sooner you relieve your mind the
better. There! I've cleared off a score or two, and may be allowed to
swear at you for getting what you deserve--which is just the very best
luck I know of."

"God bless you, Hans!" said Deronda, putting out his hand, which the
other took and wrung in silence.




CHAPTER LXVIII.

  "All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
  Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
  All are but ministers of Love,
  And feed his sacred flame."
                                --COLERIDGE.


Deronda's eagerness to confess his love could hardly have had a
stronger stimulus than Hans had given it in his assurance that Mirah
needed relief from jealousy. He went on his next visit to Ezra with the
determination to be resolute in using--nay, in requesting--an
opportunity of private conversation with her. If she accepted his love,
he felt courageous about all other consequences, and as her betrothed
husband he would gain a protective authority which might be a desirable
defense for her in future difficulties with her father. Deronda had not
observed any signs of growing restlessness in Lapidoth, or of
diminished desire to recommend himself; but he had forebodings of some
future struggle, some mortification, or some intolerable increase of
domestic disquietude in which he might save Ezra and Mirah from being
helpless victims.

His forebodings would have been strengthened if he had known what was
going on in the father's mind. That amount of restlessness, that
desultoriness of attention, which made a small torture to Ezra, was to
Lapidoth an irksome submission to restraint, only made bearable by his
thinking of it as a means of by-and-by securing a well-conditioned
freedom. He began with the intention of awaiting some really good
chance, such as an opening for getting a considerable sum from Deronda;
but all the while he was looking about curiously, and trying to
discover where Mirah deposited her money and her keys. The imperious
gambling desire within him, which carried on its activity through every
other occupation, and made a continuous web of imagination that held
all else in its meshes, would hardly have been under the control of a
contracted purpose, if he had been able to lay his hands on any sum
worth capturing. But Mirah, with her practical clear-sightedness,
guarded against any frustration of the promise she had given to Ezra,
by confiding all money, except what she was immediately in want of, to
Mrs. Meyrick's care, and Lapidoth felt himself under an irritating
completeness of supply in kind as in a lunatic asylum where everything
was made safe against him. To have opened a desk or drawer of Mirah's,
and pocketed any bank-notes found there, would have been to his mind a
sort of domestic appropriation which had no disgrace in it; the degrees
of liberty a man allows himself with other people's property being
often delicately drawn, even beyond the boundary where the law begins
to lay its hold--which is the reason why spoons are a safer investment
than mining shares. Lapidoth really felt himself injuriously treated by
his daughter, and thought that he ought to have had what he wanted of
her other earnings as he had of her apple-tart. But he remained
submissive; indeed, the indiscretion that most tempted him, was not any
insistance with Mirah, but some kind of appeal to Deronda. Clever
persons who have nothing else to sell can often put a good price on
their absence, and Lapidoth's difficult search for devices forced upon
him the idea that his family would find themselves happier without him,
and that Deronda would be willing to advance a considerable sum for the
sake of getting rid of him. But, in spite of well-practiced hardihood,
Lapidoth was still in some awe of Ezra's imposing friend, and deferred
his purpose indefinitely.

On this day, when Deronda had come full of a gladdened consciousness,
which inevitably showed itself in his air and speech, Lapidoth was at a
crisis of discontent and longing that made his mind busy with schemes
of freedom, and Deronda's new amenity encouraged them. This
pre-occupation was at last so strong as to interfere with his usual
show of interest in what went forward, and his persistence in sitting
by even when there was reading which he could not follow. After sitting
a little while, he went out to smoke and walk in the square, and the
two friends were all the easier. Mirah was not at home, but she was
sure to be in again before Deronda left, and his eyes glowed with a
secret anticipation: he thought that when he saw her again he should
see some sweetness of recognition for himself to which his eyes had
been sealed before. There was an additional playful affectionateness in
his manner toward Ezra.

"This little room is too close for you, Ezra," he said, breaking off
his reading. "The week's heat we sometimes get here is worse than the
heat in Genoa, where one sits in the shaded coolness of large rooms.
You must have a better home now. I shall do as I like with you, being
the stronger half." He smiled toward Ezra, who said,

"I am straitened for nothing except breath. But you, who might be in a
spacious palace, with the wide green country around you, find this a
narrow prison. Nevertheless, I cannot say, 'Go.'"

"Oh, the country would be a banishment while you are here," said
Deronda, rising and walking round the double room, which yet offered no
long promenade, while he made a great fan of his handkerchief. "This is
the happiest room in the world to me. Besides, I will imagine myself in
the East, since I am getting ready to go there some day. Only I will
not wear a cravat and a heavy ring there," he ended emphatically,
pausing to take off those superfluities and deposit them on a small
table behind Ezra, who had the table in front of him covered with books
and papers.

"I have been wearing my memorable ring ever since I came home," he went
on, as he reseated himself. "But I am such a Sybarite that I constantly
put it off as a burden when I am doing anything. I understand why the
Romans had summer rings--_if_ they had them. Now then, I shall get on
better."

They were soon absorbed in their work again. Deronda was reading a
piece of rabbinical Hebrew under Ezra's correction and comment, and
they took little notice when Lapidoth re-entered and took a seat
somewhat in the background.

