Daniel Deronda

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The rumbling thither in the cab after the stillness of the water seemed
long. Happily his charge had been quiet since her fit of weeping, and
submitted like a tired child. When they were in the cab, she laid down her
hat and tried to rest her head, but the jolting movement would not let it
rest. Still she dozed, and her sweet head hung helpless, first on one
side, then on the other.

"They are too good to have any fear about taking her in," thought Deronda.
Her person, her voice, her exquisite utterance, were one strong appeal to
belief and tenderness. Yet what had been the history which had brought her
to this desolation? He was going on a strange errand--to ask shelter for
this waif. Then there occurred to him the beautiful story Plutarch
somewhere tells of the Delphic women: how when the Maenads, outworn with
their torch-lit wanderings, lay down to sleep in the market-place, the
matrons came and stood silently round them to keep guard over their
slumbers; then, when they waked, ministered to them tenderly and saw them
safely to their own borders. He could trust the women he was going to for
having hearts as good.

Deronda felt himself growing older this evening and entering on a new
phase in finding a life to which his own had come--perhaps as a rescue;
but how to make sure that snatching from death was rescue? The moment of
finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation
as the moment of finding an idea.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Life is a various mother: now she dons
Her plumes and brilliants, climbs the marble stairs
With head aloft, nor ever turns her eyes
On lackeys who attend her; now she dwells
Grim-clad, up darksome allyes, breathes hot gin,
And screams in pauper riot.

But to these
She came a frugal matron, neat and deft,
With cheerful morning thoughts and quick device
To find the much in little.

Mrs. Meyrick's house was not noisy: the front parlor looked on the river,
and the back on gardens, so that though she was reading aloud to her
daughters, the window could be left open to freshen the air of the small
double room where a lamp and two candles were burning. The candles were on
a table apart for Kate, who was drawing illustrations for a publisher; the
lamp was not only for the reader but for Amy and Mab, who were
embroidering satin cushions for "the great world."

Outside, the house looked very narrow and shabby, the bright light through
the holland blind showing the heavy old-fashioned window-frame; but it is
pleasant to know that many such grim-walled slices of space in our foggy
London have been and still are the homes of a culture the more spotlessly
free from vulgarity, because poverty has rendered everything like display
an impersonal question, and all the grand shows of the world simply a
spectacle which rouses petty rivalry or vain effort after possession.

The Meyricks' was a home of that kind: and they all clung to this
particular house in a row because its interior was filled with objects
always in the same places, which, for the mother held memories of her
marriage time, and for the young ones seemed as necessary and uncriticised
a part of their world as the stars of the Great Bear seen from the back
windows. Mrs. Meyrick had borne much stint of other matters that she might
be able to keep some engravings specially cherished by her husband; and
the narrow spaces of wall held a world history in scenes and heads which
the children had early learned by heart. The chairs and tables were also
old friends preferred to new. But in these two little parlors with no
furniture that a broker would have cared to cheapen except the prints and
piano, there was space and apparatus for a wide-glancing, nicely-select
life, opened to the highest things in music, painting and poetry. I am not
sure that in the times of greatest scarcity, before Kate could get paid-
work, these ladies had always had a servant to light their fires and sweep
their rooms; yet they were fastidious in some points, and could not
believe that the manners of ladies in the fashionable world were so full
of coarse selfishness, petty quarreling, and slang as they are represented
to be in what are called literary photographs. The Meyricks had their
little oddities, streaks of eccentricity from the mother's blood as well
as the father's, their minds being like mediaeval houses with unexpected
recesses and openings from this into that, flights of steps and sudden
outlooks.

But mother and daughters were all united by a triple bond--family love;
admiration for the finest work, the best action; and habitual industry.
Hans' desire to spend some of his money in making their lives more
luxurious had been resisted by all of them, and both they and he had been
thus saved from regrets at the threatened triumphs of his yearning for art
over the attractions of secured income--a triumph that would by-and-by
oblige him to give up his fellowship. They could all afford to laugh at
his Gavarni-caricatures and to hold him blameless in following a natural
bent which their unselfishness and independence had left without obstacle.
It was enough for them to go on in their old way, only having a grand
treat of opera-going (to the gallery) when Hans came home on a visit.

