Daniel Deronda

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"Then why have you now undone the secrecy?--no, not undone it--the effects
will never be undone. But why have you now sent for me to tell me that I
am a Jew?" said Deronda, with an intensity of opposition in feeling that
was almost bitter. It seemed as if her words had called out a latent
obstinacy of race in him.

"Why?--ah, why?" said the Princess, rising quickly and walking to the
other side of the room, where she turned round and slowly approached him,
as he, too, stood up. Then she began to speak again in a more veiled
voice. "I can't explain; I can only say what is. I don't love my father's
religion now any more than I did then. Before I married the second time I
was baptized; I made myself like the people I lived among. I had a right
to do it; I was not like a brute, obliged to go with my own herd. I have
not repented; I will not say that I have repented. But yet"--here she had
come near to her son, and paused; then again retreated a little and stood
still, as if resolute not to give way utterly to an imperious influence;
but, as she went on speaking, she became more and more unconscious of
anything but the awe that subdued her voice. "It is illness, I don't doubt
that it has been gathering illness--my mind has gone back: more than a
year ago it began. You see my gray hair, my worn look: it has all come
fast. Sometimes I am in an agony of pain--I dare say I shall be to-night.
Then it is as if all the life I have chosen to live, all thoughts, all
will, forsook me and left me alone in spots of memory, and I can't get
away: my pain seems to keep me there. My childhood--my girlhood--the day
of my marriage--the day of my father's death--there seems to be nothing
since. Then a great horror comes over me: what do I know of life or death?
and what my father called 'right' may be a power that is laying hold of
me--that is clutching me now. Well, I will satisfy him. I cannot go into
the darkness without satisfying him. I have hidden what was his. I thought
once I would burn it. I have not burned it. I thank God I have not burned
it!"

She threw herself on her cushions again, visibly fatigued. Deronda, moved
too strongly by her suffering for other impulses to act within him, drew
near her, and said, entreatingly--

"Will you not spare yourself this evening? Let us leave the rest till to-
morrow."

"No," she said decisively. "I will confess it all, now that I have come up
to it. Often when I am at ease it all fades away; my whole self comes
quite back; but I know it will sink away again, and the other will come--
the poor, solitary, forsaken remains of self, that can resist nothing. It
was my nature to resist, and say, 'I have a right to resist.' Well, I say
so still when I have any strength in me. You have heard me say it, and I
don't withdraw it. But when my strength goes, some other right forces
itself upon me like iron in an inexorable hand; and even when I am at
ease, it is beginning to make ghosts upon the daylight. And now you have
made it worse for me," she said, with a sudden return of impetuosity; "but
I shall have told you everything. And what reproach is there against me,"
she added bitterly, "since I have made you glad to be a Jew? Joseph
Kalonymos reproached me: he said you had been turned into a proud
Englishman, who resented being touched by a Jew. I wish you had!" she
ended, with a new marvelous alternation. It was as if her mind were
breaking into several, one jarring the other into impulsive action.

"Who is Joseph Kalonymos?" said Deronda, with a darting recollection of
that Jew who touched his arm in the Frankfort synagogue.

"Ah! some vengeance sent him back from the East, that he might see you and
come to reproach me. He was my father's friend. He knew of your birth: he
knew of my husband's death, and once, twenty years ago, after he had been
away in the Levant, he came to see me and inquire about you. I told him
that you were dead: I meant you to be dead to all the world of my
childhood. If I had said that your were living, he would have interfered
with my plans: he would have taken on him to represent my father, and have
tried to make me recall what I had done. What could I do but say you were
dead? The act was done. If I had told him of it there would have been
trouble and scandal--and all to conquer me, who would not have been
conquered. I was strong then, and I would have had my will, though there
might have been a hard fight against me. I took the way to have it without
any fight. I felt then that I was not really deceiving: it would have come
to the same in the end; or if not to the same, to something worse. He
believed me and begged that I would give up to him the chest that my
father had charged me and my husband to deliver to our eldest son. I knew
what was in the chest--things that had been dinned in my ears since I had
had any understanding--things that were thrust on my mind that I might
feel them like a wall around my life--my life that was growing like a
tree. Once, after my husband died, I was going to burn the chest. But it
was difficult to burn; and burning a chest and papers looks like a
shameful act. I have committed no shameful act--except what Jews would
call shameful. I had kept the chest, and I gave it to Joseph Kalonymos. He
went away mournful, and said, 'If you marry again, and if another grandson
is born to him who is departed, I will deliver up the chest to him.' I
bowed in silence. I meant not to marry again--no more than I meant to be
the shattered woman that I am now."