His rambling eyes quickly alighted on the ring that sparkled on the bit
of dark mahogany. During his walk, his mind had been occupied with the
fiction of an advantageous opening for him abroad, only requiring a sum
of ready money, which, on being communicated to Deronda in private,
might immediately draw from him a question as to the amount of the
required sum: and it was this part of his forecast that Lapidoth found
the most debatable, there being a danger in asking too much, and a
prospective regret in asking too little. His own desire gave him no
limit, and he was quite without guidance as to the limit of Deronda's
willingness. But now, in the midst of these airy conditions preparatory
to a receipt which remained indefinite, this ring, which on Deronda's
finger had become familiar to Lapidoth's envy, suddenly shone detached
and within easy grasp. Its value was certainly below the smallest of
the imaginary sums that his purpose fluctuated between; but then it was
before him as a solid fact, and his desire at once leaped into the
thought (not yet an intention) that if he were quietly to pocket that
ring and walk away he would have the means of comfortable escape from
present restraint, without trouble, and also without danger; for any
property of Deronda's (available without his formal consent) was all
one with his children's property, since their father would never be
prosecuted for taking it. The details of this thinking followed each
other so quickly that they seemed to rise before him as one picture.
Lapidoth had never committed larceny; but larceny is a form of
appropriation for which people are punished by law; and, take this ring
from a virtual relation, who would have been willing to make a much
heavier gift, would not come under the head of larceny. Still, the
heavier gift was to be preferred, if Lapidoth could only make haste
enough in asking for it, and the imaginary action of taking the ring,
which kept repeating itself like an inward tune, sank into a rejected
idea. He satisfied his urgent longing by resolving to go below, and
watch for the moment of Deronda's departure, when he would ask leave to
join him in his walk and boldly carry out his meditated plan. He rose
and stood looking out of the window, but all the while he saw what lay
beyond him--the brief passage he would have to make to the door close
by the table where the ring was. However he was resolved to go down;
but--by no distinct change of resolution, rather by a dominance of
desire, like the thirst of the drunkard--it so happened that in passing
the table his fingers fell noiselessly on the ring, and he found
himself in the passage with the ring in his hand. It followed that he
put on his hat and quitted the house. The possibility of again throwing
himself on his children receded into the indefinite distance, and
before he was out on the square his sense of haste had concentrated
itself on selling the ring and getting on shipboard.

Deronda and Ezra were just aware of his exit; that was all. But,
by-and-by, Mirah came in and made a real interruption. She had not
taken off her hat; and when Deronda rose and advanced to shake hands
with her, she said, in a confusion at once unaccountable and
troublesome to herself,

"I only came in to see that Ezra had his new draught. I must go
directly to Mrs. Meyrick's to fetch something."

"Pray allow me to walk with you," said Deronda urgently. "I must not
tire Ezra any further; besides my brains are melting. I want to go to
Mrs. Meyrick's: may I go with you?"

"Oh, yes," said Mirah, blushing still more, with the vague sense of
something new in Deronda, and turning away to pour out Ezra's draught;
Ezra meanwhile throwing back his head with his eyes shut, unable to get
his mind away from the ideas that had been filling it while the reading
was going on. Deronda for a moment stood thinking of nothing but the
walk, till Mirah turned round again and brought the draught, when he
suddenly remembered that he had laid aside his cravat, and
saying--"Pray excuse my dishabille--I did not mean you to see it," he
went to the little table, took up his cravat, and exclaimed with a
violent impulse of surprise, "Good heavens, where is my ring gone?"
beginning to search about on the floor.

Ezra looked round the corner of his chair. Mirah, quick as thought,
went to the spot where Deronda was seeking, and said, "Did you lay it
down?"

"Yes," said Deronda, still unvisited by any other explanation than that
the ring had fallen and was lurking in shadow, indiscernable on the
variegated carpet. He was moving the bits of furniture near, and
searching in all possible and impossible places with hand and eyes.

But another explanation had visited Mirah and taken the color from her
cheeks. She went to Ezra's ear and whispered "Was my father here?" He
bent his head in reply, meeting her eyes with terrible understanding.
She darted back to the spot where Deronda was still casting down his
eyes in that hopeless exploration which are apt to carry on over a
space we have examined in vain. "You have not found it?" she said,
hurriedly.

He, meeting her frightened gaze, immediately caught alarm from it and
answered, "I perhaps put it in my pocket," professing to feel for it
there.

She watched him and said, "It is not there?--you put it on the table,"
with a penetrating voice that would not let him feign to have found it
in his pocket; and immediately she rushed out of the room. Deronda
followed her--she was gone into the sitting-room below to look for her
father--she opened the door of the bedroom to see if he were there--she
looked where his hat usually hung--she turned with her hands clasped
tight and her lips pale, gazing despairingly out of the window. Then
she looked up at Deronda, who had not dared to speak to her in her
white agitation. She looked up at him, unable to utter a word--the look
seemed a tacit acceptance of the humiliation she felt in his presence.
But he, taking her clasped hands between both his, said, in a tone of
reverent adoration,

"Mirah, let me think that he is my father as well as yours--that we can
have no sorrow, no disgrace, no joy apart. I will rather take your
grief to be mine than I would take the brightest joy of another woman.
Say you will not reject me--say you will take me to share all things
with you. Say you will promise to be my wife--say it now. I have been
in doubt so long--I have had to hide my love so long. Say that now and
always I may prove to you that I love you with complete love."

