Daniel Deronda

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"She's gone," said Deronda, curtly.

"An uncommonly fine girl, a perfect Diana," said Sir Hugo, turning to
Grandcourt again. "Really worth a little straining to look at her. I saw
her winning, and she took it as coolly as if she had known it all
beforehand. The same day Deronda happened to see her losing like wildfire,
and she bore it with immense pluck. I suppose she was cleaned out, or was
wise enough to stop in time. How do you know she's gone?"

"Oh, by the Visitor-list," said Deronda, with a scarcely perceptible
shrug. "Vandernoodt told me her name was Harleth, and she was with the
Baron and Baroness von Langen. I saw by the list that Miss Harleth was no
longer there."

This held no further information for Lush than that Gwendolen had been
gambling. He had already looked at the list, and ascertained that
Gwendolen had gone, but he had no intention of thrusting this knowledge on
Grandcourt before he asked for it; and he had not asked, finding it enough
to believe that the object of search would turn up somewhere or other.

But now Grandcourt had heard what was rather piquant, and not a word about
Miss Harleth had been missed by ham. After a moment's pause he said to
Deronda--

"Do you know those people--the Langens?"

"I have talked with them a little since Miss Harleth went away. I knew
nothing of them before."

"Where is she gone--do you know?"

"She is gone home," said Deronda, coldly, as if he wished to say no more.
But then, from a fresh impulse, he turned to look markedly at Grandcourt,
and added, "But it is possible you know her. Her home is not far from
Diplow: Offendene, near Winchester."

Deronda, turning to look straight at Grandcourt, who was on his left hand,
might have been a subject for those old painters who liked contrasts of
temperament. There was a calm intensity of life and richness of tint in
his face that on a sudden gaze from him was rather startling, and often
made him seem to have spoken, so that servants and officials asked him
automatically, "What did you say, sir?" when he had been quite silent.
Grandcourt himself felt an irritation, which he did not show except by a
slight movement of the eyelids, at Deronda's turning round on him when he
was not asked to do more than speak. But he answered, with his usual
drawl, "Yes, I know her," and paused with his shoulder toward Deronda, to
look at the gambling.

"What of her, eh?" asked Sir Hugo of Lush, as the three moved on a little
way. "She must be a new-comer at Offendene. Old Blenny lived there after
the dowager died."

"A little too much of her," said Lush, in a low, significant tone; not
sorry to let Sir Hugo know the state of affairs.

"Why? how?" said the baronet. They all moved out of the _salon_ into an
airy promenade.

"He has been on the brink of marrying her," Lush went on. "But I hope it's
off now. She's a niece of the clergyman--Gascoigne--at Pennicote. Her
mother is a widow with a brood of daughters. This girl will have nothing,
and is as dangerous as gunpowder. It would be a foolish marriage. But she
has taken a freak against him, for she ran off here without notice, when
he had agreed to call the next day. The fact is, he's here after her; but
he was in no great hurry, and between his caprice and hers they are likely
enough not to get together again. But of course he has lost his chance
with the heiress."

Grandcourt joining them said, "What a beastly den this is!--a worse hole
than Baden. I shall go back to the hotel."

When Sir Hugo and Deronda were alone, the baronet began--

"Rather a pretty story. That girl has something in her. She must be worth
running after--has _de l'imprevu_. I think her appearance on the scene has
bettered my chance of getting Diplow, whether the marriage comes off or
not."

"I should hope a marriage like that would not come off," said Deronda, in
a tone of disgust.

"What! are you a little touched with the sublime lash?" said Sir Hugo,
putting up his glasses to help his short sight in looking at his
companion. "Are you inclined to run after her?"

"On the contrary," said Deronda, "I should rather be inclined to run away
from her."

"Why, you would easily cut out Grandcourt. A girl with her spirit would
think you the finer match of the two," said Sir Hugo, who often tried
Deronda's patience by finding a joke in impossible advice. (A difference
of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.)

"I suppose pedigree and land belong to a fine match," said Deronda,
coldly.

