Daniel Deronda

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"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 Joseph 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 Faellen.'"

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

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 _role_ 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.
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."