Seeing the group they made this evening, one could hardly wish them to
change their way of life. They were all alike small, and so in due
proportion to their miniature rooms. Mrs. Meyrick was reading aloud from a
French book; she was a lively little woman, half French, half Scotch, with
a pretty articulateness of speech that seemed to make daylight in her
hearer's understanding. Though she was not yet fifty, her rippling hair,
covered by a quakerish net cap, was chiefly gray, but her eyebrows were
brown as the bright eyes below them; her black dress, almost like a
priest's cassock with its rows of buttons, suited a neat figure hardly
five feet high. The daughters were to match the mother, except that Mab
had Hans' light hair and complexion, with a bossy, irregular brow, and
other quaintnesses that reminded one of him. Everything about them was
compact, from the firm coils of their hair, fastened back _a la Chinoise_,
to their gray skirts in Puritan nonconformity with the fashion, which at
that time would have demanded that four feminine circumferences should
fill all the free space in the front parlor. All four, if they had been
wax-work, might have been packed easily in a fashionable lady's traveling
trunk. Their faces seemed full of speech, as if their minds had been
shelled, after the manner of horse-chestnuts, and become brightly visible.
The only large thing of its kind in the room was Hafiz, the Persian cat,
comfortably poised on the brown leather back of a chair, and opening his
large eyes now and then to see that the lower animals were not in any
mischief.

The book Mrs. Meyrick had before her was Erckmann-Chatrian's _Historie
d'un Conscrit_. She had just finished reading it aloud, and Mab, who had
let her work fall on the ground while she stretched her head forward and
fixed her eyes on the reader, exclaimed--

"I think that is the finest story in the world."

"Of course, Mab!" said Amy, "it is the last you have heard. Everything
that pleases you is the best in its turn."

"It is hardly to be called a story," said Kate. "It is a bit of history
brought near us with a strong telescope. We can see the soldiers' faces:
no, it is more than that--we can hear everything--we can almost hear their
hearts beat."

"I don't care what you call it," said Mab, flirting away her thimble.
"Call it a chapter in Revelations. It makes me want to do something good,
something grand. It makes me so sorry for everybody. It makes me like
Schiller--I want to take the world in my arms and kiss it. I must kiss you
instead, little mother?" She threw her arms round her mother's neck.

"Whenever you are in that mood, Mab, down goes your work," said Amy. "It
would be doing something good to finish your cushion without soiling it."

"Oh--oh--oh!" groaned Mab, as she stooped to pick up her work and thimble.
"I wish I had three wounded conscripts to take care of."

"You would spill their beef-tea while you were talking," said Amy.

"Poor Mab! don't be hard on her," said the mother. "Give me the embroidery
now, child. You go on with your enthusiasm, and I will go on with the pink
and white poppy."

"Well, ma, I think you are more caustic than Amy," said Kate, while she
drew her head back to look at her drawing.

"Oh--oh--oh!" cried Mab again, rising and stretching her arms. "I wish
something wonderful would happen. I feel like the deluge. The waters of
the great deep are broken up, and the windows of heaven are opened. I must
sit down and play the scales."

Mab was opening the piano while the others were laughing at this climax,
when a cab stopped before the house, and there forthwith came a quick rap
of the knocker.

"Dear me!" said Mrs. Meyrick, starting up, "it is after ten, and Phoebe is
gone to bed." She hastened out, leaving the parlor door open.

"Mr. Deronda!" The girls could hear this exclamation from their mamma. Mab
clasped her hands, saying in a loud whisper, "There now! something _is_
going to happen." Kate and Amy gave up their work in amazement. But
Deronda's tone in reply was so low that they could not hear his words, and
Mrs. Meyrick immediately closed the parlor door.

"I know I am trusting to your goodness in a most extraordinary way,"
Deronda went on, after giving his brief narrative; "but you can imagine
how helpless I feel with a young creature like this on my hands. I could
not go with her among strangers, and in her nervous state I should dread
taking her into a house full of servants. I have trusted to your mercy. I
hope you will not think my act unwarrantable."

"On the contrary. You have honored me by trusting me. I see your
difficulty. Pray bring her in. I will go and prepare the girls."