The change in Mirah had been gradual. She had not passed at once from
anguish to the full, blessed consciousness that, in this moment of
grief and shame, Deronda was giving her the highest tribute man can
give to woman. With the first tones and the first words, she had only a
sense of solemn comfort, referring this goodness of Deronda's to his
feeling for Ezra. But by degrees the rapturous assurance of unhoped-for
good took possession of her frame: her face glowed under Deronda's as
he bent over her; yet she looked up still with intense gravity, as when
she had first acknowledged with religious gratitude that he had thought
her "worthy of the best;" and when he had finished, she could say
nothing--she could only lift up her lips to his and just kiss them, as
if that were the simplest "yes." They stood then, only looking at each
other, he holding her hands between his--too happy to move, meeting so
fully in their new consciousness that all signs would have seemed to
throw them farther apart, till Mirah said in a whisper: "Let us go and
comfort Ezra."




CHAPTER LXIX.

  "The human nature unto which I felt
  That I belonged, and reverenced with love,
  Was not a punctual presence, but a spirit
  Diffused through time and space, with aid derived
  Of evidence from monuments, erect,
  Prostrate, or leaning toward their common rest
  In earth, the widely scattered wreck sublime
  Of vanished nations."
                       --WORDSWORTH: _The Prelude_.


Sir Hugo carried out his plan of spending part of the autumn at Diplow,
and by the beginning of October his presence was spreading some
cheerfulness in the neighborhood, among all ranks and persons
concerned, from the stately home of Brackenshaw and Quetcham to the
respectable shop-parlors in Wanchester. For Sir Hugo was a man who
liked to show himself and be affable, a Liberal of good lineage, who
confided entirely in reform as not likely to make any serious
difference in English habits of feeling, one of which undoubtedly is
the liking to behold society well fenced and adorned with hereditary
rank. Hence he made Diplow a most agreeable house, extending his
invitations to old Wanchester solicitors and young village curates, but
also taking some care in the combination of the guests, and not feeding
all the common poultry together, so that they should think their meal
no particular compliment. Easy-going Lord Brackenshaw, for example,
would not mind meeting Robinson the attorney, but Robinson would have
been naturally piqued if he had been asked to meet a set of people who
passed for his equals. On all these points Sir Hugo was well informed
enough at once to gain popularity for himself and give pleasure to
others--two results which eminently suited his disposition. The rector
of Pennicote now found a reception at Diplow very different from the
haughty tolerance he had undergone during the reign of Grandcourt. It
was not that the baronet liked Mr. Gascoigne; it was that he desired to
keep up a marked relation of friendliness with him on account of Mrs.
Grandcourt, for whom Sir Hugo's chivalry had become more and more
engaged. Why? The chief reason was one that he could not fully
communicate, even to Lady Mallinger--for he would not tell what he
thought one woman's secret to another, even though the other was his
wife--which shows that his chivalry included a rare reticence.

Deronda, after he had become engaged to Mirah, felt it right to make a
full statement of his position and purposes to Sir Hugo, and he chose
to make it by letter. He had more than a presentiment that his fatherly
friend would feel some dissatisfaction, if not pain, at this turn of
his destiny. In reading unwelcome news, instead of hearing it, there is
the advantage that one avoids a hasty expression of impatience which
may afterward be repented of. Deronda dreaded that verbal collision
which makes otherwise pardonable feeling lastingly offensive.

And Sir Hugo, though not altogether surprised, was thoroughly vexed.
His immediate resource was to take the letter to Lady Mallinger, who
would be sure to express an astonishment which her husband could argue
against as unreasonable, and in this way divide the stress of his
discontent. And in fact when she showed herself astonished and
distressed that all Daniel's wonderful talents, and the comfort of
having him in the house, should have ended in his going mad in this way
about the Jews, the baronet could say,

"Oh, nonsense, my dear! depend upon it, Dan will not make a fool of
himself. He has large notions about Judaism--political views which you
can't understand. No fear but Dan will keep himself head uppermost."

But with regard to the prospective marriage she afforded him no
counter-irritant. The gentle lady observed, without rancor, that she
had little dreamed of what was coming when she had Mirah to sing at her
musical party and give lessons to Amabel. After some hesitation,
indeed, she confessed it _had_ passed through her mind that after a
proper time Daniel might marry Mrs. Grandcourt--because it seemed so
remarkable that he should be at Genoa just at that time--and although
she herself was not fond of widows she could not help thinking that
such a marriage would have been better than his going altogether with
the Jews. But Sir Hugo was so strongly of the same opinion that he
could not correct it as a feminine mistake; and his ill-humor at the
disproof of his disagreeable conclusions on behalf of Gwendolen was
left without vent. He desired Lady Mallinger not to breathe a word
about the affair till further notice, saying to himself, "If it is an
unkind cut to the poor thing (meaning Gwendolen), the longer she is
without knowing it the better, in her present nervous state. And she
will best learn it from Dan himself." Sir Hugo's conjectures had worked
so industriously with his knowledge, that he fancied himself well
informed concerning the whole situation.

Meanwhile his residence with his family at Diplow enabled him to
continue his fatherly attentions to Gwendolen; and in these Lady
Mallinger, notwithstanding her small liking for widows, was quite
willing to second him.