"The best horse will win in spite of pedigree, my boy. You remember
Napoleon's _mot--Je suis un ancetre_" said Sir Hugo, who habitually
undervalued birth, as men after dining well often agree that the good of
life is distributed with wonderful equality.

"I am not sure that I want to be an ancestor," said Deronda. "It doesn't
seem to me the rarest sort of origination."

"You won't run after the pretty gambler, then?" said Sir Hugo, putting
down his glasses.

"Decidedly not."

This answer was perfectly truthful; nevertheless it had passed through
Deronda's mind that under other circumstances he should have given way to
the interest this girl had raised in him, and tried to know more of her.
But his history had given him a stronger bias in another direction. He
felt himself in no sense free.

CHAPTER XVI.

Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The
astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so
for every visible arc in the wanderer's orbit; and the narrator of
human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would
have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead
up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense
suffering which take the quality of action--like the cry of
Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea
and sky he invokes and the deity he defies.

Deronda's circumstances, indeed, had been exceptional. One moment had been
burned into his life as its chief epoch--a moment full of July sunshine
and large pink roses shedding their last petals on a grassy court enclosed
on three sides by a gothic cloister. Imagine him in such a scene: a boy of
thirteen, stretched prone on the grass where it was in shadow, his curly
head propped on his arms over a book, while his tutor, also reading, sat
on a camp-stool under shelter. Deronda's book was Sismondi's "History of
the Italian Republics";--the lad had a passion for history, eager to know
how time had been filled up since the flood, and how things were carried
on in the dull periods. Suddenly he let down his left arm and looked at
his tutor, saying in purest boyish tones--

"Mr. Fraser, how was it that the popes and cardinals always had so many
nephews?"

The tutor, an able young Scotchman, who acted as Sir Hugo Mallinger's
secretary, roused rather unwillingly from his political economy, answered
with the clear-cut emphatic chant which makes a truth doubly telling in
Scotch utterance--

"Their own children were called nephews."

"Why?" said Deronda.

"It was just for the propriety of the thing; because, as you know very
well, priests don't marry, and the children were illegitimate."

Mr. Fraser, thrusting out his lower lip and making his chant of the last
word the more emphatic for a little impatience at being interrupted, had
already turned his eyes on his book again, while Deronda, as if something
had stung him, started up in a sitting attitude with his back to the
tutor.

He had always called Sir Hugo Mallinger his uncle, and when it once
occurred to him to ask about his father and mother, the baronet had
answered, "You lost your father and mother when you were quite a little
one; that is why I take care of you." Daniel then straining to discern
something in that early twilight, had a dim sense of having been kissed
very much, and surrounded by thin, cloudy, scented drapery, till his
fingers caught in something hard, which hurt him, and he began to cry.
Every other memory he had was of the little world in which he still lived.
And at that time he did not mind about learning more, for he was too fond
of Sir Hugo to be sorry for the loss of unknown parents. Life was very
delightful to the lad, with an uncle who was always indulgent and
cheerful--a fine man in the bright noon of life, whom Daniel thought
absolutely perfect, and whose place was one of the finest in England, at
once historical; romantic, and home-like: a picturesque architectural
outgrowth from an abbey, which had still remnants of the old monastic
trunk. Diplow lay in another county, and was a comparatively landless
place which had come into the family from a rich lawyer on the female side
who wore the perruque of the restoration; whereas the Mallingers had the
grant of Monk's Topping under Henry the Eighth, and ages before had held
the neighboring lands of King's Topping, tracing indeed their origin to a
certain Hugues le Malingre, who came in with the Conqueror--and also
apparently with a sickly complexion which had been happily corrected in
his descendants. Two rows of these descendants, direct and collateral,
females of the male line, and males of the female, looked down in the
gallery over the cloisters on the nephew Daniel as he walked there: men in
armor with pointed beards and arched eyebrows, pinched ladies in hoops and
ruffs with no face to speak of; grave-looking men in black velvet and
stuffed hips, and fair, frightened women holding little boys by the hand;
smiling politicians in magnificent perruques, and ladies of the prize-
animal kind, with rosebud mouths and full eyelids, according to Lely; then
a generation whose faces were revised and embellished in the taste of
Kneller; and so on through refined editions of the family types in the
time of Reynolds and Romney, till the line ended with Sir Hugo and his
younger brother Henleigh. This last had married Miss Grandcourt, and taken
her name along with her estates, thus making a junction between two
equally old families, impaling the three Saracens' heads proper and three
bezants of the one with the tower and falcons _argent_ of the other, and,
as it happened, uniting their highest advantages in the prospects of that
Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt who is at present more of an acquaintance to
us than either Sir Hugo or his nephew Daniel Deronda.

