Daniel Deronda

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"You don't repent the choice of the law as a profession, Rex?" said his
father.

"There is no profession I would choose before it," said Rex. "I should
like to end my life as a first-rate judge, and help to draw up a code. I
reverse the famous dictum. I should say, 'Give me something to do with
making the laws, and let who will make the songs.'"

"You will have to stow in an immense amount of rubbish, I suppose--that's
the worst of it," said the rector.

"I don't see that law-rubbish is worse than any other sort. It is not so
bad as the rubbishy literature that people choke their minds with. It
doesn't make one so dull. Our wittiest men have often been lawyers. Any
orderly way of looking at things as cases and evidence seems to me better
than a perpetual wash of odds and ends bearing on nothing in particular.
And then, from a higher point of view, the foundations and the growth of
law make the most interesting aspects of philosophy and history. Of course
there will be a good deal that is troublesome, drudging, perhaps
exasperating. But the great prizes in life can't be won easily--I see
that."

"Well, my boy, the best augury of a man's success in his profession is
that he thinks it the finest in the world. But I fancy it so with most
work when a man goes into it with a will. Brewitt, the blacksmith, said to
me the other day that his 'prentice had no mind to his trade; 'and yet,
sir,' said Brewitt, 'what would a young fellow have if he doesn't like the
blacksmithing?"

The rector cherished a fatherly delight, which he allowed to escape him
only in moderation. Warham, who had gone to India, he had easily borne
parting with, but Rex was that romance of later life which a man sometimes
finds in a son whom he recognizes as superior to himself, picturing a
future eminence for him according to a variety of famous examples. It was
only to his wife that he said with decision: "Rex will be a distinguished
man, Nancy, I am sure of it--as sure as Paley's father was about his son."

"Was Paley an old bachelor?" said Mrs. Gascoigne.

"That is hardly to the point, my dear," said the rector, who did not
remember that irrelevant detail. And Mrs. Gascoigne felt that she had
spoken rather weakly.

This quiet trotting of time at the rectory was shared by the group who had
exchanged the faded dignity of Offendene for the low white house not a
mile off, well enclosed with evergreens, and known to the villagers, as
"Jodson's." Mrs. Davilow's delicate face showed only a slight deepening of
its mild melancholy, her hair only a few more silver lines, in consequence
of the last year's trials; the four girls had bloomed out a little from
being less in the shade; and the good Jocosa preserved her serviceable
neutrality toward the pleasures and glories of the world as things made
for those who were not "in a situation."

The low narrow drawing-room, enlarged by two quaint projecting windows,
with lattices wide open on a July afternoon to the scent of monthly roses,
the faint murmurs of the garden, and the occasional rare sound of hoofs
and wheels seeming to clarify the succeeding silence, made rather a
crowded, lively scene, Rex and Anna being added to the usual group of six.
Anna, always a favorite with her younger cousins, had much to tell of her
new experience, and the acquaintances she had made in London, and when on
her first visit she came alone, many questions were asked her about
Gwendolen's house in Grosvenor Square, what Gwendolen herself had said,
and what any one else had said about Gwendolen. Had Anna been to see
Gwendolen after she had known about the yacht? No:--an answer which left
speculation free concerning everything connected with that interesting
unknown vessel beyond the fact that Gwendolen had written just before she
set out to say that Mr. Grandcourt and she were going yachting on the
Mediterranean, and again from Marseilles to say that she was sure to like
the yachting, the cabins were very elegant, and she would probably not
send another letter till she had written quite a long diary filled with
_dittos_. Also, this movement of Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt had been
mentioned in "the newspaper;" so that altogether this new phase of
Gwendolen's exalted life made a striking part of the sisters' romance, the
book-devouring Isabel throwing in a corsair or two to make an adventure
that might end well.