The plan of removal to Offendene had been carried out; and Gwendolen,
in settling there, maintained a calm beyond her mother's hopes. She was
experiencing some of that peaceful melancholy which comes from the
renunciation of demands for self, and from taking the ordinary good of
existence, and especially kindness, even from a dog, as a gift above
expectation. Does one who has been all but lost in a pit of darkness
complain of the sweet air and the daylight? There is a way of looking
at our life daily as an escape, and taking the quiet return of morn and
evening--still more the star-like out-glowing of some pure
fellow-feeling, some generous impulse breaking our inward darkness--as
a salvation that reconciles us to hardship. Those who have a
self-knowledge prompting such self-accusation as Hamlet's, can
understand this habitual feeling of rescue. And it was felt by
Gwendolen as she lived through and through again the terrible history
of her temptations, from their first form of illusory self-pleasing
when she struggled away from the hold of conscience, to their latest
form of an urgent hatred dragging her toward its satisfaction, while
she prayed and cried for the help of that conscience which she had once
forsaken. She was now dwelling on every word of Deronda's that pointed
to her past deliverance from the worst evil in herself, and the worst
infliction of it on others, and on every word that carried a force to
resist self-despair.

But she was also upborne by the prospect of soon seeing him again: she
did not imagine him otherwise than always within her reach, her supreme
need of him blinding her to the separateness of his life, the whole
scene of which she filled with his relation to her--no unique
preoccupation of Gwendolen's, for we are all apt to fall into this
passionate egoism of imagination, not only toward our fellow-men, but
toward God. And the future which she turned her face to with a willing
step was one where she would be continually assimilating herself to
some type that he would hold before her. Had he not first risen on her
vision as a corrective presence which she had recognized in the
beginning with resentment, and at last with entire love and trust? She
could not spontaneously think of an end to that reliance, which had
become to her imagination like the firmness of the earth, the only
condition of her walking.

And Deronda was not long before he came to Diplow, which was a more
convenient distance from town than the Abbey. He had wished to carry
out a plan for taking Ezra and Mirah to a mild spot on the coast, while
he prepared another home which Mirah might enter as his bride, and
where they might unitedly watch over her brother. But Ezra begged not
to be removed, unless it were to go with them to the East. All outward
solicitations were becoming more and more of a burden to him; but his
mind dwelt on the possibility of this voyage with a visionary joy.
Deronda, in his preparations for the marriage, which he hoped might not
be deferred beyond a couple of months, wished to have fuller
consultation as to his resources and affairs generally with Sir Hugo,
and here was a reason for not delaying his visit to Diplow. But he
thought quite as much of another reason--his promise to Gwendolen. The
sense of blessedness in his own lot had yet an aching anxiety at his
heart: this may be held paradoxical, for the beloved lover is always
called happy, and happiness is considered as a well-fleshed
indifference to sorrow outside it. But human experience is usually
paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk
or even current philosophy. It was no treason to Mirah, but a part of
that full nature which made his love for her the more worthy, that his
joy in her could hold by its side the care for another. For what is
love itself, for the one we love best?--an enfolding of immeasurable
cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

Deronda came twice to Diplow, and saw Gwendolen twice--and yet he went
back to town without having told her anything about the change in his
lot and prospects. He blamed himself; but in all momentous
communication likely to give pain we feel dependent on some preparatory
turn of words or associations, some agreement of the other's mood with
the probable effect of what we have to impart. In the first interview
Gwendolen was so absorbed in what she had to say to him, so full of
questions which he must answer, about the arrangement of her life, what
she could do to make herself less ignorant, how she could be kindest to
everybody, and make amends for her selfishness and try to be rid of it,
that Deronda utterly shrank from waiving her immediate wants in order
to speak of himself, nay, from inflicting a wound on her in these
moments when she was leaning on him for help in her path. In the second
interview, when he went with new resolve to command the conversation
into some preparatory track, he found her in a state of deep
depression, overmastered by some distasteful miserable memories which
forced themselves on her as something more real and ample than any new
material out of which she could mould her future. She cried
hysterically, and said that he would always despise her. He could only
seek words of soothing and encouragement: and when she gradually
revived under them, with that pathetic look of renewed childlike
interest which we see in eyes where the lashes are still beaded with
tears, it was impossible to lay another burden on her.

But time went on, and he felt it a pressing duty to make the difficult
disclosure. Gwendolen, it was true, never recognized his having any
affairs; and it had never even occurred to her to ask him why he
happened to be at Genoa. But this unconsciousness of hers would make a
sudden revelation of affairs that were determining his course in life
all the heavier blow to her; and if he left the revelation to be made
by different persons, she would feel that he had treated her with cruel
inconsiderateness. He could not make the communication in writing: his
tenderness could not bear to think of her reading his virtual farewell
in solitude, and perhaps feeling his words full of a hard gladness for
himself and indifference for her. He went down to Diplow again, feeling
that every other peril was to be incurred rather than that of returning
and leaving her still in ignorance.

On this third visit Deronda found Hans Meyrick installed with his easel
at Diplow, beginning his picture of the three daughters sitting on a
bank, "in the Gainsborough style," and varying his work by rambling to
Pennicote to sketch the village children and improve his acquaintance
with the Gascoignes. Hans appeared to have recovered his vivacity, but
Deronda detected some feigning in it, as we detect the artificiality of
a lady's bloom from its being a little too high-toned and steadily
persistent (a "Fluctuating Rouge" not having yet appeared among the
advertisements). Also with all his grateful friendship and admiration
for Deronda, Hans could not help a certain irritation against him, such
as extremely incautious, open natures are apt to feel when the breaking
of a friend's reserve discloses a state of things not merely
unsuspected but the reverse of what had been hoped and ingeniously
conjectured. It is true that poor Hans had always cared chiefly to
confide in Deronda, and had been quite incurious as to any confidence
that might have been given in return; but what outpourer of his own
affairs is not tempted to think any hint of his friend's affairs is an
egotistic irrelevance? That was no reason why it was not rather a sore
reflection to Hans that while he had been all along naively opening his
heart about Mirah, Deronda had kept secret a feeling of rivalry which
now revealed itself as the important determining fact. Moreover, it is
always at their peril that our friends turn out to be something more
than we were aware of. Hans must be excused for these promptings of
bruised sensibility, since he had not allowed them to govern his
substantial conduct: he had the consciousness of having done right by
his fortunate friend; or, as he told himself, "his metal had given a
better ring than he would have sworn to beforehand." For Hans had
always said that in point of virtue he was a _dilettante_: which meant
that he was very fond of it in other people, but if he meddled with it
himself he cut a poor figure. Perhaps in reward of his good behavior he
gave his tongue the more freedom; and he was too fully possessed by the
notion of Deronda's happiness to have a conception of what he was
feeling about Gwendolen, so that he spoke of her without hesitation.

