Daniel Deronda

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She had cast down her eyes that she might not see her father while she
spoke the last words--unable to bear the ignoble look of frustration that
gathered in his face. But he was none the less quick in invention and
decision.

"Mirah, _Liebchen_," he said, in the old caressing way, "shouldn't you
like me to make myself a little more respectable before my son sees me? If
I had a little sum of money, I could fit myself out and come home to you
as your father ought, and then I could offer myself for some decent place.
With a good shirt and coat on my back, people would be glad enough to have
me. I could offer myself for a courier, if I didn't look like a broken-
down mountebank. I should like to be with my children, and forget and
forgive. But you have never seen your father look like this before. If you
had ten pounds at hand--or I could appoint you to bring it me somewhere--I
could fit myself out by the day after to-morrow."

Mirah felt herself under a temptation which she must try to overcome. She
answered, obliging herself to look at him again--

"I don't like to deny you what you ask, father; but I have given a promise
not to do things for you in secret. It _is_ hard to see you looking needy;
but we will bear that for a little while; and then you can have new
clothes, and we can pay for them." Her practical sense made her see now
what was Mrs. Meyrick's wisdom in exacting a promise from her.

Lapidoth's good humor gave way a little. He said, with a sneer, "You are a
hard and fast young lady--you have been learning useful virtues--keeping
promises not to help your father with a pound or two when you are getting
money to dress yourself in silk--your father who made an idol of you, and
gave up the best part of his life to providing for you."

"It seems cruel--I know it seems cruel," said Mirah, feeling this a worse
moment than when she meant to drown herself. Her lips were suddenly pale.
"But, father, it is more cruel to break the promises people trust in. That
broke my mother's heart--it has broken Ezra's life. You and I must eat now
this bitterness from what has been. Bear it. Bear to come in and be cared
for as you are."

"To-morrow, then," said Lapidoth, almost turning on his heel away from
this pale, trembling daughter, who seemed now to have got the inconvenient
world to back her; but he quickly turned on it again, with his hands
feeling about restlessly in his pockets, and said, with some return to his
appealing tone, "I'm a little cut up with all this, Mirah. I shall get up
my spirits by to-morrow. If you've a little money in your pocket, I
suppose it isn't against your promise to give me a trifle--to buy a cigar
with."

Mirah could not ask herself another question--could not do anything else
than put her cold trembling hands in her pocket for her _portemonnaie_ and
hold it out. Lapidoth grasped it at once, pressed her fingers the while,
said, "Good-bye, my little girl--to-morrow then!" and left her. He had not
taken many steps before he looked carefully into all the folds of the
purse, found two half-sovereigns and odd silver, and, pasted against the
folding cover, a bit of paper on which Ezra had inscribed, in a beautiful
Hebrew character, the name of his mother, the days of her birth, marriage,
and death, and the prayer, "May Mirah be delivered from evil." It was
Mirah's liking to have this little inscription on many articles that she
used. The father read it, and had a quick vision of his marriage day, and
the bright, unblamed young fellow he was at that time; teaching many
things, but expecting by-and-by to get money more easily by writing; and
very fond of his beautiful bride Sara--crying when she expected him to
cry, and reflecting every phase of her feeling with mimetic
susceptibility. Lapidoth had traveled a long way from that young self, and
thought of all that this inscription signified with an unemotional memory,
which was like the ocular perception of a touch to one who has lost the
sense of touch, or like morsels on an untasting palate, having shape and
grain, but no flavor. Among the things we may gamble away in a lazy
selfish life is the capacity for ruth, compunction, or any unselfish
regret--which we may come to long for as one in slow death longs to feel
laceration, rather than be conscious of a widening margin where
consciousness once was. Mirah's purse was a handsome one--a gift to her,
which she had been unable to reflect about giving away--and Lapidoth
presently found himself outside of his reverie, considering what the purse
would fetch in addition to the sum it contained, and what prospect there
was of his being able to get more from his daughter without submitting to
adopt a penitential form of life under the eyes of that formidable son. On
such a subject his susceptibilities were still lively.