But when Rex was present, the girls, according to instructions, never
started this fascinating topic, and to-day there had only been animated
descriptions of the Meyricks and their extraordinary Jewish friends, which
caused some astonished questioning from minds to which the idea of live
Jews, out of a book, suggested a difference deep enough to be almost
zoological, as of a strange race in Pliny's Natural History that might
sleep under the shade of its own ears. Bertha could not imagine what Jews
believed now; and she had a dim idea that they rejected the Old Testament
since it proved the New; Miss Merry thought that Mirah and her brother
could "never have been properly argued with," and the amiable Alice did
not mind what the Jews believed, she was sure she "couldn't bear them."
Mrs. Davilow corrected her by saying that the great Jewish families who
were in society were quite what they ought to be both in London and Paris,
but admitted that the commoner unconverted Jews were objectionable; and
Isabel asked whether Mirah talked just as they did, or whether you might
be with her and not find out that she was a Jewess.

Rex, who had no partisanship with the Israelites, having made a
troublesome acquaintance with the minutiae of their ancient history in the
form of "cram," was amusing himself by playfully exaggerating the notion
of each speaker, while Anna begged them all to understand that he was only
joking, when the laughter was interrupted by the bringing in of a letter
for Mrs. Davilow. A messenger had run with it in great haste from the
rectory. It enclosed a telegram, and as Mrs. Davilow read and re-read it
in silence and agitation, all eyes were turned on her with anxiety, but no
one dared to speak. Looking up at last and seeing the young faces "painted
with fear," she remembered that they might be imagining something worse
than the truth, something like her own first dread which made her unable
to understand what was written, and she said, with a sob which was half
relief--

"My dears, Mr. Grandcourt--" She paused an instant, and then began again,
"Mr. Grandcourt is drowned."

Rex started up as if a missile had been suddenly thrown into the room. He
could not help himself, and Anna's first look was at him. But then,
gathering some self-command while Mrs. Davilow was reading what the rector
had written on the enclosing paper, he said--

"Can I do anything, aunt? Can I carry any word to my father from you?"

"Yes, dear. Tell him I will be ready--he is very good. He says he will go
with me to Genoa--he will be here at half-past six. Jocosa and Alice, help
me to get ready. She is safe--Gwendolen is safe--but she must be ill. I am
sure she must be very ill. Rex, dear--Rex and Anna--go and and tell your
father I will be quite ready. I would not for the world lose another
night. And bless him for being ready so soon. I can travel night and day
till we get there."

Rex and Anna hurried away through the sunshine which was suddenly solemn
to them, without uttering a word to each other: she chiefly possessed by
solicitude about any reopening of his wound, he struggling with a
tumultuary crowd of thoughts that were an offence against his better will.
The tumult being undiminished when they were at the rectory gate, he
said--

"Nannie, I will leave you to say everything to my father. If he wants me
immediately, let me know. I shall stay in the shrubbery for ten minutes--
only ten minutes."

Who has been quite free from egoistic escapes of the imagination,
picturing desirable consequences on his own future in the presence of
another's misfortune, sorrow, or death? The expected promotion or legacy
is the common type of a temptation which makes speech and even prayer a
severe avoidance of the most insistent thoughts, and sometimes raises an
inward shame, a self-distaste that is worse than any other form of
unpleasant companionship. In Rex's nature the shame was immediate, and
overspread like an ugly light all the hurrying images of what might come,
which thrust themselves in with the idea that Gwendolen was again free--
overspread them, perhaps, the more persistently because every phantasm of
a hope was quickly nullified by a more substantial obstacle. Before the
vision of "Gwendolen free" rose the impassable vision of "Gwendolen rich,
exalted, courted;" and if in the former time, when both their lives were
fresh, she had turned from his love with repugnance, what ground was there
for supposing that her heart would be more open to him in the future?

These thoughts, which he wanted to master and suspend, were like a
tumultuary ringing of opposing chimes that he could not escape from by
running. During the last year he had brought himself into a state of calm
resolve, and now it seemed that three words had been enough to undo all
that difficult work, and cast him back into the wretched fluctuations of a
longing which he recognized as simply perturbing and hopeless. And at this
moment the activity of such longing had an untimeliness that made it
repulsive to his better self. Excuse poor Rex; it was not much more than
eighteen months since he had been laid low by an archer who sometimes
touches his arrow with a subtle, lingering poison. The disappointment of a
youthful passion has effects as incalculable as those of small-pox which
may make one person plain and a genius, another less plain and more
foolish, another plain without detriment to his folly, and leave perhaps
the majority without obvious change. Everything depends--not on the mere
fact of disappointment, but--on the nature affected and the force that
stirs it. In Rex's well-endowed nature, brief as the hope had been, the
passionate stirring had gone deep, and the effect of disappointment was
revolutionary, though fraught with a beneficent new order which retained
most of the old virtues; in certain respects he believed that it had
finally determined the bias and color of his life. Now, however, it seemed
that his inward peace was hardly more than that of republican Florence,
and his heart no better than the alarm-bell that made work slack and
tumult busy.