In Sir Hugo's youthful portrait with rolled collar and high cravat, Sir
Thomas Lawrence had done justice to the agreeable alacrity of expression
and sanguine temperament still to be seen in the original, but had done
something more than justice in slightly lengthening the nose, which was in
reality shorter than might have been expected in a Mallinger. Happily the
appropriate nose of the family reappeared in his younger brother, and was
to be seen in all its refined regularity in his nephew Mallinger
Grandcourt. But in the nephew Daniel Deronda the family faces of various
types, seen on the walls of the gallery; found no reflex. Still he was
handsomer than any of them, and when he was thirteen might have served as
model for any painter who wanted to image the most memorable of boys: you
could hardly have seen his face thoroughly meeting yours without believing
that human creatures had done nobly in times past, and might do more nobly
in time to come. The finest childlike faces have this consecrating power,
and make us shudder anew at all the grossness and basely-wrought griefs of
the world, lest they should enter here and defile.

But at this moment on the grass among the rose-petals, Daniel Deronda was
making a first acquaintance with those griefs. A new idea had entered his
mind, and was beginning to change the aspect of his habitual feelings as
happy careless voyagers are changed with the sky suddenly threatened and
the thought of danger arises. He sat perfectly still with his back to the
tutor, while his face expressed rapid inward transition. The deep blush,
which had come when he first started up, gradually subsided; but his
features kept that indescribable look of subdued activity which often
accompanies a new mental survey of familiar facts. He had not lived with
other boys, and his mind showed the same blending of child's ignorance
with surprising knowledge which is oftener seen in bright girls. Having
read Shakespeare as well as a great deal of history, he could have talked
with the wisdom of a bookish child about men who were born out of wedlock
and were held unfortunate in consequence, being under disadvantages which
required them to be a sort of heroes if they were to work themselves up to
an equal standing with their legally born brothers. But he had never
brought such knowledge into any association with his own lot, which had
been too easy for him ever to think about it--until this moment when there
had darted into his mind with the magic of quick comparison, the
possibility that here was the secret of his own birth, and that the man
whom he called uncle was really his father. Some children, even younger
than Daniel, have known the first arrival of care, like an ominous
irremovable guest in their tender lives, on the discovery that their
parents, whom they had imagined able to buy everything, were poor and in
hard money troubles. Daniel felt the presence of a new guest who seemed to
come with an enigmatic veiled face, and to carry dimly-conjectured,
dreaded revelations. The ardor which he had given to the imaginary world
in his books suddenly rushed toward his own history and spent its
pictorial energy there, explaining what he knew, representing the unknown.
The uncle whom he loved very dearly took the aspect of a father who held
secrets about him--who had done him a wrong--yes, a wrong: and what had
become of his mother, for whom he must have been taken away?--Secrets
about which he, Daniel, could never inquire; for to speak or to be spoken
to about these new thoughts seemed like falling flakes of fire to his
imagination. Those who have known an impassioned childhood will understand
this dread of utterance about any shame connected with their parents. The
impetuous advent of new images took possession of him with the force of
fact for the first time told, and left him no immediate power for the
reflection that he might be trembling at a fiction of his own. The
terrible sense of collision between a strong rush of feeling and the dread
of its betrayal, found relief at length in big slow tears, which fell
without restraint until the voice of Mr. Fraser was heard saying:

"Daniel, do you see that you are sitting on the bent pages of your book?"