Meanwhile Mirah had entered the house with her power of reticence overcome
by the cruelty of her pain. She found her brother quietly reading and
sifting old manuscripts of his own, which he meant to consign to Deronda.
In the reaction from the long effort to master herself, she fell down
before him and clasped his knees, sobbing, and crying, "Ezra, Ezra!"

He did not speak. His alarm for her spending itself on conceiving the
cause of her distress, the more striking from the novelty in her of this
violent manifestation. But Mirah's own longing was to be able to speak and
tell him the cause. Presently she raised her hand, and still sobbing, said
brokenly--

"Ezra, my father! our father! He followed me. I wanted him to come in. I
said you would let him come in. And he said No, he would not--not now, but
to-morrow. And he begged for money from me. And I gave him my purse, and
he went away."

Mirah's words seemed to herself to express all the misery she felt in
them. Her brother found them less grievous than his preconceptions, and
said gently, "Wait for calm, Mirah, and then tell me all,"--putting off
her hat and laying his hands tenderly on her head. She felt the soothing
influence, and in a few minutes told him as exactly as she could all that
had happened.

"He will not come to-morrow," said Mordecai. Neither of them said to the
other what they both thought, namely, that he might watch for Mirah's
outgoings and beg from her again.

"Seest thou," he presently added, "our lot is the lot of Israel. The grief
and the glory are mingled as the smoke and the flame. It is because we
children have inherited the good that we feel the evil. These things are
wedded for us, as our father was wedded to our mother."

The surroundings were of Brompton, but the voice might have come from a
Rabbi transmitting the sentences of an elder time to be registered in
_Babli_--by which (to our ears) affectionate-sounding diminutive is meant
the voluminous Babylonian Talmud. "The Omnipresent," said a Rabbi, "is
occupied in making marriages." The levity of the saying lies in the ear of
him who hears it; for by marriages the speaker meant all the wondrous
combinations of the universe whose issue makes our good and evil.

CHAPTER LXIII.

"Moses, trotz seiner Bafeindung der Kunst, dennoch selber ein grosser
Kuenstler war und den wahren Kuenstlergeist besass. Nur war dieser
Kuenstlergeist bei ihm, wie bei seinen aegyptischen Landsleuteu, nurauf
das Colossale und Unverwustliche gerichtet. Aber nicht vie die
Aegypter formirte er seine Kunstwerke aus Backstem und Granit, sondern
er baute Menchen-pyramiden, er meisselte Menschen Obelisken, ernahm
einen armen Hirtenstamm und Schuf daraus ein Volk, das ebenfalls den
Jahrhahunderten, trotzen sollte * * * er Schuf Israel."--HEINE:
_Gestandnisse_.