She ceased speaking, and her head sank back while she looked vaguely
before her. Her thought was traveling through the years, and when she
began to speak again her voice had lost its argumentative spirit, and had
fallen into a veiled tone of distress.

"But months ago this Kalonymos saw you in the synagogue at Frankfort. He
saw you enter the hotel, and he went to ask your name. There was nobody
else in the world to whom the name would have told anything about me."

"Then it is not my real name?" said Deronda, with a dislike even to this
trifling part of the disguise which had been thrown round him.

"Oh, as real as another," said his mother, indifferently. "The Jews have
always been changing their names. My father's family had kept the name of
Charisi: my husband was a Charisi. When I came out as a singer, we made it
Alcharisi. But there had been a branch of the family my father had lost
sight of who called themselves Deronda, and when I wanted a name for you,
and Sir Hugo said, 'Let it be a foreign name,' I thought of Deronda. But
Joseph Kalonymos had heard my father speak of the Deronda branch, and the
name confirmed his suspicion. He began to suspect what had been done. It
was as if everything had been whispered to him in the air. He found out
where I was. He took a journey into Russia to see me; he found me weak and
shattered. He had come back again, with his white hair, and with rage in
his soul against me. He said I was going down to the grave clad in
falsehood and robbery--falsehood to my father and robbery of my own child.
He accused me of having kept the knowledge of your birth from you, and
having brought you up as if you had been the son of an English gentleman.
Well, it was true; and twenty years before I would have maintained that I
had a right to do it. But I can maintain nothing now. No faith is strong
within me. My father may have God on his side. This man's words were like
lion's teeth upon me. My father's threats eat into me with my pain. If I
tell everything--if I deliver up everything--what else can be demanded of
me? I cannot make myself love the people I have never loved--is it not
enough that I lost the life I did love?"

She had leaned forward a little in her low-toned pleading, that seemed
like a smothered cry: her arms and hands were stretched out at full
length, as if strained in beseeching, Deronda's soul was absorbed in the
anguish of compassion. He could not mind now that he had been repulsed
before. His pity made a flood of forgiveness within him. His single
impulse was to kneel by her and take her hand gently, between his palms,
while he said in that exquisite voice of soothing which expresses oneness
with the sufferer--

"Mother, take comfort!"

She did not seem inclined to repulse him now, but looked down at him and
let him take both her hands to fold between his. Gradually tears gathered,
but she pressed her handkerchief against her eyes and then leaned her
cheek against his brow, as if she wished that they should not look at each
other.

"Is it not possible that I could be near you often and comfort you?" said
Deronda. He was under that stress of pity that propels us on sacrifices.

"No, not possible," she answered, lifting up her head again and
withdrawing her hand as if she wished him to move away. "I have a husband
and five children. None of them know of your existence."

Deronda felt painfully silenced. He rose and stood at a little distance.

"You wonder why I married," she went on presently, under the influence of
a newly-recurring thought. "I meant never to marry again. I meant to be
free and to live for my art. I had parted with you. I had no bonds. For
nine years I was a queen. I enjoyed the life I had longed for. But
something befell me. It was like a fit of forgetfulness. I began to sing
out of tune. They told me of it. Another woman was thrusting herself in my
place. I could not endure the prospect of failure and decline. It was
horrible to me." She started up again, with a shudder, and lifted
screening hands like one who dreads missiles. "It drove me to marry. I
made believe that I preferred being the wife of a Russian noble to being
the greatest lyric actress of Europe; I made believe--I acted that part.
It was because I felt my greatness sinking away from me, as I feel my life
sinking now. I would not wait till men said, 'She had better go.'"