While Deronda went back to the cab, Mrs. Meyrick turned into the parlor
again and said: "Here is somebody to take care of instead of your wounded
conscripts, Mab: a poor girl who was going to drown herself in despair.
Mr. Deronda found her only just in time to save her. He brought her along
in his boat, and did not know what else it would be safe to do with her,
so he has trusted us and brought her here. It seems she is a Jewess, but
quite refined, he says--knowing Italian and music."

The three girls, wondering and expectant, came forward and stood near each
other in mute confidence that they were all feeling alike under this
appeal to their compassion. Mab looked rather awe-stricken, as if this
answer to her wish were something preternatural.

Meanwhile Deronda going to the door of the cab where the pale face was now
gazing out with roused observation, said, "I have brought you to some of
the kindest people in the world: there are daughters like you. It is a
happy home. Will you let me take you to them?"

She stepped out obediently, putting her hand in his and forgetting her
hat; and when Deronda led her into the full light of the parlor where the
four little women stood awaiting her, she made a picture that would have
stirred much duller sensibilities than theirs. At first she was a little
dazed by the sudden light, and before she had concentrated her glance he
had put her hand into the mother's. He was inwardly rejoicing that the
Meyricks were so small: the dark-curled head was the highest among them.
The poor wanderer could not be afraid of these gentle faces so near hers:
and now she was looking at each of them in turn while the mother said,
"You must be weary, poor child."

"We will take care of you--we will comfort you--we will love you," cried
Mab, no longer able to restrain herself, and taking the small right hand
caressingly between both her own. This gentle welcoming warmth was
penetrating the bewildered one: she hung back just enough to see better
the four faces in front of her, whose good will was being reflected in
hers, not in any smile, but in that undefinable change which tells us that
anxiety is passing in contentment. For an instant she looked up at
Deronda, as if she were referring all this mercy to him, and then again
turning to Mrs. Meyrick, said with more collectedness in her sweet tones
than he had heard before--

"I am a stranger. I am a Jewess. You might have thought I was wicked."

"No, we are sure you are good," burst out Mab.

"We think no evil of you, poor child. You shall be safe with us," said
Mrs. Meyrick. "Come now and sit down. You must have some food, and then
you must go to rest."

The stranger looked up again at Deronda, who said--

"You will have no more fears with these friends? You will rest to-night?"

"Oh, I should not fear. I should rest. I think these are the ministering
angels."

Mrs. Meyrick wanted to lead her to seat, but again hanging back gently,
the poor weary thing spoke as if with a scruple at being received without
a further account of herself.

"My name is Mirah Lapidoth. I am come a long way, all the way from Prague
by myself. I made my escape. I ran away from dreadful things. I came to
find my mother and brother in London. I had been taken from my mother when
I was little, but I thought I could find her again. I had trouble--the
houses were all gone--I could not find her. It has been a long while, and
I had not much money. That is why I am in distress."

"Our mother will be good to you," cried Mab. "See what a nice little
mother she is!"

"Do sit down now," said Kate, moving a chair forward, while Amy ran to get
some tea.

Mirah resisted no longer, but seated herself with perfect grace, crossing
her little feet, laying her hands one over the other on her lap, and
looking at her friends with placid reverence; whereupon Hafiz, who had
been watching the scene restlessly came forward with tail erect and rubbed
himself against her ankles. Deronda felt it time to go.

"Will you allow me to come again and inquire--perhaps at five to-morrow?"
he said to Mrs. Meyrick.

"Yes, pray; we shall have had time to make acquaintance then."

"Good-bye," said Deronda, looking down at Mirah, and putting out his hand.
She rose as she took it, and the moment brought back to them both strongly
the other moment when she had first taken that outstretched hand. She
lifted her eyes to his and said with reverential fervor, "The God of our
fathers bless you and deliver you from all evil as you have delivered me.
I did not believe there was any man so good. None before have thought me
worthy of the best. You found me poor and miserable, yet you have given me
the best."

Deronda could not speak, but with silent adieux to the Meyricks, hurried
away.

BOOK III--MAIDENS CHOOSING.

CHAPTER XIX.

"I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and say, 'Tis
all barren': and so it is: and so is all the world to him who will not
cultivate the fruits it offers."--STERNE: _Sentimental Journey_.

To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under
his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervor which
made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of every-day
life. And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world
except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have
regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily
in the same room with the microscope and even in railway carriages: what
banishes them in the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should
all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the
tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that
had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which
thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to
the near?