"When did you come down, Hans?" said Deronda, joining him in the
grounds where he was making a study of the requisite bank and trees.

"Oh, ten days ago; before the time Sir Hugo fixed. I ran down with Rex
Gascoigne and stayed at the rectory a day or two. I'm up in all the
gossip of these parts; I know the state of the wheelwright's interior,
and have assisted at an infant school examination. Sister Anna, with
the good upper lip, escorted me, else I should have been mobbed by
three urchins and an idiot, because of my long hair and a general
appearance which departs from the Pennicote type of the beautiful.
Altogether, the village is idyllic. Its only fault is a dark curate
with broad shoulders and broad trousers who ought to have gone into the
heavy drapery line. The Gascoignes are perfect--besides being related
to the Vandyke duchess. I caught a glimpse of her in her black robes at
a distance, though she doesn't show to visitors."

"She was not staying at the rectory?" said Deronda.

"No; but I was taken to Offendene to see the old house, and as a
consequence I saw the duchess' family. I suppose you have been there
and know all about them?"

"Yes, I have been there," said Deronda, quietly.

"A fine old place. An excellent setting for a widow with romantic
fortunes. And she seems to have had several romances. I think I have
found out that there was one between her and my friend Rex."

"Not long before her marriage, then?" said Deronda, really interested,
"for they had only been a year at Offendene. How came you to know
anything of it?"

"Oh--not ignorant of what it is to be a miserable devil, I learn to
gloat on the signs of misery in others. I found out that Rex never goes
to Offendene, and has never seen the duchess since she came back; and
Miss Gascoigne let fall something in our talk about charade-acting--for
I went through some of my nonsense to please the young ones--something
that proved to me that Rex was once hovering about his fair cousin
close enough to get singed. I don't know what was her part in the
affair. Perhaps the duke came in and carried her off. That is always
the way when an exceptionally worthy young man forms an attachment. I
understand now why Gascoigne talks of making the law his mistress and
remaining a bachelor. But these are green resolves. Since the duke did
not get himself drowned for your sake, it may turn out to be for my
friend Rex's sake. Who knows?"

"Is it absolutely necessary that Mrs. Grandcourt should marry again?"
said Deronda, ready to add that Hans's success in constructing her
fortunes hitherto had not been enough to warrant a new attempt.

"You monster!" retorted Hans, "do you want her to wear weeds for _you_
all her life--burn herself in perpetual suttee while you are alive and
merry?"

Deronda could say nothing, but he looked so much annoyed that Hans
turned the current of his chat, and when he was alone shrugged his
shoulders a little over the thought that there really had been some
stronger feeling between Deronda and the duchess than Mirah would like
to know of. "Why didn't she fall in love with me?" thought Hans,
laughing at himself. "She would have had no rivals. No woman ever
wanted to discuss theology with me."

No wonder that Deronda winced under that sort of joking with a
whip-lash. It touched sensibilities that were already quivering with
the anticipation of witnessing some of that pain to which even Hans's
light words seemed to give more reality:--any sort of recognition by
another giving emphasis to the subject of our anxiety. And now he had
come down with the firm resolve that he would not again evade the
trial. The next day he rode to Offendene. He had sent word that he
intended to call and to ask if Gwendolen could receive him; and he
found her awaiting him in the old drawing-room where some chief crises
of her life had happened. She seemed less sad than he had seen her
since her husband's death; there was no smile on her face, but a placid
self-possession, in contrast with the mood in which he had last found
her. She was all the more alive to the sadness perceptible in Deronda;
and they were no sooner seated--he at a little distance opposite to
her--than she said:

"You were afraid of coming to see me, because I was so full of grief
and despair the last time. But I am not so today. I have been sorry
ever since. I have been making it a reason why I should keep up my hope
and be as cheerful as I can, because I would not give you any pain
about me."

There was an unwonted sweetness in Gwendolen's tone and look as she
uttered these words that seemed to Deronda to infuse the utmost cruelty
into the task now laid upon him. But he felt obliged to make his answer
a beginning of the task.

"I _am_ in some trouble to-day," he said, looking at her rather
mournfully; "but it is because I have things to tell you which you will
almost think it a want of confidence on my part not to have spoken of
before. They are things affecting my own life--my own future. I shall
seem to have made an ill return to you for the trust you have placed in
me--never to have given you an idea of events that make great changes
for me. But when we have been together we have hardly had time to enter
into subjects which at the moment were really less pressing to me than
the trials you have been going through." There was a sort of timid
tenderness in Deronda's deep tones, and he paused with a pleading look,
as if it had been Gwendolen only who had conferred anything in her
scenes of beseeching and confession.