Daniel immediately moved the book without turning round, and after holding
it before him for an instant, rose with it and walked away into the open
grounds, where he could dry his tears unobserved. The first shock of
suggestion past, he could remember that he had no certainty how things
really had been, and that he had been making conjectures about his own
history, as he had often made stories about Pericles or Columbus, just to
fill up the blanks before they became famous. Only there came back certain
facts which had an obstinate reality,--almost like the fragments of a
bridge, telling you unmistakably how the arches lay. And again there came
a mood in which his conjectures seemed like a doubt of religion, to be
banished as an offense, and a mean prying after what he was not meant to
know; for there was hardly a delicacy of feeling this lad was not capable
of. But the summing-up of all his fluctuating experience at this epoch
was, that a secret impression had come to him which had given him
something like a new sense in relation to all the elements of his life.
And the idea that others probably knew things concerning which they did
not choose to mention, set up in him a premature reserve which helped to
intensify his inward experience. His ears open now to words which before
that July day would have passed by him unnoted; and round every trivial
incident which imagination could connect with his suspicions, a newly-
roused set of feelings were ready to cluster themselves.

One such incident a month later wrought itself deeply into his life.
Daniel had not only one of those thrilling boy voices which seem to bring
an idyllic heaven and earth before our eyes, but a fine musical instinct,
and had early made out accompaniments for himself on the piano, while he
sang from memory. Since then he had had some teaching, and Sir Hugo, who
delighted in the boy, used to ask for his music in the presence of guests.
One morning after he had been singing "Sweet Echo" before a small party of
gentlemen whom the rain had kept in the house, the baronet, passing from a
smiling remark to his next neighbor said:

"Come here, Dan!"

The boy came forward with unusual reluctance. He wore an embroidered
holland blouse which set off the rich coloring of his head and throat, and
the resistant gravity about his mouth and eyes as he was being smiled
upon, made their beauty the more impressive. Every one was admiring him.

"What do you say to being a great singer? Should you like to be adored by
the world and take the house by storm; like Mario and Tamberlik?"

Daniel reddened instantaneously, but there was a just perceptible interval
before he answered with angry decision--

"No; I should hate it!"