To Deronda this event of finding Mirah was as heart-stirring as anything
that befell Orestes or Rinaldo. He sat up half the night, living again
through the moments since he had first discerned Mirah on the river-brink,
with the fresh and fresh vividness which belongs to emotive memory. When
he took up a book to try and dull this urgency of inward vision, the
printed words were no more than a network through which he saw and heard
everything as clearly as before--saw not only the actual events of two
hours, but possibilities of what had been and what might be which those
events were enough to feed with the warm blood of passionate hope and
fear. Something in his own experience caused Mirah's search after her
mother to lay hold with peculiar force on his imagination. The first
prompting of sympathy was to aid her in her search: if given persons were
extant in London there were ways of finding them, as subtle as scientific
experiment, the right machinery being set at work. But here the mixed
feelings which belonged to Deronda's kindred experience naturally
transfused themselves into his anxiety on behalf of Mirah.

The desire to know his own mother, or to know about her, was constantly
haunted with dread; and in imagining what might befall Mirah it quickly
occurred to him that finding the mother and brother from whom she had been
parted when she was a little one might turn out to be a calamity. When she
was in the boat she said that her mother and brother were good; but the
goodness might have been chiefly in her own ignorant innocence and
yearning memory, and the ten or twelve years since the parting had been
time enough for much worsening. Spite of his strong tendency to side with
the objects of prejudice, and in general with those who got the worst of
it, his interest had never been practically drawn toward existing Jews,
and the facts he knew about them, whether they walked conspicuous in fine
apparel or lurked in by-streets, were chiefly of a sort most repugnant to
him. Of learned and accomplished Jews he took it for granted that they had
dropped their religion, and wished to be merged in the people of their
native lands. Scorn flung at a Jew as such would have roused all his
sympathy in griefs of inheritance; but the indiscriminate scorn of a race
will often strike a specimen who has well earned it on his own account,
and might fairly be gibbeted as a rascally son of Adam. It appears that
the Caribs, who know little of theology, regard thieving as a practice
peculiarly connected with Christian tenets, and probably they could allege
experimental grounds for this opinion. Deronda could not escape (who can?)
knowing ugly stories of Jewish characteristics and occupations; and though
one of his favorite protests was against the severance of past and present
history, he was like others who shared his protest, in never having cared
to reach any more special conclusions about actual Jews than that they
retained the virtues and vices of a long-oppressed race. But now that
Mirah's longing roused his mind to a closer survey of details, very
disagreeable images urged themselves of what it might be to find out this
middle-aged Jewess and her son. To be sure, there was the exquisite
refinement and charm of the creature herself to make a presumption in
favor of her immediate kindred, but--he must wait to know more: perhaps
through Mrs. Meyrick he might gather some guiding hints from Mirah's own
lips. Her voice, her accent, her looks--all the sweet purity that clothed
her as with a consecrating garment made him shrink the more from giving
her, either ideally or practically, an association with what was hateful
or contaminating. But these fine words with which we fumigate and becloud
unpleasant facts are not the language in which we think. Deronda's
thinking went on in rapid images of what might be: he saw himself guided
by some official scout into a dingy street; he entered through a dim
doorway, and saw a hawk-eyed woman, rough-headed, and unwashed, cheapening
a hungry girl's last bit of finery; or in some quarter only the more
hideous for being smarter, he found himself under the breath of a young
Jew talkative and familiar, willing to show his acquaintance with
gentlemen's tastes, and not fastidious in any transactions with which they
would favor him--and so on through the brief chapter of his experience in
this kind. Excuse him: his mind was not apt to run spontaneously into
insulting ideas, or to practice a form of wit which identifies Moses with
the advertisement sheet; but he was just now governed by dread, and if
Mirah's parents had been Christian, the chief difference would have been
that his forebodings would have been fed with wider knowledge. It was the
habit of his mind to connect dread with unknown parentage, and in this
case as well as his own there was enough to make the connection
reasonable.