Rex's love had been of that sudden, penetrating, clinging sort which the
ancients knew and sung, and in singing made a fashion of talk for many
moderns whose experience has by no means a fiery, demonic character. To
have the consciousness suddenly steeped with another's personality, to
have the strongest inclinations possessed by an image which retains its
dominance in spite of change and apart from worthiness--nay, to feel a
passion which clings faster for the tragic pangs inflicted by a cruel,
reorganized unworthiness--is a phase of love which in the feeble and
common-minded has a repulsive likeness to his blind animalism insensible
to the higher sway of moral affinity or heaven-lit admiration. But when
this attaching force is present in a nature not of brutish
unmodifiableness, but of a human dignity that can risk itself safely, it
may even result in a devotedness not unfit to be called divine in a higher
sense than the ancient. Phlegmatic rationality stares and shakes its head
at these unaccountable prepossessions, but they exist as undeniably as the
winds and waves, determining here a wreck and there a triumphant voyage.

This sort of passion had nested in the sweet-natured, strong Rex, and he
had made up his mind to its companionship, as if it had been an object
supremely dear, stricken dumb and helpless, and turning all the future of
tenderness into a shadow of the past. But he had also made up his mind
that his life was not to be pauperized because he had had to renounce one
sort of joy; rather, he had begun life again with a new counting-up of the
treasures that remained to him, and he had even felt a release of power
such as may come from ceasing to be afraid of your own neck.

And now, here he was pacing the shrubbery, angry with himself that the
sense of irrevocableness in his lot, which ought in reason to have been as
strong as ever, had been shaken by a change of circumstances that could
make no change in relation to him. He told himself the truth quite
roughly--

"She would never love me; and that is not the question--I could never
approach her as a lover in her present position. I am exactly of no
consequence at all, and am not likely to be of much consequence till my
head is turning gray. But what has that to do with it? She would not have
me on any terms, and I would not ask her. It is a meanness to be thinking
about it now--no better than lurking about the battle-field to strip the
dead; but there never was more gratuitous sinning. I have nothing to gain
there--absolutely nothing. * * * Then why can't I face the facts, and
behave as they demand, instead of leaving my father to suppose that there
are matters he can't speak to me about, though I might be useful in them?"

The last thought made one wave with the impulse that sent Rex walking
firmly into the house and through the open door of the study, where he saw
his father packing a traveling-desk.

"Can I be of any use, sir?" said Rex, with rallied courage, as his father
looked up at him.

"Yes, my boy; when I'm gone, just see to my letters, and answer where
necessary, and send me word of everything. Dymock will manage the parish
very well, and you will stay with your mother, or, at least, go up and
down again, till I come back, whenever that may be."

"You will hardly be very long, sir, I suppose," said Rex, beginning to
strap a railway rug. "You will perhaps bring my cousin back to England?"
He forced himself to speak of Gwendolen for the first time, and the rector
noticed the epoch with satisfaction.

"That depends," he answered, taking the subject as a matter-of-course
between them. "Perhaps her mother may stay there with her, and I may come
back very soon. This telegram leaves us in ignorance which is rather
anxious. But no doubt the arrangements of the will lately made are
satisfactory, and there may possibly be an heir yet to be born. In any
case, I feel confident that Gwendolen will be liberally--I should expect,
splendidly--provided for."

"It must have been a great shock for her," said Rex, getting more resolute
after the first twinge had been borne. "I suppose he was a devoted
husband."

"No doubt of it," said the rector, in his most decided manner. "Few men of
his position would have come forward as he did under the circumstances."