A thrill of surprise was visible in her. Such meaning as she found in
his words had shaken her, but without causing fear. Her mind had flown
at once to some change in his position with regard to Sir Hugo and Sir
Hugo's property. She said, with a sense of comfort from Deronda's way
of asking her pardon,

"You never thought of anything but what you could do to help me; and I
was so troublesome. How could you tell me things?"

"It will perhaps astonish you," said Deronda, "that I have only quite
lately known who were my parents."

Gwendolen was not astonished: she felt the more assured that her
expectations of what was coming were right. Deronda went on without
check.

"The reason why you found me in Italy was that I had gone there to
learn that--in fact, to meet my mother. It was by her wish that I was
brought up in ignorance of my parentage. She parted with me after my
father's death, when I was a little creature. But she is now very ill,
and she felt that the secrecy ought not to be any longer maintained.
Her chief reason had been that she did not wish me to know I was a Jew."

"_A Jew_!" Gwendolen exclaimed, in a low tone of amazement, with an
utterly frustrated look, as if some confusing potion were creeping
through her system.

Deronda colored, and did not speak, while Gwendolen, with her eyes
fixed on the floor, was struggling to find her way in the dark by the
aid of various reminiscences. She seemed at last to have arrived at
some judgment, for she looked up at Deronda again and said, as if
remonstrating against the mother's conduct,

"What difference need that have made?"

"It has made a great difference to me that I have known it," said
Deronda, emphatically; but he could not go on easily--the distance
between her ideas and his acted like a difference of native language,
making him uncertain what force his words would carry.

Gwendolen meditated again, and then said feelingly, "I hope there is
nothing to make you mind. _You_ are just the same as if you were not a
Jew."

She meant to assure him that nothing of that external sort could affect
the way in which she regarded him, or the way in which he could
influence her. Deronda was a little helped by this misunderstanding.

"The discovery was far from being painful to me," he said, "I had been
gradually prepared for it, and I was glad of it. I had been prepared
for it by becoming intimate with a very remarkable Jew, whose ideas
have attracted me so much that I think of devoting the best part of my
life to some effort at giving them effect."

Again Gwendolen seemed shaken--again there was a look of frustration,
but this time it was mingled with alarm. She looked at Deronda with
lips childishly parted. It was not that she had yet connected his words
with Mirah and her brother, but that they had inspired her with a
dreadful presentiment of mountainous travel for her mind before it
could reach Deronda's. Great ideas in general which she had attributed
to him seemed to make no great practical difference, and were not
formidable in the same way as these mysteriously-shadowed particular
ideas. He could not quite divine what was going on within her; he could
only seek the least abrupt path of disclosure.

"That is an object," he said, after a moment, "which will by-and-by
force me to leave England for some time--for some years. I have
purposes which will take me to the East."

Here was something clearer, but all the more immediately agitating.
Gwendolen's lips began to tremble. "But you will come back?" she said,
tasting her own tears as they fell, before she thought of drying them.

Deronda could not sit still. He rose, and went to prop himself against
the corner of the mantel-piece, at a different angle from her face. But
when she had pressed her handkerchief against her cheeks, she turned
and looked up at him, awaiting an answer.

"If I live," said Deronda--"_some time_."

They were both silent. He could not persuade himself to say more unless
she led up to it by a question; and she was apparently meditating
something that she had to say.

"What are you going to do?" she asked, at last, very mildly. "Can I
understand the ideas, or am I too ignorant?"

"I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition
of my race in various countries there," said Deronda, gently--anxious
to be as explanatory as he could on what was the impersonal part of
their separateness from each other. "The idea that I am possessed with
is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a
nation again, giving them a national center, such as the English have,
though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a
task which presents itself to me as a duty; I am resolved to begin it,
however feebly. I am resolved to devote my life to it. At the least, I
may awaken a movement in other minds, such as has been awakened in my
own."

There was a long silence between them. The world seemed getting larger
round poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst.
The thought that he might come back after going to the East, sank
before the bewildering vision of these wild-stretching purposes in
which she felt herself reduced to a mere speck. There comes a terrible
moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger
destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other
neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives--where
the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an
invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and gray fathers know
nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls
forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the
shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. Then it is as if the
Invisible Power that had been the object of lip-worship and
lip-resignation became visible, according to the imagery of the Hebrew
poet, making the flames his chariot, and riding on the wings of the
wind, till the mountains smoke and the plains shudder under the rolling
fiery visitations. Often the good cause seems to lie prostrate under
the thunder of relenting force, the martyrs live reviled, they die, and
no angel is seen holding forth the crown and the palm branch. Then it
is that the submission of the soul to the Highest is tested, and even
in the eyes of frivolity life looks out from the scene of human
struggle with the awful face of duty, and a religion shows itself which
is something else than a private consolation.

That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in
Gwendolen's small life: she was for the first time feeling the pressure
of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dislodged from
her supremacy in her own world, and getting a sense that her horizon
was but a dipping onward of an existence with which her own was
revolving. All the troubles of her wifehood and widowhood had still
left her with the implicit impression which had accompanied her from
childhood, that whatever surrounded her was somehow specially for her,
and it was because of this that no personal jealousy had been roused in
her relation to Deronda: she could not spontaneously think of him as
rightfully belonging to others more than to her. But here had come a
shock which went deeper than personal jealousy--something spiritual and
vaguely tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled all her anger
into self-humiliation.