Imagine the difference in Deronda's state of mind when he left England and
when he returned to it. He had set out for Genoa in total uncertainty how
far the actual bent of his wishes and affections would be encouraged--how
far the claims revealed to him might draw him into new paths, far away
from the tracks his thoughts had lately been pursuing with a consent of
desire which uncertainty made dangerous. He came back with something like
a discovered charter warranting the inherited right that his ambition had
begun to yearn for: he came back with what was better than freedom--with a
duteous bond which his experience had been preparing him to accept gladly,
even if it had been attended with no promise of satisfying a secret
passionate longing never yet allowed to grow into a hope. But now he dared
avow to himself the hidden selection of his love. Since the hour when he
left the house at Chelsea in full-hearted silence under the effect of
Mirah's farewell look and words--their exquisite appealingness stirring in
him that deep-laid care for womanhood which had begun when his own lip was
like a girl's--her hold on his feeling had helped him to be blameless in
word and deed under the difficult circumstances we know of. There seemed
no likelihood that he could ever woo this creature who had become dear to
him amidst associations that forbade wooing; yet she had taken her place
in his soul as a beloved type--reducing the power of other fascination and
making a difference in it that became deficiency. The influence had been
continually strengthened. It had lain in the course of poor Gwendolen's
lot that her dependence on Deronda tended to rouse in him the enthusiasm
of self-martyring pity rather than of personal love, and his less
constrained tenderness flowed with the fuller stream toward an indwelling
image in all things unlike Gwendolen. Still more, his relation to Mordecai
had brought with it a new nearness to Mirah which was not the less
agitating because there was no apparent change in his position toward her;
and she had inevitably been bound up in all the thoughts that made him
shrink from an issue disappointing to her brother. This process had not
gone on unconsciously in Deronda: he was conscious of it as we are of some
covetousness that it would be better to nullify by encouraging other
thoughts than to give it the insistency of confession even to ourselves:
but the jealous fire had leaped out at Hans's pretensions, and when his
mother accused him of being in love with a Jewess any evasion suddenly
seemed an infidelity. His mother had compelled him to a decisive
acknowledgment of his love, as Joseph Kalonymos had compelled him to a
definite expression of his resolve. This new state of decision wrought on
Deronda with a force which surprised even himself. There was a release of
all the energy which had long been spent in self-checking and suppression
because of doubtful conditions; and he was ready to laugh at his own
impetuosity when, as he neared England on his way from Mainz, he felt the
remaining distance more and more of an obstruction. It was as if he had
found an added soul in finding his ancestry--his judgment no longer
wandering in the mazes of impartial sympathy, but choosing, with that
partiality which is man's best strength, the closer fellowship that makes
sympathy practical--exchanging that bird's eye reasonableness which soars
to avoid preference and loses all sense of quality for the generous
reasonableness of drawing shoulder to shoulder with men of like
inheritance. He wanted now to be again with Mordecai, to pour forth
instead of restraining his feeling, to admit agreement and maintain
dissent, and all the while to find Mirah's presence without the
embarrassment of obviously seeking it, to see her in the light of a new
possibility, to interpret her looks and words from a new starting-point.
He was not greatly alarmed about the effect of Hans's attentions, but he
had a presentiment that her feeling toward himself had from the first lain
in a channel from which it was not likely to be diverted into love. To
astonish a woman by turning into her lover when she has been thinking of
you merely as a Lord Chancellor is what a man naturally shrinks from: he
is anxious to create an easier transition.

What wonder that Deronda saw no other course than to go straight from the
London railway station to the lodgings in that small square in Brompton?
Every argument was in favor of his losing no time. He had promised to run
down the next day to see Lady Mallinger at the Abbey, and it was already
sunset. He wished to deposit the precious chest with Mordecai, who would
study its contents, both in his absence and in company with him; and that
he should pay this visit without pause would gratify Mordecai's heart.
Hence, and for other reasons, it gratified Deronda's heart. The strongest
tendencies of his nature were rushing in one current--the fervent
affectionateness which made him delight in meeting the wish of beings near
to him, and the imaginative need of some far-reaching relation to make the
horizon of his immediate, daily acts. It has to be admitted that in this
classical, romantic, world-historic position of his, bringing as it were
from its hiding-place his hereditary armor, he wore--but so, one must
suppose, did the most ancient heroes, whether Semitic or Japhetic--the
summer costume of his contemporaries. He did not reflect that the drab
tints were becoming to him, for he rarely went to the expense of such
thinking; but his own depth of coloring, which made the becomingness, got
an added radiance in the eyes, a fleeting and returning glow in the skin,
as he entered the house wondering what exactly he should find. He made his
entrance as noiseless as possible.

It was the evening of that same afternoon on which Mirah had had the
interview with her father. Mordecai, penetrated by her grief, and also the
sad memories which the incident had awakened, had not resumed his task of
sifting papers: some of them had fallen scattered on the floor in the
first moments of anxiety, and neither he nor Mirah had thought of laying
them in order again. They had sat perfectly still together, not knowing
how long; while the clock ticked on the mantelpiece, and the light was
fading, Mirah, unable to think of the food that she ought to have been
taking, had not moved since she had thrown off her dust-cloak and sat down
beside Mordecai with her hand in his, while he had laid his head backward,
with closed eyes and difficult breathing, looking, Mirah thought, as he
would look when the soul within him could no longer live in its straitened
home. The thought that his death might be near was continually visiting
her when she saw his face in this way, without its vivid animation; and
now, to the rest of her grief, was added the regret that she had been
unable to control the violent outburst which had shaken him. She sat
watching him--her oval cheeks pallid, her eyes with the sorrowful
brilliancy left by young tears, her curls in as much disorder as a just-
awakened child's--watching that emaciated face, where it might have been
imagined that a veil had been drawn never to be lifted, as if it were her
dead joy which had left her strong enough to live on in sorrow. And life
at that moment stretched before Mirah with more than a repetition of
former sadness. The shadow of the father was there, and more than that, a
double bereavement--of one living as well as one dead.