She sank into her seat again, and looked at the evening sky as she went
on: "I repented. It was a resolve taken in desperation. That singing out
of tune was only like a fit of illness; it went away. I repented; but it
was too late. I could not go back. All things hindered, me--all things."

A new haggardness had come in her face, but her son refrained from again
urging her to leave further speech till the morrow: there was evidently
some mental relief for her in an outpouring such as she could never have
allowed herself before. He stood still while she maintained silence longer
than she knew, and the light was perceptibly fading. At last she turned to
him and said--

"I can bear no more now." She put out her hand, but then quickly withdrew
it saying, "Stay. How do I know that I can see you again? I cannot bear to
be seen when I am in pain."

She drew forth a pocket-book, and taking out a letter said, "This is
addressed to the banking-house in Mainz, where you are to go for your
grandfather's chest. It is a letter written by Joseph Kalonymos: if he is
not there himself, this order of his will be obeyed."

When Deronda had taken the letter, she said, with effort but more gently
than before, "Kneel again, and let me kiss you."

He obeyed, and holding his head between her hands, she kissed him solemnly
on the brow. "You see, I had no life left to love you with," she said, in
a low murmur. "But there is more fortune for you. Sir Hugo was to keep it
in reserve. I gave you all your father's fortune. They can never accuse me
of robbery there."

"If you had needed anything I would have worked for you," said Deronda,
conscious of disappointed yearning--a shutting out forever from long early
vistas of affectionate imagination.

"I need nothing that the skill of man can give me," said his mother, still
holding his head, and perusing his features. "But perhaps now I have
satisfied my father's will, your face will come instead of his--your
young, loving face."

"But you will see me again?" said Deronda, anxiously.

"Yes--perhaps. Wait, wait. Leave me now."

CHAPTER LII.

"La meme fermete qui sert a resister a l'amour sert aussi a le rendre
violent et durable; et les personnes faibles qui sont toujours
agitees des passions n'en sont presque jamais veritablement remplies."
--LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.

Among Deronda's letters the next morning was one from Hans Meyrick of four
quarto pages, in the small, beautiful handwriting which ran in the Meyrick
family.

MY DEAR DERONDA,--In return for your sketch of Italian movements and
your view of the world's affairs generally, I may say that here at
home the most judicious opinion going as to the effects of present
causes is that "time will show." As to the present causes of past
effects, it is now seen that the late swindling telegrams account for
the last year's cattle plague--which is a refutation of philosophy
falsely so called, and justifies the compensation to the farmers. My
own idea that a murrain will shortly break out in the commercial
class, and that the cause will subsequently disclose itself in the
ready sale of all rejected pictures, has been called an unsound use of
analogy; but there are minds that will not hesitate to rob even the
neglected painter of his solace. To my feeling there is great beauty
in the conception that some bad judge might give a high price for my
Berenice series, and that the men in the city would have already been
punished for my ill-merited luck.