There had been a long silence. Deronda had stood still, even thankful
for an interval before he needed to say more, and Gwendolen had sat
like a statue with her wrists lying over each other and her eyes
fixed--the intensity of her mental action arresting all other
excitation. At length something occurred to her that made her turn her
face to Deronda and say in a trembling voice,

"Is that all you can tell me?"

The question was like a dart to him. "The Jew whom I mentioned just
now," he answered, not without a certain tremor in his tones too, "the
remarkable man who has greatly influenced my mind, has not perhaps been
totally unheard of by you. He is the brother of Miss Lapidoth, whom you
have often heard sing."

A great wave of remembrance passed through Gwendolen and spread as a
deep, painful flush over neck and face. It had come first at the scene
of that morning when she had called on Mirah, and heard Deronda's voice
reading, and been told, without then heeding it, that he was reading
Hebrew with Mirah's brother.

"He is very ill--very near death now," Deronda went on, nervously, and
then stopped short. He felt that he must wait. Would she divine the
rest?

"Did she tell you that I went to her?" said Gwendolen, abruptly,
looking up at him.

"No," said Deronda. "I don't understand you."

She turned away her eyes again, and sat thinking. Slowly the color
dried out of face and neck, and she was as pale as before--with that
almost withered paleness which is seen after a painful flush. At last
she said--without turning toward him--in a low, measured voice, as if
she were only thinking aloud in preparation for future speech,

"But _can_ you marry?"

"Yes," said Deronda, also in a low voice. "I am going to marry."

At first there was no change in Gwendolen's attitude: she only began to
tremble visibly; then she looked before her with dilated eyes, as at
something lying in front of her, till she stretched her arms out
straight, and cried with a smothered voice,

"I said I should be forsaken. I have been a cruel woman. And I am
forsaken."

Deronda's anguish was intolerable. He could not help himself. He seized
her outstretched hands and held them together, and kneeled at her feet.
She was the victim of his happiness.

"I am cruel, too, I am cruel," he repeated, with a sort of groan,
looking up at her imploringly.

His presence and touch seemed to dispel a horrible vision, and she met
his upward look of sorrow with something like the return of
consciousness after fainting. Then she dwelt on it with that growing
pathetic movement of the brow which accompanies the revival of some
tender recollection. The look of sorrow brought back what seemed a very
far-off moment--the first time she had ever seen it, in the library at
the Abbey. Sobs rose, and great tears fell fast. Deronda would not let
her hands go--held them still with one of his, and himself pressed her
handkerchief against her eyes. She submitted like a half-soothed child,
making an effort to speak, which was hindered by struggling sobs. At
last she succeeded in saying, brokenly,

"I said--I said--it should be better--better with me--for having known
you."

His eyes too were larger with tears. She wrested one of her hands from
his, and returned his action, pressing his tears away.

"We shall not be quite parted," he said. "I will write to you always,
when I can, and you will answer?"

He waited till she said in a whisper, "I will try."

"I shall be more with you than I used to be," Deronda said with gentle
urgency, releasing her hands and rising from his kneeling posture. "If
we had been much together before, we should have felt our differences
more, and seemed to get farther apart. Now we can perhaps never see
each other again. But our minds may get nearer."

Gwendolen said nothing, but rose too, automatically. Her withered look
of grief, such as the sun often shines on when the blinds are drawn up
after the burial of life's joy, made him hate his own words: they
seemed to have the hardness of easy consolation in them. She felt that
he was going, and that nothing could hinder it. The sense of it was
like a dreadful whisper in her ear, which dulled all other
consciousness; and she had not known that she was rising.

Deronda could not speak again. He thought that they must part in
silence, but it was difficult to move toward the parting, till she
looked at him with a sort of intention in her eyes, which helped him.
He advanced to put out his hand silently, and when she had placed hers
within it, she said what her mind had been laboring with,

"You have been very good to me. I have deserved nothing. I will
try--try to live. I shall think of you. What good have I been? Only
harm. Don't let me be harm to _you_. It shall be the better for me--"

She could not finish. It was not that she was sobbing, but that the
intense effort with which she spoke made her too tremulous. The burden
of that difficult rectitude toward him was a weight her frame tottered
under.

She bent forward to kiss his cheek, and he kissed hers. Then they
looked at each other for an instant with clasped hands, and he turned
away.

When he was quite gone, her mother came in and found her sitting
motionless.

"Gwendolen, dearest, you look very ill," she said, bending over her and
touching her cold hands.

"Yes, mamma. But don't be afraid. I am going to live," said Gwendolen,
bursting out hysterically.

Her mother persuaded her to go to bed, and watched by her. Through the
day and half the night she fell continually into fits of shrieking, but
cried in the midst of them to her mother, "Don't be afraid. I shall
live. I mean to live."

After all, she slept; and when she waked in the morning light, she
looked up fixedly at her mother and said tenderly, "Ah, poor mamma! You
have been sitting up with me. Don't be unhappy. I shall live. I shall
be better."




CHAPTER LXX.

    In the checkered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled
    as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same
    moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the
    green cluster and another treads the winepress. Nay, in each of our
    lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until himself
    gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.


Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the
sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its
happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of
privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy. Deronda's
love for Mirah was strongly imbued with that blessed protectiveness.
Even with infantine feet she had begun to tread among thorns; and the
first time he had beheld her face it had seemed to him the girlish
image of despair.