But what was to be done with Mirah? She needed shelter and protection in
the fullest sense, and all his chivalrous sentiment roused itself to
insist that the sooner and the more fully he could engage for her the
interest of others besides himself, the better he should fulfill her
claims on him. He had no right to provide for her entirely, though he
might be able to do so; the very depth of the impression she had produced
made him desire that she should understand herself to be entirely
independent of him; and vague visions of the future which he tried to
dispel as fantastic left their influence in an anxiety stronger than any
motive he could give for it, that those who saw his actions closely should
be acquainted from the first with the history of his relation to Mirah. He
had learned to hate secrecy about the grand ties and obligations of his
life--to hate it the more because a strong spell of interwoven
sensibilities hindered him from breaking such secrecy. Deronda had made a
vow to himself that--since the truths which disgrace mortals are not all
of their own making--the truth should never be made a disgrace to another
by his act. He was not without terror lest he should break this vow, and
fall into the apologetic philosophy which explains the world into
containing nothing better than one's own conduct.

At one moment he resolved to tell the whole of his adventure to Sir Hugo
and Lady Mallinger the next morning at breakfast, but the possibility that
something quite new might reveal itself on his next visit to Mrs.
Meyrick's checked this impulse, and he finally went to sleep on the
conclusion that he would wait until that visit had been made.

CHAPTER XX.

"It will hardly be denied that even in this frail and corrupted world,
we sometimes meet persons who, in their very mien and aspect, as well
as in the whole habit of life, manifest such a signature and stamp of
virtue, as to make our judgment of them a matter of intuition rather
than the result of continued examination."--ALEXANDER KNOX: quoted in
Southey's Life of Wesley.

Mirah said that she had slept well that night; and when she came down in
Mab's black dress, her dark hair curling in fresh fibrils as it gradually
dried from its plenteous bath, she looked like one who was beginning to
take comfort after the long sorrow and watching which had paled her cheek
and made blue semicircles under her eyes. It was Mab who carried her
breakfast and ushered her down--with some pride in the effect produced by
a pair of tiny felt slippers which she had rushed out to buy because there
were no shoes in the house small enough for Mirah, whose borrowed dress
ceased about her ankles and displayed the cheap clothing that, moulding
itself on her feet, seemed an adornment as choice as the sheaths of buds.
The farthing buckles were bijoux.

"Oh, if you please, mamma?" cried Mab, clasping her hands and stooping
toward Mirah's feet, as she entered the parlor; "look at the slippers, how
beautiful they fit! I declare she is like the Queen Budoor--' two delicate
feet, the work of the protecting and all-recompensing Creator, support
her; and I wonder how they can sustain what is above them.'"

Mirah looked down at her own feet in a childlike way and then smiled at
Mrs. Meyrick, who was saying inwardly, "One could hardly imagine this
creature having an evil thought. But wise people would tell me to be
cautious." She returned Mirah's smile and said, "I fear the feet have had
to sustain their burden a little too often lately. But to-day she will
rest and be my companion."

"And she will tell you so many things and I shall not hear them," grumbled
Mab, who felt herself in the first volume of a delightful romance and
obliged to miss some chapters because she had to go to pupils.

Kate was already gone to make sketches along the river, and Amy was away
on business errands. It was what the mother wished, to be alone with this
stranger, whose story must be a sorrowful one, yet was needful to be told.

The small front parlor was as good as a temple that morning. The sunlight
was on the river and soft air came in through the open window; the walls
showed a glorious silent cloud of witnesses--the Virgin soaring amid her
cherubic escort; grand Melancholia with her solemn universe; the Prophets
and Sibyls; the School of Athens; the Last Supper; mystic groups where
far-off ages made one moment; grave Holbein and Rembrandt heads; the
Tragic Muse; last-century children at their musings or their play; Italian
poets--all were there through the medium of a little black and white. The
neat mother who had weathered her troubles, and come out of them with a
face still cheerful, was sorting colored wools for her embroidery. Hafiz
purred on the window-ledge, the clock on the mantle-piece ticked without
hurry, and the occasional sound of wheels seemed to lie outside the more
massive central quiet. Mrs. Meyrick thought that this quiet might be the
best invitation to speech on the part of her companion, and chose not to
disturb it by remark. Mirah sat opposite in her former attitude, her hands
clasped on her lap, her ankles crossed, her eyes at first traveling slowly
over the objects around her, but finally resting with a sort of placid
reverence on Mrs. Meyrick. At length she began to speak softly.