Meanwhile I am consoling myself for your absence by finding my
advantage in it--shining like Hesperus when Hyperion has departed;
sitting with our Hebrew prophet, and making a study of his head, in
the hours when he used to be occupied with you--getting credit with
him as a learned young Gentile, who would have been a Jew if he could
--and agreeing with him in the general principle, that whatever is
best is for that reason Jewish. I never held it my _forte_ to be
a severe reasoner, but I can see that if whatever is best is A, and B
happens to be best, B must be A, however little you might have
expected it beforehand. On that principle I could see the force of a
pamphlet I once read to prove that all good art was Protestant.
However, our prophet is an uncommonly interesting sitter--a better
model than Rembrandt had for his Rabbi--and I never come away from him
without a new discovery. For one thing, it is a constant wonder to me
that, with all his fiery feeling for his race and their traditions, he
is no straight-laced Jew, spitting after the word Christian, and
enjoying the prospect that the Gentile mouth will water in vain for a
slice of the roasted Leviathan, while Israel will be sending up plates
for more, _ad libitum_, (You perceive that my studies had taught
me what to expect from the orthodox Jew.) I confess that I have always
held lightly by your account of Mordecai, as apologetic, and merely
part of your disposition to make an antedeluvian point of view lest
you should do injustice to the megatherium. But now I have given ear
to him in his proper person, I find him really a sort of
philosophical-allegorical-mystical believer, and yet with a sharp
dialectic point, so that any argumentative rattler of peas in a
bladder might soon be pricked in silence by him. The mixture may be
one of the Jewish prerogatives, for what I know. In fact, his mind
seems so broad that I find my own correct opinions lying in it quite
commodiously, and how they are to be brought into agreement with the
vast remainder is his affair, not mine. I leave it to him to settle
our basis, never yet having seen a basis which is not a world-
supporting elephant, more or less powerful and expensive to keep. My
means will not allow me to keep a private elephant. I go into mystery
instead, as cheaper and more lasting--a sort of gas which is likely to
be continually supplied by the decomposition of the elephants. And if
I like the look of an opinion, I treat it civilly, without suspicious
inquiries. I have quite a friendly feeling toward Mordecai's notion
that a whole Christian is three-fourths a Jew, and that from the
Alexandrian time downward the most comprehensive minds have been
Jewish; for I think of pointing out to Mirah that, Arabic and other
incidents of life apart, there is really little difference between me
and--Maimonides. But I have lately been finding out that it is your
shallow lover who can't help making a declaration. If Mirah's ways
were less distracting, and it were less of a heaven to be in her
presence and watch her, I must long ago have flung myself at her feet,
and requested her to tell me, with less indirectness, whether she
wished me to blow my brains out. I have a knack of hoping, which is as
good as an estate in reversion, if one can keep from the temptation of
turning it into certainty, which may spoil all. My Hope wanders among
the orchard blossoms, feels the warm snow falling on it through the
sunshine, and is in doubt of nothing; but, catching sight of Certainty
in the distance, sees an ugly Janus-faced deity, with a dubious wink
on the hither side of him, and turns quickly away. But you, with your
supreme reasonableness, and self-nullification, and preparation for
the worst--you know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious
maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called
deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment,
whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only escapes by
transformation. (You observe my new vein of allegory?) Seriously,
however, I must be permitted to allege that truth will prevail, that
prejudice will melt before it, that diversity, accompanied by merit,
will make itself felt as fascination, and that no virtuous aspiration
will be frustrated--all which, if I mistake not, are doctrines of the
schools, and they imply that the Jewess I prefer will prefer me. Any
blockhead can cite generalities, but the mind-master discerns the
particular cases they represent.

I am less convinced that my society makes amends to Mordecai for your
absence, but another substitute occasionally comes in the form of
Jacob Cohen. It is worth while to catch our prophet's expression when
he has that remarkable type of young Israel on his knee, and pours
forth some Semitic inspiration with a sublime look of melancholy
patience and devoutness. Sometimes it occurs to Jacob that Hebrew will
be more edifying to him if he stops his ears with his palms, and
imitates the venerable sounds as heard through that muffled medium.
When Mordecai gently draws down the little fists and holds them fast,
Jacob's features all take on an extraordinary activity, very much as
if he was walking through a menagerie and trying to imitate every
animal in turn, succeeding best with the owl and the peccary. But I
dare say you have seen something of this. He treats me with the
easiest familiarity, and seems in general to look at me as a second-
hand Christian commodity, likely to come down in price; remarking on
my disadvantages with a frankness which seems to imply some thoughts
of future purchase. It is pretty, though, to see the change in him if
Mirah happens to come in. He turns child suddenly--his age usually
strikes one as being like the Israelitish garments in the desert,
perhaps near forty, yet with an air of recent production. But, with
Mirah, he reminds me of the dogs that have been brought up by women,
and remain manageable by them only. Still, the dog is fond of Mordecai
too, and brings sugar-plums to share with him, filling his own mouth
to rather an embarrassing extent, and watching how Mordecai deals with
a smaller supply. Judging from this modern Jacob at the age of six, my
astonishment is that his race has not bought us all up long ago, and
pocketed our feebler generations in the form of stock and scrip, as so
much slave property. There is one Jewess I should not mind being slave
to. But I wish I did not imagine that Mirah gets a little sadder, and
tries all the while to hide it. It is natural enough, of course, while
she has to watch the slow death of this brother, whom she has taken to
worshipping with such looks of loving devoutness that I am ready to
wish myself in his place.