Rex had never seen Grandcourt, had never been spoken to about him by any
one of the family, and knew nothing of Gwendolen's flight from her suitor
to Leubronn. He only knew that Grandcourt, being very much in love with
her, had made her an offer in the first weeks of her sudden poverty, and
had behaved very handsomely in providing for her mother and sisters. That
was all very natural and what Rex himself would have liked to do.
Grandcourt had been a lucky fellow, and had had some happiness before he
got drowned. Yet Rex wondered much whether Gwendolen had been in love with
the successful suitor, or had only forborne to tell him that she hated
being made love to.

CHAPTER LIX.

"I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends."
--SHAKESPEARE.

Sir Hugo Mallinger was not so prompt in starting for Genoa as Mr.
Gascoigne had been, and Deronda on all accounts would not take his
departure until he had seen the baronet. There was not only Grandcourt's
death, but also the late crisis in his own life to make reasons why his
oldest friend would desire to have the unrestrained communication of
speech with him, for in writing he had not felt able to give any details
concerning the mother who had come and gone like an apparition. It was not
till the fifth evening that Deronda, according to telegram, waited for Sir
Hugo at the station, where he was to arrive between eight and nine; and
while he was looking forward to the sight of the kind, familiar face,
which was part of his earliest memories, something like a smile, in spite
of his late tragic experience, might have been detected in his eyes and
the curve of his lips at the idea of Sir Hugo's pleasure in being now
master of his estates, able to leave them to his daughters, or at least--
according to a view of inheritance which had just been strongly impressed
on Deronda's imagination--to take makeshift feminine offspring as
intermediate to a satisfactory heir in a grandson. We should be churlish
creatures if we could have no joy in our fellow-mortals' joy, unless it
were in agreement with our theory of righteous distribution and our
highest ideal of human good: what sour corners our mouths would get--our
eyes, what frozen glances! and all the while our own possessions and
desires would not exactly adjust themselves to our ideal. We must have
some comradeship with imperfection; and it is, happily, possible to feel
gratitude even where we discern a mistake that may have been injurious,
the vehicle of the mistake being an affectionate intention prosecuted
through a life-time of kindly offices. Deronda's feeling and judgment were
strongly against the action of Sir Hugo in making himself the agent of a
falsity--yes, a falsity: he could give no milder name to the concealment
under which he had been reared. But the baronet had probably had no clear
knowledge concerning the mother's breach of trust, and with his light,
easy way of taking life, had held it a reasonable preference in her that
her son should be made an English gentleman, seeing that she had the
eccentricity of not caring to part from her child, and be to him as if she
were not. Daniel's affectionate gratitude toward Sir Hugo made him wish to
find grounds of excuse rather than blame; for it is as possible to be
rigid in principle and tender in blame, as it is to suffer from the sight
of things hung awry, and yet to be patient with the hanger who sees amiss.
If Sir Hugo in his bachelorhood had been beguiled into regarding children
chiefly as a product intended to make life more agreeable to the full-
grown, whose convenience alone was to be consulted in the disposal of
them--why, he had shared an assumption which, if not formally avowed, was
massively acted on at that date of the world's history; and Deronda, with
all his keen memory of the painful inward struggle he had gone through in
his boyhood, was able also to remember the many signs that his experience
had been entirely shut out from Sir Hugo's conception. Ignorant kindness
may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were
direct cruelty would be an ignorant _un_kindness, the most remote from
Deronda's large imaginative lenience toward others. And perhaps now, after
the searching scenes of the last ten days, in which the curtain had been
lifted for him from the secrets of lives unlike his own, he was more than
ever disposed to check that rashness of indignation or resentment which
has an unpleasant likeness to the love of punishing. When he saw Sir
Hugo's familiar figure descending from the railway carriage, the life-long
affection which had been well accustomed to make excuses, flowed in and
submerged all newer knowledge that might have seemed fresh ground for
blame.

"Well, Dan," said Sir Hugo, with a serious fervor, grasping Deronda's
hand. He uttered no other words of greeting; there was too strong a rush
of mutual consciousness. The next thing was to give orders to the courier,
and then to propose walking slowly in, the mild evening, there being no
hurry to get to the hotel.

"I have taken my journey easily, and am in excellent condition," he said,
as he and Deronda came out under the starlight, which was still faint with
the lingering sheen of day. "I didn't hurry in setting off, because I
wanted to inquire into things a little, and so I got sight of your letter
to Lady Mallinger before I started. But now, how is the widow?"