But now the door was opened, and while none entered, a well-known voice
said: "Daniel Deronda--may he come in?"

"Come! come!" said Mordecai, immediately rising with an irradiated face
and opened eyes--apparently as little surprised as if he had seen Deronda
in the morning, and expected this evening visit; while Mirah started up
blushing with confused, half-alarmed expectation.

Yet when Deronda entered, the sight of him was like the clearness after
rain: no clouds to come could hinder the cherishing beam of that moment.
As he held out his right hand to Mirah, who was close to her brother's
left, he laid his other hand on Mordecai's right shoulder, and stood so a
moment, holding them both at once, uttering no word, but reading their
faces, till he said anxiously to Mirah, "Has anything happened?--any
trouble?"

"Talk not of trouble now," said Mordecai, saving her from the need to
answer. "There is joy in your face--let the joy be ours."

Mirah thought, "It is for something he cannot tell us." But they all sat
down, Deronda drawing a chair close in front of Mordecai.

"That is true," he said, emphatically. "I have a joy which will remain to
us even in the worst trouble. I did not tell you the reason of my journey
abroad, Mordecai, because--never mind--I went to learn my parentage. And
you were right. I am a Jew."

The two men clasped hands with a movement that seemed part of the flash
from Mordecai's eyes, and passed through Mirah like an electric shock. But
Deronda went on without pause, speaking from Mordecai's mind as much as
from his own--

"We have the same people. Our souls have the same vocation. We shall not
be separated by life or by death."

Mordecai's answer was uttered in Hebrew, and in no more than a loud
whisper. It was in the liturgical words which express the religious bond:
"Our God and the God of our fathers."

The weight of feeling pressed too strongly on that ready-winged speech
which usually moved in quick adaptation to every stirring of his fervor.

Mirah fell on her knees by her brother's side, and looked at his now
illuminated face, which had just before been so deathly. The action was an
inevitable outlet of the violent reversal from despondency to a gladness
which came over her as solemnly as if she had been beholding a religious
rite. For the moment she thought of the effect on her own life only
through the effect on her brother.

"And it is not only that I am a Jew," Deronda went on, enjoying one of
those rare moments when our yearnings and our acts can be completely one,
and the real we behold is our ideal good; "but I come of a strain that has
ardently maintained the fellowship of our race--a line of Spanish Jews
that has borne many students and men of practical power. And I possess
what will give us a sort of communion with them. My grandfather, Daniel
Charisi, preserved manuscripts, family records stretching far back, in the
hope that they would pass into the hands of his grandson. And now his hope
is fulfilled, in spite of attempts to thwart it by hiding my parentage
from me. I possess the chest containing them, with his own papers, and it
is down below in this house. I mean to leave it with you, Mordecai, that
you may help me to study the manuscripts. Some of them I can read easily
enough--those in Spanish and Italian. Others are in Hebrew, and, I think,
Arabic; but there seem to be Latin translations. I was only able to look
at them cursorily while I stayed at Mainz. We will study them together."

Deronda ended with that bright smile which, beaming out from the habitual
gravity of his face, seemed a revelation (the reverse of the continual
smile that discredits all expression). But when this happy glance passed
from Mordecai to rest on Mirah, it acted like a little too much sunshine,
and made her change her attitude. She had knelt under an impulse with
which any personal embarrassment was incongruous, and especially any
thoughts about how Mrs. Grandcourt might stand to this new aspect of
things--thoughts which made her color under Deronda's glance, and rise to
take her seat again in her usual posture of crossed hands and feet, with
the effort to look as quiet as possible. Deronda, equally sensitive,
imagined that the feeling of which he was conscious, had entered too much
into his eyes, and had been repugnant to her. He was ready enough to
believe that any unexpected manifestation might spoil her feeling toward
him--and then his precious relation to brother and sister would be marred.
If Mirah could have no love for him, any advances of love on his part
would make her wretched in that continual contact with him which would
remain inevitable.