For the rest, we are a little merrier than usual. Rex Gascoigne--you
remember a head you admired among my sketches, a fellow with a good
upper lip, reading law--has got some rooms in town now not far off us,
and has had a neat sister (upper lip also good) staying with him the
last fortnight. I have introduced them both to my mother and the
girls, who have found out from Miss Gascoigne that she is cousin to
your Vandyke duchess!!! I put the notes of exclamation to mark the
surprise that the information at first produced on my feeble
understanding. On reflection I discovered that there was not the least
ground for surprise, unless I had beforehand believed that nobody
could be anybody's cousin without my knowing it. This sort of
surprise, I take it, depends on a liveliness of the spine, with a more
or less constant nullity of brain. There was a fellow I used to meet
at Rome who was in an effervescence of surprise at contact with the
simplest information. Tell him what you would--that you were fond of
easy boots--he would always say, "No! are you?" with the same energy
of wonder: the very fellow of whom pastoral Browne wrote
prophetically--

"A wretch so empty that if e'er there be
In nature found the least vacuity
'Twill be in him."

I have accounted for it all--he had a lively spine.

However, this cousinship with the duchess came out by chance one day
that Mirah was with them at home and they were talking about the
Mallingers. _Apropos_; I am getting so important that I have
rival invitations. Gascoigne wants me to go down with him to his
father's rectory in August and see the country round there. But I
think self-interest well understood will take me to Topping Abbey, for
Sir Hugo has invited me, and proposes--God bless him for his rashness!
--that I should make a picture of his three daughters sitting on a
bank--as he says, in the Gainsborough style. He came to my studio the
other day and recommended me to apply myself to portrait. Of course I
know what that means.--"My good fellow, your attempts at the historic
and poetic are simply pitiable. Your brush is just that of a
successful portrait-painter--it has a little truth and a great
facility in falsehood--your idealism will never do for gods and
goddesses and heroic story, but it may fetch a high price as flattery.
Fate, my friend, has made you the hinder wheel--_rota posterior
curras, et in axe secundo_--run behind, because you can't help it."
--What great effort it evidently costs our friends to give us these
candid opinions! I have even known a man to take the trouble to call,
in order to tell me that I had irretrievably exposed my want of
judgment in treating my subject, and that if I had asked him we would
have lent me his own judgment. Such was my ingratitude and my
readiness at composition, that even while he was speaking I inwardly
sketched a Last Judgment with that candid friend's physiognomy on the
left. But all this is away from Sir Hugo, whose manner of implying
that one's gifts are not of the highest order is so exceedingly good-
natured and comfortable that I begin to feel it an advantage not to be
among those poor fellows at the tip-top. And his kindness to me tastes
all the better because it comes out of his love for you, old boy. His
chat is uncommonly amusing. By the way, he told me that your Vandyke
duchess is gone with her husband yachting to the Mediterranean. I
bethink me that it is possible to land from a yacht, or to be taken on
to a yacht from the land. Shall you by chance have an opportunity of
continuing your theological discussion with the fair Supralapsarian--I
think you said her tenets were of that complexion? Is Duke Alphonso
also theological?--perhaps an Arian who objects to triplicity. (Stage
direction. While D. is reading, a profound scorn gathers in his face
till at the last word he flings down the letter, grasps his coat-
collar in a statuesque attitude and so remains with a look generally
tremendous, throughout the following soliloquy, "O night, O blackness,
etc., etc.")

Excuse the brevity of this letter. You are not used to more from me
than a bare statement of facts, without comment or digression. One
fact I have omitted--that the Klesmers on the eve of departure have
behaved magnificently, shining forth as might be expected from the
planets of genius and fortune in conjunction. Mirah is rich with their
oriental gifts.