Daniel Deronda

G >> George Eliot >> Daniel Deronda

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69

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 LXVII.

"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
Mallinger's, 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 _a 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 _pate
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."