But now she was glowing like a dark-tipped yet delicate ivory-tinted
flower in the warm sunlight of content, thinking of any possible grief
as part of that life with Deronda, which she could call by no other
name than good. And he watched the sober gladness which gave new beauty
to her movements; and her habitual attitudes of repose, with a delight
which made him say to himself that it was enough of personal joy for
him to save her from pain. She knew nothing of Hans's struggle or of
Gwendolen's pang; for after the assurance that Deronda's hidden love
had been for her, she easily explained Gwendolen's eager solicitude
about him as part of a grateful dependence on his goodness, such as she
herself had known. And all Deronda's words about Mrs. Grandcourt
confirmed that view of their relation, though he never touched on it
except in the most distant manner. Mirah was ready to believe that he
had been a rescuing angel to many besides herself. The only wonder was,
that she among them all was to have the bliss of being continually by
his side.

So, when the bridal veil was around Mirah it hid no doubtful
tremors--only a thrill of awe at the acceptance of a great gift which
required great uses. And the velvet canopy never covered a more goodly
bride and bridegroom, to whom their people might more wisely wish
offspring; more truthful lips never touched the sacrament
marriage-wine; the marriage-blessing never gathered stronger promise of
fulfillment than in the integrity of their mutual pledge. Naturally,
they were married according to the Jewish rite. And since no religion
seems yet to have demanded that when we make a feast we should invite
only the highest rank of our acquaintances, few, it is to be hoped,
will be offended to learn that among the guests at Deronda's little
wedding-feast was the entire Cohen family, with the one exception of
the baby who carried on her teething intelligently at home. How could
Mordecai have borne that those friends of his adversity should have
been shut out from rejoicing in common with him?

Mrs. Meyrick so fully understood this that she had quite reconciled
herself to meeting the Jewish pawnbroker, and was there with her three
daughters--all of them enjoying the consciousness that Mirah's marriage
to Deronda crowned a romance which would always make a sweet memory to
them. For which of them, mother or girls, had not had a generous part
in it--giving their best in feeling and in act to her who needed? If
Hans could have been there, it would have been better; but Mab had
already observed that men must suffer for being so inconvenient;
suppose she, Kate, and Amy had all fallen in love with Mr.
Deronda?--but being women they were not so ridiculous.

The Meyricks were rewarded for conquering their prejudices by hearing a
speech from Mr. Cohen, which had the rare quality among speeches of not
being quite after the usual pattern. Jacob ate beyond his years, and
contributed several small whinnying laughs as a free accompaniment of
his father's speech, not irreverently, but from a lively sense that his
family was distinguishing itself; while Adelaide Rebekah, in a new
Sabbath frock, maintained throughout a grave air of responsibility.

Mordecai's brilliant eyes, sunken in their large sockets, dwelt on the
scene with the cherishing benignancy of a spirit already lifted into an
aloofness which nullified only selfish requirements and left sympathy
alive. But continually, after his gaze had been traveling round on the
others, it returned to dwell on Deronda with a fresh gleam of trusting
affection.

The wedding-feast was humble, but Mirah was not without splendid
wedding-gifts. As soon as the betrothal had been known, there were
friends who had entertained graceful devices. Sir Hugo and Lady
Mallinger had taken trouble to provide a complete equipment for Eastern
travel, as well as a precious locket containing an inscription--"_To
the bride of our dear Daniel Deronda all blessings. H. and L. M._" The
Klesmers sent a perfect watch, also with a pretty inscription.

But something more precious than gold and gems came to Deronda from the
neighborhood of Diplow on the morning of his marriage. It was a letter
containing these words:,

    Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding-day. I have remembered
    your words--that I may live to be one of the best of women, who
    make others glad that they were born. I do not yet see how that can
    be, but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it will be
    because you helped me. I only thought of myself, and I made you
    grieve. It hurts me now to think of your grief. You must not grieve
    any more for me. It is better--it shall be better with me because I
    have known you.

    GWENDOLEN GRANDCOURT.

The preparations for the departure of all three to the East began at
once; for Deronda could not deny Ezra's wish that they should set out
on the voyage forthwith, so that he might go with them, instead of
detaining them to watch over him. He had no belief that Ezra's life
would last through the voyage, for there were symptoms which seemed to
show that the last stage of his malady had set in. But Ezra himself had
said, "Never mind where I die, so that I am with you."

He did not set out with them. One morning early he said to Deronda, "Do
not quit me to-day. I shall die before it is ended."

He chose to be dressed and sit up in his easy chair as usual, Deronda
and Mirah on each side of him, and for some hours he was unusually
silent, not even making the effort to speak, but looking at them
occasionally with eyes full of some restful meaning, as if to assure
them that while this remnant of breathing-time was difficult, he felt
an ocean of peace beneath him.

It was not till late in the afternoon, when the light was falling, that
he took a hand of each in his and said, looking at Deronda, "Death is
coming to me as the divine kiss which is both parting and
reunion--which takes me from your bodily eyes and gives me full
presence in your soul. Where thou goest, Daniel, I shall go. Is it not
begun? Have I not breathed my soul into you? We shall live together."

He paused, and Deronda waited, thinking that there might be another
word for him. But slowly and with effort Ezra, pressing on their hands,
raised himself and uttered in Hebrew the confession of the divine
Unity, which long for generations has been on the lips of the dying
Israelite.

He sank back gently into his chair, and did not speak again. But it was
some hours before he had ceased to breathe, with Mirah's and Deronda's
arms around him.

  "Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
  Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt,
  Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair,
  And what may quiet us in a death so noble."
Daniel Deronda - Part 2