"Getting calmer," said Deronda. "She seems to be escaping the bodily
illness that one might have feared for her, after her plunge and terrible
excitement. Her uncle and mother came two days ago, and she is being well
taken care of."

"Any prospect of an heir being born?"

"From what Mr. Gascoigne said to me, I conclude not. He spoke as if it
were a question whether the widow would have the estates for her life."

"It will not be much of a wrench to her affections, I fancy, this loss of
the husband?" said Sir Hugo, looking round at Deronda.

"The suddenness of the death has been a great blow to her," said Deronda,
quietly evading the question.

"I wonder whether Grandcourt gave her any notion what were the provisions
of his will?" said Sir Hugo.

"Do you know what they are, sir?" parried Deronda.

"Yes, I do," said the baronet, quickly. "Gad! if there is no prospect of a
legitimate heir, he has left everything to a boy he had by a Mrs. Glasher;
you know nothing about the affair, I suppose, but she was a sort of wife
to him for a good many years, and there are three older children--girls.
The boy is to take his father's name; he is Henleigh already, and he is to
be Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt. The Mallinger will be of no use to him,
I am happy to say; but the young dog will have more than enough with his
fourteen years' minority--no need to have had holes filled up with my
fifty thousand for Diplow that he had no right to: and meanwhile my
beauty, the young widow, is to put up with a poor two thousand a year and
the house at Gadsmere--a nice kind of banishment for her if she chose to
shut herself up there, which I don't think she will. The boy's mother has
been living there of late years. I'm perfectly disgusted with Grandcourt.
I don't know that I'm obliged to think the better of him because he's
drowned, though, so far as my affairs are concerned, nothing in his life
became him like the leaving it."

"In my opinion he did wrong when he married this wife--not in leaving his
estates to the son," said Deronda, rather dryly.

"I say nothing against his leaving the land to the lad," said Sir Hugo;
"but since he had married this girl he ought to have given her a handsome
provision, such as she could live on in a style fitted to the rank he had
raised her to. She ought to have had four or five thousand a year and the
London house for her life; that's what I should have done for her. I
suppose, as she was penniless, her friends couldn't stand out for a
settlement, else it's ill trusting to the will a man may make after he's
married. Even a wise man generally lets some folly ooze out of him in his
will--my father did, I know; and if a fellow has any spite or tyranny in
him, he's likely to bottle off a good deal for keeping in that sort of
document. It's quite clear Grandcourt meant that his death should put an
extinguisher on his wife, if she bore him no heir."

"And, in the other case, I suppose everything would have been reversed--
illegitimacy would have had the extinguisher?" said Deronda, with some
scorn.

"Precisely--Gadsmere and the two thousand. It's queer. One nuisance is
that Grandcourt has made me an executor; but seeing he was the son of my
only brother, I can't refuse to act. And I shall mind it less if I can be
of any use to the widow. Lush thinks she was not in ignorance about the
family under the rose, and the purport of the will. He hints that there
was no very good understanding between the couple. But I fancy you are the
man who knew most about what Mrs. Grandcourt felt or did not feel--eh,
Dan?" Sir Hugo did not put this question with his usual jocoseness, but
rather with a lowered tone of interested inquiry; and Deronda felt that
any evasion would be misinterpreted. He answered gravely--

"She was certainly not happy. They were unsuited to each other. But as to
the disposal of the property--from all I have seen of her, I should
predict that she will be quite contented with it."

"Then she is not much like the rest of her sex; that's all I can say,"
said Sir Hugo, with a slight shrug. "However, she ought to be something
extraordinary, for there must be an entanglement between your horoscope
and hers--eh? When that tremendous telegram came, the first thing Lady
Mallinger said was, 'How very strange that it should be Daniel who sends
it!' But I have had something of the same sort in my own life. I was once
at a foreign hotel where a lady had been left by her husband without
money. When I heard of it, and came forward to help her, who should she be
but an early flame of mine, who had been fool enough to marry an Austrian
baron with a long mustache and short affection? But it was an affair of my
own that called me there--nothing to do with knight-errantry, any more
than you coming to Genoa had to do with the Grandcourts."