"Well, well, well!" said Sir Hugo, with surprised kindliness intended to
be soothing. But Daniel turned away quickly, left the room, and going to
his own chamber threw himself on the broad window-sill, which was a
favorite retreat of his when he had nothing particular to do. Here he
could see the rain gradually subsiding with gleams through the parting
clouds which lit up a great reach of the park, where the old oaks stood
apart from each other, and the bordering wood was pierced with a green
glade which met the eastern sky. This was a scene which had always been
part of his home--part of the dignified ease which had been a matter of
course in his life. And his ardent clinging nature had appropriated it all
with affection. He knew a great deal of what it was to be a gentleman by
inheritance, and without thinking much about himself--for he was a boy of
active perceptions and easily forgot his own existence in that of Robert
Bruce--he had never supposed that he could be shut out from such a lot, or
have a very different part in the world from that of the uncle who petted
him. It is possible (though not greatly believed in at present) to be fond
of poverty and take it for a bride, to prefer scoured deal, red quarries
and whitewash for one's private surroundings, to delight in no splendor
but what has open doors for the whole nation, and to glory in having no
privileges except such as nature insists on; and noblemen have been known
to run away from elaborate ease and the option of idleness, that they
might bind themselves for small pay to hard-handed labor. But Daniel's
tastes were altogether in keeping with his nurture: his disposition was
one in which everyday scenes and habits beget not _ennui_ or rebellion,
but delight, affection, aptitudes; and now the lad had been stung to the
quick by the idea that his uncle--perhaps his father--thought of a career
for him which was totally unlike his own, and which he knew very well was
not thought of among possible destinations for the sons of English
gentlemen. He had often stayed in London with Sir Hugo, who to indulge the
boy's ear had carried him to the opera to hear the great tenors, so that
the image of a singer taking the house by storm was very vivid to him; but
now, spite of his musical gift, he set himself bitterly against the notion
of being dressed up to sing before all those fine people, who would not
care about him except as a wonderful toy. That Sir Hugo should have
thought of him in that position for a moment, seemed to Daniel an
unmistakable proof that there was something about his birth which threw
him out from the class of gentlemen to which the baronet belonged. Would
it ever be mentioned to him? Would the time come when his uncle would tell
him everything? He shrank from the prospect: in his imagination he
preferred ignorance. If his father had been wicked--Daniel inwardly used
strong words, for he was feeling the injury done him as a maimed boy feels
the crushed limb which for others is merely reckoned in an average of
accidents--if his father had done any wrong, he wished it might never be
spoken of to him: it was already a cutting thought that such knowledge
might be in other minds. Was it in Mr. Fraser's? probably not, else he
would not have spoken in that way about the pope's nephews. Daniel
fancied, as older people do, that every one else's consciousness was as
active as his own on a matter which was vital to him. Did Turvey the valet
know?--and old Mrs. French the housekeeper?--and Banks the bailiff, with
whom he had ridden about the farms on his pony?--And now there came back
the recollection of a day some years before when he was drinking Mrs.
Banks's whey, and Banks said to his wife with a wink and a cunning laugh,
"He features the mother, eh?" At that time little Daniel had merely
thought that Banks made a silly face, as the common farming men often did,
laughing at what was not laughable; and he rather resented being winked at
and talked of as if he did not understand everything. But now that small
incident became information: it was to be reasoned on. How could he be
like his mother and not like his father? His mother must have been a
Mallinger, if Sir Hugo were his uncle. But no! His father might have been
Sir Hugo's brother and have changed his name, as Mr. Henleigh Mallinger
did when he married Miss Grandcourt. But then, why had he never heard Sir
Hugo speak of his brother Deronda, as he spoke of his brother Grandcourt?
Daniel had never before cared about the family tree--only about that
ancestor who had killed three Saracens in one encounter. But now his mind
turned to a cabinet of estate-maps in the library, where he had once seen
an illuminated parchment hanging out, that Sir Hugo said was the family
tree. The phrase was new and odd to him--he was a little fellow then--
hardly mare than half his present age--and he gave it no precise meaning.
He knew more now and wished that he could examine that parchment. He
imagined that the cabinet was always locked, and longed to try it. But
here he checked himself. He might be seen: and he would never bring
himself near even a silent admission of the sore that had opened in him.

It is in such experiences of a boy or girlhood, while elders are debating
whether most education lies in science or literature, that the main lines
of character are often laid down. If Daniel had been of a less ardently
affectionate nature, the reserve about himself and the supposition that
others had something to his disadvantage in their minds, might have turned
into a hard, proud antagonism. But inborn lovingness was strong enough to
keep itself level with resentment. There was hardly any creature in his
habitual world that he was not fond of; teasing them occasionally, of
course--all except his uncle, or "Nunc," as Sir Hugo had taught him to
say; for the baronet was the reverse of a strait-laced man, and left his
dignity to take care of itself. Him Daniel loved in that deep-rooted
filial way which makes children always the happier for being in the same
room with father or mother, though their occupations may be quite apart.
Sir Hugo's watch-chain and seals, his handwriting, his mode of smoking and
of talking to his dogs and horses, had all a rightness and charm about
them to the boy which went along with the happiness of morning and
breakfast time. That Sir Hugo had always been a Whig, made Tories and
Radicals equally opponents of the truest and best; and the books he had
written were all seen under the same consecration of loving belief which
differenced what was his from what was not his, in spite of general
resemblance. Those writings were various, from volumes of travel in the
brilliant style, to articles on things in general, and pamphlets on
political crises; but to Daniel they were alike in having an
unquestionable rightness by which other people's information could be
tested.

Who cannot imagine the bitterness of a first suspicion that something in
this object of complete love was _not_ quite right? Children demand that
their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a
first discovery to the contrary is hardly a less revolutionary shock to a
passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which
makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

But some time after this renewal of Daniel's agitation it appeared that
Sir Hugo must have been making a merely playful experiment in his question
about the singing. He sent for Daniel into the library, and looking up
from his writing as the boy entered threw himself sideways in his
armchair. "Ah, Dan!" he said kindly, drawing one of the old embroidered
stools close to him. "Come and sit down here."