While such feelings were pulsating quickly in Deronda and Mirah, Mordecai,
seeing nothing in his friend's presence and words but a blessed
fulfillment, was already speaking with his old sense of enlargement in
utterance--

"Daniel, from the first, I have said to you, we know not all the pathways.
Has there not been a meeting among them, as of the operations in one soul,
where an idea being born and breathing draws the elements toward it, and
is fed and glows? For all things are bound together in that Omnipresence
which is the place and habitation of the world, and events are of a glass
wherethrough our eyes see some of the pathways. And if it seems that the
erring and unloving wills of men have helped to prepare you, as Moses was
prepared, to serve your people the better, that depends on another order
than the law which must guide our footsteps. For the evil will of man
makes not a people's good except by stirring the righteous will of man;
and beneath all the clouds with which our thought encompasses the Eternal,
this is clear--that a people can be blessed only by having counsellors and
a multitude whose will moves in obedience to the laws of justice and love.
For see, now, it was your loving will that made a chief pathway, and
resisted the effect of evil; for, by performing the duties of brotherhood
to my sister, and seeking out her brother in the flesh, your soul has been
prepared to receive with gladness this message of the Eternal, 'behold the
multitude of your brethren.'"

"It is quite true that you and Mirah have been my teachers," said Deronda.
"If this revelation had been made to me before I knew you both, I think my
mind would have rebelled against it. Perhaps I should have felt then--'If
I could have chosen, I would not have been a Jew.' What I feel now is--
that my whole being is a consent to the fact. But it has been the gradual
accord between your mind and mine which has brought about that full
consent."

At the moment Deronda was speaking, that first evening in the book-shop
was vividly in his remembrance, with all the struggling aloofness he had
then felt from Mordecai's prophetic confidence. It was his nature to
delight in satisfying to the utmost the eagerly-expectant soul, which
seemed to be looking out from the face before him, like the long-enduring
watcher who at last sees the mountain signal-flame; and he went on with
fuller fervor--

"It is through your inspiration that I have discerned what may be my
life's task. It is you who have given shape to what, I believe, was an
inherited yearning--the effect of brooding, passionate thoughts in many
ancestors--thoughts that seem to have been intensely present in my
grandfather. Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe brought
up in a city of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for painting,
and born blind--the ancestral life would lie within them as a dim longing
for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their
inherited frames would be like a cunningly-wrought musical instrument,
never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy mysterious meanings of
its intricate structure that, under the right touch, gives music.
Something like that, I think, has been my experience. Since I began to
read and know, I have always longed for some ideal task, in which I might
feel myself the heart and brain of a multitude--some social captainship,
which would come to me as a duty, and not be striven for as a personal
prize. You have raised the image of such a task for me--to bind our race
together in spite of heresy. You have said to me--'Our religion united us
before it divided us--it made us a people before it made Rabbanites and
Karaites.' I mean to try what can be done with that union--I mean to work
in your spirit. Failure will not be ignoble, but it would be ignoble for
me not to try."

"Even as my brother that fed at the breasts of my mother," said Mordecai,
falling back in his chair with a look of exultant repose, as after some
finished labor.

To estimate the effect of this ardent outpouring from Deronda we must
remember his former reserve, his careful avoidance of premature assent or
delusive encouragement, which gave to this decided pledge of himself a
sacramental solemnity, both for his own mind and Mordecai's. On Mirah the
effect was equally strong, though with a difference: she felt a surprise
which had no place in her brother's mind, at Deronda's suddenly revealed
sense of nearness to them: there seemed to be a breaking of day around her
which might show her other facts unlike her forebodings in the darkness.
But after a moment's silence Mordecai spoke again--

"It has begun already--the marriage of our souls. It waits but the passing
away of this body, and then they who are betrothed shall unite in a
stricter bond, and what is mine shall be thine. Call nothing mine that I
have written, Daniel; for though our masters delivered rightly that
everything should be quoted in the name of him that said it--and their
rule is good--yet it does not exclude the willing marriage which melts
soul into soul, and makes thought fuller as the clear waters are made
fuller, where the fullness is inseparable and the clearness is
inseparable. For I have judged what I have written, and I desire the body
that I gave my thought to pass away as this fleshly body will pass; but
let the thought be born again from our fuller soul which shall be called
yours."